Chapter 21
TWENTY-ONE
GWENNA
Kai won’t stop fidgeting.
We’re in the library reading room, me trying to make some progress on Peter Abelard’s Sic Et Non and him…sitting there, watching me without looking at me, yet somehow in constant motion.
Bouncing his leg up and down. Drumming his fingers on the tabletop. Chewing his thumbnail with a faint clicking sound against his lip ring. Finally, it's too much.
I spread the pages of the book smooth in front of me and look over at him. “What's your deal?” I whisper. “Can you just cool it?”
Kai angles a look at me without sitting up straight. “Cool it,” he repeats.
“With all the jittering,” I say at last. “It's, I'm sorry, it's just distracting.”
“Well, isn't that too bad?” Kai mutters, catching his teeth on the piercing again.
I let out a short sigh. “Is something wrong?” I ask. “Like, what's gotten into you?”
Kai pokes his tongue in his cheek, considering. And I get the sense that it's not just for show, that he's really contemplating how to answer that question. Something about that makes me uncomfortable, like there's another secret I'm not being let in on.
“If you must know,” he says, now leaning in over the table so that he can speak it closer to a normal tone of voice, “my babysitting shift happens to fall in the only time I'd be able to get to the salle today. So I've…got a little bit of extra energy pent up, I guess.”
“Don't you practice in the morning?”
“I was otherwise occupied,” Kai says tersely. He leans back again, spreading his arms a little in his chair. “So yeah, you're getting the jittery version.”
I retreat too, a little bit, hands still on my book. I chew my cheek, look left, look right.
“We could go to the salle,” I say softly.
“What?” Kai darts a glance at me, like he must have misheard me.
“I said we could go to the salle,” I repeat. “I don't need to be reading here. It's just a book.” I hold it up. “It's portable.”
Kai sets his jaw, lifts his head a little, breathes out so hard his nostrils flare. “Yeah, all right,” he says after a minute. “Bring all your studying shit and we'll have a little party.”
I settle myself on one of the benches and spread out my books as best I can. I really do just need to read, so it's easy enough to be wherever. But at the same time, it's hard not to be distracted by all the contraptions that fill up a fencing salle.
For a sport that's ostensibly so simple, there's an awful lot of stuff involved in fencing.
There's jackets and underarm protectors and chest protectors, plus lamés, which are something different, gloves, masks, knickers, and a battalion of weapons, not to mention the electric wiring system that scoots around on pulleys overhead.
And then there's targets. Hanging targets.
Dummy targets. Square targets. Round targets.
And all that's before even getting into the entire weight room full of conditioning things.
My eyes are darting from one piece of gear to the next, across the room and in front of me and basically everywhere except the page of my book, when something grabs their attention much more immediately.
Kai. Emerging from the locker room. Knickers on. Straps over his shoulders. No shirt.
My cheeks get warm, in spite of myself. He's in very, very good shape. Lean arms, and visible abs, and a broad chest. His skin smooth, and a little golden, even though it's the dead of winter and even the windows in the salle are blocked up with snowdrift.
But that's not all. There's . . . tattoos, crawling up his arms, the side of his neck, over his ribs, leaves and vines, dragons, swords, hearts.
It's not all one piece, not interconnected in a sleeve, but it all sort of goes together.
And there are letters, I realize, Greek and Latin.
I feel the itch to get close to read them when I'm acutely aware of the fact that he's no longer moving.
“What's the saying?” he says flatly. “Take a picture, it’ll last longer?”
My face goes lava hot. “I'm sorry,” I stammer, and look down to break eye contact, which I quickly realize is a mistake because it has me staring directly at his very pierced nipples.
Holy…shit.
I try not to let my eyes go wide as I force my gaze down to my book page, swimming around for focus, not even remembering what this book is about, let alone what paragraph or sentence I was on. In my peripheral visit, I see Kai shrugging on a white jacket, and zipping it up in a single pull.
