Chapter 4

He started coming to morning drill about a week after the hearing.

He never asked to join. He stood at the rail on the east side of the yard where the light comes over the tack roof, and he watched, and when we finished he went back to Ash Lane and read until dark. This went on for nine days. Rook counted them, which should tell you something about how Rook was sleeping.

I run drill myself four mornings in five. It is the only part of command I have never delegated and never wanted to. Sixty people, an hour of forms, and then paired work with the blunts until somebody bleeds a little. It is honest in a way that almost nothing else in my life has been.

On the tenth morning Bevan Ash left his practice blade leaning against the rail while he went to see about his boot, and Alfred picked it up.

I saw him do it out of the corner of my eye and I did not stop him, because a man is allowed to hold a stick.

He turned it over twice. He found the balance point with one finger, the way I do, the way I have done since I was nine years old and my arms master made me do it every morning until I stopped thinking about it. Then he set his feet.

I have taught a great many beginners. They all do the same wrong things. They grip too hard, they lock the back knee, they hold the point too high because a high point feels dangerous and low feels defenseless.

Alfred did none of it. He came up into the first guard with his weight already right, and I felt the yard go quiet behind me, which meant that thirty other people had noticed at the same moment I did.

Bevan came back and found a man in his stance holding his sword.

"Sir," he said to me, which he does when he is nervous.

"Give him a pass," I said. "Slow. Nothing to the head."

Bevan Ash is not my best blade but he is a large young man with four years in and a great deal of natural confidence, and he went in slow the way I told him and Alfred put him on the ground in about six seconds.

Not by strength. I want that understood, because the men afterward all told it as though he had been thrown. He simply was not where Bevan's blade went, twice, and then he stepped inside and hooked Bevan's front ankle with his own, and Bevan sat down in the mud looking deeply confused about how he had got there.

"That is my trip," Rook said from the wall.

It was. It is Rook's own footwork, which he learned in a Vashen border scrap eleven years ago and has been teaching badly to my recruits ever since.

Alfred stepped back and lowered the blade and looked at me for instruction, and the whole yard looked at me with him.

I should have ended it there.

"Sergeant," I said. "Go and take that stick off him."

Rook took a blunt and went out and gave him a real pass, not a teaching pass, and it lasted longer, maybe half a minute. Rook is forty-four and has a bad shoulder and is still the second most dangerous person in this garrison. He landed one on Alfred's ribs early, hard enough that I heard it, and Alfred did not react to it at all, and I saw Rook's face change when he registered that.

After that he did not land anything.

The thing that unsettled the men was not the losing. Soldiers lose in the yard every day. It was that Alfred fought Rook using Rook, the drop step, the short recovery, the little false opening on the left that Rook shows on purpose and that half of my company still falls for. He gave the sergeant his own habits back at him, cleanly, nine days after seeing them for the first time.

Rook stopped and put his hands on his knees and breathed for a while.

"Enough," he said.

"One more," I said.

I do not have a good explanation for that. I had been standing at the edge of my own drill yard watching something happen that I did not understand, and I have never in my life been able to leave a thing alone that I do not understand.

I took a blunt off the rack and told everyone to get back.

He gave me the courtesy first, blade up, which nobody had taught him and which he must have taken off the men in the yard. Then he came at me and I have never been so thoroughly beaten by anyone.

Here is what it was like. Every fighter has tells. I have three that I know about and my arms master in the capital spent four years failing to break me of any of them. Alfred had all three inside the first exchange. He did not counter them the way another swordsman would, by punishing them. He used them, the way you use a door handle. My weight goes forward a half beat early when I intend a bind, and he simply arranged himself so that my own forward weight carried me into the place he wanted me to be.

I was not fighting an opponent. I was being operated.

He put me on the ground in the mud in front of my entire company and then he stopped and offered me his hand, and the yard was so quiet I could hear the gulls down on the wharf.

I took the hand. What else was I going to do.

"You are angry," he said.

"I am winded."

