Sword

by Amy Bai

  * * *

  "Balance. Breathe in. The blade is your mirror. It only reflects you. Breathe out. This is the beginning of real—stop twitching, girl. Breathe in. Follow—no. Breathe. Follow my hand with the point. Be the reflection. Be—gods, straighten up, you look like a felled tree. Better. Now. This is about flow. Be a still pool. Your movements must be smooth. Again. Follow—no, Kyali."

  "I am not a still pool!"

  "It's a thing to think about. It's supposed to help you concentrate."

  "It's not bloody well working!"

  "I see that." Arlen shrugged, expressive as a tree, and folded the little quartz ball, latest and by far the worst of the trials he had inflicted on her, inside a fist. Kyali clenched her hands, too flustered even to scowl. "So. We've found something you're not good at."

  Her sullen slouch unbent itself in a hurry. Her teacher matched her stare for stare, an uncommon amusement crinkling his dark eyes, which sparked gold with reflected light. The realization that it was her own eyes his mirrored cooled her temper.

  I'm as transparent as Taireasa, she thought despairingly, and schooled her expression with fierce concentration, though she had to turn away to manage it.

  A pebble soared past her ear. Sword came free of sheath without thought. She glowered, her blade far too close to Arlen's throat, fighting to keep her face smooth.

  "Like that," Arlen remarked, as casually as if they were discussing last year's barley crops.

  A tic began under her right eye. "Like what?" Kyali said, careful not to let her voice get to the volume it wanted to.

  He might not have noticed. Except, of course, he had. Sometimes it seemed Arlen spent his days coming up with new ways to make her shout, or pitch something into the brush where she would be obliged to spend a prickly half hour trying to find it.

  "You should move like that," he explained, infuriatingly calm. "The ball won't stay on the blade unless it's either moving flawlessly or held perfectly still, girl—a concept worth more than a few thoughts from you, I might add. You do well enough when you're surprised into it, at least. I was starting to think I might have found your limits after all."

  Words failed her. Again. Something like a growl crawled out of her throat. All she had was the sword in her hands, and that she could hardly throw.

  Arlen tilted an eyebrow. "Not giving up, were we?"

  Her anger cooled abruptly, as it always did when goaded long enough, into a composed and hostile precision of thought. Eyes narrowed, she twisted the sword up and arranged her limbs. Arlen lobbed the ball in a gentle arc, reading her intention better than she would have liked him to. It landed on the flat of her blade and her hands tilted the steel in tiny, frantic increments until it caught in the center groove and held... held—

  Stilled, sitting on her sword.

  All the breath left her body. Her eyes met Arlen's over the flash of trapped sunlight in the crystal. Kyali clung fiercely to a startling upwelling of confidence and began breathing in pattern. Without allowing herself to think about it, she brought the sword up and around in the first of the Forms, listening in distant amazement to the soft grind of stone on metal.

  The ball stayed, sliding smoothly in the groove of her sword, a strange new weight on her blade that nonetheless felt as though it should have been there all along. Her blood hummed in her veins. Her head began to ache and her eyes to burn, a sure sign that she was doing magic—though of what sort, she had no idea.

  There was a strange shimmer in the air, and a stranger feeling in her middle, like something was pulling gently on her insides.

  Second, third, and fourth Forms, done as carefully as she had ever done anything in her life. It went on. She lost count. Her muscles remembered what to do, her mind was occupied. She placed her feet exactly in the steps, feeling the weight of ball on blade, the weight of magic and of the strange pulling, as sensations suddenly and inexplicably familiar, utterly right, like a door she'd never seen before opening onto her own room.

  The perception was alarming. She wobbled off balance and sent the ball sailing off into the brush. The warmth of confidence and of magic fled instantly, leaving behind only the desperate certainty that this was important, and she couldn't do it, and she had less time than she knew.

  "Damn," Kyali murmured, and flushed hot when she heard the ragged edge of fear in her own voice. Her belly hurt. Her muscles were shuddering from the effort and the strange sensations. She sheathed her sword, unable to look Arlen in the face, and then didn't know what to do with her hands.

