“My ability to stand still while someone swings wood at me?”
“Your response to a strike that arrives without warning.”
“Linden said response.”
“Linden enjoys words that make violence sound clean.”
I looked at the stave in his hand.
“And Aldric?”
“Aldric knows exactly what this is.”
“Does he enjoy it?”
“Far from it. But he can’t do anything to stop it.”
Hale set his stave back on the rack and came toward me empty-handed.
“The assessment will begin with the four first-year forms.”
“I don’t know the four first-year forms.”
“You will know enough of them by the time you leave. Hopefully.”
“That’s not comforting.”
“It wasn’t meant to be comforting.”
“I’m beginning to suspect no one in this building knows what comfort even is.”
“Reverie does.”
That surprised me into looking at him. Maybe he did pay attention to the world outside his salle.
He was already looking at my grip.
“Again,” he said.
So we began again.
He gave me the forms in pieces: feet first, then hands, then the turn, then the recovery. I learned fast, suspiciously, with very little faith that the knowledge would still be there tomorrow.
By the third form, sweat had gathered at the back of my neck.
By the fourth, my hands hurt.
Hale must have noticed both but he said nothing about either.
“Now the fifth.”
I lowered the stave.
“You said there were four.”
“For the class.”
“Oh, so one is special for me?”
