The Armsmasters had left them by the kefront early in the morning before returning to their camp over the hill.

  Aien turned to Trystan and Ren, who had left their chainmail back at camp. Aien was still to receive his. And the white cloak. And a mount.

  “We should take turns sparring,” he said.

  “I think we should warm ourselves up first,” Trystan said, rubbing at his own shoulders, the spear leaning against him.

  Nodding, Aien stretched his arms up, grunting. It was cold by the keside, a chilly end-of-autumn breeze had rolled against them the moment they reached this side of the hill. He couldn’t help but think that Yshnim and Igbol were sitting comfortably around a fire back at camp, cooking their meal.

  Ren was leaning down at a weird angle. Trystan saw Aien looking and turned to watch.

  She was taking her boots out.

  “Ren?” Trystan asked.

  “What are you doing?” Aien asked.

  “I’m going to fish,” she answered, reaching down to roll her trousers up.

  “We’re supposed to practice,” Aien said.

  “We should just leave her. They didn’t outright say we had to spar,” Trystan said.

  “But you know that’s what they expect,” Aien said.

  Ren answered before Trystan could, “Yshnim is patient. Don’t let her looks fool you. She’ll wait for you to realize some things on your own for a long time, maybe until we reach Farhill.”

  “Our training doesn’t technically start until we reach Farhill,” Trystan said.

  I figured that out, Aien thought, thinking back to the past few months. Never staying too long in one pce, avoiding rge cities since Geshin and Eruin, being made to spar every morning before joining the road, then some more before nightfall followed by exercising their bodies so they slept soundly, though they still had to take turns watching over the camp.

  Ren slowly pced one foot on the water, shaking with the cold, then continued in. She had rolled her trousers all the way to her knees and only stopped when the water was almost touching it.

  “You’re going to catch fish with your hands?” Trystan asked.

  “You think I had a rod or a spear growing up? Watch and learn.”

  Watch and learn. Aien heard the words echo with a second, different voice. Boy.

  “Let’s not sit around and watch,” Aien said, taking position and drawing his sword.

  Trystan picked his arms up, a medium-sized round shield of iron on his right hand and a shortspear on the left.

  “Can we start?” Trystan asked.

  Aien nodded.

  The spearman inched forward; shield held high on his front with the spear poking out from the side.

  Aien waited for a second step, then a third before retreating. Trystan moved his spear in a feint. If he had thrusted, Aien would have stepped away from his range.

  He didn’t want a repeat of st time.

  Aien stepped forward with a feint of his own, drawing a reaction from Trystan. He entered the spear’s range with the sword held to his front in a defensive stance.

  Trystan attacked low, aiming for the leg farthest from his bde. Aien had been anticipating it and batted the spear aside with a long sweeping arch.

  He almost rushed ahead, but Trystan raised the shield to meet his advance.

  He’s also starting to read me.

  Stepping to the side of the spear, Aien risked a thrust, sword-tip pushing against the shield for a moment before he recovered his stance. Trystan answered with consecutive thrusts, more threatening to gain ground than trying to hurt him.

  This is a repeat of st time.

  Something smmed to the ground and both tilted their heads for a brief moment.

  Aien pulled his focus back together a moment faster, rushing ahead to ssh at the shield. He released his left hand from the sword’s lower hilt and reached for the side of the shield, pulling hard, then passing the sword under it.

  He put only enough force behind the blow to pretend to attack, stopping the bde as it touched Trystan’s belly.

  “Dead,” Aien said.

  Their eyes met for a moment, but Trystan didn’t look in the slightest bit worried. Serious, but not irritated. Aien had a hard time imagining Trystan ever getting mad at something.

  Pulling away from Trystan, he turned to see a silver fish flopping on its side not twenty paces away from them. Ren was staring into the water, standing still, not even looking their way.

  “Again,” Trystan said.

  At first, Aien had seriously struggled when sparring with the other recruits. He had practiced by himself most of his life. He had fought and he had killed some, but sparring was about giving as many opportunities to both sides to learn.

