Chapter 9

Rhea’s POV

I woke before dawn and lay still for a moment, listening to the others breathe.

I lowered my feet to the cold floor one at a time so the boards would not creak.

I pulled my clothes on in the dark, and checked the corner by the door twice with my boot before I was sure I had everything I needed.

The blade was there. I picked it up, then remembered he'd said no blade, both hands free.

I put it back and nudged it straight with my toe, so it looked like nobody had touched it.

Maisie turned over and mumbled something into her arm.

I stood there until she settled, then went out and pulled the door closed.

The corridor was cold enough that my breath went ahead of me into the lamplight.

I counted the lamps on the way — four still burning, one dying at the corner where the wind got in.

The guard at the turn got up off his stool when he saw me and fell in behind without asking where I was going.

The yard was grey, the frost unbroken over the packed dirt, and at the far rack Adrian had his back to me and was sliding two wooden blades into their slots, one and then the other.

I stopped, then stepped forward, bringing my heels down hard enough to crack the frost.

"You're early," I said.

"Just got here." He didn't turn around.

The frost had melted in a dark ring around his boots and the wet patch extended a hand's width past his heels, so he'd been standing there a while.

I looked at it, said nothing, and raised my chin instead.

He turned with his hands open and empty.

"Twenty steps," he said. "Heel first, then put your weight on it. From that post to this one."

I walked it fast and hard, driving my heels in so the frost popped.

When I turned at the post, he was already shaking his head. "Slower. Walk. Don't lunge from one step to the next."

"I am walking."

"Then walk so you could stop on any one of those steps without falling over."

So I walked slowly, and that was worse.

I felt every uneven shift of my weight, every time my knee turned outward to make the step easier.

He watched the whole thing without a word, twice through, and by the end my ears were hot.

"Now get to my left side," he said, and started across the yard with his hands loose at his sides.

"The side I can't see. You don't touch me, you don't push. You get where I'm blind, and you stay there."

The first time I just walked straight at him, and he turned half a step, and there I was in front of him again with his eyebrows up.

The second time I tried to go around, and he pivoted with me like a door on a hinge.

The third time I dropped low and cut in under his arm, and he gave me half a step and then nodded.

"That's not how you usually move," he said.

"I know a bit of everything."

"You know a bit of everything because nobody ever taught you the whole of it."

My face went hot and then cold. I had nothing to say to that, so I went in again without answering.

This time I leaned into the move before my feet were in position. My hand came up to grab his sleeve.

He brought a forearm across my path and pulled it back half a beat too slowly. My boot came down flat on his.

I turned with the push of his arm, and the back of my hand struck his wrist.

I stopped, and I looked at his face instead of his wrist.

He was laughing.

His mouth curved, then his eyes crinkled. He barely made a sound, just a small chuckle in his throat, and he shook out his wrist. "Do it again."

"What are you laughing at?"

"Was I laughing?"

"You were. I saw you."

"I don't know what you saw." He was still shaking his wrist. "Again. From the post."

The next three rounds I lost without him touching me once, because my mind was still on the sound he'd made and my feet kept lagging a beat behind the rest of me.

He didn't lecture me. He slapped the ground twice beside his boots and said, "Come back. Start from here."

When it was over I sat down on the stone steps with my legs stretched out, still breathing hard.

He sat one step below me and turned his wrist round and round in his other hand.

I watched him do that a while before I asked.

"Did it really hurt, then?"

He turned his hand over. "So which is it? Do you want me to say it hurts, or that it doesn't?"

I didn't have an answer ready, and I didn't like the question, so I turned my head away toward the gate. "Let's go again."

"You want to win."

"I want to win." Too quick.

He put his hand flat on his knee and stood. "Tomorrow. Same time."

"Mm." Also too quick. "I just want to win. That's all it is."

He went off across the yard, and before he reached the gate he raised that hand and rubbed his wrist again, lightly.

I sat there and watched him do it.

The kitchen smoke was going up by then, and somebody was dragging a bucket along the stones behind the wall, and it came to me, sitting there with my arms still shaking, that I had never once asked him why he was teaching me.

I asked the guard at the well what time it was, and he said they'd be putting food out in a quarter of an hour.

I remembered the answer because I was already hungry.

After breakfast, I sat on the bed and went over the three ways of getting to a man's blind side, and then I got up and did them in the gap between the bed and the door.

On the fifth try, the guard coughed out in the corridor, and I sat back down again.

In the afternoon I took Maisie to the kitchens, and we shelled peas into a bowl and washed the big pots.

She asked when we could go back to the bakery, and I said when there was somebody to go with.

By evening the light along the porch had turned honey-coloured. Maisie fell asleep against Tessa's shoulder and was carried inside.

I stood in the doorway and watched the lamps come on in the training yard, one and then another and then another.

Tessa had a sock over her hand and was stitching when I came in. "How was it?"

"Arms didn't move. Legs ache."

"Mm. That's all right, then." She turned the sock over and didn't ask me anything else about it.

Before I lay down, I picked my boots up and set them by the side of the bed, toes pointing into the room, and I put my palm on the tops of them and pressed until they sat steady.

Tessa looked over. "What are you doing?"

"So I don't have to hunt for them in the morning."

"Oh." It was a long sort of oh, and she didn't say anything after it.

The lamp burned down to the last of its oil and went out.

I lay with my eyes open, going over the day. When I remembered his laugh, I buried my face in my arm.

I'd worked out a new way to come at him from below, one he hadn't seen yet, and I'd meant to keep it for the morning.

I lay in the dark and went through the move in my head, but kept losing my place until I couldn't remember whether the turn came before the step or after it.

I turned over, said something unkind about myself into the pillow, and then fell asleep.