Chapter 69

Chapter 69: Chapter 69

Nia stepped out of the circle on the third swing.

She didn’t mean to. Kaelen hadn’t even hit her hard—he just came in low with the wooden rod aimed at her left hip, and when she shifted her weight back to block it, her heel caught the lip of the rut he had drawn in the wet gravel. She went down on one knee in the slush, her practice spear clattering across the stones.

"Dammit," Nia muttered, staying down for a second with her hands on her knees. Her breath came out in thick white clouds under the oil lantern hanging from the pit gate. "The dirt’s frozen on top and muddy underneath. My boot keeps sliding."

"The dirt in the Bramble is going to be worse," Kaelen said. He wasn’t even breathing hard. He leaned on his ash stick, watching her get up. "You’re looking at my hands. Stop looking at my hands."

"You’re holding the stick with your hands, Kaelen! What am I supposed to look at?"

"My collarbone," he said, tapping the hollow of his throat with two fingers. "I can fake a swing with my wrists all day. I can’t move my chest left while going right. If my collarbone stays inside the circle, you stay inside the circle. Again."

I sat on the stone rim of the horse trough ten feet away, paring a rough splinter off the shaft of a spare practice spear with my dagger so it wouldn’t tear Nia’s palms when we switched to heavy blocks. The iron water pump beside me had an icicle the size of a carrot hanging off the spout.

Nia wiped the mud off her knee, picked up her spear, and stepped back into the four-foot ring.

The crown mineral had definitely changed the way she moved, though not in a way that was helping her yet. Before Saturday, she had been slow enough that she had to think about where her feet went before she shifted her weight. Now, her legs had more spring in them than she was used to; every time Kaelen feinted, she pushed off her back foot too hard and overshot her balance by six inches.

On the next pass, Kaelen came in high toward her shoulder, then dropped his stick toward her knee at the last second. Nia kept her eyes on his chest this time and didn’t jump back. She pivoted her hip inside the circle and caught his wooden rod against the thick bottom third of her spear shaft.

The wood smacked together loud enough to echo off the bathhouse wall.

Then a bright, sudden puff of orange sparks shot out of Nia’s right sleeve.

"Ow! Son of a—" Nia dropped her spear and yanked her right glove off with her teeth, shaking her bare fingers in the cold air. A thread of grey smoke was curling up from the thumb seam of the leather glove on the ground. "That’s the second pair this week! I didn’t even mean to pull heat that time!"

I got up from the trough, walked over, and picked up her smoking glove. A hole the size of a copper penny was burned right through the palm leather.

"You’re clenching your fist when you take the hit," I said, turning the glove over. "When you brace your arm, you’re squeezing your chest muscles at the same time, and the new heat has nowhere to go except out through your skin."

"Well, how do I stop doing that?" Nia asked, sucking on the side of her scorched thumb. "If I don’t brace my arm when someone swings a stick at me, the stick hits me in the head."

"Let the wood take it, not your thumb," I said. I picked up her spear and held it across my body with my palms open, cradling the ash shaft in the crook of my thumbs rather than wrapping my fingers tight around it. "Don’t strangle the pole. Keep your fingers loose until the exact second the other blade hits, then push forward with your hips instead of your shoulders. Here. Hit me."

Nia picked up Kaelen’s rod, blew on her red thumb once, and swung a two-handed chop at my left shoulder.

I kept my hands half-open until the wood touched mine, tightened my grip for half a heartbeat while sliding my front foot two inches forward into the gravel, and let her stick slide harmlessly down the slant of my shaft into the dirt.

"See?" I said, handing the spear back to her. "No heat. If you try to stop a heavy guy dead in his tracks with your arms, he’ll break your wrists anyway, mineral or no mineral. Let him slide past you and trip him on the way by."

"Speaking of heavy guys," Luckas’s voice came out of the dark down the path.

He came trudging around the corner of the armory wall with a big two-handled copper pot wrapped in an old flour sack held against his stomach, and four loaves of dark rye bread tucked under his chin like firewood. When he reached the lantern light, he dropped the pot onto the stone bench with a loud metallic clatter and blew on his red fingers.

"The head cook is a thief," Luckas announced, pulling a wooden spoon out of his coat pocket. "He wouldn’t let me near the mutton kettle until I gave him the silver chain off my pocket watch. Kaelen, you owe me half a mark."

"I didn’t tell you to give him your watch chain," Kaelen said, already walking over to the bench and lifting the tin lid off the pot. Thick, greasy steam smelling of boiled turnips, onions, and mutton neck rose into the freezing air. "Did you get bowls?"