  The first difference he had noticed between him and people who had been properly instructed by an experienced fighter was how much they moved. Ren had the footwork of a cat, and when Aien first sparred with Trystan, he had expected to be met with an unmoving fighter who only thrusted his spear to keep enemies away. Instead, Trystan was quick to retreat when Aien tried to enter the close range where the spear couldn’t hurt him, and Aien had a habit of parrying too low in his sword’s length. That Trystan was left-handed also made things confusing at first.

  Getting used to parrying closer to the sword-tip had made him more flexible, gave him more room to work with, even. If this were a battlefield, Trystan would have the absolute advantage, but in a battlefield, there would be more distractions. Aien had to create those distractions himself in a duel, or simply be too good for his enemy to have a chance. So far, he had failed to do that against both Trystan and Ren.

  The sound of water followed by another fish spshing down sent Aien forward. He pretended to go for the shield side before turning to Trystan’s left.

  Aien was a moment faster once again. Raising his sword, he sshed down, forcing Trystan to use his spear to block—

  Twisting, Trystan brought his shield all the way from the opposite side of his body towards Aien, hammering it hard against his chest. Aien winced at the pain, stepping back as he tried to bring his arms down to a defensive stance but met something on the way.

  When Aien opened his eyes, the spear was pointed at his belly.

  “Dead,” Trystan said.

  Fuck.

  He tried to pull in air, but breathing hurt. Raising a hand for Trystan to wait, Aien slowly worked through the thrumming pain in his chest.

  Ren was chuckling as she trodded through the water back to them.

  Despite that, she asked, “Did you break something?”

  “I don’t think so,” Trystan answered.

  “No, doesn’t feel like it,” Aien said, voice rough from a ck of air, “Didn’t know you could be that fast.”

  “Twist of the hip,” Trystan said, taking stance once again to demonstrate it.

  He imitated his position at the st moment, body and shield pointing away from Aien. Then, he twisted his hips back a moment before doing the same with his upper body, violently shield-bashing the air.

  Aien understood it the moment it happened, but it had still been faster than he expected.

  Had it been a real fight, I would have sshed down with force and pulled your spear down first, opening a way to thrusting forward into your chest.

  Or you would have caught me at the same time and took the thrust yourself.

  Dead.

  Watch and learn.

  He recovered enough to stand up straight, but already he could tell that the ache would follow him through the day.

  “Igbol is coming,” Ren said, spping the dirt away from her feet.

  Aien turned the way they had come. Igbol didn’t have his preferred spear with him, but he was carrying the dagger on his belt. Apparently, the other weapon — Aien didn’t know which had come first — the Second Bde had mastered was a simple pointy thing intended for close quarters combat in alleys and rooms without much space to move.

  Igbol’s eyes trailed to the fish in the ground.

  “I thought you said you haven’t fished for years?” Igbol asked, raising his eyebrows.

  “I haven’t”, Ren answered, “but you never really forget.” She reached down with her arms, pretending to be catching a fish before throwing it high and behind her. “They’re slippery and you can crush them if they’re not big, so it’s more about throwing than gripping.”

  “Go ahead and take those to Yshnim. Trystan. You go ahead too.”

  Trystan gnced at Aien before moving to the side. He waited for Ren to finish putting on her boots before they moved away. Ren looked over her shoulder to show Aien a satisfied smirk.

  Not a word about practice.

  “Sheathe your sword,” Igbol said.

  Aien did it. “Something happened?”

  “That’s what I’m here to find out,” Igbol said, gesturing for Aien to follow him.

  The older spearman walked very slowly, almost dragging his feet; forcing Aien to match his walk. They were the same height, despite Aien being half of Igbol’s age.

  “Yshnim is worried about a few things. She was pnning on asking you as we eat, but I offered to do it the old way.”

  “The old way?” Aien was suddenly wary, expecting Igbol to pull something.

  “Man to man. For us Armsmasters, learning to work together is life-or-death. Yshnim has been in the squad business since she was a recruit. Plenty died around her, Armed Brothers and Sisters and even Armsmasters, and some of those could have been prevented. Anything that can be dangerous to the others, we have to know. Take Yshnim herself as an example: she always prefers to fight where there is enough room for her whip-sword, meaning she has to trust us to stay away. She’ll assume that anyone who enters her range is an enemy, and that has led to accidents in the past.”

  “She killed her own men?”

