7. Old Ways
Old Ways
Three years old and they finally let me hold a blade.
The training sword was wood, sized for children half my age in a previous life.
My fingers wrapped around the handle with the confidence of experience and old muscle memory trapped in a body that had only been breathing for thirty-six months.
The disconnect was maddening. I knew exactly how the weight should feel, how the balance should sit, how my wrist should angle for a proper guard.
My wrist couldn’t do any of it.
The junior training yard occupied a corner of the estate grounds, walled off from the main sparring courts where the acknowledged sons practiced.
Gray stone surrounded us on two sides, stained with old sweat and older blood.
The air smelled of leather oil, packed earth, and the particular musk of children working harder than their bodies wanted.
Here the unproven gathered. Children of uncertain worth, tested daily to see which might become weapons and which would become servants or corpses.
Rulfen walked the line of us, twenty children in rough formation, wooden swords gripped in holds that ranged from competent to catastrophic.
His face bore the particular patience of a man who’d broken more students than he could count.
A scar ran from his left ear to the corner of his mouth, pulling his expression into a permanent half-grimace.
He carried a cane he used more for striking than walking .
“Feet shoulder width. Sword forward and angled to protect your center.” He cracked the cane against the nearest post for emphasis. “This is the foundation. Get it wrong and nothing else matters.”
I adjusted my stance, knowing where my legs should be even if they couldn’t hold the position for long without wobbling. The body was weak in ways that went beyond simple youth. The gruel, cold floors, and this life’s idea of survival had built some foundation, but nothing close to what I needed.
Around me the other children shifted and fidgeted, most of them older than me by a year or two.
Maise stood four positions to my left, her flame-red hair pulled back in a practical knot, grip on the wooden sword too tight but her stance solid.
Grit was somewhere behind me, silent as always.
Rulfen had put Perrin in a different training group focused on the spear.
“You.”
Rulfen stopped in front of a boy I knew too well. Kasimir de Lancer had grown since our last encounter, taller and broader in the way children outpace each other at that age. He was six now, with soft features that suggested noble blood wearing thin.
“Name.”
“Kasimir.” The boy lifted his chin with practiced arrogance. “Of House Lancer.”
Rulfen gestured to the center of the yard. “Show me what your house taught you.”
Kasimir stepped forward with the easy confidence of someone who’d been praised often and tested rarely. He settled into a stance technically correct but held with the stiffness of classroom drilling. His wooden sword came up in a guard that protected his chest while leaving his legs exposed.
I watched him move. Years of reading fighters told me everything I needed to know in seconds. He’d been trained by someone who cared more about form than function. His weight sat too far forward, his grip too tight. He’d tire quickly and telegraph every strike.
“Adequate.” Rulfen turned to survey the rest of us. His eyes passed over the line and stopped on me. “You. Smallest one.”
I stepped forward without hesitation.
“Name.”
“Danarre.” My tongue still struggled with the harder consonants. “De Blaise.”
Recognition flickered across his face. Everyone in the household knew about the bastard who’d watched an execution without flinching.
“Face Kasimir.”
The Lancer boy looked down at me with poorly concealed amusement. He had a foot of height on me and probably twice my weight. In any fair contest, he’d break me like kindling.
I had no intention of fighting fair.
“Begin.”
Kasimir moved first. He wasn’t fast by any real standard, but against a three-year-old, he didn’t need to be. His wooden sword swept down in a diagonal cut aimed at my shoulder.
I wasn’t there when it arrived.
The body couldn’t execute what my mind remembered, but it could do something simpler: get out of the way.
My feet read the attack angle, shifted weight at the last moment, let the strike pass through empty air.
What should’ve been a smooth sidestep came out as a clumsy half-stumble. The result was the same.
His blade hit nothing. Kasimir blinked.
His follow-up swing came faster and more committed. I moved again, another graceless dodge that worked despite its ugliness. My legs were already burning. This body had no endurance for sustained movement.
