Another pass. Then another.
Heat gathered beneath his collar. Then sweat. He wiped his brow with the back of his wrist and resumed his stance.
“Once more.”
Darcy obeyed. The exchange quickened. Parry followed parry without pause, the master pressing him faster than before, narrowing the space between them until there was no room for thought at all. Only reaction.
Darcy met each engagement cleanly, but the effort cost him more than it should have. His arm burned. His footing shortened. He pressed to compensate, forcing the distance rather than reading it.
Steel rang again, sharper this time. Darcy recovered too quickly, already guarding against the next attack before it had formed.
That was when the room darkened—not fully, but enough that the line of the blade wavered before his eyes. Lamplight flared too bright along the steel, then was swallowed in shadow. Heat rushed where none belonged, and the air seemed too thick for his blade. His arm moved to counter a strike that did not come.
Steel met nothing.
“Mr Darcy?”
Darcy shook himself. No more of this madness! “Again,” he said, before Monsieur Armand could speak.
They resumed. The master altered the pattern—narrowed the advance, restrained the reach—drawing the exercise inward until it demanded attention without offering release. Darcy complied at once. He always had. His body answered instruction even when his thoughts would not.
At first, the correction brought him round to his old routines. The familiar measures returned: the clean press of the floor beneath his foot, the expected resistance of steel, the sequence of movements he had rehearsed often enough to trust without question. This was what he had come for. This was what he understood.
But the exertion did not gather him as it should have. Instead, it dispersed him. The rhythm he sought refused to settle, each exchange requiring more effort than the last, as though the discipline itself were slipping just beyond his reach. He found himself counting where he never had before—pace, distance, recovery—forcing order where it ought to have arisen of its own accord.
He drove into the next exchange and waited—waited—for the familiar yielding, the moment when strain tipped into command. It did not come.
He pressed again at once, too hard, breaking distance to force what should have answered him without demand.
His focus wavered at the edge of the next engagement, not enough to halt him, but enough to spoil the instinct that ordinarily guided his hand. He corrected, then corrected again, pressing forward to compensate, seeking firmness in momentum where patience would once have sufficed.
And then—without warning, without sense—herface was there.
Not as memory, not as image recalled, but as presence: intent, unyielding, fixed upon him with that unmistakable look of challenge she reserved for moments when she would not be moved. It came not gently, nor did it recede when he willed it to. It stood between him and the line of the blade, intolerable in its clarity.
Darcy broke distance abruptly. His foot slid where it should have held.
The master withdrew at once. “You are overreaching.”
Darcy drew himself back into position with visible care, each movement deliberate, contained. “Continue.”
They did. The pattern sharpened, the exchanges quickened, but Darcy no longer trusted the interval between them. He drove forward when he ought to have waited, his grip tightening until the hilt pressed hard into his palm. The discomfort grounded him. He welcomed it, leaning into the certainty of strain, as though pain honestly earned might drown out what discipline could not. Still, the pressure in his chest did not ease.
“Again,” he said.
Monsieur Armand hesitated, then obliged.
Darcy lunged too soon. The master’s blade slid past his guard with a neat, economical movement that would have scored him cleanly. Darcy felt it even as he twisted aside, a jolt of something like shock passing through him—disproportionate, unwelcome.
He stepped back, breath uneven now, the world narrowing to the strip of floor before him.
“That will suffice,” the master said quietly.
Darcy lowered his blade but did not release it at once. Sweat ran down his spine, chilled already where the air touched it. His legs trembled—not with fatigue alone, but with something unspent.
At last, he set the foil aside.
The room offered him nothing in return. No order restored. No clarity earned. Only the knowledge that motion had failed him—and that whatever waited beyond it would not be met by discipline alone.
