“Well, how sore are you?” he asked without preamble.
“Very,” she replied, as the servant put buttered flatcakes on her plate and drizzled honey over them. “And please, do not tell me that the only cure for the soreness is to get on the wretched horse again. My first instructor told me that. Why are your horses so…wide?” she added.
“Because they all have destrier blood in them. Knight’s horses. Heavier bones, better for jumping and going over rough country, since they’re bred to carry a rider and all that armor.” He was consuming ham single-mindedly as he spoke. But at least he didn’t talk with his mouth full.
“This morning we’ll be working inside, now that I know you’ll at least not break mirrors and windows when you shoot,” he continued. “There’s a big room here they used to use for balls, but it’s made for practice with weapons. Swords, generally, but we can use some light hand-crossbows in there, and you can practice your knife work.”
“Oh, I’ve been there,” she said. “Sebastian gave me leave to explore as much as I wanted.”
“Well, good. As soon as you’re finished, we’ll go straight there. I told the servants to build up the fires so it won’t be hideously cold.” He began mopping the last of the ham juice from his plate with a roll, so she hastened to finish her flatcakes.
“Are we riding this afternoon?” she asked, as they walked toward what she could only think of as the “music room,” and at his chuckle, she groaned. “Of course we are,” she said, answering her own question. “Or at least, I am.”
“Take heart. You’re going to be less sore tomorrow. In a week, you’ll be fit for the trail on a proper horse instead of that puny little mule.” He handed her a much smaller crossbow than before. “Several things occurred to me. Outside, you have to deal with windage. You don’t in here. And I thought the regular crossbow might be too heavy, considering how many arrows you drove into the dirt. So I reckoned that this might work out better for you. It will still kill a man, or make him hurt quite a lot. It just won’t do so instantly unless you get an insanely lucky shot.” He shrugged. “Unless we’re in a situation where someone wants to kill us, I’d as soon a good healer could save him. He’ll serve as an example to anyone else who gets ideas. Now, try that out, and see how you like it.”
It was certainly easier to cock. She fitted a bolt into the guide, and took aim at the target — which had been placed against a generous number of straw mattresses leaning up against the wall. Either Eric, the servants or both were taking no chances on her ruining the wood paneling.
Her very first bolt hit the target! So did her second, and her third!
None of them got near the bull’s eye, of course, but at least now she was hitting what she was supposed to hit!
He nodded, suggested corrections, until finally, her trigger finger was actually starting to ache, and she was placing the bolts inside the first ring, consistently.
“Now for your knife work,” he said, collecting all the bolts and setting them and the crossbow aside. He handed her a wooden knife with blunted edge and point. “First thing — it’s not a duel. Someone who attacks you with a knife means to kill you. Knife work is dirty work, not gentleman’s work, and anyone who’s attacking with a knife is a ruffian at the very best, and he’s probably murdered before. You have to be dirtier than he is.”
He picked up a wooden knife himself. “Now, assuming you actually see me coming with the knife, what do you do?”
That seemed perfectly obvious to her. “Run. I run very well, and I am lighter than you. Even if I can’t run faster than you, as long as I can keep out of reach, I can probably run longer than you. And if I can keep running long enough to get to some place where other people are, he’ll give up.”
He actually grinned. “Well done! Ninety-nine men out of a hundred wouldn’t give that answer.”
“Women are more practical. And we have no problem with being called cowards,” she pointed out, wryly.
“Right. So, against someone with a knife, your first priority is going to be to escape. Your second, if you can’t outrun him, is going to be to evade him or hurt him so you can escape. You are unlikely to ever find yourself facing someone your size or smaller, so this is how it’s done.”
He couldn’t show her everything in one afternoon, obviously, but what he began with was very interesting indeed. Using a cloak wrapped around one arm as a shield, for instance, and the pattern of move out of the way, block the next blow, strike back while he’s off balance, run.
Mostly, though, he showed her how to evade, how to tell the way that someone was coming at her, and how to squirm out of the way like a ferret. How to cut or stab if she could, and if not, how to punch her attacker with the hand not holding the knife. “He’ll be concentrating on that hand,” Eric pointed out. “Not on the hand he thinks isn’t dangerous. And this is a good time to have a nice, heavy rock, a piece of wood or half a brick in that hand if you can.” He chuckled a little. “I once put a man down with a horseshoe that way. I’d picked it up and put it in my pocket — no point in wasting a good horseshoe.”
She hardly noticed that as she warmed up with the exercise, she hurt less and less, until, when he called a halt for dinner, she realized she hardly hurt at all!
“You are being rather nicer to me than you were when I first got here,” she said lightly, as they left the music room to clean up before dinner.
“I expected someone more arrogant, based on our first meeting,” he said bluntly. “Just another of the same sort of women who used to look down their noses at me.”
She snorted. “You bullied me, tried to intimidate me and did your level best to terrify me. What kind of response did you expect?”
“Not what I got, obviously.” He reached out and caught her elbow, making her stop. “Look…I’ll admit it. I wanted to bed you. If I can bully a woman into that position, I will. Most of the women I run into out in the forest respond to that. They’re happy to trade a rogering for getting off with whatever they’ve poached. I get what I want, they get what they want, no harm done. And I’ll freely admit I’m a good customer at the brothels, and when we still had human servants around here, I was known to tumble a chambermaid or three. That’s the kind of women I know best. The only other women I’ve ever met are the nobles who’d look through me as if I wasn’t there.”
She was not surprised to hear the venom in his voice at that last.