Luckas stared at him. "I had four loaves of bread under my chin and a thirty-pound pot in my hands. Where was I supposed to carry four bowls? Use the bread."

We didn’t go back to the dorms to eat. If we went inside where it was warm, nobody was going to want to come back out into the frost at eight o’clock. Instead, we tore the dark loaves in half, hollowed out the soft centers to eat first, and used the thick heel crusts to scoop the hot mutton gravy straight out of the copper pot while sitting on the stone bench by the horse trough.

It was the best meal I’d had since we got to the capital. Nobody cared about forks, and the cold wind off the lake made the greasy mutton fat taste like banquet food.

"So," Luckas said around a mouthful of bread crust, wiping gravy off his chin with his wrist. "While I was waiting by the kitchen loading dock for the cook to finish robbing me, two carriages came across the south bridge with an escort from the 1st Household Cavalry. Six baggage wagons behind them."

Nia paused with her bread crust halfway to the pot. "The Sospurro delegation? Orlov said they weren’t due until the first week of December."

"The King’s brother isn’t with them yet," Luckas said. "The stable boys said this is the advance party—quartermasters, horses, and a dozen junior officers from the Sospurro royal guard who came early to inspect the barracks and set up their pavilion before the trials start."

Kaelen chewed slowly, looking toward the upper tiers where the guest houses were lit up. "Twelve officers and six wagons of baggage just to inspect a tent?"

"You haven’t met Sospurro lords," Luckas said, reaching into the pot for a piece of turnip with his spoon. "My cousin married a baron from their southern hills three years ago. At the wedding, the groom brought four different trunks just for his plumed hats, and his second cousin challenged one of our footmen to a duel because the red wine was served two degrees too warm. If the Viganator Republic really has steam tractors sitting on their border, Sospurro is in trouble."

"Eat up," I said, scraping the last of my bread crust clean and standing up to brush the crumbs off my trousers. "The grease is turning white on the top of the pot. Nia, back in the circle. Give me twenty clean slides from the left side before we go upstairs, and if you burn another hole in my spare gloves, you’re sewing them tonight."

Over the next two weeks, November did its best to freeze the lake solid, though the water was too deep in the middle to crust over completely; the wind just piled broken grey plates of ice against the stone bridge pilings until they sounded like breaking crockery all night long.

We fell into a hard, ugly schedule that didn’t leave time for much else. Up at five-thirty for Toris’s morning runs around the frost-heaved paths of the Bramble; lectures until three; then three hours in the back gravel pit behind the bathhouse until our hands were too numb to feel the spear shafts.

Nia stopped burning her gloves by the second Thursday.

Once she got used to the extra heat sitting behind her ribs, Master Bram helped us rig a weapon setup that actually made sense for someone her size. A standard seven-foot infantry spear was too front-heavy for her when she had to pivot fast in the mud, so Bram took a five-foot ash boar-spear, cut six inches off the butt, and fitted a heavy iron collar around the middle grip. In her left hand, instead of a wide strapped shield that caught the wind and tired her shoulder out, she carried a twelve-inch round iron buckler with a thick central boss meant for punching an opponent’s blade sideways.

She still couldn’t trade heavy blows with someone like Luckas or Mercer, and we didn’t ask her to. Her job in the four-man line was simple: stay three feet off my left hip, use the iron buckler to knock aside anything aimed at my blind spot while I broke the front line, and let Kaelen work off her back shoulder.

We got our first real look at our future employers on the twenty-fourth of November, right in the middle of the Tuesday lunch rush.

The four of us were standing in the slow-moving line by the soup cauldrons when the double glass doors at the main entrance of the dining pavilion swung open, letting in a blast of freezing lake wind that made the floating light spheres near the ceiling bob and flicker.

Eight men walked in, stamping snow off their riding boots onto the marble tiles.

Even if I hadn’t heard the stable gossip, I would have known within three seconds that they weren’t Imperial officers.

They wore knee-length coats of bright sky-blue wool trimmed with silver fox fur at the cuffs and collars, and tall leather shakos with dyed white heron feathers tucked into silver clasps on the side. At their hips, instead of the straight, double-edged broadswords or heavy backswords used by the legions, they carried light, deeply curved cavalry sabers in scabbards plated with chased silver—the kind of thin, whippy blades that were great for slashing at unarmored peasants from horseback and completely useless against iron brigandine.

More interesting than their swords, though, was the way they walked.

