knees bent, legs wide, so that I couldn’t easily be knocked over.
Then she got to the blade itself. How to strike without signaling it beforehand. How to go for the arteries between groin and thigh. How to make a low slash at the stomach, and how to twist the blade on the way out.
“I don’t want to know this,” I said, grimacing.
“You’re enjoying it,” she said. “For once you’re not slouching around. You’ve haven’t looked this animated in weeks.”
I wondered if it were true. There was a satisfaction in the mastery of each move, in feeling the actions become familiar. But at the same time I was repulsed by the idea of gutting anyone. Could actions and their consequences be so neatly separated? The movements permitted no uncertainty, and no ambiguity: you did them. That was it. All morning we’d repeated them, again and again. It was comforting, in the same way that biting my nails was comforting: a mindless action that gave some respite from thought. But when I bit my nails, all I ended up with was my own fingers raw-tipped and sore. The routines Zoe was teaching me would leave a body sundered, robbed of blood. Somewhere a twin, too, would bleed out, and it would be my hand dealing that double death.
Zoe resumed the fighting stance, waiting for me to mirror her.
“There’s no point if you don’t practice,” she said. “It needs to be so that your knife’s in your hand before you realize you need it. It needs to feel seamless—so it comes to you without thinking.”
I’d seen how she and Piper moved, and fought—their bodies fluid, not responding to their thoughts but becoming their thoughts. It was true what she’d said—There’s nothing pretty about fighting—and I knew that however striking Zoe’s and Piper’s movements, the results were the same: blood, death. Flies swarming on sticky bodies. But I still found myself admiring the certainty of their bodies as they inscribed their answers on the world with a blade.
It was past noon when we stopped.
“Enough,” she said, when I clumsily blocked her final parry. “You’re tired. That’s how stupid mistakes happen.”
“Thank you,” I said, as I slipped my knife back into my belt. I smiled at her.
She shrugged. “It’s in my interests to give you a better chance of getting yourself out of trouble, for a change.” She was already walking away. She was a door, forever slamming shut in my face.
“Why are you like this?” I called after her. “Why do you always have to cut me down and stalk off?”
She looked back at me.
“What do you want from me?” she said. “You want me to hold your hand and braid your hair? Have we not given you enough, me and Piper?”
I couldn’t answer. More than once, she’d proved that she was willing to risk her life to protect me. It seemed petty to complain that she didn’t also give me her friendship.
“I didn’t mean to see your dreams,” I said. “I couldn’t help it. You don’t know what it’s like, being a seer.”
“You’re not the first seer,” she said as she walked away. “I doubt you will be the last.”
Ω
It was dawn, two days later, when the bards came. We’d made camp just a few hours before, at a spot Zoe and Piper knew. It was a forested hill overlooking the road, with a spring nearby. Since the Ringmaster’s ambush we’d been edgy, flinching at every sound. To make it worse, for two days it hadn’t stopped raining. My blanket was a sodden load, dragging my rucksack until the straps chafed at my shoulders. The rain had thinned to a drizzle when we arrived, but everything was soaked and there was no chance of a fire. Piper took the first lookout shift. He spotted them in the tentative dawn light—two travelers making their way along the main road, in the opposite direction from where we’d come. He called us over. I’d been wrapped in a blanket in the shelter of the trees, and Zoe had just returned from a hunt, two freshly dead rabbits swinging from her belt.
The newcomers were still only small figures on the road when we heard the music. As they drew closer, through the thinning fog we could see that one of them was thrumming her fingers on the drum hanging by her side, sounding out the rhythm of their steps. The other one, a bearded man with a staff, held a mouth organ to his lips with one