“Fourth!”
Relam was panting from exertion now, sweat streaming from his limbs and forehead, dripping into his eyes and forcing him to blink constantly. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could keep up the grueling pace.
“Fifth!”
The call, coming from somewhere behind Relam, startled him and he faltered. Then, it was back into action, performing the fifth sequence at the same instinctive speed Oreius had demanded of the previous four patterns. After several minutes of the fifth pattern, Oreius stopped pacing in front of Relam, looking at him dispassionately.
“Halt.”
Relam finished the last stroke and returned to the ready stance, chest heaving.
“At ease,” Oreius said after a moment, clasping his hands behind his back.
Relam allowed his sword point to drop, so that it pointed towards the ground, but he continued to stand straight, breathing deeply and trying to recover. Oreius nodded approvingly.
“Good, excellent discipline. No collapsing or folding over during the break, no instant urge to sit down. Tar did well for you there.”
“Thanks,” Relam gasped.
“Take a moment,” Oreius said, waving a hand dismissively. “Then we’ll get back to it, starting with the sixth pattern. If you need a drink, there’s a rain barrel and some beakers by the left wing there, next to the gutter.”
Relam followed the sword master’s pointing finger and saw the rain barrel. He walked over to it quickly, stumbling slightly from fatigue. Then, he plunged one of the wooden mugs into the barrel, filling it to the brim and drank deeply. Once his initial thirst had been slaked, the prince refilled the mug and sipped at it more slowly, knowing that too much water too fast was a bad idea.
“And water discipline,” Oreius observed. “Most impressive. Important, if you ever try to cross Gobel-Tek in the summer or the deserts near Mizzran.”
Relam set the mug down abruptly. “This is a test, isn’t it?” he realized. “All of it?”
“Of course,” Oreius replied.
Relam shook his head wearily. “I should have known,” he muttered. “You’re testing every skill or bit of knowledge I have ever had, every habit, every movement, every thought?”
“Well, I haven’t perfected mind reading, so evaluating your thoughts is a little harder,” Oreius said. “But yes. Everything is being evaluated. That way, I know you as well as possible and I know how to relay knowledge and skill so that it sticks and doesn’t go straight through to your other earhole and bouncing down to the river once it shoots out the other side.”
“It’s sticking,” Relam assured Oreius, shaking his sore arms. “Speed and precision.”
“Survival,” Oreius added, inclining his head. “The faster, more precise fighter wins. Not the strongest, mind you. Strength is important but endurance, skill, knowledge, those are far more useful in the heat of battle.”
“You keep talking about battle,” Relam noticed. “Do you mean like in a war? With thousands of men all around you and galloping horses and siege engines firing and arrows whistling back and forth?”
“An eloquent description,” Oreius noticed. “And an oversimplification, but yes. That is what I mean by battle. But I usually think of it as chaos. Death. Darkness, sometimes even despair.”
“That’s rather gloomy,” Relam muttered.
“But far more accurate,” Oreius promised. “Your minute is up, back to work. And don’t even think about slowing your pace down, boy.”
Relam took up the ready stance once more, though his muscles were starting to feel wrung out and sore already. No practice session with Tar had ever been so painful. But Relam trusted Oreius, trusted that the old warrior knew what he was doing, and trusted that the work he was putting in would help him become the best warrior he could be.
Relam spent the next hour moving through the sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth patterns. Oreius paced around him the entire time, noting his technique, occasionally providing pointers or curt orders to pick up the pace. But for the most part he was silent, watching and evaluating. Never in that span did he call a halt or allow Relam to rest. By the end of the tenth pattern, Relam’s arms felt like metal rods, clumsy, heavy, and slow. But when Oreius called the halt, he defiantly returned to the ready position and held the blade aloft, though he wanted more than anything to collapse on the ground and pass out.
His determination was rewarded with a curt nod from Oreius, just before the warrior told him to relax. Relam let his blade drop once more and made for the water barrel. The day had grown uncomfortably warm during the last hour, despite the pleasant shade provided by the trees and the refreshing cool breeze blowing up from the river.
“How do you feel?” Oreius asked, joining Relam at the water barrel.
“Exhausted,” the prince admitted with a tired grin. “That’s the hardest I’ve ever worked.”
“You’ll work even harder before I’m through with you,” Oreius promised, filling a mug for himself and sipping slowly. “Tar did well with you on the first ten patterns. Very well, actually. You were precise, and you know them so well that upping the speed to somewhere between unreasonable and impossible hardly affected your technique.”
Relam frowned. “You mean I won’t always have to fight at that speed?”
“Exactly,” Oreius agreed. “The speed was more a test of how well you knew what you were doing than a test of your strength or endurance. Both of which are impressive, by the way.”
“Thanks.”
“The one major lacking so far has been your balance and footwork,” Oreius continued heedlessly. “The timing of some of your thrusts was off and your feet tend to stay still for far too long. You need to be moving to get the full power
