stripped off our coats and sweaters, and my shirt clung to the sweat on my back and my elbows. The training forced me to focus on my body: the strain of my right shoulder, from keeping my knife arm raised before my face. The bruise on my cheek, where Zoe’s kick had slipped past my guard. As we circled and jabbed and circled again I had to concentrate on each breath, instead of on my visions of the children.
“We’re done here,” she said after an hour or more. “No sense wearing yourself out.” But before she stepped away, she nodded at me. “Better,” she said. It was as close to approval as I’d ever had from her.
Ω
I stood in the entrance of our tent. Nearby, Sally sat on a fallen tree, four soldiers squatting by her feet as she jabbed with a stick at a map spread on the ground. Beyond her, the hobbled horses were feeding noisily on hay fetched by scouts from beyond the swamps. Three armorers were at work, cutting up a felled tree to carve shields. Near the camp’s center, on one of the few flat patches of ground, Piper had joined a squadron in some combat drills. They practiced one-on-one, the clatter of sword strikes reminding me of the warning bells that had rung out on the island when the Council’s fleet came. Piper was sparring with Violet, Simon’s adviser. He had the advantage of height and strength, but she had both arms, and the missing hand on her left arm didn’t stop her from wielding a shield, strapped to her forearm. They were well matched; her short-sword was speedy against Piper’s longer blade, and her shield blocked some of his parries. His single arm meant he carried no shield, and he had to move quicker than her, and more economically. Each block and turn was precise, and he seemed to pivot on the spot, forcing her to move around him. He pounced only when her more extravagant swipes gave him an opening.
They seemed to alternate in gaining the advantage. Twice Piper’s reach allowed his sword to find her neck, where he gave a gentle slap with the flat of his blade; twice Violet’s speed allowed her to get beneath his defenses and nudge his body with the flat of her own sword. Then the two would step apart briefly, before beginning again. I noticed, though, that while Piper nodded at her each time he conceded a point, and laughed once at his own folly when he overreached and stumbled, Violet’s face was fixed. She launched herself at him ever faster, each time they had stepped apart. Soon enough they were both panting, and the grass around them was a circle trampled free of frost.
Then, when she gained a point, instead of turning her blade she struck home with the edge. Not a real strike, but enough to make him wince, and to sketch a thin line of blood on his shirt. Zoe, who’d been talking with Simon, turned suddenly. I wondered whether she’d felt a jab of pain from Piper’s wound, or had just heard his intake of breath.
Piper stepped back from Violet, an eyebrow raised. He didn’t look down at the blood, but stayed in the fighting stance that I recognized from my own lessons with Zoe: knees bent, weight lightly on his toes, sword raised.
“You doing the Council’s job for them now, Violet?” he said.
“You’d know about that, since the island,” she said. The two of them were moving in tandem, pivoting slowly around the point where their raised swords almost met.
The others sparring nearby had stopped now. Weapons lowered, they watched Piper and Violet.
“You should have handed the seer over,” she said to him.
“What kind of a leader would I have been, if I’d rolled over and given them one of our own?”
Violet came at him again. On the third strike her blade shrieked its way down the length of his, and they were brought close, their swords locked together at the hilts. She aimed a kick at Piper, which he dodged, and while she was off balance, he shoved the sword hilts away, twisting his blade free. Violet’s own hilt struck her, and she wiped her face with the shoulder of her shield arm, smearing the blood that ran from the corner of her mouth.
“She isn’t one of our own,” she said. “She’s a seer.”
The stares of the crowd shifted to me, and I forced myself to return their