And when he does, when he turns, I see something else. Angry welts streaking across his back, line after line, like stripes. They look tender and red, as if something had clawed him across the back and not quite broken the skin.
“Jesus,” I whisper, too startled to remember to be quiet.
Kai's head snaps to me. His eyes glance down toward his shoulder, and he flattens his lips together.
“It's a contact sport,” he says shortly. “People get hurt.”
I frown. “But you don't turn your back,” I murmur under my breath.
“What was that?” Kai's tone is sharp, but not angry, at least I don't think.
I look back up from my book. Take a deep breath. “I said,” I begin, “you don't turn your back in fencing.”
Kai lifts his chin. “Astutely observed,” he deadpans and grabs the weapon resting by his feet—a saber.
With that resolved, I look back at the page, try to get myself re-immersed in the text.
But if I'm being completely honest, and I feel like a traitor to my line of study for even thinking it, the theological work of Peter Abelard is…
boring. It's not like the stuff that we read in Emrys’s class, where things are alive and pulsing with urgency, or half-finished and inviting you through a mystery.
This is all theory about the nature of the divine and salvation and general hair-splitting that involves a lot of new Latin coinages I have to constantly flip around and look for, and conclusions that don't really have any bearing on anything meaningful.
I get the sense that maybe the reason we're assigned this text is because it's so frustrating to translate.
And so my gaze keeps drifting upward, occasionally at first, at every page turn, but then a little more frequently, because…watching Kai is fascinating.
Lunges. Strikes. Thrusts. Jabs. I don’t have to know the terms to know it’s elaborate and exhausting.
And then he stops, panting, and looks at me. “Can I help you?” he asks, dragging a wrist across his forehead.
I sit up straighter. I know he doesn't hate me, or at least, I'm pretty sure he doesn't. Not after what happened after the Candlemas ball.
And if he really did hate me, he wouldn't bother with any of this.
Certainly not before I elected to come with him here to the salle.
But just because we're in a relative detente doesn't mean he seems to actually like me.
At the same time, I'm not just going to let him steamroll over me either.
“No,” I say simply. “I was just watching because it’s…cool.”
Kai studies me for a minute, then snatches a water bottle from the ground, wrenches it open with his teeth, and funnels some into his mouth. “Yeah,” he says, wiping his lips. “It is cool. It's swords. They're cool.”
He goes back en garde for emphasis and flicks his wrist at the target, neatly hitting it square. “Try doing that shit in golf.”
I snort.
Kai frowns. “What?”
“Just…golf?” I say. “That’s random. What did golf ever do to you?”
Kai keeps his eyes intent on the target, whipping his arm around at the elbow and swatting it with the blade.
Swat, swat, swat. “Nothing in particular.” Swat. “Just another rich kid's sport that requires a lot of equipment.” He shrugs. Swat. “First thing that came to mind.”
A thought occurs to me, one that's absolutely none of my fucking bustiness, but that I can't resist wanting to know. “How'd you get started fencing, anyway?”
I know some of the origin story. From Morgan. The part where Kai joined the family, anyway. Everything that happened after that. At least the broad strokes. But before that, with Kai, it's a blank.
“Why? Because I have that white trash look about me?” Kai says. Swat. He lowers his saber. Stares me down.
I stare back.
“Because it looks like you were born doing it,” I answer.
Something shifts in Kai's gaze. He tugs at his glove, looks away.
“I got started as a kid. Y8. That's Youth 8.
We had a program in the rec center in Chicago.
Just plastic weapons and shit. Only masks, no jackets or wires, but I kind of got obsessed with it.
I guess I was good at it too, but mostly it was just…
“…cool?”
I offer. An actual smile flickers across Kai's mouth.
“Yeah.” He looks back at the target. “So they took notice of me and let me bust out for club practice in the suburbs.
It was like two fucking hours each way. But it's not like I had anywhere else to be, so. And then I just kind of kept winning. I used club gear, until I earned a little money, then I bought my own shit, and then I beat a certain Kingston Pendragon in the Y12 foil at the Midwest Youth Invitational and—” He shrugs, lunges.