  Igbol waved his worries aside with a hand. “Not killed, but hurt. These things? What we are good and bad at? These we figure out with time. We fix what we can with practice and work around what we can’t. But what happened in the past? That we have to ask. I was an Acolyte before I was an Armsmaster, and had I not told them no one would know, and that would waste opportunities, but it would also be dangerous. If we find ourselves in front of an Abyssal, that thing is going straight for me, and everyone has to know that. Do you understand what I’m saying, Aien?” He asked, holding Aien’s gaze.

  “You want to know if there’s anything in my past that could be dangerous to us.”

  “Ren grew up in the capital’s slums, that means dealing with gangs, so if we ever find ourselves there, we have to remember that. It has taught her some things, but it also created problems. She can be too violent at times, too mocking. Trystan is smart, he doesn’t exactly fit, but he pulls his own weight and he learns fast. Sometimes he thinks too much, so if we’re ever in a situation where we expect someone to freeze, it will be him. If you want to know more, you can ask them. You should ask them.”

  “What about you?” Aien asked.

  “Me? If we’re talking about a fight, I stick too closely to pns. Yshnim has been shaving that off of me for a long time, so it’s not as bad anymore. In that sense I’m not that far from Trystan, and Ren is my opposite. She’s good at acting on instinct and thinking fast like Yshnim, but she’s not polished enough yet. Too eager.”

  Igbol went silent after that, no doubt waiting for Aien to speak for himself. He knew what this was about.

  Ren and Trystan had disappeared ahead, but the camp wasn’t that far.

  Aien stopped walking and Igbol did too.

  “I hide my forehead because there’s a sve’s mark there.”

  “For now, you only have to share as much as you want. Only enough for us to understand what to expect from it.”

  “That’s enough, then. I hide it because everyone would watch and plenty of people would know what it means, as if the hair wasn’t enough.”

  “Saldassa or Odanas?”

  “Odanas.”

  “That complicates things. What happens if someone finds out?”

  “I’ll just tell them that I bought my freedom.”

  “Did you?”

  Aien shook his head.

  We killed all of them.

  “Then can I trust you to not make it obvious if we meet sves or a sve master? And will you tell us if you’re pnning on doing something?”

  Can I? He wasn’t entirely sure. He thought he was, once, but that had been before.

  “Yes,” Aien answered.

  “And worst-case scenario? Someone that recognizes you from back then stumbles upon us. What then?”

  “That’s not going to happen. They’re all dead.”

  “All?” Igbol asked, two questions in one.

  Aien sighed.

  “Fine, I’m telling you. We killed them, all of them. We got together and murdered everyone and fled. Some of us were caught and others were killed. I wasn’t. That was years ago. I left the only person who knows back in Geshin. She might have told the others and if she did there’s three more who know.”

  “But they were your friends, weren’t they?”

  They were friends to me, but I wasn’t a friend to them.

  Aien nodded.

  “I’ll only tell Yshnim what I think she needs to know. I can’t imagine how it is dealing with that sort of thing, but I’m not asking to get at you.”

  Sighing, Aien nodded again. He understood that it was important, but there was no reason to keep getting worked up about it. This was different from Kakinse.

  Different from Loho.

  “Just one more thing,” Igbol said when Aien resumed walking, “You have to show it to me. I’m from the far north of Odanas, so I’ve seen a couple sve marks, more than the others. You don’t have to tell me where it was, only let us know if we’re heading towards it, but I have to see it.”

  Aien was intending to get it over with fast, but when he raised his hands he found that they were trembling. He took a long moment to untie the bandana from the back of his head, feeling his fingers colder than the cold wind made them.

  Aien had murdered people, at least one who didn’t deserve it, and here he was, shaking because of something he knew was bound to happen.

  Igbol studied the scars with his eyes.

  The searing pain of the knife fred to life from his memories.

  Unable to take it any longer, Aien raised the bandana to his forehead again, looking down to hide the shameful proof of his weakness just a second earlier.

  “Have you never seen it?” Igbol asked.

  “No.” He had an idea of what they looked like, since he felt the knife cutting the lines from up to down, very close to one another, all in the middle of his forehead. Not a sigil nor words, but a simple form of counting.

  “Do you—”

  “No, Igbol, I don’t want to know how much I was worth.”

  Aien hoped his words were just as sharp as the knife had been.