Chapter 19
Chapter
Nineteen
Everyone has a hidden talent
The beach south of the village was flat enough and far enough from the water’s edge.
I set up targets on the first morning. They were simple, rough shapes cut from salvage board, mounted on posts driven into the sand.
I stood at the front of my training group with ten blasters in a crate at my feet.
I’d pulled them from the Andromeda’s storage.
Set each one to visual flare mode only. It produced a satisfying burst of light on impact rather than a hole in whatever you’d aimed at.
No point in casualties before the enemy even arrived.
At the end of each session I’d collect them, count them, and lock them back up.
I wasn’t squeamish about arming the Runams. It had to be done.
The Rivonok Alliance wasn’t going to arrive armed with flutes and flowers.
Twenty-three Runams turned out on the first morning. I had them line up in a loose row facing the targets, and I stood to the side and watched them arrange themselves.
Right, I thought. Here we go.
Micher arrived in his healer’s whites.
I noticed this because it was absurd. The whites were clean, pressed, and thoroughly unsuited to any activity involving combat, wind, or exertion. I decided not to say anything, since he’d come at all and I’d take what I could get.
After a thorough explanation of how the weapons worked, how to hold them, aim, etc., they all got to take turns shooting. This seemed to generate a good deal of excitement, and I refrained from telling them that at some point, it was likely that they’d have one pointed at them.
Micher picked up his blaster, checked the charge indicator, settled his stance as if he’d done it a thousand times, and fired. The target lit up in the center. He fired again. And again. Four more times after that.
I walked over and looked at the target. Six flare impacts in a grouping tight enough to cover with my palm. A guild marksman would have had complicated feelings about that grouping. I had complicated feelings about it, and I’d been one.
Micher stood with the blaster held loosely at his side, watching me look at the target.
“I have steady hands,” he said.
Fleck, yes. He did. Thirty years of precise movements on bodies that couldn’t afford for him to flinch had paid off. His hands had learned to do what they were told regardless of what the rest of him was feeling. Apparently, this translated.
I stared at him. He stared back.
“Well done,” I said, which was a significant understatement, and moved on.
There were no other prodigies in the group, unfortunately, but some possessed a portion of natural talent. And what they lacked in talent, they made up for in effort.
Braija absorbed everything I told her and improved on it before I was done talking.
She hit what she aimed at from the first day.
She adjusted her stance before I’d finished explaining why it was wrong.
She had no innate gift for it, having never held a weapon before in her life, and it showed in the small details, but she paid attention and corrected without argument.
I’d trained soldiers who never managed both at once.
Her partner, Viltra, was another matter.
Viltra was enthusiastic, but somehow managed to miss targets that were closer to her than I was, consistently and with great sincerity.
On the fourth day, I moved her to hand-to-hand defense drills, where she turned out to have a genuinely alarming grip strength and did considerably better. I noted this and moved on.
Pasek.
There were no words to adequately describe Pasek as a student. I really tried with him.
He was the most earnest trainee I’d ever had.
He was also, by a considerable distance, the slowest to improve.
He telegraphed every move before making it, so that anyone watching knew exactly what was coming several seconds before it arrived.
I corrected this. He corrected it. He lost the correction immediately and telegraphed the next move.
Raising my voice didn’t help. It made him tense, which made everything worse.
Calm, specific instruction worked marginally better.
He’d do the exact thing I described, correctly, once, and then the next attempt would come apart.
This happened so many times I began to wonder if he was doing it intentionally, and then I’d see his face and know he wasn’t.
Nobody looked that distressed on purpose.
By the end of week two, I’d run out of new approaches to footwork.
By week three, I’d made peace with it.
I started noticing other things. Pasek knew where every trainee was at any given moment.
He knew who was discouraged and quietly went to stand near them.
He knew when something was about to go wrong and positioned himself to limit the damage.
When the group was tired or frightened or getting sloppy, they looked for Pasek, and Pasek steadied them.
