Chapter 87: Watch the Hip, Not the Shoulder

Chapter 87: Watch the Hip, Not the Shoulder

Alden Cross owned one good shirt, and he had ironed it twice before the second bell.

The Office of Student Placement was a quiet room with tall windows and a carpet that swallowed his footsteps. The officer pushed her reading glasses into her gray hair and turned his open file toward him.

Soul Talent: Battle Evolution. S-Rank. Verified by registry appraisal; confirmed on re-examination.

"The registry confirmed the result this morning," she said.

"They checked it again?" Alden asked.

"Yes. You can stop worrying." She slid a printed timetable across the desk. "S-Rank classification places you in Star Class. That’s the policy, and it’s already approved. You keep your room. Your practical sessions, your cultivation instruction, and your field foundations move to the Star Class schedule from this afternoon. You’ll also meet a Talent advisor once a week, so you have help understanding what changed."

Alden looked at the timetable. Half the session names were ones he had seen on notice boards and walked past.

"Do I have to prove anything?" he asked. "Before they let me in?"

"No entrance test," the officer said. She tapped the cultivation line on his file. "Your instructors know your current level. Ask questions when you need to. That’s why they’re there."

He walked out with the timetable folded in his breast pocket, over his heart, and felt faintly ridiculous about that and didn’t move it.

The Star Class practical hall was newer than any room he had trained in. The floor gave a little under his boots. Weapon racks ran the length of one wall, and painted lines in three colors crossed the floor in patterns he didn’t understand. Students stood in loose groups, stretching and talking. Several of them stopped talking when he came in.

Alden felt the old scholarship-boy instinct to go and stand somewhere near the door, where he could leave without being noticed. He made himself walk to the middle instead.

"Cross!" Dagna Korr was waving at him from the far side of the hall. She came over rolling one shoulder, the way she had in the forecourt before the gate. "They said you were coming. Stand on the white lines, not the blue. Blue’s for people whose Talents throw things."

"What are the red ones?" Alden asked.

"Restricted space until the instructor opens it," Dagna said. She grinned. "And when Osk rings the bell, stop. Whatever you’re doing. Mid-swing if you have to. She means it."

"Thanks," Alden said.

"You carried Bellamy up that ramp on a bitten leg," Dagna said, as if that settled something, and went back to her group.

Leander Solvain was already on a white line, checking the binding on a padded practice sword. He looked up when Alden took the line beside him.

"Battle Evolution," Leander said. "I heard."

"News travels," Alden said.

"We were told you were joining us." Leander turned the sword in his hand. His eyes were interested and careful, the way they had been in the gate when he was working out who could do what. "How does it work? Second Attempt learned from the last try. Is this the same thing, faster?"

Alden had been asking himself the same question all night.

"It’s like the second try starts while I’m still in the first one," he said slowly. "When something’s going wrong, I see what’s wrong, and I can change it before it’s over. Then it fades. But what I changed stays."

Leander thought about that. "So it works best when you’re losing."

"I’ve had practice," Alden said.

"We’ll find out," Leander said, not unkindly.

Instructor Osk was a short, broad woman with cropped hair and a voice that didn’t need raising. She walked down the white lines and stopped beside Alden.

"Cross. Welcome. You’re with Solvain today. Line exchange, padded blades. Attacker picks from six lines. Defender meets it. Three touches and you swap." She moved on, then said over her shoulder, "Solvain, don’t be polite."

Leander wasn’t.

His first attack came high from the right, and Alden met it. The second came from the same place, and Alden met that too, and was pleased with himself for about a heartbeat. The third came low and from the left, and the padded edge tapped his hip before Alden’s blade had finished moving.

"One," Leander said.

The fourth went the same way. Alden had been watching Leander’s shoulder, the way he’d learned to watch a mill hand’s shoulder before a heavy lift. The shoulder lied. It turned the same way every time, high or low.

"Two."

On the fifth, the feeling came.

It wasn’t as strong as it had been in Carrow Hall, with stone and blood and Silas under the slab. It was thinner, a sharpening at the edge of his attention. But it was there, and it pointed him away from Leander’s shoulder and down to his front hip, which shifted a finger’s width before every low attack and stayed still before every high one.

Leander’s hip shifted. Alden moved his front foot out of the attack’s path as his blade dropped. Mana gathered along the forearm taking the impact instead of stiffening both shoulders. The padded swords met low and left, and this time the force didn’t jar his whole upper body.

Leander’s eyebrows went up. He attacked again, faster. Alden shortened the same step and met him without lifting his heel too far. He hadn’t planned that correction. The first movement had shown him the waste, and the next had already removed it.

For a moment, Alden wanted Leander to keep coming.

Leander smiled slightly and shifted half a pace sideways and back. Alden adjusted toward the new line, quicker than he would have managed that morning, but Leander had already reversed his blade. The apparent opening disappeared. Alden’s weight was moving the wrong way when the padded edge tapped his wrist.

He saw the mistake as it happened. Knowing didn’t give him time to undo a step already taken.

"Three," Leander said. "Swap."

"What was that?" Alden asked.

"Distance change. Off the line instead of along it." Leander shrugged. "My grandfather started me on it when I was eight."

When they paused to swap, the urgent corrections settled. Alden still remembered the more economical guard. He used it when they exchanged roles again, and Leander had to change his approach sooner. Alden still took the hits, but he began to understand how each had been arranged.

At the end of the session, Osk stopped beside them.

"Good adjustment, Cross," Osk said. "You moved and changed your reinforcement together. Solvain’s been practicing changes of distance for years. You’ve had one session. Come early tomorrow and I’ll give you the first footwork set."

"Yes, Instructor," Alden said.

She was already walking away.

In the corridor, Alden realized how far the news had traveled.

People looked at him. Not unkindly, mostly. A Gold Class boy he had never spoken to nodded as if they knew each other. Two girls stopped talking and then started again more quietly. Dagna, walking out beside him, asked whether a wall had really come down on Rooke, and Alden said, "Part of one. He’s fine. He tells it better than I do," and left it there. It was Silas’s afternoon too. He didn’t feel like handing it out in pieces.

Near the stairs, a boy stepped into his path and then looked as though he regretted it.

He was small for a first-year, in a Bronze uniform that had been taken in at the shoulders by someone with more patience than skill. Alden recognized him from a shared table in the refectory, though they had never spoken.

"Is it true?" the boy said. "You were D?"

"Yes," Alden said.

The boy swallowed. "Mine’s E," he said.

He didn’t ask anything else. He just stood there for a moment as if he’d needed to say it out loud to someone, and then said, "Okay," and went off down the stairs at something close to a run.

Alden lingered on the landing, wanting to run after him and say something useful. He didn’t know what. He couldn’t promise the boy an awakening, or explain how to get one. Yesterday he hadn’t known how to get his own.

Still, someone had looked at him and felt hopeful. He found himself standing a little straighter, pleased and embarrassed by how much that pleased him.

He took out his communicator.

Started, he wrote to Silas. Solvain hit me eleven times. I learned something from about eight of them.

The reply came in under a minute. Only eight?

The other three were the same thing. Footwork. I’ll fix it tomorrow.

He put the communicator away and went to find out where the library kept its distance-work manuals. Osk had said early. He intended to be there before she was.