  Her teacher walked off without a word and crouched in the brush where the ball had flown off. Kyali stared at the dirt, struggling with a sudden impulse to bolt into the trees like a spooked horse.

  Arlen's worn leather boots appeared in her view, their toes scarred and scuffed. Kyali bit her tongue and tried to muster the courage to raise her chin, to meet that cool, scornful gaze. Courage seemed to have left her along with magic, though, and for a mortifying moment she couldn't make herself move.

  Arlen's big hand closed over her shoulder, hard enough to make her wince.

  "Damn?" he said. The frustration in that one word made her head snap up with a painful jerk. She met his eyes and the apology that was weltering up out of her froze in her throat at the intensity of his expression. "Damn?" he said again. "You young idiot, have you any idea how long it takes to learn what you just did? How few of us ever manage it?"

  Kyali opened her mouth. Nothing but a sad little squeak fell out of it, and she shut her teeth over that sound before another one like it could emerge. Arlen's free hand fell on her other shoulder and she sucked in a harsh breath, feeling suddenly trapped.

  "I… I don't…"

  He shook her, not hard, but enough to make her teeth rattle. "One thing you've yet to achieve—one thing you'll need badly, soon enough—is a dispassionate judgment of your own skill. You'll have more than enough people underestimating you in your lifetime, Kyali Corwynall. You cannot afford to be one of them."

  Kyali jerked away, wishing, for once, that her hair was free to hide her face. She had no idea what expression was on it, but she was sure it wasn't something she wanted there. "I don't know what you mean," she said, her voice quivering badly now.

  "Stubborn child, do you not? You, who've spent more years studying the arts of war than many of the officers of your kingdom's court? Who knew the use of a blade and the feel of shed blood in a year when your agemates were all learning how to dance and ride? Who could—"

  "I don't know!"

  She turned full around on the tail of that outburst, lonely and shaken and furious with herself, fighting the desire to run away, all the way down the mountain if necessary, to get away from this discussion. A strange panic caught at her. Her heart was pounding in her chest like it wanted to get out. Her belly still hurt, that inexplicable pulling waxing and waning like a cruel tide. Arlen gave her no grace, though.

  "I think you do know, general's daughter. A girl who could master all the Sword Forms in two years ought to know. A girl who could command a party of rangers in battle must know… and a girl who could do what you just did now, wielding your magic and your blade together as one weapon—such a girl cannot help but know what it is to hold power."

  Kyali gasped as though he'd knocked the wind from her; it surely felt that way. She couldn't make herself turn around. "I am not that girl," she said, and, hearing how stupid that sounded, put her hands to her face and breathed through her fingers.

  Arlen was right behind her. She could feel him standing too close. Her shoulders twitched. "You are."

  "I don't want to be that girl," she whispered, the awful, humiliating truth.

  His hand settled back on her shoulder, but it was kinder now, too kind. Her burning eyes spilled over and it got harder to breathe. She stood there like a fool, weeping and trying to stop. "But you are," Arlen murmured, soothing and low, like he was talking to a panicked horse. "There's no fighting that. You were when you came here. You'll be
more so when you leave here to do—"

  There he stopped.

  Right where she most wanted him to go on. As always. He had that in common with her father.

  She turned, no longer caring that there were tears streaking her face and her chin was quivering. "To do what? What shall I do with this—this—" she waved a hand, lacking a word to encompass everything this mountain held for her: all the sweat, all the work, all the love, all the fierce satisfaction of learning something so hard.

  Arlen's expression grew even more intent. He opened his mouth and Kyali held still, feeling like she was close to a real answer for the first time in two years.

  "Whatever you must do," her teacher said finally.

  Kyali spun back around with a growl. For a long moment there was only the sound of them both breathing too hard. "You know far more than you say."

  "It's the way of teachers," Arlen agreed. His voice was shaking now. Kyali straightened, still refusing to look at him, but thinking hard about that.