“Stand still,” Kasimir grunted.
I didn’t answer. Speaking would waste energy I couldn’t spare.
He pressed forward, each swing harder than the last. Frustration built in his shoulders and his footwork degraded as anger replaced training. I watched it happen with the cold assessment of someone who’d killed men twice his size by exploiting this exact pattern.
He committed too hard to an overhead strike. His weight went forward. His back foot lifted.
There.
For just a moment, his entire right side was open. My body couldn’t deliver the killing strike I knew how to make. These arms had no power to give. But I could fall forward, extend my wooden sword, and let the point find the soft space between his ribs.
We hit the ground together. My weapon jammed into his side hard enough to bruise. His crashed down across my back, too late and at the wrong angle to matter.
“Hold.”
Rulfen’s voice cut through the yard. I rolled off Kasimir and forced myself upright despite legs that wanted to collapse. The other children were staring. Some of the older ones had stopped their own drills to watch .
Kasimir rose more slowly, his face gone red from exertion or embarrassment or both.
“The Lancer strikes first,” Rulfen said to the group. “He strikes second. He strikes third, fourth, fifth. His form is correct. His speed is acceptable.”
He paused, letting the silence stretch. “He doesn’t win. Why?”
The other children looked at each other, uncertain.
“Because the bastard cheated,” Kasimir spat.
Rulfen turned to face him fully. “How?”
Kasimir’s chin came up. “He wouldn’t stand and fight like a proper opponent.”
“Should he?” Rulfen walked between us, forcing Kasimir to track him. “You outweigh him by half again. You have twice his reach. Should he stand in front of your blade and let you cut him down because that would be more fair?”
Kasimir opened his mouth, then closed it.
“The de Blaise way is victory.” Rulfen held up one finger. “Honor belongs in songs. Glory belongs in epitaphs. Fairness will get you killed.”
He let that settle over the group before continuing. “Victory is what you’ll learn here, or you’ll die learning why it matters.”
He turned to me. His eyes were harder than his voice. “You read him. You knew he’d tire faster than you.”
I held his gaze and said nothing.
“You knew his frustration would make him sloppy.” He shifted his weight, cane tapping the stone once. “You waited for the moment and you took it.”
He let that sit for a breath. “Who taught you that?”
“No one.” I kept my voice flat.
“Then how?”
I had no answer I could give. Thirty years of bleeding on battlefields had burned patterns into my bones, and none of that could come out of a three-year-old’s mouth.
“I watch,” I said instead. “I see what happens.”
Rulfen studied me for a long moment. Then he nodded once, sharply. “Back in line. Both of you.”
The rest of the morning passed in drills. Basic cuts, basic guards, basic footwork. My body screamed for rest after the first hour. I gave it nothing.
The wrists that remembered how to hold a spear without shaking couldn’t manage it in this body. I let them shake and kept going. The legs that had carried me through siege camps burned and wobbled. I ignored them until they stopped complaining.
Weakness was information. Every tremor told me where this body needed work, and every failed movement showed me the gap between what I knew and what I could execute. I’d close that gap, one bruise at a time, until this vessel could hold the weight of everything I’d been.
When Rulfen called the end of training, most children collapsed. I remained upright through sheer bloody-mindedness, legs locked and sword still in my grip.
“Danarre. Stay.”
The others filed out, casting glances that ranged from curious to hostile. Kasimir walked with his shoulders tight. He’d remember this morning. Whether that made him an enemy or a neutral, time would tell .
Rulfen waited until the yard had emptied before speaking. “Your feet know where to go before you move. Your eyes track attacks before they start.”
He crouched to my level. “But your arms can’t hold the guard your body wants. Your legs give out when your instincts say push forward.”
He narrowed his eyes. “You know more than you should, and you can do less than you need.”
I said nothing. Denial would be pointless and confirmation dangerous.
“I’ve seen this before,” Rulfen continued. He rested one hand on the cane across his knees. “Once or twice, in children of old blood. The body carries echoes of lives it never lived.”