"Your jaw is tight and your breathing is fine." He said it without any cruelty. That is the thing about him that I still cannot make people understand. There was never any cruelty in it. "I did it wrong. Tell me which part."

"You did not do it wrong. That is the problem."

"Then explain the problem."

I stood there in the mud with my hair coming down and thirty of my own soldiers pretending very hard to be looking somewhere else, and I understood that I could not explain it, because the problem was not something he had done. The problem was that I had spent twenty nine years becoming this and he had spent nine days watching, and one of us had been wasting our time.

"Later," I said, and I sent the company to breakfast.

He came back the next morning and the one after. Within a fortnight he was taking two men at once. Within three weeks the boys had started asking him for corrections, and to my surprise he was good at it, patient in a flat and mechanical way, and Wick Aldery, who had come back on light duty with a patch over his eye, followed him around that yard like a duckling. That should have pleased me more than it did.

The part I did not tell anyone about happened in the fourth week.

I had been watching him closely by then and I had worked out the shape of the thing, or thought I had. He did not invent. Everything he did was something he had seen. He was a mirror with very good memory, and I had made an uneasy peace with that, because a mirror is at least a thing that exists in the world.

Then on a gray morning he was working with Teo, and he did something with the point that was Rook's and something with the hips that was mine, at the same time, in the same movement.

They do not go together. They are two different schools four hundred miles apart and the reason nobody puts them together is that the hip commitment leaves you open at exactly the moment the point work needs you closed. Except he had changed the timing of the recovery by about a quarter beat, and it worked, and it was better than either version and I have never seen anyone do it before or since.

He had not copied that. There was nothing to copy it from.

I went and sat on the tack room bench for a while afterward. Rook found me there and did not ask.

"He is making things now," I said.

"I know."

"You knew before me."

"I did." Rook sat down on the other end of the bench, and neither of us said anything for a good while. "Commander. What are we going to do about it?"

"He has done nothing wrong."

"That is not what I asked."

I did not have an answer for him, and I said as much, and Rook accepted it the way he accepts most things and went off to see about the north pickets.

The truth, which I did not say to Rook and barely said to myself, was this. I liked him. Somewhere in the reading and the drill and the endless flat questions I had stopped keeping the ledger. He came and found me on the wall walk in the evenings and made noise on the stairs on purpose because I had asked him to. He argued with Marda about her spelling. He had taken a small boy with one eye under his arm without being asked to and without wanting anything for it.

I had left a court full of people who behaved perfectly and meant nothing by any of it, and I had ended up with a man out of the marsh who meant everything he said and could not manage the behaving. Of course I liked him. Anyone would have.

It rained for four days at the end of that month and the drill yard turned to soup and we worked in the granary instead.

On the fifth morning, dry and cold, I was on the wall walk before dawn when I saw Teo Lisk come across the bridge at a dead run.

He was not carrying a weapon. He had come from the town, not the pickets, and he was running the way you run when you have already run a long way, and he was looking up at the wall for me before he had even cleared the bridge post.

I met him at the stair.

He could not get it out at first. He had his hands onhis knees and he was making a sound that was not words, and I took him by the shoulder and made him stand up straight and told him to breathe, and he breathed.

"Ryse Tolliver," he said. "Behind the tannery. Same lane as the boy."

"Dead?"

"No." Teo's face was wrong. I had known that boy for four years and I had seen him pull dead men out of the fen and he had never looked like that. "Commander, he is not dead. He is sitting up against the wall and he is talking. It is only that he is burned. All of him is burned, and the wall behind him is not, and there is no fire anywhere in that lane and there never was."

The cold came into me very slowly, starting somewhere under the breastbone.

"Where is Alfred," I said.

Teo would not look at me.

"Teo. Where is Alfred."

"The magistrate's men came for him at Mistress Vane's an hour ago," he said. "He did not fight them. He put the book down and he went with them, and Commander, he told them where to find Tolliver before anybody had said a word about it."

I was already moving.

"They have got him in the pit," Teo said behind me. "They have got him in the pit and Bern Tolliver's barge came in on the night tide."