FSW Chapter 19

News

Blossoms had barely opened before they changed their clothes again. By the time the warming days had thinned Nishina's training clothes to something nearly weightless, she had finally managed five full laps.

It was the honest result of showing up without excuses. She had been so pleased with herself that she'd cornered Joy and Ellis for the rest of the day and announced, repeatedly, that tomorrow the real sword training would begin. By the time she fell asleep she had worked herself into a pleasant stupor imagining the picture she would cut—her blade meeting his on equal terms, not embarrassing herself.

Those idle dreams were destroyed the following morning without ceremony. The wooden practice sword she was handed was graceless, and more to the point, extremely heavy. Compared to the steel weapons the knights used it was practically nothing—mere paper, really—but for a princess whose books were carried by Sir Hilton, there was no version of it that was manageable.

And here she was, more than a week past that first day, and the only technique she had learned was the downward cut. As she did every time, she worked through the stamina drills first and then lifted the wooden sword with both arms, feeling the familiar drag begin at her wrists.

"One hundred repetitions today," he said. "Nothing more."

"...Yes."

She barely managed to narrow the cheeks she could feel inflating with protest. She had just raised the sword when he spoke again.

"Your Highness. When you grip the sword, your right hand needs to angle past perpendicular. More than you have it."

"Like this?"

She tried to mirror the position he had described, but his head did not incline. After she had wandered through several wrong arrangements and shown no signs of arriving at the right one, Lavis finally reached over.

"If I may."

His hands adjusted her fingers—each one placed at the width he needed, with a care that suggested the millimeter mattered to him. Clean. Unhurried.

Actually, come to think of it—hadn't there been a moment like this on the first day too? His hands then had been just as warm as they were now. She remembered being surprised by it; he had looked, somehow, like someone who would be cold to the touch.

"Sir Russell's hands are very warm," she said, a small helpless smile pulling at her mouth.

His hands had startled back from her the first time she'd said something like that—as though she'd scorched him. And his ears had reddened so completely she had almost asked after his health. He must be used to it by now, she reasoned. Or he should be, at least. Cute though it was—and it was—she made herself swallow it.

Now she looked down at her captured hands and said nothing. The same line would produce the same result, she knew. She made herself swallow the impulse and set about swinging the sword with genuine effort instead.

If she could escape the downward-cut purgatory, she could swallow her mischief a hundred times over. She was perhaps halfway through the count when her sword point began to waver, and he was the one who called a rest.

"Shall we stop for a moment?"

"We should."

Her arms had gone numb some time ago. She let the practice sword dangle and trudged toward the tree, dropping onto the mat she had thought to lay there in advance. Without it she would simply have sat on the dirt and accepted her fate. She had long since surrendered whatever dignity the situation required.

Lavis, by contrast, looked exactly like a person who had just arrived—not like someone who had finished a full morning of knights' drills before agreeing to take on her training as well. Every time the difference between them became this legible, she felt the creep of doubt. Would she ever, before she died of natural causes, manage even a single exchange with him?

"At what point do you think we could actually spar?"

"...Spar?"

The question seemed genuinely unanticipated. His eyes went round, and then he settled into a look of entirely earnest calculation.

The silence stretched.

"At this rate," he said at last, "thirty years?"

—He meant, presumably, thirty years in which he had not improved at all.

Motivation departed at remarkable speed. Combat technique had never suited her constitution to begin with—she was not built for the business of hurting people.

'I should probably just be satisfied with the muscle.'

She worked her hand over one forearm with the other, prodding at whatever was or wasn't there. The results were inconclusive. And Joy had been appalled recently about the state of her palms—calluses were apparently beginning. Even her mother had made an unhappy face and asked, tearfully, whether she couldn't simply stop.

She had spent considerable effort explaining the importance of an hour's daily exercise to a person's long-term health. The persuasion had held, but it left her faintly sad that the only one pleased by the arrangement was herself.

And really—she hadn't even been meant to find it pleasing. The original purpose was sympathy. That was the plan: show up, be visibly struggling, earn the red-eyed knight's concern. But something had gone sideways almost immediately, and the original goal had gone so thoroughly under the surface that she had to look for it on purpose. She had stopped trying to earn his sympathy before she noticed she had. She had started wanting his happiness instead—something that had nothing in common with the original design.

