The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,149

her mind casting back to what she’d always thought of as the best worst days of her life.

“You remember that day when the physickers came and yanked you out of training?”

As if Karris could forget it. Quietly, she said, “I thought I was done.”

“You should’ve been,” Samite said. “I know that now. Trainers tell each other things, not just the rules as written and what to let slide, but also how to keep kids from getting dead. You’re lucky you didn’t die. It’s because of kids like you that they checked our piss every day. You remember that? We submitted to it thinking it was a test of whether we could stand awkwardness and humiliation, but it wasn’t. A kid stops pissing regular, and then it comes out bloody—that kid’s gonna kill himself from exertion.”

“The physickers told me it was pretty bad,” Karris admitted.

“When you were gone, Trainer Tzeddig stopped us and asked two questions.”

“Oh? I never heard about that.” The trainer had asked enough trick questions to make every scrub paranoid.

“She asked us, if we had to pair up that day and fight in teams, fighting to the death against the others, who we would like to have on our side: you or Aghilas. We all said Aghilas, of course—except Aghilas, who tried to be smart.”

Aghilas had never been as funny as he thought. “She whack him upside the head?” Karris asked.

“She whacked him upside the head,” Samite said with a smile. “Then she said we’d have to be fools not to choose Aghilas, that he was one of the most naturally gifted athletes she’d ever seen. He was fast, strong, and quick with a dozen weapons, or without any at all. Then she asked us if, in a few years, we had to go to war, who we’d want to have fight beside us: you or Aghilas.”

Karris realized momentarily that she hadn’t thought about her damned papers in several minutes, but she was enrapt.

“Some of us figured this had to be the trick part, so we said you instead of the obvious answer, but when she demanded why, none of us could say. You could see the traps opening up in front of your feet with that woman and still never avoid them. I hope I can be half the trainer she was.”

“Well, what’d she say?” Karris demanded.

“Do you know why you piss blood when you’re killing yourself from overexertion?”

“What?” she asked, not following.

“Your body panics. It starts devouring its own muscles.”

“That sounds . . . unhelpful, when one’s already overexerted.”

“Trainer Tzeddig pointed after you, where the physickers were carrying you, and—” Samite’s voice cracked with sudden emotion. She cleared her throat, but her eyes brimmed. “And she said, ‘That girl Karris has all of two muscles to rub together, and she wants to be here with you so bad she’s literally pissing them down her leg. She is working harder than anyone here. That goddam slip of a girl is working herself to death. Aghilas, do you know how good you could be if you worked half that hard? I don’t, and I don’t think you ever will, either. Last week we rigged the race so you couldn’t do better than second—and you gave up and didn’t finish in the top ten. You haven’t stopped complaining since. You know who’s never complained?’ ” Samite shook her head, tears spilling down her cheeks. “Orholam’s stones, I remember it like it was yesterday. That woman was magnificent when she was chewing our asses.”

Karris was barely holding back tears herself.

“Tzeddig said, ‘That little girl will run through a brick wall for you. You give her a goal and death itself won’t keep it from her. For years now I’ve trained the best fighters in the world, and I tell you that you haven’t seen a person until you’ve seen how hard they’ll push themselves and what they do after they reach their end and fail. So you tell me, when you go to war—and you will, may Orholam grant that it’s merely a metaphorical one—but when you go to war, who do you want beside you?’ And I tell you what, Karris, you weren’t there, and Aghilas was. And a lot of us were afraid of him, and we knew we’d have to spar him that afternoon, and the next day, and the next, but almost everyone in the cohort chose you anyway.”

They did? And now Karris couldn’t stop the tears from spilling hot down her face.

“And then Trainer Tzeddig