2. Chapter 2
Valdyr's sword met the flat of Brell's shield and the impact rang across the training yard like a struck bell with a grudge.
Brell didn't flinch. She never fucking flinched.
It was one of the most irritating and admirable things about her.
She took the blow with her legs planted wide and her shield angled to shed the force, and then she stepped inside his reach and drove the pommel of her sword at his ribs with an efficiency that would have cracked something important if he hadn't already been moving.
He twisted. The pommel grazed his side, close, too close, she was fast today, and he used the momentum to bring his elbow around and catch her across the shoulder. Dirty move. Street move. The sort of thing that got you thrown out of a tourney and kept you breathing in a ditch.
Brell staggered. She caught herself, reset her feet, and looked at him with the flat immovable expression she had been perfecting at his side for twelve years and had by now elevated to an art form.
"That the best you've got, old man?"
"I'm forty-five. Not dead."
"Getting there, though. You're slowing down. That combination used to put me on my arse. Now it just makes me sad."
"The only sad thing in this yard is your footwork. You left your right side open for a full second."
"Because I knew you'd go for the elbow. You always go for the elbow. You're predictable."
"I'm reliable. There's a distinction."
"There really isn't."
He bared his teeth at her. It was not a smile. Valdyr's face did not do smiles. It did grimaces and glares and, on the rare good day, grim satisfaction when something he'd hit stayed down. The teeth were a warning. Brell had stopped reading them as one about eleven years ago.
"Again," he said.
"Again," she agreed, and came at him like she meant it.
The training yard was alive despite the hour.
Two dozen soldiers filled it in various configurations, pairs sparring with blunted swords, a knot of recruits drilling formation under the hoarse direction of Sergeant Callum, a cluster of archers on the far range putting holes in targets that had long since stopped resembling anything human.
The ground was packed earth and gravel, bordered on three sides by the castle walls and open on the fourth to the lower bailey, and it smelled the way training yards always smelled.
Sweat and leather and iron and the particular musk of bodies working hard enough to remind themselves they were alive.
Valdyr had been here since before dawn. He was always here before dawn, because dawn was the only hour that didn't come with people trying to talk to him.
Sleep happened occasionally, grudgingly, and usually only when his body forced the issue by refusing to remain upright.
He didn't enjoy it. Sleep was lying in the dark doing nothing, which was his least favorite activity, surpassed only by sitting in council and listening to Maddox explain seating arrangements.
The yard made sense. The yard was honest. You hit something, it hit you back, and the outcome came down to who was stronger and faster and more willing to take damage, and there was a purity in that transaction that Valdyr had never found anywhere else in his life.
He drove Brell back three paces with a combination out of the deep repertoire, the one he saved for days when he wanted his muscles to burn and his lungs to scream and his brain to shut up for five consecutive seconds.
She parried the last blow, barely, her arm buckling under the force, and disengaged and raised a hand.
"Hold."
He held. His chest heaved. Sweat ran down the back of his neck and soaked the collar of his training leathers, and the scales on his forearms prickled with heat the way they always did when his blood was up.
Good. This was good. Hitting something with his full strength and feeling the impact travel up his arm was the only thing that had felt clean in months.
"You're in a shit mood today," Brell observed, pulling off her gauntlet and shaking out her hand with a wince she'd never admit to.
She was tall, broad through the shoulder, dark hair cropped close to her skull, a scar running from her left ear to her jaw, a souvenir of a border campaign three years back that she wore without vanity or self-pity.
She was the steadiest soldier Valdyr had ever served with and the only living person who could call him on his shit to his face without getting her teeth knocked in, and she exercised the privilege often enough to suggest she enjoyed it.
"I'm always in a shit mood."
"No, your baseline is unpleasant. This is something else. This is the mood where you try to decapitate me during a training spar and call it exercise."
"I wasn't trying to decapitate you."
"Your sword was at my throat twice."
"Then move your throat."
She gave him a look. It was the I've known you a long time and I read you like a field manual look, and he hated it, and it was almost always accurate.
"Something crawl up your arse this morning?" she asked pleasantly.
"Yes. Your sparring technique. It's been living there rent free."