The tip of his blade bends into the plush of the target. “The rest is fucking history.”
“Wow,” I say. “Just like that. What a coincidence.”
Kai's face goes dark. “Yeah,” he says. “A real fucking coincidence.”
I watch him a moment longer. “Foil,” I repeat. “But you fence saber now.”
“Yeah. Because that's what we needed.” Kai looks straight ahead, lunges a second time.
He resets, shrugging. “And I'm the best at it.
But I'd argue I'm the best at foil, too.” He slashes right at the dummy's head, almost knocks it clear off its wooden shoulders.
“Fuck,” he mutters, and steps back, shaking his hand out.
“Why was that wrong?” I ask. Subtly, I put a bookmark in the middle of the Abelard book, and set it to the side. I'll finish it later, or not finish it and fake my way through the translation tomorrow in class. It’s not life or death, unlike some of my studies. “What's the difference?”
“Huh?”
“What you did in the tournament and just now,” I specify. “That's an illegal move. But sometimes you can smack people in the head?”
Kai snorts. “Uh, smacking people in the head is not exactly how we describe it. But yeah, sort of.” He scratches the back of his own head, hesitates a moment, then beckons me over.
I stand up, walk across the strips to the dummy, and look where he's indicating.
“See this?” He points at his sword. “The metal thing. Over my hand. This is the…” He pauses, waits for me to fill in.
“Hilt?” I guess.
“Try again,” Kai says. “It's shaped like a…” He spins a finger in the air, prompting.
I squint. “Bell, I guess?”
“Right,” he says. “And what does it do to my hand?”
“Protect it? Guard it?”
“Guard,” he confirms. “This part is the bell guard. So what I did was…” He moves his hand in slow motion toward the dummy, gripping the saber and moving the bell guard towards its cloth head.
“I basically just clocked him with the bell guard, and you can't do that. You could give a concussion. Fuck, I probably did give a concussion.” He squints, rubs his temple.
“Anyway, the bell guard doesn't light up when you're plugged in, so that's why it doesn't get a point.”
“So what's the legal move?”
“Here.” Kai extracts his hand, flips the sword in the air, and holds it by the blade, extending the handle toward me. “Take it.”
I do. Awkwardly. The handle isn't straight. It's some sort of antler-looking thing with a hook that I think my fingers go around.
“Oh yeah, it's ergo grip. Pistol. Here.” Kai steps to my side, tips the saber forward a little, and shows me.
“You put your thumb here, index curled under like that—yeah, kind of brace it against the bell guard with your knuckle—and then the other three curled under here. Like shooting a pistol, kinda.”
“I wouldn't know,” I say darkly.
“Surprisingly, neither would I,” says Kai.
“I got off the streets too fast to learn anything about modern weaponry.” He shrugs.
“Anyway, come at it like this.” He gestures with his hand.
I follow suit. He shakes his head. “No, no, more like…” He flattens his wrist, extends.
“You need the blade to bend a little. Strong hand.”
“I see.” I try again, tightening my wrist, and sure enough, the blade flexes when I hit.
“Yeah, see? There you go.”
I untangle my hand from the grip and hand it back to him. “Jeez.” I shake out my fingers. “That hurts.”
“Takes a lot of finger strength,” Kai says. “But with this grip, if you can choke up enough—”
Footsteps behind us. I turn around and almost jump back, practically knocking over the dummy.
It's Kingston, dressed in dark warm-ups and with a gear bag over his shoulder.
He sees us, lowers it to the ground. I don't know what to say.
We weren't doing anything wrong, but whatever we were doing probably looks awfully strange and suspicious, especially to Kingston.
And I feel the dual impulse to be defiant and insist on doing what I want and reluctant because I don't want to get Kai in trouble.
Not given what I saw raked across his back.
Fortunately, Kai speaks first. “We weren't—”
Kingston cuts him off with a raised hand.
“As you were,” he says, smiling slightly. “She likes learning new things.”