  "Sword shall guide the hands of men," she murmured. Behind her, Arlen was very still. "Whose hands? Guide to what? And when?"

  "So you believe now."

  "I believed two years ago," she shot back, and had to clench her fists and her teeth against the dreadful feeling of certainty that washed over her. Her guts ached with it. "I believed… I believed when I saw that my father did. When I saw he was afraid." The memory made her want to weep again, and she dug her nails into her palms and refused to let that happen. "But I still don't know what it means and you won't say, Arlen Ulin's-son."

  There was a long silence.

  "It's not so simple as saying or not saying," he murmured.

  "It never is." Kyali folded her arms, trying not to shiver, and bit down on her tongue until the pain of that chased away the anger. "That leaves us… where, Landanar?"

  "About where we were an hour ago, student mine."

  A bitter laugh caught in her throat. She sighed. Around them the trees whispered peacefully and birds wheeled through branches in the mad way they had when summer was just beginning to stretch the days out. Kyali shut her eyes. "I want an hour to myself, if you've no immediate use for me. My head needs clearing."

  "Take two." Arlen backed away, a soft sound of displaced dirt and pine needles. "It will come or it won't," he said softly. "Probably it will. Probably it will be hard. Much in life is. But don't flinch, Kyali. You've as fine a court face as could be wished for otherwise, but right now this is a hole in your armor anyone can see."

  And he wouldn't tell her what he knew about it.

  There was no use in saying anything else: she had her answer. What dread Clan secrets Eairon's prophecy might touch on, she had no idea, but she was tangled in it, trapped by it, and right now she couldn't find room in herself to forgive Arlen for holding back something so involved with her life, and Taireasa's and Devin's. Something that promised disaster.

  Arlen left her standing alone, with her fists clenched and her belly still full of that odd tidal pulling. After looking around uselessly for something to hit, Kyali spun and stalked off into the trees, not caring which direction. She couldn't bear to be still another minute. Branches whipped into her face, only making her angrier; she elbowed her baldric back into place on her shoulder and flung an arm in front of her eyes, unwilling to slow her pace.

  Damn this Clan and its secretive ways! Damn Arlen for teaching her everything in the world she wanted to learn except what to expect next, and damn her stupid self for trusting them all, for following blindly, for wanting so badly to be good at this, for wanting to be… to be…

  Free.

  The tears came back so suddenly she had no chance to swallow them. She pressed the heel of her hand to her mouth, stumbling to a halt, and gasped into her palm until she regained some measure of control.

  Free was a lie. Free meant no Taireasa, no family, no House. No self.

  At the thought, Taireasa's face, somehow older-looking, flickered on the backs of her eyelids. Her brother's followed it. There was a pressure in her chest, like grief, or fear. The pulling in her middle grew stronger, almost enough to make her sick.

  What was she to do? Ride home wearing the Fraonir sword and daggers and wait to see what shape things took around her? Hope her father would tell her what was next? Training here had made her harder to kill, but also, she began to perceive, harder to place. And her presence would not make things easier for Taireasa, with the Western provinces pressing hard for advantage and Devin increasingly likely to be named a Bard, the first in some centuries, which would remove him from all other possible titles: she would be the only game-piece scheming barons could use against the Marsadron line.

  In that thought she found a direction, and the glimmer of an idea.

  There was no such thing as free. But maybe, just possibly, she could thread her way through the maze of court intrigues and keep Taireasa out of harm’s way.

  “Right,” Kyali breathed, and shook herself, beginning to walk again. “Right.”

  But that answer took no account of prophecy, or fate. She saw no way to account for those things, because she had no warning of what to expect but wind and storm and dark. Whatever those meant.

  The next branch took her unawares and caught her full in the face. It stung, and she stopped. A hand to her nose came back bloodied. The realization that she was being a fool came to her somehow out of the sight of her own blood. Here she was, running from nothing, in the middle of—

  Oh, damn.

  In her preoccupation, she had been a very great fool indeed.

  The trees parted just in front of her. Two men were gaping at her from where they sat on the ground near a smothered firepit.

