Chapter 110. Qualified: The Most Beautiful Word a Commander Ever Said to a Human

Chapter 110: 110. Qualified: The Most Beautiful Word a Commander Ever Said to a Human

At breakfast, Magnara announced a schedule, and I understood that I was going to die.

"I will not be idle," she said, standing at the head of the long table in the Covenant dining hall with her arms folded and her face like granite. "A day is a long time!"

"I will not spend it pacing... I will spend it making this one stronger."

She pointed at me.

I put down my toast.

"Everyone who cares whether he lives will help," she added.

Velora, Elsbeth, and Sylvara looked at each other. It was a quick look, the kind passed between people who have just realized that they’ve been drafted.

"I assume this is not optional," Velora said.

"It is not."

"I have not eaten."

"Then eat quickly."

And that was how I came to spend the longest, funniest, and most painful day of my life in the capital of the beastkin, being systematically beaten up by five women who all claimed to love me.

Velora went first.

She took me to the Nightclaw practice yard, a long, narrow stretch of raked sand between two stone walls, strewn at intervals with tall wooden posts.

It looked like a very short, very ugly slalom course. Several of her riders had gathered along the wall to watch, in neat rows, with their arms folded and their faces wiped of all expression.

I noticed that a few of them were holding small leather pouches. I decided not to ask.

"Nightstep," Velora said.

She stood in front of me, perfectly straight, with her hands clasped behind her back. "You have the gift... but you do not yet have the discipline."

"We will begin."

"What do I do?"

"Choose a point. Step."

"That’s it?"

"That is the beginning."

I looked down the yard. There was a post about thirty feet ahead of me.

I fixed my eyes on it, drew a breath, and reached for the thing that had been curled up at the base of my spine since Briarhollow.

It woke... I felt it stretch, like a cat.

The world went thin and silvery. I took a step.

And I went about forty feet to the left and hit the wrong post.

It was a very good hit. I don’t want to understate that.

I went through a faint, rippling smear of my own afterimage, which hung in the air behind me like a ghost, and I struck the post with my shoulder at roughly the speed of a runaway cart.

The post rang like a bell. I bounced off it and landed on my back in the sand with my legs in the air.

Somewhere along the wall, somebody made a sound like a punctured bellows.

I looked up. Velora was standing over me with her hands clasped behind her back and a face of perfect stone.

Her ears were rigid. Her lips were pressed together so tightly that they’d gone white.

"Again," she said.

I got up. I picked a point, and that’s when I stepped.

This time I overcorrected.

I swung too wide to the right, flew past the second post by a good ten feet, and plowed into the third one with such force that I knocked off a sizable chunk of its top.

Velora’s shoulders had begun to shake.

"Again," she said, in a very strange, strangled voice.

The third time I managed to go in a straight line, through a bright streak of silver, across the whole width of the yard. I hit the wall.

It was a stone wall. It was a very solid, very real stone wall, and I met it forehead first.

I lay at the foot of it for a long time, listening to the ringing in my ears. A sound drifted down to me from above, small and high and tightly controlled.

I raised my head slowly.

Velora Nightclaw, Duchess of House Nightclaw and commander of the most feared cavalry in the north, was bent double with her fist pressed against her mouth, shaking from head to foot.

Tears were running down her face. She’d lost the battle.

She was wheezing. A choked, helpless, breathless noise kept bursting out between her fingers, and every time she tried to get herself under control, she looked at me, and it started again.

"It is not funny," she gasped.

"It’s a little funny."

"It is an utter disgrace."

"You’re laughing."

"I am coughing."

"You’re laughing so hard you’re going to die."

"I am..." She broke off and bent over and howled.

The whole row of Nightclaw riders along the wall had given up any pretense. Several of them had dropped to the ground with their faces in their hands.

One was hanging off a post, weeping with laughter, while another slapped her on the back.

Velora recovered, eventually.

She straightened up, wiped her eyes with the back of her glove, and turned a long, flat, murderous stare on her riders.

"Hand them over," she said.

There was a pause.

"I beg your pardon, Commander?" said the round-faced girl from the dining hall.

"The pouches! All of them... Now!"

They handed them over.

Every rider had one.

Velora collected them in a grim row, weighing each in her palm, and dumped the contents into a bucket. Coins clinked.

"Discipline, fine," she said.

"Commander, that is, we have a, it’s merely a, ah..."

"I do not wish to know what it was about... The matter is closed." She lifted her chin. "You will each take two extra night watches."

There was a long, miserable groan.

I found out later that the new bet, which had been placed about thirty seconds before the first post, had been ’how many times he hits the wrong thing before he hits the right one.’

The winning number, as far as I could determine, had been four.

Velora had taken the pot. She donated it, with an entirely straight face, to the keep’s winter orphan fund.

When she had gotten herself under control, she taught me properly.

I’d like to say it was easy. But fucking hell... It wasn’t.

She stood beside me in the sand and made me do it over and over, correcting every mistake with a tap, or a cold word, or a sharp correction of my hips.

But there was no contempt in it. She was precise and patient, and every so often her eyes would flick to my face in a way that suggested she was checking whether I was still alive.

"You are thinking about the distance," she said. "Do not!"

"The distance is irrelevant... You are not running to the post, but you are arriving at it."

"What?! That doesn’t even make any sense!"

"It will."

"It really... really won’t."

"Choose one point, and trust it," Velora said. "Not the path."

"But the point! A man who doubts his destination will end at the wrong post."

I stood very still.

It was a strange thing to hear. I didn’t think she meant it as anything more than a lesson.

But I thought about a muddy courtyard in Frosthaven, a man with a knife, and a long, long road that had led from a cold bathroom window to a sunlit stone hall.

I thought about how many times I’d taken a step without knowing where I was going.

I chose a post. I looked at nothing else.

I stepped.

It was like falling upward.

The world blurred.

For a heartbeat, there was only a silver rush of motion, and then my boots hit the sand with a crunch, and I was standing beside the post, with my hand against the wood.

I’d landed in a perfect crouch, upright, with my sword hand steady.

Velora said nothing for a long moment.

"Qualified," she said.