He studied my face for a reaction I didn’t give him. “Yours carries more than most.”
It was a convenient explanation. I let it stand.
“You’ll train with the three-year cohort in the mornings. But in the afternoons, you’ll join the five-year group for conditioning.” He stood up. “Your mind is ready. Your body needs to catch up.”
Extra training meant extra calories burned on a diet that barely sustained growth. It meant more risk of injury in a household where injured children often became dead children. It also meant attention, which cut both ways.
“I understand.”
“Do you?” Rulfen looked down at me with an unreadable expression. “The lord watches you, young one. That’s protection and peril in equal measure. ”
He looked toward the main keep. “Those who resent his attention will test you. Those who seek his favor will use you.”
He lowered his voice. “You’re three years old and already you have enemies whose names you don’t know.”
“The Lancer boy.” I said it without inflection.
“His father serves a house that lost soldiers to your lord last season.” Rulfen paused. “Kasimir was sent here as a gesture of submission. A hostage dressed as a student.”
He looked back at the gate. “Now he’s been humiliated by a bastard half his age. His father will hear of it.”
Politics. Even here, at three years old, it came down to politics. Men I’d never meet were hating me for victories I didn’t seek. The mercenary in me understood: you didn’t choose your enemies. They chose you.
“I’ll be careful.”
“Be more than careful.” Rulfen reached into his belt and produced a knife in a leather sheath. “Be good enough that they think twice about the cost of moving against you.”
The blade was a finger in length. The handle was wrapped in cord for small hands. He set it on the bench beside me.
Real steel. My first real weapon in this life.
“Keep it hidden. Keep it sharp. Use it only when wood won’t suffice.”
He turned to leave. “Training resumes tomorrow at dawn. Don’t be late.”
I picked up the knife with hands that still trembled from the morning’s exertion. The weight was nothing. The edge was keen enough to draw blood. Years of killing, and here I was starting over with a blade the length of my finger.
The absurdity of it should’ve been crushing. Instead, I felt the old hunger: a weapon in my hand and enemies worth preparing for.
◇ ◆ ◇
I lay on my pallet that night in the Youngling Barracks, breathing in the familiar smell of sweat and straw while cold seeped up through the stone floor despite the thin bedding.
The Knight Brand warmed between my shoulder blades.
The faint heat had become familiar over the past year, a low presence I barely noticed most days, but it had stirred during the fight with Kasimir.
Now, in the quiet, I could feel what it left behind.
A sharpening. An acknowledgment of a blade held with intent.
It was the first thread of sword-craft winding itself into this body. I’d been competent with a sword in my previous life but never a master. The spear had been my weapon. The sword would have to become one.
I ran my thumb along the knife’s edge beneath the blanket. I had enemies whose names I didn’t know and politics I couldn’t escape. I had a body that would take years to become the weapon I needed.
I’d started from nothing before. Built a company from castoffs and criminals, led them through campaigns that should’ve killed us all, right up until the one that did. This was no different. Just a longer timeline and higher stakes.
The knife went under my pillow, within easy reach. Tomorrow I’d train again, and the day after, and every day after that until this body could hold the weight of everything I meant to become .
The silver thread held steady in my chest. Hel could wait. Her target could wait. They’d given me time to grow, and I intended to use every moment of it.
I closed my eyes and let exhaustion take me. In the darkness, I saw Fletcher’s face drifting on black water, reaching for something he could no longer recognize.
I’d find them again. All of them, whatever it took.
But first, I had to survive being three years old.
◇ ◆ ◇
「Hel’s Ledger」
Vessel: Danarre de Blaise | Year 818 | Age 3
House de Blaise | Status: Bastard (Unacknowledged)
Location: de Blaise Estate, Backhouse
「Knight of Swords」 — Stirring
「Emperor」 — Sleeping
「Magician」 — Sleeping
Active Charge: Find the one who broke Hel’s claim.
The thread is taut. The vessel endures.