  Outlaws. And she was completely alone here.

  For a brief instant, not even a whisper of wind marred the perfect silence, and then one man gave a wild shout, leaping to his feet. The other lunged at her from where he knelt, a flash of metal in his hands. She felt the shock of whatever it was as it grated off her vest.

  Her sword came free of its sheath and cut his feet out from under him. His scream was terrible. The rest seemed to happen as if at some distance—the arc of blood following the sweep of steel, the bewildered agony on the man’s face as she drove her sword through him. It was far too easy.

  Her own ragged panting brought her back to herself.

  Kyali backed up a step and then another, and moaned in what she first thought was horror and then realized was pain. At her side, her blood leaked out. A great deal of it was already soaking the leather armor.

  A very great deal of it.

  Not so easy after all, it seemed.

  The second man held an old dagger, now stained brighter red. The pain, when she let fall her sword and tried to release the side buckle of her vest, loosened her knees. She dropped to the ground. The locket around her neck leapt up and swung. She stared fixedly at the Corwynall dragon engraved on it as she worked at the armor’s catches, hissing through clenched teeth, trying to ignore the pain, which was rising rapidly past endurance.

  The buckle came undone. Her fingers found the wound at once, and she drew in a ragged gasp and shrieked at the feel of her hand against it. Unable to do anything else, Kyali pressed both hands against the outpouring of blood, rolling onto her back.

  The peaceful trees grew shadowed, then faded altogether into a strangely gold-flecked dark.

  CHAPTER 6

  There was something crawling on her nose. Devin must have found one of the barn spiders to disturb her sleep with, but she was tired enough to ignore it and disappoint him. Any moment now, Father would come in and make him remove it and leave her be. She burrowed deeper into the blankets, smiling at the thought of her brother's frustration. The bedclothes rustled oddly and smelled peculiarly of—

  Dirt?

  "Kyali. Kyali. Wake, child, can you hear me? Hells, I think this is all her blood—Arlen, help me lift her—good gods!"

  She knew the voices, but her mind swung wil
dly back to the outlaws and the blood and the unbelievable pain of being stabbed, and she was suddenly on her knees in the dirt, her sword waving in her shaking hands as her vision came in flashes and gold flickered over everything. "No, don't—"

  Saraid knelt in front of her, wide-eyed, hands spread out. Her silver hair was crawling with gold flecks; her lined, gentle face was covered with them. Arlen, stepping into view and then halting as she lifted the sword, was in a similar state. Kyali squeezed her eyes shut, opened them to the same sight, and realized she was holding the edge of her sword to her teacher's throat.

  "Sorry," she rasped, and lowered the blade carefully. "I'm sorry, Saraid."

  "Child…" Saraid rose, leaning in to press a hand to her cheek. "You're bleeding."

  "I'm not—I am? I was—I think I—"

  "They're dead. You're safe. Let me see now, Kyali, there's too much blood."

  She went still and dropped the sword, trusting, and tried to stay still as the old woman peeled back blood-soaked leather and pressed gentle fingers to her skin, first lightly, then harder. Saraid felt around for a long, uncomfortable moment while Arlen inspected the dead men and retrieved a blood-slick dagger. Kyali looked away.

  "There's no wound," Saraid said, slowly, as though she didn't believe her own words.

  Arlen knelt beside them, tossing the dagger into the brush, and shoved Kyali down on her side. She muttered half a curse, but didn't struggle as both her teachers pushed armor and tunic out of the way. The gold was beginning to retreat to the corners of her eyes. The sick pulling in her belly was tenfold worse than it had been.

  "There was a wound," Arlen said, sounding both bewildered and frightened, as he had never before sounded. "It's… gone. But it's clear where the armor was pierced."

  Kyali twitched under their fingers for another moment, then rolled away and dragged herself to her knees, ignoring their objections. She felt her side, already knowing there was nothing there but unbroken skin sticky with drying blood. Her blood. Her hand came away covered in it. The flash of the dagger caught her memory, the awful draining pain. She hadn't dreamed it.