"My sparring technique put you on the ground last week."
"You caught me off balance."
"I caught you daydreaming. Which is new. You don't daydream. You barely dream. I'm not convinced you have an inner life."
"I don't. It's restful. You should try it."
She snorted. A proper snort, none of this delicate amusement business, full and nasal and unrefined, thirty years of barracks life compressed into one sound.
Valdyr liked it. He'd never tell her that, because he'd sooner gargle broken glass than pay Brell a compliment, but it was one of the few noises in his daily life that consistently failed to irritate him.
They racked their practice weapons and he caught the water skin she tossed him and drank deep.
The water was warm and tasted like the inside of a leather bag and it was perfect.
Cold water was for the court. Warm water out of a bag that had been sitting in the sun was for soldiers, and Valdyr had been a soldier since he was old enough to hold a blade and would be one until they put him in the ground.
"General Valdyr, sir."
The voice came from behind him, thin and vaguely terrified, and Valdyr turned to find a courier hovering at the edge of the yard, visibly recalculating his life expectancy.
He was young. Barely past presentation, by the smell of him. Beta, mild-scented, sweating through his livery in a way that had nothing to do with the morning heat. He had both arms locked around a leather satchel and he did not make eye contact.
"What," Valdyr said.
The courier swallowed. "The steward sends word, sir.
The king's betrothed reaches the city this afternoon.
The omega prince of Aelholm. He's to be received before supper and installed in the east wing, and the ceremony is set for tomorrow morning, tenth bell, in the chapel, and the steward requests... "
"No."
"...requests your presence at this afternoon's processional rehearsal for..."
"What part of no was unclear? Was it the n or the o? I can do them separately if it helps."
The courier's eyes went round. "Sir, the steward was quite emphatic that all members of the king's personal retinue are expected to..."
"Tell the steward I will be at the ceremony tomorrow in my formal armor, standing where I always stand, which is at the king's right, doing what I always do, which is looking threatening enough to discourage anyone stupid enough to interrupt.
I will not be at the rehearsal, because I do not rehearse standing.
I have been standing for forty-five years. I'm a fucking expert."
The courier's mouth opened and closed. He looked at Brell. Brell looked back at him with the serenity of a woman watching a man walk into a wall she had described to him in advance.
"He said you'd say that, sir. The steward, I mean. He told me to tell you the king specifically..."
"The king can tell me himself. Go."
The courier went. He went at speed, satchel bouncing against his hip, and he did not look back.
"You terrorize them on purpose," Brell said, arms folded.
"I don't terrorize anyone. I speak plainly. If people find plain speech terrifying, the problem is with their constitution, not my vocabulary."
"Your vocabulary just made a twenty-year-old courier shit himself."
"Good. Builds character."
"It builds resentment. One day the couriers are going to unionize and refuse to carry your messages and you'll have to walk to the steward's office yourself."
"Let them try."
Brell grinned. It was the sharp delighted grin she wore when she'd gotten a rise out of him, which happened more often than he'd like, because she had an instinct for the soft spots in his armor that rivalled any tactician he'd ever faced across a field.
"So," she said. "The king's getting married."
Valdyr shrugged and started unbuckling his practice armor. The leather was warm and sweat-darkened and he pulled it off without looking at it, three decades of dressing and undressing in battlefield conditions having reduced the whole business to reflex.
"An omega prince from Aelholm," Brell continued, undeterred by his silence, which she had never once interpreted as a signal to stop talking. "Word in the barracks is he's young. Pretty, supposedly. Silver hair."
"Riveting."
"You don't care."
"I don't care."
"Not even a little curious?"
"Why the fuck would I be curious? The king gets married, the alliance gets sealed, the borders get secured, my patrol rotations get fucked because Maddox has requisitioned half my men for ceremonial horseshit. That's the full extent of my involvement."
"You know," Brell said, racking her armor with the calm of a woman standing outside the weather system that was Valdyr's temperament, "most people would find a royal wedding at least mildly interesting."
"I'm not most people."
"No. Most people are pleasant."
"Being pleasant is a waste of energy better spent on literally anything else."