Chapter 99 – Shield Edge

Rook brought a stool instead of a target.

It was a kitchen stool with one leg shorter than the others. She set it beside Kai's bed, tried it with her hand, then folded a strip of cloth under the short leg. Her shield stayed on her back.

"Sayegh says fifteen minutes," she told him. "That includes getting you comfortable."

"She told me ten."

"The other five are for me to argue with the furniture."

Kai watched her test the stool again. Several days earlier, she had fought one creature outside and another in the ward. This morning she had come in with a swollen cheek and a shield she wanted him to interfere with. He appreciated the stool. He would have appreciated a little more sleep.

Tomas raised the bed and adjusted the support beneath Kai's left shoulder. The wound at his waist pulled when he leaned forward. Kai told him, and Tomas lowered the head of the bed one notch. The pain eased without vanishing.

Nia's bed stood beside his, farther from the repaired ceiling than before. She had a letter propped against a book. She looked over its top at Rook.

"Are you going to hit him with it?"

"No. I'm going to sit here and hold it."

"Then why the shield?"

"That's the part he can touch."

Kai lifted his eyes from Rook's swollen cheek. "Maybe. I could feel it when you fought, but I couldn't tell what I was feeling."

"Good. That's why we're doing this without a fight."

Sayegh came in as Rook unstrapped the shield. She checked Kai's dressing, asked whether the warmth had stayed near his wrist overnight, and made him describe it without guessing where it came from. It was still there, weaker than after the core experiment but easier to find than before. His fingers had not straightened. The right wrist band still pulled when the arm lay at the wrong angle.

"One attempt to locate the shield," Sayegh said. "Then, if that doesn't increase pain, one attempt to change it. Stop at the first sign of heat climbing your arm."

"Rook said fifteen minutes."

"I said fifteen minutes in this position. You may spend most of them talking."

Rook accepted that without complaint. She settled on the stool with the shield edge just beyond Kai's supported fingertips. No part of her equipment touched his hand. Tomas measured the gap with the same marked strip he had used for Sana's light and wrote it beside the bed number.

"Ready?" Rook asked.

Kai nodded.

She braced her forearm inside the shield. A pale border appeared beyond its iron rim, scarcely wider than a thumbnail. It was difficult to see against the morning window, but Kai felt a familiar external pressure at the left edge of his attention.

"There," he said.

Rook turned the shield a little. The pressure shifted with it. Kai followed it without moving his hand.

"And now?"

"Closer to the window."

"That's where it is."

She let the skill go. The pressure faded before the pale border disappeared from his sight. It reminded him that his eyes and the sensation did not always report events together.

Tomas noted the answer. Sayegh checked Kai's face and shoulder. He was still breathing normally.

"Do you want the second attempt?" she asked.

"Yes."

Rook restored the border. Kai closed his eyes. The warmth near his palm gathered when he attended to it, and the shield's edge was a separate, harder line beyond it. With Sana's light he had eased outward and held the pressure. He tried the same thing here, stopping when he met resistance.

Rook said, "I felt that."

"What happened?"

"Stay where you are."

He held the pressure through one breath. A dull ache began high in his shoulder, not a sudden flare but enough to remind him what Sayegh had said. He drew back before she had to tell him.

The warmth remained near his wrist. He opened his eyes.

The border had bowed inward beside the iron rim, leaving a narrow exposed section of shield no wider than two fingers. Rook kept her arm in place while Tomas put a pencil mark on a piece of paper held behind the edge. When she dropped the skill, she set the shield down and rubbed her forearm.

"You can make a gap," she said.

"For a breath."

"Long enough for a blade to find it."

That was what she had wanted to know. Kai looked at the iron rim, then at her hand. "Could someone else do the same?"

"I don't know. Most people don't get close enough to try."

Sayegh stepped between the stool and the bed. "We're finished for today."

Rook did not argue. She showed Kai the pencil mark before putting the paper in Tomas's notes. It described one location, one holder and one short attempt.

***

After Rook left, Kai tried to take a drink and found the straw had turned away from his mouth. He waited for Tomas to reposition it. That small delay bothered him more than the ache in his shoulder.

"You did something useful," Nia said from her bed.

"I found a way to make her shield worse."

"She asked you to."

He took a slow drink. "If someone can do that to her in a real fight, she needs to know."

"That's useful."

