Chapter 1242: A Joke

"Your Elowyn Caerlin...does seem to collect men around her."

Cedric’s eyebrows rose. He had heard Kaireth clearly, but the remark sat so strangely among the sounds of practice weapons that he looked for some connection to the drill. His line held. The group was still on the road. Kaireth had stopped beyond sword reach to talk about Elowyn.

"What are you trying to say?"

Kaireth smirked. "What is so hard to understand?"

Since the lecture began, Kaireth had pressed every advantage his argument gave him, and Cedric had found him irritating before conceding that the man understood how a forward attack could buy time. They had argued over where to spend fighters and how to bring them back. Elowyn had no place in it.

Kaireth raised his spear before Cedric could answer. The student beside him moved first, drawing Cedric’s replacement toward the open side of the lane, and Kaireth drove through the space between them.

Cedric caught the shaft on his longsword and turned it toward the barrier. Kaireth let it slide along the blade, withdrew far enough to free the point, and came in again. Cedric met him a step farther back, where the runner still had a clear route past his shoulder.

"If you are trying to annoy me, then—"

"I am failing?" Kaireth asked as their weapons parted.

Cedric kept his guard up. He wanted Kaireth to leave Elowyn out of his mouth, but saying so would hand the man the very response he wanted.

"Heh. Look at your face."

Cedric pressed the next thrust aside and drove Kaireth back around the bend, stopping before the movement carried him away from his line. Kaireth regained his distance, watching over the spear shaft.

"But since you seem unable to grasp my words, I suppose I must speak plainly." His grip shifted. "Elowyn... She is a rather peculiar girl, isn’t she? You follow her everywhere, and she still needs someone else to entertain her."

Cedric met the next thrust late. He recovered before Kaireth could drive through, but the impact jarred his wrist.

Kaireth had spent the entire drill steering around Lucavion. He had come at Cedric instead, and through Cedric at her, because that was the door that would open.

’...You...’

The thought stopped there. Cedric turned another thrust into the barrier and concentrated on the narrow space beside him until Kaireth drew back.

"I am right, am I not?"

"Stop."

"Why? I have said nothing wrong."

Cedric’s replacement stepped in at his shoulder. Cedric signaled him to hold, aware of how far Kaireth’s voice carried.

"In our houses, there is a name for a lady who goes from one man to the next looking for an audience." Kaireth glanced toward the road, then back. "A salon beggar. She can have a title and still beg for attention."

Cedric’s grip tightened around the hilt.

’You know nothing about her.’

Kaireth had never seen Elara after the banishment. Cedric remembered her coming out of the room where they had abolished her core and reaching, once, for power that no longer answered. He remembered the nights she cried behind a closed door, her voice dropping whenever his footsteps passed, and the mornings she washed her face and found something that needed doing. Her hands raw from the supplies she carried and the floors she scrubbed, she learned to mend what they could not afford to replace, and her first attempts were poor, and she went back to them anyway. Sometimes she pressed coins into his hand, coins she had earned, he learned later, while he thought she was resting.

Someone else to entertain her.

The words snagged. Cedric’s eyes went past Kaireth’s shoulder to the edge of the reserve, where a man stood with an estoc hanging loose from one hand, watching the lane as though it were happening to other people. They returned before the spear did.

Knocking the spearhead down, Cedric stepped through the opening and forced Kaireth to pull back his forward hand.

"Take that back."

"Which part?"

Cedric drove his sword against the spear. Kaireth caught the blow, though his rear foot slid across the dirt, and Cedric was on him before the foot could find purchase. Kaireth gave ground toward the mouth of the lane; Cedric, for his part, took every inch of it.

The harder she had worked to learn what nobody had thought to teach a ducal heir, the more fiercely she had refused to be praised for it, and Kaireth had folded all of it into an appetite for attention.

"You heard me," Cedric said.

"If she is above the name, why does it bother you?"

With the spearhead pinned toward the barrier, Kaireth’s upper arm lay open for an instant. Cedric touched it with the flat of his longsword, a strike that would have counted in the exercise, and felt Kaireth yield another step.

’My place is beside her.’

His replacement called a warning. Cedric heard it. Kaireth was backing toward the mouth with that arm still in reach, the reserve waiting behind him, and Cedric followed until the chalk mark showed beneath his boot.

It was also, though Cedric did not notice, the first time all drill that he had pressed toward the reserve instead of back toward his own line.

