“Are you sure you still want to train?” He glanced out the darkening windows with concern, yawning. “It’s getting late.”
Sathryn was panting and damp with sweat from running and leaping over the obstacles Julian had made for her to “replicate the conditions we may very well encounter,” but despite being tired, she wanted to continue. She hadn’t thought of her mother since they began training, hadn’t cried, and though she knew that wouldn’t last long, she figured she would make it last as long as she could. “I’m sure.”
The knives felt the best, larger than the darts but smaller and lighter than the sword. They were beautiful in the same way dragons or tigers were beautiful, their beauty enhanced by their deadliness and their deadliness enhanced by their beauty. She stood in the same spot she’d been in all day and aimed at the wall.
She threw the first knife and watched sourly as it sailed through the air and lodged in the floor, missing the wall completely.
“Throw it with your entire body, not just your arm. You get more force and speed, and you get better direction.”
She threw the second knife. It was closer to the center than the first, but it was still far from the circle of rocks Julian had placed in the middle. “It’s okay,” Julian said. “It takes practice to get it accurate. Your speed and force are good, though, for a beginner.”
She frowned and went to go yank the daggers from the wall. “Am I useful enough to follow you to Kings’ Castle yet?”
She handed him the two daggers and watched him pack the blades along with the rest of his weapons back into his bag. “You’ll be good company. Besides, I have decided to take Myrna’s advice about waiting to kill them. Maybe we could just sneak in and scout it out a little bit before we do anything.” He walked toward the guest wing.
“Wait—I thought—if we don’t do anything, then my family—”
Julian stopped walking and turned to look at her. “Your family?”
“My father is still in prison, Julian, I can’t just do nothing.” She ran to catch up to him as he walked down the hallway. “Maybe we can sneak him out. And maybe my brother is there too, even if my mother isn’t.”
She chanced a glance at Julian’s face. His brows were knit together and he wasn’t looking at her; he was staring down at the ground and dragging his hand along the moist walls. She waited for his answer, but he didn’t say anything.
“Is the ground saying something more important than I am?”
Julian glanced up at her, and then looked down immediately after. “It’s just that your idea—it’s a little risky.”
“This whole plan is risky, but at least my plan has a direct good effect. If it were your family, you would want to save them.” With Julian’s head faced away, it was hard for her glare to have its intended effect.
They reached the room in silence. Then, Julian, climbing into his bed, setting his bag on the ground, and grabbing food from yesterday—two now lukewarm bowls of soup—spoke. “Fine.” He handed Sathryn a bowl of soup.
She smiled a little bit and climbed into her own bed. By then, the sun from outside had died to a soft glow echoing like sound around the room. It was too dim in the room to see much, so Julian stood again, grabbing the old torch from the wall and handing it to Sathryn as he made a fire with the fire striker and the flint rock. It wasn’t much, but the light resulting from the torch did enough to illuminate the room just a little bit more than the sun had offered them. He hooked the torch back on the wall and sat on his bed.
“We can save your family,” he said, “but you have to be patient.” The torch spilled shadows under his eyes.
She rolled her eyes and sipped at her soup. It was thick and white with mushroom chunks in it. “What happened to you? I thought I was the one monitoring you and your impulses.”
He smirked. “It seems our roles have switched. Myrna calmed me down a bit.” He yawned, and in that moment, he looked so exhausted.
Sathryn noticed that Julian wasn’t sleeping the next day. They trained all day like the day before, but toward the middle of the day, a storm outside stifled the sun’s light faster than usual. Instead of light rays streaking through the window, rain streaked across the glass panes in long rivers. The cloudy skies meant that they had to come back into the room of the guest wing early, as the lack of light made their training room too dim to see, and since Sathryn wasn’t yet tired enough to sleep, they sat around in the quiet once they ran out of things to talk about. Julian seemed not in the mood for talking for whatever reason. In the quiet, Sathryn got to thinking about her mother again.
Even in her grief, Sathryn could tell that Julian was worried about her until she slept and quieted her tears. But sometime in the middle of the night, she woke from a fit of nightmares to find that Julian was gone, and so was the torch to light the room.
Her first thought was that he had been taken. Blind eyed from the dark, she crawled out of bed and found a wall to drag her hands along, guiding her from the room and into the hallway. “Julian?” she called, quiet at first. No response.
“Julian!” She walked a little faster, comforted by the thought that there wasn’t much in the hall for her to trip over. She beat against the walls, called his name more, and listened for any reply.
She must have exited the guest wing, because the narrower walls of the corridor slipped away from her fingers. It was no lighter for a while, but then, from the far corner, there was a faint glow that grew in intensity as whatever the glow was got closer.
“Julian?” she asked.
The figure emerged from the hallway. It was, in fact, Julian, carrying the missing torch. The glow from the fire cast shadows deeper into his face. As he got closer, she saw how shaded his eyes were. He looked drained.
“Are you okay?” she asked him.
He stared blankly at her and didn’t answer.
She walked him back to the room, expecting him to mention where he went and why he wasn’t asleep, but he said nothing. When they got back to the room, she lay in her bed and watched him lie down, but refuse to close his eyes.