He could not dispute it. Rook had brought a stool and gone away with an answer. But the pale gap stayed in his mind, exactly where the creature's jointed limb might have reached through.

Tomas returned with the morning medicines. He had marked the two-finger width in his notes, along with the shoulder ache and how quickly it passed after Kai stopped. He showed Kai the entry before filing it.

"No extra skill in the chart," Tomas said.

"I didn't expect one."

"I know. Rook asked whether the System had shown you anything. I told her you hadn't mentioned it."

"It didn't."

Tomas waited while Kai found a comfortable position again. "She wasn't asking for a reward. She wanted to know if it had noticed the gap."

Kai considered that. Sana's light and Rook's shield were both skills the System acknowledged. He had changed their shapes without appearing in any report he could see. Whether the System had missed it entirely or simply withheld the information, he could not tell from his own blank view.

"Tell her I don't know," he said. "Not that it didn't notice."

Tomas made a note for the watch desk.

***

By lunchtime Rook was back, this time without the shield.

She had spoken to Sana and the crossbowman. The bolt that struck the second roof creature had hit after Rook's first impact, when the skill had nearly failed from the force. Rook wanted to know whether Kai had altered the border at that moment.

"I didn't try," he said. "I felt something from your direction, but Beck was moving me. I couldn't separate you from the creature."

"That's what I told them."

"They thought I helped?"

"They wondered. There's a difference."

She pulled up the stool again but left the shield on its hook by the ward door. It was her cheek that needed attention now. Sayegh had cleaned the scrape; the swelling made her words slightly thick on one side.

"I asked Sana about your light test," she said. "You held her skill in one place. With mine, you pushed into it. Can you push the other way?"

"I don't know how I'd tell."

"Neither do I. We can work it out when you're rested. Not today."

Kai had expected her to ask him to make the gap bigger. Instead she had come back with a question about holding it closed.

"You want me to reinforce it."

"I want to find out whether that's possible. My skill braces in the direction I choose. It doesn't cover everything around me. If your pressure can shift its edge, there may be a way to put it back when I'm busy taking a hit."

"Or make it fail while you're busy."

"Which is why we'll practice when nobody's hitting anything."

She stood before he could promise an answer he did not have. At the door she stopped and looked toward Nia.

"The roof watch found no more openings. We'll keep the inner beds where they are until the next rain."

Nia lowered her letter. "Will you tell June when it's all right to visit?"

"I'll tell Sayegh what we've checked. She can tell June what she thinks is safe enough."

That was as much as Nia had asked. She returned to her letter.

***

That afternoon Beck came with the repaired stretcher from the yard. Ruth had sent a short note about the patient who had missed the first transport. Her leg had been examined at the clinic, splinted again and placed where staff could reach her without moving the other patients. Ruth's handwriting slanted sharply across the bottom: Eat when they feed you. The message was addressed to Kai, though she had added Nia's name beside it.

Beck read it aloud because Kai could not hold the paper. Then he reported the yard was still using its painted white arrow to direct people to the water queue. Somebody had refreshed it after rain washed one side thin.

"It worked better than the blue ones," he said. "A man asked me who had drawn it. He wanted to know whether he'd get a quest for following it."

"What did you tell him?" Nia asked.

"That he'd get water."

Nia laughed, then winced because laughing pulled at her leg. Kai could picture the yard from the serving-room window: real people, a white arrow on concrete, and someone still checking whether a reward was attached.

Beck put Ruth's note beside Kai's cup, weighted with the book that held Nia's letter. He had to leave before the clinic's evening round. Kai asked him to thank Ruth for staying with the injured woman while the stretcher was delayed. Beck said he would.

After he left, Kai asked Tomas for the paper with the shield measurements. The nurse propped it beside Ruth's note. The pencil mark was unremarkable. It showed only a two-finger gap on an otherwise straight line.

"Rook asked me a different question," Kai said.

"I heard."

"I don't know whether I can do it."

"She knows that too."

Tomas adjusted the straw so Kai could reach it without calling him back. He gathered the other charts and went to the next bed.

Kai watched a late patch of sun cross the floor. He was tired enough that following the warmth near his wrist took effort. He left it alone.

The exposed section of Rook's shield had been real. Tomorrow, when she brought the stool again, he would ask her to show him the intact edge before he tried to change it. He wanted to know the shape he was trying to keep.