Chapter 23
At four-twelve, the basin lit again.
For one miserable second, I thought Linden had found another excuse to terrorize me.
The water went silver-white, and three words formed across the surface.
Salle. Five o’clock. Hale.
I stared at the basin until the words dissolved.
I didn’t fail to notice the academy kept ‘please’ out of its waters no matter who was doing the summoning.
Combat assessment soon.
Salle at five.
Hale.
At Zenith Hall, warning and reprieve seemed to arrive in the same handwriting.
I left my room in my ordinary clothes.
The wool coat. The uniform underneath. Boots that were already worn out before Zenith’s stone floors.
I tied my hair back with string from my coat lining and hoped Hale had low standards.
I reached the salle at three minutes past five.
Jonah Hale was crouched at the center of the floor, drawing a fresh chalk line over an older one.
Two staves lay beside him. One long. One short.
For me, then.
The salle was longer than I remembered from the other times I had met him here, and quieter. A wooden floor rubbed dull with years of feet. More chalk lines at the center. The faint smell of oil and dust.
Hale kept his back to me.
“You’re late.”
“By three minutes.”
“The assessment will not care why.”
“This isn’t the assessment.”
“Treat it like it is if you want to survive it.”
That took the sarcasm out of my mouth.
He turned then.
His eyes moved over the wool coat. The dress. The boots.
Then back to my face.
“You came in that?”
“I was summoned by a magical bowl in my bedroom. It didn’t indicate a dress code.”
“Did you check the bottom drawer of your wardrobe?”
The bottom drawer.
I used the wardrobe for the uniform Zenith had supplied that hung there. I hadn’t explored the other drawers.
The bag I’d arrived with still sat on the floor next to my bed, because the bag was mine. The room was only a place I had not yet been removed from.
“There are drawers?”
Hale closed his eyes and shook his head, which was probably the closest I would ever get to a victory over his composure.
“Training clothes,” he said. “Every first-year room has them.”
“You left that out of the tour.”
“I assumed you would put your current clothes in the furniture designed for it.”
“Everyone here makes a lot of assumptions about me, it seems.”
He looked away, toward the rack of staves.
“There are spare clothes in the cabinet. Change behind the screen.”
The screen was folded against the wall near the equipment cabinet. Hale opened the cabinet, took out linen, canvas, cloth shoes, and set them on the bench without looking at me.
“This might be worse than Linden’s inquisition.”
“Don’t say that.”
Hale’s voice killed the joke in the air.
“Right.”
I took the clothes behind the screen.
The linen shirt was plain, the canvas trousers too long until I rolled the cuffs twice, and the cloth shoes made me feel like I had borrowed someone else’s feet. I left my dress and coat folded over the back of the screen, my mother’s wren hidden inside the coat pocket.
When I came out, Hale had changed too.
No coat. Sleeves rolled to the forearm. I saw the Mark there: dark, narrow, controlled into lines so severe they looked cut rather than born. It held still when he looked at me.
Mine still answered, barely.
The Pull caught at my throat with the controlled force of something trained not to move and moving anyway.
Hale saw me feel it and looked away. But his throat worked like he’d felt it too.
He jerked his chin at the floor. “Take the short stave.”
I picked it up. It was heavier than it looked.
“Stand on the line.”
I walked up to the white chalk line and toed it.
Hale crossed the floor toward me.
He stopped three feet away.
“Show me what you know.”
I stared at the stave in my hands.
“I know this is a stick.”
“Good. That’s a start.”
“That was a joke.”
“So is your grip.”
I blinked at him.
Hale’s face gave me the slightest twitch toward a grin.
“You do have a sense of humor.”
“Don’t tell anyone.”
“Of course. Wouldn’t want anyone to know there’s an actual personality hiding under all that discipline.”
His eyes narrowed slightly, which was Hale for almost amused.”Your hands, Astra.”
I looked down.
“Right hand higher. Left hand lower.”
I moved my hands.
“No, not that low. There.”
I tightened my grip, but he shook his head.
“Try again.”
“But I haven’t even done anything yet.”
“Just get used to gripping it.”
I tried, but I felt absurd. Never in my life did I expect I’d have to know how to hold a giant stick to swing it at another person.
Hale corrected the grip twice more. Then my feet. Then my shoulders. At first, he used words like tools: shorter, wider, lower, stop, again.
The first ten minutes were humiliating.
The next were worse, because I began to improve and he refused to give me any credit.
Hale taught without praise. He named what was wrong, waited for me to fix it, and moved on as if that were that.
He wanted my back foot two inches in.
So I moved it two inches in.
“There,” he said.
That was how we went about it.
He showed me the first block slowly. Then again at a speed I could follow. Then once at the speed someone might actually use if they meant to hit me.
The stave cut through the air and stopped an inch from my right shoulder.
I held still because I had forgotten I was allowed to move.
Hale lowered the stave.