There were eight of them, yet they came down the center aisle in two separate clusters of four, keeping a good six feet of empty floor between the two groups as if someone had drawn a chalk line down the marble. The four men on the left wore gold braided cords over their right shoulders; the four on the right wore dark green silk sashes tied around their waists.

Aurio Gentrimio was walking between the two groups, wearing his formal crimson representative coat and that polite, patient smile he used when people were giving him a headache.

"Look at the boots," I muttered to Kaelen as the group passed within ten feet of the soup line on their way toward the raised faculty dais.

Kaelen glanced down without turning his head. "Calfskin. Single leather sole, high riding heel."

"No hobnails," I said quietly. "If you march five miles in river mud wearing those, the suction pulls the heel right off the welt before noon."

As the delegation reached the foot of the faculty steps, one of the green-sashed Sospurro officers—a thin, dark-mustached captain in his late twenties—accidentally bumped his silver scabbard against the wooden tray of a first-year boy who was backing away from the bread table.

Two loaves of hot rolls tumbled off the tray and rolled across the floor, one of them bumping squarely against the polished toe of the captain’s boot.

The first-year—it was Harlan’s old roommate from Geography, a quiet kid from the textile towns—went white to the ears. "Forgive me, my lord, I didn’t see—"

He bent down quickly to pick up the bread.

The mustached captain didn’t yell, and he didn’t draw his saber. He just lifted his right boot three inches and kicked the loaf of bread across the marble floor like a stray stone, sending it skidding under our soup table, while using the flat of his gloved hand to shove the boy backward by the shoulder hard enough to send him sprawling onto his backside among the dropped tin plates.

"Watch your elbows, conscript," the captain said in heavily accented Imperial, brushing a crumb off his sky-blue coat hem. "If my boots are greased before I meet the Headmaster, I’ll have your house master whip your back."

Across the six-foot gap, one of the gold-corded Sospurro officers let out a loud, nasal laugh. "Careful, Captain Varga. Your uncle’s river militia hasn’t won a skirmish since the salt riots; don’t waste all your courage on the bakers’ boys."

Captain Varga spun toward the gold-corded officer, his hand dropping straight to his silver saber hilt, his mustache bristling. "At least my uncle’s men don’t sell royal horses to the Viganator smugglers, Lorenzo—"

"Gentlemen," Aurio’s voice cut between them. He didn’t shout, and he didn’t flare his Ember the way Corvus did, yet there was a sudden, sharp weight in the air around his shoulders that made both Sospurro officers stop with their mouths open. "The Headmaster is waiting in the West Gallery. And in the Imperial Academy, foreign guests do not put their hands on cadets. Regardless of which family employs them."

Varga glared at Aurio for a second, his fingers twitching on his silver grip, before he seemed to remember that Aurio Gentrimio was the eldest son of an Imperial Duke and could probably buy half of Sospurro’s southern province on credit. Varga gave a stiff, jerky bow from the neck, pulled his hand off his sword, and marched up the steps into the gallery, with Lorenzo’s faction following four paces behind.

The dining hall stayed quiet for a few seconds after the gallery doors shut behind them.

I reached under the soup table with my boot, hooked the kicked loaf of bread back out, picked it up, and set it on the edge of the compost bin beside the cauldron while Luckas helped the textile-town boy up off the floor and handed him his tin tray.

"Well," Luckas muttered, ladling cabbage soup into his bowl once we reached the pot. "They seem lovely. Remind me why the Ministry wants to send twenty squads over the mountains to keep those idiots on their throne?"

"Because if we don’t, Viganator puts siege cannons on our side of the river," Kaelen said, taking two ladlefuls of broth.

We carried our trays back to our corner table by the frosty window.

Nia sat down and stabbed her spoon into her soup with a little more force than necessary. "Did you see those coats? Fox fur on a field uniform. If we draw a Sospurro patrol in the spring, I hope Orlov lets us camp half a mile away from them so we don’t have to listen to them argue over dinner."

"We have to get into the top sixteen next week before anyone sends us anywhere," I said, breaking my roll in half.

I looked out through the tall glass panes toward the northern end of the island, where the grey pine tops of the Bramble were tossing under a low, heavy sky that looked ready to dump six inches of snow before Friday.

"Tonight we skip the gravel pit," I told the three of them. "After last period, put on your greased boots and two pairs of wool socks. We’re going up to the north wall to look at the stone bridge over the Bramble creek before the snow covers the banks. If we have to hold that bridge in the first round on Monday, I want to know which rocks are loose before somebody tries to drop them on our heads."