There was still time to return. The student behind him held the line, and the runner had not called the group clear. Whatever the drill still wanted from him, Cedric saw only the arm, left uncovered by the spear’s sweep and close to the barrier. One swing with his weight behind it would hurt him.

Kaireth had smiled when Cedric told him to stop, and he would walk out of the yard with that smile unless someone taught him what it cost.

At the edge of his sight, the hand that held the estoc had stopped hanging loose.

’Let him remember.’

Cedric stepped across the chalk mark.

Kaireth’s eyes dropped to his leading foot. The guard began to turn toward a scoring blow, and Cedric changed the angle to come around it; until the last possible instant he was still free to shorten the swing and let Kaireth retreat unhurt.

He put his full weight through the strike. The line of the blade ran through Kaireth’s arm and on beyond it, toward the open ground at the mouth of the lane.

—CLANK!

Cedric’s sword changed direction so suddenly that his shoulder followed it. A narrow, blunted blade had met his longsword near the hilt, and the force of his swing passed Kaireth and struck the barrier; he had felt almost no resistance, only a small, exact pressure, and for an instant it seemed his own hand had chosen the new path.

The barrier rattled. Someone behind Cedric drew a sharp breath. Then he found the practice estoc laid across his longsword and followed it to the man who had stepped between him and Kaireth.

Lucavion, who had been standing at the edge of the reserve a breath ago, drew the estoc free and lowered its rounded point.

"Come on now," he said. "Let’s not go overboard."

Cedric stared at him. The last time an estoc had stopped him this close, it had come to rest beneath his chin; this one hung loose at the man’s side, which was somehow worse. Beyond him, Kaireth had backed against the barrier.

No one resumed the drill.

The fighters on Kaireth’s side had lowered their weapons, Cedric’s replacement stood several paces behind him watching his sword hand, and beyond the lane the students who had been following the withdrawing group had turned to look.

"You may want to control that bloodlust," Lucavion said.

The words were light, the voice that said them lighter, yet Cedric became aware of his own breathing, and of the strength still gathered in his arm after the swing had ended, unspent and with nowhere to go. He eased his grip. His replacement did not take his eyes off him.

A murmur traveled along the yard. Cedric caught Reilan Dorne from one group, then a quieter question about where a coastal baron’s retainer had learned to look like that. Nobody answered it, but he could feel the yard measuring him again, and he lowered his sword.

Arcten entered the lane, checked Kaireth first, and only then looked at the chalk mark behind Cedric’s feet.

"Both of you, weapons down."

They obeyed. Lucavion stepped aside, giving Arcten room without leaving the lane.

"Student Reilan. You saw the boundary?"

"Yes, Instructor."

"And you crossed it deliberately?"

Cedric looked at the mark. He had heard his replacement call to him. He had known where the blow would land.

"Yes."

Arcten let the answer stand. "Student Olarion. Your assessment."

Valeria had watched from outside the barriers, a slate beneath one arm. "He left the assigned line. The final strike exceeded the force the exercise required."

Arcten took the slate and entered the assessment himself, making Cedric wait while he finished writing.

"The defense held until you abandoned its position," he said. "That will be reflected in your result. Remain here when the others clear the yard."

"Yes, Instructor."

Kaireth shifted his spear against the dirt. "It was a joke."

His voice had lost its ease. Cedric expected him to address Arcten, but Kaireth’s eyes had gone to Lucavion, and Lucavion, estoc lowered, looked back at him; Kaireth’s hand tightened around the shaft.

Cedric had meant to make him regret the remark. Fear showed in Kaireth now, plain enough to read, and it had arrived only when Lucavion turned toward him.

’Him again.’

Arcten sent the defenders back to their line to finish. The runner’s final report came soon after: the group had cleared the road. Cedric repeated it to the others, and Arcten called an end to the drill.

The students carried the barriers away in pairs. Cedric lifted one of the frames with his replacement, keeping his pace to the other student’s, while across the yard Kaireth, rejoined with the attackers gathering their practice weapons, did not look toward Cedric.

Lucavion returned his estoc to the rack and spoke briefly with Arcten. Cedric could not hear what passed between them; he saw only Arcten glance once at the lane and then back at Lucavion, and he carried his frame to the edge of the yard.

He had wanted to stand for Elara. Kaireth had been the one to back away frightened, and Lucavion the one to stop Cedric from hurting him, and the thought brought a tightness under his ribs that he could not place. Where the blade would have gone had it kept its line, he did not ask himself. Setting down his end of the frame, he stayed where Arcten had told him to wait, opening and closing the hand that still remembered the swing.