Not every fighter holds a blaster.
I rebuilt his role around his unique strength: knowing the status of every person in the village, maintaining order among the trainees, being the one people found when they were frightened and needed to feel less frightened.
He was exceptional at all three within a week of being assigned. The training ran better after that.
Tregen was a recurring disaster of a very specific variety.
He dropped things. He turned the wrong direction, consistently and with a reliability that almost suggested an internal compass pointing the wrong way.
He nearly fired in the wrong direction frequently.
I worried that he was just as likely to help the enemy in a fight by hitting one of our own.
I fervently hoped he could go back to fishing when this was over.
He was so relentlessly cheerful about all of it that I couldn’t find it in me to be angry.
He apologized each time, and then made the same mistake in a different configuration.
I was sure every teacher had students they disliked, and students they pitied, and students who made them question their career choices.
Tregen made me question the nature of aptitude itself.
By week three, I moved him.
Communications. Supply inventory. Knowing which specific Runam to find when something was needed immediately.
Within four days, Tregen had reorganized the supply stores so efficiently that Braija came to ask me who had done it.
Within a week, messages were being relayed faster than they’d ever been.
Within two weeks, the village ran observably better.
I watched him cross the square one afternoon with a supply manifest tucked under one arm and a look of complete purpose on his face, and I thought maybe fishing wasn’t his calling after all.
He fished because Pasek fished, but the young man was an organization machine.
It had just taken a military crisis to find his true strength.
Salie trained with her jaw set and her eyes forward, and she reminded me of Maive so completely that I kept doing double takes. The determination was identical. The set of the shoulders was identical.
The difference was in what drove it. Salie was there to protect Aila and Maive, in that order, and you could see it in how she angled toward the village during drills, even when she wasn’t supposed to, as though she couldn’t stop watching the direction her daughter was in.
Maive trained beside her some mornings. She wasn’t a natural and she didn’t pretend to be.
She listened to my instruction without resistance and worked at corrections with the same focused patience she brought to everything else.
She had a tendency to grip the blaster too tightly when concentrating.
I told her three times. She fixed it twice and forgot once.
Silli had also decided to attend training.
I had not invited him. He had not asked. On the first morning, he appeared on a flat-topped rock at the edge of the beach and settled in, and I chose to leave him there because I had bigger issues.
He was, it turned out, an opinionated observer.
He chittered rapidly when someone made a mistake and made a different sound when something went right.
By the end of week one, four trainees had started waiting for the second sound before they reset and tried again.
By week two, it was more than half. By week three, when Silli made the approval sound, the trainee’s posture straightened and they’d smile.
I could find no complaint as it saved me time, and the little bugger was more consistent than I was, which was a touch annoying.
Toward the end of the second week, in the early morning before the rest had arrived, I watched Braija walk Tregen through a defensive stance correction.
She’d moved into his space and was adjusting the angle of his arm, telling him something in a low voice while he listened and repositioned.
She’d learned that correction from me two days earlier.
I’d shown her once. She’d kept it, and here she was, passing it on to someone who hadn’t been there for the original lesson.
Tregen adjusted. Braija looked at him. Nodded. They reset and ran the sequence again without being told to.
Two people who had never raised a hand against another, teaching each other how to hurt someone.
I watched longer than I needed to and I couldn’t push away the sadness I felt at seeing it. This was not what they’d been. They’d been a cook and a fisherman, and I had turned them into something else. And I really didn’t like that.
Six weeks in, I stood at the front of the beach and watched them run drills in the early light.
They would never be soldiers. That wasn’t achievable in six weeks, even if it had been the goal, which it wasn’t.
What they were was people who knew their home, knew their neighbors, knew what they were protecting.
Most importantly, they knew why. In my experience, that counted for more than anyone gave credit for.
It didn’t make me less worried, but it made me differently worried. I couldn’t say if that was progress or not.
Silli chittered approvingly from his rock at someone’s perfect shot.
High praise.