Chapter 82: Three Steps and Back

Chapter 82: Three Steps and Back

The second attempt went better for about forty seconds.

Alden kept to his three steps. When his first striker retreated, he let it go, shouted "Back!" to nobody in particular, and returned to his charge’s shoulder in time to meet the second one coming round the partition. He’d got that right.

What he hadn’t got right was the feint. The third striker came at his charge from the front, swung wide to the left, and when Alden moved to cut it off, it ducked under his sword and went right. It knocked his charge’s arm hard enough to spin it round. The light flickered and held, but the charge staggered into the partition and fell over.

The bell rang.

"That feint," Alden said, breathing hard. "It went one way and then the other, and I bit."

"Watch its body, not the reaching hand," Ferrow said from the platform.

The fourth attempt, the same striker made the same move, and Silas saw Alden’s shoulders change before it happened. He didn’t commit. He waited half a beat longer, saw the duck coming, and met the striker on the right with the flat of his blade. It wasn’t elegant. It was correct.

That’s his Talent, Silas thought. The plain one. He gets it wrong once and fixes it the next time. It was easy to forget how useful that was when you were thinking about what it might turn into.

Silas’s own problems were less tidy.

Against these strikers, twelve paces was a comfortable throw. Accuracy wasn’t what kept going wrong. His weakness was that every good throw made him stop. On the fifth attempt, he planted his feet, sent the dart into a striker’s elbow, watched it drop its arm, and turned back to find that his charge had kept walking. It was six paces ahead now, alone, and a fresh striker was coming out of the bay beside it.

Silas ran and shoved the attacker sideways with Remote Grasp. Its swinging arm clipped the charge, which rocked on one foot before recovering. The blue light stayed on, but Silas had come much too close to losing it.

"Rooke," Ferrow said.

"I know," Silas said.

"You keep stopping to throw. The charge doesn’t stop. Stop throwing from where you are. Throw from where it’s going to be."

Silas looked at him. Then at the charge, which was waddling peacefully toward the next bend as if nothing had happened.

"So I need to be ahead of it," he said slowly. "Not beside it."

"A step ahead," Ferrow said. "Move sideways where there’s room. Backward if you must, but check your footing. Keep the charge in sight while you attack."

It sounded simple. It wasn’t. On the sixth attempt, Silas backed over a track junction without checking it. His heel caught in the groove, and he sat down hard.

Alden laughed. It came out of him before he could stop it, a startled bark.

"Shut up," Silas said from the floor.

"I didn’t say anything," Alden said.

"You laughed," Silas replied.

"Your charge is walking away again," Alden said, which was true, and Silas got up and went after it with as much dignity as he had left.

The seventh attempt fell apart over a single word. A striker came round Silas’s end of the partition, Silas shouted "Back!" to warn Alden it was coming, and Alden, who used "Back!" to mean he had returned to his charge, stayed exactly where he was. The striker walked between them and knocked his charge flat.

"I said back," Silas said.

"I know. I was back," Alden said. "That’s what back means."

"Pick words that can’t mean two things," Ferrow called down. "You’ve got three jobs to announce. Leaving your charge, returning to it, and handing a striker to the other man. Three words. Don’t share them."

They settled it in under a minute. Off meant leaving. Back meant returned. Yours meant a striker was crossing to the other side. Alden made Silas repeat them like vocabulary, which was humiliating and also, Silas had to admit, exactly what he needed.

They took water after the seventh attempt, sitting with their backs against the east wall in the yellow lane while the partitions ground into their next arrangement.

Alden drank half his flask without stopping. Sweat had darkened his hair at the temples. The calf the medic had cleared was holding; Silas had been watching it on every turn, and Alden hadn’t once favored it.

"In the gate," Alden said, without looking at him, "everybody kept pulling me out of things."

Silas waited.

"Leander told me where to stand. Dagna’s shield was over my head. Isolde did the hard part on the ramp. And then Elyra..." He turned the flask round in his hands. "I’m not complaining. I’m glad everyone came out. But I spent that whole day being the person somebody else was keeping safe. And when it mattered, I was standing there with my sword up and I was too slow to do anything about it." He shook his head. "I don’t want to be that one again."

Silas could have told him that in another version of that day, Alden hadn’t been slow at all. That he had stood in front of the guardian and kept getting up until something inside him broke open. He couldn’t say any of it, so he said the only true thing he had.

"You weren’t useless in there."

"I didn’t say useless. I said slow." Alden finally looked over. "This is the first place where I can see exactly what I’m doing wrong."

"Me too," Silas said. "I can hit these things. I just keep stopping to do it. Apparently walking at the same time is an unreasonable demand."

"I noticed," Alden said.

"Everyone noticed," Silas muttered.

Alden’s mouth twitched. Then he sighed and leaned his head against the wall. "Three steps," he said, mostly to himself. "Call it. Come back."

On the eighth attempt, it held.

Alden’s striker retreated. Alden took his three steps, called "Off!" and Silas’s head turned to cover the right side while he kept a step ahead of his own charge. A second striker came at Alden’s charge, and Silas sent the dart into its hip from where he already stood. It stumbled. "Back!" Alden called, and was there, and drove it into the partition.

When a striker crossed from Alden’s side toward Silas’s, Alden shouted, "Yours!" and Silas was already turned to meet it, walking backward, not quite falling.

Both charges reached the painted gate with their lights on. The bell rang twice instead of once.

Alden let out a whoop and then looked embarrassed about it.

"That’s the first course," Ferrow called. "You can cover each other while you share a lane. Good. Back to the yellow strip."

Silas retrieved his dart, and they returned to the east wall. Ferrow waited until both were clear before reaching for the lever.

"Now it gets harder."

The floor rumbled. This time the partitions didn’t just shift. They closed in. The route narrowed until it was barely wide enough for two people side by side, then bent hard round a sharp corner. At the corner, a partition slid into place down the middle of the track and split it into two lanes, one inside and one outside, each just wide enough for a charge and one escort.

Silas looked at it and felt his stomach sink.

At that turn, the charges would separate. He and Alden would be on opposite sides of a stone wall.