“Go to sleep,” she said.
He shrugged. “I’m not tired.” Then he yawned.
She peered at him, taking in his droopy eyes and slow movements. “Have you been sleeping any nights?”
He shrugged but didn’t answer her question—which meant he hadn’t been sleeping.
“Lie down, Julian.”
“I will, I will, I just need to—”
“No. You haven’t been sleeping at all each night and you need to sleep.”
“I have been sleeping,” he lied.
“Okay, well, I won’t sleep until you sleep.” This was only a good persuasion because he felt she needed to rest her mind after losing her mother.
It panicked him for a second. “What? No, that’s ridiculous, you need to rest—”
“So do you. You think you can fight a bunch of kings with no energy? If I must train, you have to sleep.”
He glared at her. The torch was hooked back on the wall between them again. Its soft light threw eerie shadows across his face so that his menacing stare was so much more unnerving.
“Why don’t you just drop it?” he snapped.
She let herself believe it was irritability talking, which was probably true. But, after nearly ten minutes of them staring intently at each other, waiting for the other to fall asleep, Julian broke down and let his eyes close. And ten minutes after that, he was snoring.
They would leave in a week. The Spring Festival began the day Julian wished to go, which meant there would be a lot distracting the kings, leaving Sathryn and Julian time to sneak around the castle with less chance of being caught. Sathryn got better over the week—at least, what she thought was better—but Julian felt like she had a bit to improve on. It didn’t matter much, for Julian would be doing most of the work anyway (according to him), and all she had to do was help where she could. She told him that she would eventually save his life, but he laughed.<
br />
After the first few days of the week, alongside Sathryn’s training, Julian snuck through the markets and bought little treats for them. He surprised her with a book on the second day.
“It’s beautiful.” She admired its hardback brown cover, the words Sises and Eruma sketched on the front in gold script.
“It’s one of my favorites,” Julian said.
On the third day, they went to a play.
“Should we be doing stuff like this now?” she asked him. As the day to go to the castle drew closer, Julian became calmer and more casual, while Sathryn’s nerves pulled taut. “Shouldn’t we train more?”
Julian, a blanket wrapped about his head like Sathryn to hide his face from the crowd, just laughed. Many people wandered the crowd with blankets or linens covering their hair to block out the dew from the previous day’s rain. Otherwise, it frizzed their hair into a cloud on their heads.
“We may not get a chance to do it again,” he said quietly, weaving her through the crowd. Many markets were already selling for the Spring Festival—woven blankets, throws, rugs, and curtains all detailed with flowers, leaves, and vines. More tables were selling dragon’s eggs, since spring was the best time to hatch them, and food stands sold spring fruits, better in season than the ones they sold during winter—apples, plums, oranges.
She knew what he was talking about. They both knew that the chance of death was still a looming concern.
The theater had one room, but the room was large on all sides and circular. Many people were already filing into their seats—strong wooden benches facing a stone platform—but Julian managed to find them a seat toward the front.
“Spring Festival shows are always the most popular,” he said. Sathryn enjoyed plays. She had seen quite a few in Pomek, but “none of what you will see today,” as Julian said.
“They are so magnificent and emotional. And if you listen to the music”—he pointed to where the musicians sat in their own compartment offstage—“you’ll find it’s the most beautiful sound you’ve ever heard.”
A harpist sat and plucked from her instrument, tuning it. “You should go take her harp,” Sathryn suggested with a wide smile. Perhaps Julian was right. Perhaps she should enjoy herself, even if it was just for a few hours to watch the play.
She tried to push the possibility of more Arrows invading the theater to the back of her mind, but every time she caught someone so much as glancing in her direction, she pulled her blanket farther over her head. “Do you have your daggers?” Julian asked her when he saw her paranoia. He had a knife tucked in his boot, just as she had one hidden in her coat. He’d suggested they bring them just in case they were confronted again.
“Yes.” They weren’t the crystal ones she had been training with—her favorites of all the weapons—but rather a pair of normal, metal blades. The crystal ones were reserved for the kings.
The show began.
Julian was right. It was a beautiful show with beautiful music, and Sathryn could hardly look away at first. But toward the end, while the twang of the orchestra rooted the dancers and actors into the audience, Julian’s hands rested so close to hers that she inched her hand just far enough to touch against his. She left it there throughout the show’s last act, and it distracted much of her attention away from the play and instead toward the feeling of his hand on hers.
On the fourth day, they trained some more.
“The play was a break,” Julian said.
He also briefed her on the plan. He’d had to alter it from the original plan since killing the kings wasn’t quite an option yet, but the main idea still held.
Since they had waited so long to infiltrate, the two people he’d recruited in his original, pre-Beastmen-invasion plan, were ready now, and were visiting on the fifth day, tomorrow.
“You want them to believe that it’s worth their while stringing me along,” Sathryn said, throwing yet another knife at the wall. It landed much closer to the rock circle that Julian had in the middle than it had the day before.
“Nice shot.” Julian handed her the next weapon, his bow and a quiver of arrows. “And no, you’re wrong. It doesn’t matter what they think—you’re coming along regardless.”
