Strike, parry, pivot, strike. The pattern Corvin had drilled into us over a decade ago, when he’d stood at the edge of this same yard in the blue pre-dawn cold and shouted corrections with that insufferable calm of his.Your left shoulder drops. Again. Your weight is in your heels. Again.The memory of his voice made my jaw tighten, and I swung harder as a chunk of wood the size of my fist spun off into the dirt.
This was the third post. The second had lasted four days.
I didn’t think about that. I didn’t think about anything. That was the point.
Strike. It ran up the shaft, from the hilt to my palms, to wrists that were already chafed under the cloth bindings. Parry. It burned against my shoulders. Pivot. The blade slipped across the hard-packed earth, throwing me. I regained balance, moved forward, and the blade struck deep but didn’t come free.
To stop was to stand still. Standing still meant the silence rushed in. And in the silence, there was nothing to hold back the image ofherface.
I’d tried. Gods Above, I’d fucking tried. But the image of her kept returning like a fucking nightmare that wouldn’t quit.
That wasn’t the only issue causing me unrest. I’d completely lost the ability to fuck. It was as if my body had gone on strike because I repeatedly found myself with a limp cock in my hand and the humiliation to show for it. What was more, it didn’t matter what the woman looked like, whether she was fair-haired or not.
The blonde girl from the kitchens who smelled like bread and laughed too loud: a failed attempt. The dark-haired one who served wine at the high table and had made it very plain she was available and willing: a useless venture. Two others after that, whose faces I’d already blurred into a general shape of softness and willing warmth. I’d pressed my mouth to skin that wasn’thersand waited for my body to do what it had always done without thought, effort, or mercy, and instead...
Nothing. Not a fucking thing.
Not reluctance. Not distraction. Nothing. Just the flat, humiliating absence of any response whatsoever, while my mind produced, with perfect involuntary precision, the exact angle of violet eyes in torchlight.
I swung until my arms shook.
The yard was empty. Gray light was now coming up over the eastern wall, the color of dirty water, the kind of dawn that didn’t commit to anything. My breath came hard, ragged, and the cold air burned going in. There was frost on the practice dummies, frost on the ground, and the creak of the stable block settling somewhere behind me but nothing else, and for one moment...
One moment.
There was nothing but the weight of the sword in my ruined hands, the scream of my overtaxed shoulders and the beautiful, temporary obliteration of a body pushed past the point where thought was possible.
I closed my eyes.
“You’ll destroy your muscles training like that.”
I kept my eyes closed for exactly one more second. Then I opened them.
“But I suppose you know that already.”
Kay.
Leaning against the armory door with his arms folded and a cup of something steaming in one hand, his angular face was arranged into the expression that passed for neutral on him. And that meant he was thinking hard about something and had been for a while. His gray-streaked hair, which was thinning at the temples, was already neat. He’d been awake long enough to be presentable, which told me he hadn’t slept well, which told me something was driving him. Something was always fucking driving him.
The watching was what people always missed about Kay. They saw the sharp tongue and the administrative exactness and the slight frame, and they made their assessments and stopped looking. They didn’t notice his eyes, how they moved constantly, always cataloguing, storing.
He’d been standing there for a while.
I drove the practice sword into the dirt. “What do you want, Kay?”
“A word,” he said, detaching himself from the wall and striding towards me with the same deliberate pace of someone who had nothing better to do. It was all an act, all part of the equation.
I should have told him to go to hell. I knew that even then, standing in the frozen dirt with my hands bleeding through the wrappings and my body emptied out to the point of transparency. But I was tired in a way that had nothing to do with the training.
I followed him inside.
The armory smelled of linseed oil, old iron, and the damp cold that stone walls hold long after the rest of a building has warmed. Blades were racked along both walls and armor stood on forms in the shadows like men who’d been emptied out but still left standing. Kay closed the door and set his cup on the workbench, and when he turned back, the performance of leisure was simply gone, shed cleanly, the way a man sheds a cloak he no longer needs.
The person looking at me was sharper. Brighter in the eyes, in a way that had nothing warm in it.
“I know,” he said.
Just two words that were decorated with nothing else. There was no context, no preface, nothing that might hint to what he was talking about. But I knew. Of course, I fucking knew.
