Dart backed a step, trying her best to settle into a ready guard. She was all too aware of her opponent’s weight, reach, and skill. Would her humiliation never end?
“Swords up!” Yuril barked. “Begin!”
Pyllor attacked immediately. He step-lunged, crackling fast. Dart barely got her guard up, parrying his sword aside. The tip of his sword sailed past her ear. She flinched when she should have taken the advantage with a counterattack.
Pyllor sprang back deftly, turning his shoulder and striking down with his blade. The strength of the impact knocked Dart’s sword almost to the mud. Pyllor rocked forward and slammed Dart square in the chest with the point of his sword, hard enough to knock her back.
She tripped and fell onto her backside.
Pyllor stood over her.
Dart rubbed where he had struck, knowing it would bruise. If the blade had been steel instead of wood, she would be dead.
Around her the clack-clacking of other practice swords echoed. She was the first defeated. In a matter of breaths.
Yuril rolled her eyes and surveyed the others.
Dart regained her feet and stared glumly across the field. There was much crude hacking and slashing, bouts of brawn over skill, but several of her peers demonstrated flashes of talent: a turned feint, a roundhouse parry, a double thrust.
Yuril called out a few rare compliments-which usually caused the receiver to stumble and lose his match, but the loss was greeted with embarrassed grins.
“Again!” Yuril commanded.
Dart picked up her sword. Two more matches and she was on the ground again, favoring a stinging wrist slap. Pyllor was not holding back-neither with his skill nor with his muscle.
Tears threatened, but Dart let her anger pull her back to her feet.
Pupp, bristling and fiery, stalked around her ankles. Dart waved him back with her free hand. Though without substance, Pupp could sometimes rile himself enough to have some impact on his own. Dart didn’t want him interfering.
“Again!”
Dart took her stance. When the call to start was shouted, she took the lead for the first time, lunging out with a feint to Pyllor’s sword. He countered, trying to smack her blade back. She anticipated and nipped her sword point under the swing of his blade.
Pyllor’s eyes widened in surprise, caught off guard.
Dart lunged into the opening, going for a tag to Pyllor’s torso.
Instead, Pyllor reached with his free hand and grabbed her wooden sword, trapping it. He yanked it closer, dragging Dart off her toes. As she stumbled toward him, he clubbed the hilt of his sword into Dart’s chin.
Her head snapped back, and she fell hard onto the frozen field.
Yuril had missed the maneuver, witnessing only the end.
“Hothbrin, never close guard! Learn to keep your distance!”
The swordmaster turned away again.
Pyllor sneered down at her.
He had cheated and now gloated over his ill-gotten victory. If they had been sparring with steel, he would never have been able to grab a razor-edged blade like that. He would’ve lost fingers, and Dart’s lunge would have struck home.
“That’s enough for this morning!” Yuril called out. “Off to your bread-boards! I’ll see you all on the morrow. And you’d better practice your stances!”
Yuril barked the last while staring straight at Dart.
A few chuckles rose from the others.
With the lessons over, everyone headed across the cold fields toward the warm towers and halls. Most left in groups or pairs. Only Dart walked within a mantle of disgrace thick enough to hold off all others.
A final glance back showed Pyllor with Yuril. The swordmaster’s back was to Dart, but she seemed to be sharing a few hard words with the young squire. Pyllor opened his mouth to offer some protest, but something in Yuril’s face made him close his lips. His eyes, though, noted Dart’s attention and flashed with fury at her. Plainly the discourse concerned Pyllor’s sparring match.
Dart quickly glanced back around.
Had the swordmaster witnessed his deceitful grab of Dart’s sword after all? Or was he merely being scolded for being so hard on such a lesser pupil?
Either way, the black cloud around Dart grew a few shades lighter. Even Pupp shook out of his hunkered tread and trotted more brightly.
Dart felt a renewed determination settle through her. She would practice, every night. She would not end up on her backside in the mud again.
Still, her gaze stretched upward, following the rise of Stormwatch Tower into the steel gray sky. Up near the top lay the hermitage of the castellan, where Kathryn ser Vail held sway. Dart had her responsibilities there, too. The knighting ceremony for Tylar was only days away. There were a thousand details to attend to.
Yet despite her duties here on the field and up in the tower, Dart had never felt more alone. She stared again at her laughing, jostling peers with a heavy heart. She missed her friend Laurelle, sharing a bed, talking in whispers all through the night. She had no friend like that here.
No one even knew her real name.
Pupp must have sensed the clouds about her shoulders, for he bounced back to her, biting at her training sword, his teeth passing harmlessly through the wood. She could almost hear his determined growls.
A small, tired smile formed.
She had at least one friend here.
“Let’s go, Pupp-we’ve got a long climb.”
Dart hurried up the stairs, around and around. After so many flights, her attention drifted, caught in the press and flow of the busy day-then a shout startled her back to alertness.
“Mind the robe!”
Dart danced around the rotund form of Master Hesharian, head of the Council of Masters. He huffed on the stairs ahead of her, filling the passage, one hand on the wall to support himself. His bald pate shone with a slick of sweat, highlighting the eleven sigils tattooed around the crown of his head, marking his mastered disciplines.
He must have important duties with Warden Fields to have climbed so far out of his subterranean den. The levels of the masters were said to delve as deep below the land as Stormwatch climbed into the sky. It was the masters’ sole domain. Down below lay their domiciles, alchemy labs, and storehouses. Dart had heard rumors of Hesharian’s personal menagerie, where he studied new alchemies on beasts of the field.
Dart pushed past him with distaste, earning a disgruntled glare from the massive man. He climbed with another master, one Dart didn’t know, an ancient man in a muddied traveling cloak. He also noted Dart’s passage. His gaze fell upon her. She glanced up-then shuddered, almost tripping on a step. His eyes were the color of milk. He should’ve been blind, so scaled did his eyes appear, but Dart sensed the cold weight of his attention. For a breath, she heard the flutter of ravens’ wings, taken back to another moment of terror, of violation.
Then his gaze drifted off, freeing her.
She hurried past, followed just as quickly by Pupp, his stubby tail tucked low. She was relieved to finally reach the twenty-second flight, where both the Warden of Tashijan and Castellan Vail had their rooms. She fled the stairs, happy to be rid of the midday crowd ascending and descending Stormwatch Tower, though at this lofty height, most of the crowd had thinned. The only folk still on the stairs were those who had matters to settle with Castellan Vail or Warden Fields.
Like the two masters.
Glancing back, Dart saw them enter the stone hallway.
What matters had drawn them so high?
Dart turned away from them, toward the tall doors that marked the Warden’s Eyrie. The doors were open but flanked by a pair of knights. Dart noted the crimson stitching at the shoulder of their cloaks. A perfect circle