“That,” he said, “is what they are testing.”
My mouth had gone dry.
“My ability to stand still while someone swings wood at me?”
“Your response to a strike that arrives without warning.”
“Linden said response.”
“Linden enjoys words that make violence sound clean.”
I looked at the stave in his hand.
“And Aldric?”
“Aldric knows exactly what this is.”
“Does he enjoy it?”
“Far from it. But he can’t do anything to stop it.”
Hale set his stave back on the rack and came toward me empty-handed.
“The assessment will begin with the four first-year forms.”
“I don’t know the four first-year forms.”
“You will know enough of them by the time you leave. Hopefully.”
“That’s not comforting.”
“It wasn’t meant to be comforting.”
“I’m beginning to suspect no one in this building knows what comfort even is.”
“Reverie does.”
That surprised me into looking at him. Maybe he did pay attention to the world outside his salle.
He was already looking at my grip.
“Again,” he said.
So we began again.
He gave me the forms in pieces: feet first, then hands, then the turn, then the recovery. I learned fast, suspiciously, with very little faith that the knowledge would still be there tomorrow.
By the third form, sweat had gathered at the back of my neck.
By the fourth, my hands hurt.
Hale must have noticed both but he said nothing about either.
“Now the fifth.”
I lowered the stave.
“You said there were four.”
“For the class.”
“Oh, so one is special for me?”
He nodded.
Typical.
“The Council added it this morning,” Hale went on.
“Because of the interrogation?”
“Because someone wants to know what happens when pressure comes from the other side.”
He raised his stave again.
“The strike will come at your right shoulder without warning. If you miss the block, it will hurt. If you overcorrect, your left side opens. If you freeze, you lose.”
“And if I get it right?”
“Then they learn something else.”
“You make winning sound very rewarding.”
“Staying alive another day is the best reward you can hope for at this point.”
The room went quiet after that.
He had said alive instead of safe. I hadn’t missed the difference in the definitions.
Hale showed me the block.
Once slow.
Once slower.
Then he handed the movement to me.
I botched it completely.
The stave came up crooked. My left foot moved when it should have held. My right hand slid to the wrong place.
Hale watched the whole disaster without blinking, but a grimace twisted his lips.
“Gods help us.” His voice came out utterly deadpan.
“That bad?”
“Worse.”
“Do you give all your students this much positive reinforcement?”
“Try it again, Astra.”
I did it again.
The right hand was still wrong.
Hale stepped closer.
“I’m going to move your hand.”
I nodded.
He put his hand over mine and shifted my grip down the stave.
The Pull struck hard enough that I nearly lost more than just the form. Like consciousness.
Leather at the back of my throat. Heat under his palm. The steady pressure of his fingers around mine, putting me where I needed to be.
“Keep it there,” he said.
His voice was rougher than it had been.
“I am.”
“Move your foot.”
“I have two. Be specific.”
“Left.” This time the word was almost choked.
I moved it back.
“There.”
He took his hand away.
The place he had touched kept the sensation of him.
I did the block again.
This time the stave rose cleanly.
Hale stepped back.
“Again.”
I did it again, and again, until the movement stopped feeling forced and began to feel possible.
At the fourth repetition, my hair came loose.
The string slipped. Hair fell into my eyes, into the corner of my mouth, damp from sweat and sticking there.
I started to lift a hand.
“Don’t drop the stave.”
“I’m not planning to fight anyone blind.”
“You may have to.”
Annoyingly, he was right.
The hair caught at my mouth again.
I lifted a hand.
“Don’t drop the stave. Ever. For any reason.”
“I’m being strangled by my own hair.”
“Then turn around.”
I turned before I could think better of it.
Hale stepped in behind me. He took the loose string from my shoulder, gathered my hair at the nape of my neck, and tied it tighter than I had.
The motion was almost impersonal.
Almost.
His knuckles brushed the back of my neck.
The Pull went straight down my spine.
My body went electric.
“So,” I said, because silence had become far too dangerous and I needed a distraction from what my body felt. “Is this part of the lesson?”
“It is if it keeps you from losing.”
Hale’s hands should have left my hair by now.
They had not.
“Hale,” I said.
“I know. I should step back now.”
“Probably.”
He didn’t.
My hands stayed on the stave. His stayed in my hair. The Pull held between us like a blade pressed against skin, ready to cut.
Then voices sounded in the corridor.
Students. Coming closer.
Hale’s hands finally left me with noticeable reluctance.
“Again,” he said.
My breath came hard despite my best attempts to master it.
“Now?”
“Now. For appearances.”
The first voices reached the door.
Hale stepped away from me, three feet exactly, as if the distance had been there the whole time.
I lifted the stave.
My right hand found the correct place without looking.
Hale noticed, and finally he smiled.
“There,” he said.
The students came into the salle.
I held the stance.
Everything looked perfectly innocent from the outside.