She notched the arrow in the bow and aimed just above the circle. “What happened to you not wanting me to come along?” The arrow landed to the left of the rock.
“Didn’t we already discuss this? You wanted to come along, so you’re coming along. And now you’re good at the weapons—especially the knives. They’ll be quite surprised.”
His two friends came early morning on the fifth day, when the sun was still low enough in the sky to be dark, but light enough for someone to sneak around without a torchlight—torches drew attention. Julian had sent a letter to them both on the first day. Sathryn hadn’t even noticed. It was a younger man and a younger woman, the girl and the boy around Julian’s age, and Julian was only two years older than Sathryn.
As soon as Julian saw them, he threw his arms around the girl and held her in such a tight embrace that Sathryn could see the girl struggling to breathe even though she was as excited to see him as he was her. All of them even cried, but it was so brief and so little that Sathryn couldn’t catch it for long. He and the girl pulled away, laughing and smiling at each other like crazy, and then Julian hugged the boy. Then they, including Sathryn, shuffled into the house and followed Julian up to what Julian and Sathryn had called the training room.
The boy approached her first. The girl, a short, red-haired girl with pale skin like Taz’s, was too interested in Julian to introduce herself.
“Hello,” the boy said. He was taller than her—taller than Julian, even—and had narrow eyes and pin-straight hair. When he smiled, his eyes were like thin, black cuts in his face. “I’m Navier.” He said something after that too, but Sathryn’s diluted attention had already drifted away. The way that red-haired girl looked at Julian—the way she brushed her fingers against his arm, as if she had done it many times before—
“Hey, Julian, is she deaf?” Navier asked, turning his head away from Sathryn. The little redhead laughed and glanced over at Sathryn with a pitifully arrogant glare.
“No,” Sathryn muttered before Julian could say anything. He shot her a questioning glance, as if asking, What’s wrong? But she pretended not to see. She instead looked back up at Navier and returned a quarter of his wide smile. “I’m Sathryn.”
“I know.” Navier pulled a sword and a cloth from his belt and ran the cloth along the sliver blade until it shined as bright as his smile. He cradled his sword like he was the proud father of a newborn child. “Julian already told us. I asked you what weapons you used. I’m a swordsman.”
Sathryn shrugged. “I’m just beginning to use the weapons.” After the look on Navier’s face, Sathryn regretted her words. “But I’m doing well with a pair of throwing knives.”
He jerked his head toward the redheaded girl, who was laughing at whatever Julian was saying to her. “Colette is great at knife throwing. Perhaps you can ask her to help you.” His voice suggested he had nothing but good intentions, but Sathryn’s first impression of the girl was already stained. At the sound of her name, Colette approached them both with a small smile. Julian followed her.
“Hi Sathryn,” she said.
“Hello,” Sathryn answered, though she was half inclined to ignore her. “Navier just mentioned that you were good at knife throwing.”
Colette pulled her curly hair back into a large twist behind her head and nodded. “I would like to think so. After all, I learned from the best.” She looked at Julian beside her and nudged him.
Sathryn rolled her eyes and turned her attention away to look at Navier, even as Julian spoke. “I’m not the best.”
“Of course you aren’t. Not anymore—if you were, you would surpass me. And that’s not possible.” She laughed, soon joined by Navier and Julian.
After a moment of reminiscing over things Sathryn hadn’t done and couldn’t
relate to, Julian suggested they train more. Colette and Navier had brought their own bag of weapons—of course. None of them were as exquisite as Julian’s, but they came close. While Colette struck consecutive bull’s-eyes with her daggers and Navier and Julian fought with their swords, Sathryn stood away from them, throwing her daggers and shooting her arrows with an accuracy far less than that of Colette or Julian. Her arrows, knives, and short spears dwindled near the center rather than striking a bull’s-eye. And however hard Sathryn tried not to look over at Colette, she found herself doing so more than she would have admitted. Colette hit the same spot every single time, and—
Colette bent to pick up another knife and noticed Sathryn looking her way. Sathryn snapped her head away and immediately threw the knife she was holding, but not before Colette walked over and watched her just as she missed the center. Again.
“Julian!” she called.
Julian, who was in the middle of fending off Navier, shouted back, sounding a bit annoyed that she was calling him. “What?” No matter how hard Julian fought him off, Navier still found a vulnerability in Julian’s rigid sword skills.
“Did you teach her to throw knives? She isn’t very good at it and I blame you.” Sathryn didn’t snap back at her. Her cheeks were too busy heating. Her mind was too busy wetting her palms.
Julian lost his concentration. Navier knocked his sword to the ground and stood over Julian’s fallen body with his own sword teetering triumphantly near Julian’s throat. “Do you surrender?” Navier asked with a laugh.
Julian rolled his eyes as Navier helped him up from the floor. “You’ve gotten better,” he commented, then made his way over to Sathryn and Colette. He was panting and sweating, and having long discarded his coat, wore just a plain, white shirt and a pair of brown trousers. He smiled at Sathryn, then looked at Colette with a question on his face. “Yes, I trained her. What’s the problem?”
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