If he had been the crueler person the novel described, or if she hadn't known his history, perhaps the plan would have held. But she had learned that he was gentle despite having been raised without it. From the moment she understood that, she had only wanted to see him smile.

After months of showing up, the time they spent together had become something she looked forward to for its own sake. She passed him an almond chocolate and watched him eat with his eyes lowered softly, lashes down, as though the eating required his full attention—and the afternoon felt genuinely peaceful.

She propped her chin on her knees and studied him.

'I wonder if he's grown as comfortable with me as I have with him.'

He was busy enough that their lessons might feel like one more obligation. But she hoped, a little, that he let them be a rest from something. That the weeks she had been forcing sweets on him and asking impertinent questions constituted a pause, however brief, in whatever his life cost him. She thought she would be quite pleased, if that were true.

He seemed to feel the weight of being watched. His head tilted, slightly. The gaze that would not leave him finally produced a faint color in his cheeks, and he parted his lips uncertainly.

"...Your Highness?"

"In thirty years, spar with me."

So—both of us alive in thirty years, please, she added, only to herself, and smiled at the nonsense of it. His eyes blinked once, slowly. Then he gave a nod of the sort a knight gives when accepting a formal challenge.

"Yes."

She laughed out loud. He had the face of a knight accepting a formal duel. It really was a perfectly peaceful summer afternoon.

The weather had grown properly hot.

Sunlight poured through the open window at an angle that was beginning to sting.

Nishina picked up her glass—the outside beaded with cold—and drank off nearly half the lemon tea inside it. The ice had melted to a point where the flavor was a little wan, but the tartness of the fresh-squeezed lemon had survived.

Summer really does call for lemon tea.

The lethargy of the heat lifted from her shoulders. She set the glass down and glanced at the time. This was normally the hour for afternoon lessons or training, but today's lessons had all been finished before noon, and there was no training either. She had been keeping up the schedule faithfully enough—the reason for the interruption was not the heat but a personal matter on Sir Russell's end.

At the close of yesterday's session, he had told her, with an expression of considerable distress, that he would be unable to give her any time today. He had looked so wretched about it that she had nodded before she could think to ask why.

I should have asked at least a little, she thought now. Over months of showing up, this was the first time he had been the one to cancel. She tapped one finger against the desk.

She reached for the stack of letters that had been waiting for her attention. Joy and Ellis had already done the sorting, but the remaining pile was still considerable—roughly half new invitations and half correspondence from the young ladies who had attended her salon.

She pulled Haelsi Laurent's letter first. The envelope was the deep yellow of her hair. The handwriting inside was rounded and unhurried, which suited her exactly.

The letter was simple: the tea she had been given was wonderful, she had been more nervous than she would have admitted but the afternoon had turned out to be genuinely enjoyable, and so on. Most of the young ladies who cultivated Nishina's acquaintance used thank-you letters as invitations in disguise—gesturing toward a return gathering, maneuvering toward the next occasion. Haelsi's letter simply ended where it said it would end: with gratitude.

That was probably why it read as something real. Not a formula dressed as warmth but something that had actually started from warmth and remained there.

It might have been a generous interpretation—but when she thought of that bright, open face, the interpretation felt reasonable.

She wrote back with genuine pleasure, as though she were corresponding with a friend. The reply she composed was longer than her usual careful brevity, and she sealed it before she could second-guess the length.

The remaining letters required a different energy. Most of them were, as she had suspected, invitations wearing the costume of gratitude. She composed the same round refusal several times over until her hand felt it in the fingers.

Somewhere in the middle of her fatigue, a small parcel appeared—accompanied by a letter in a vivid, faintly ominous red.

'Something about this feels wrong.'

The sender was one of the young ladies who had spoken most effusively about Madame Puresa at the salon. The letter itself was polite and standard until the postscript:

p.s. Your Highness appeared to take an interest in the subject, so I am enclosing Madame Puresa's latest work.

'When did I show any interest?!'

She opened her mouth involuntarily.

The one at the salon who had leaned forward with something approaching genuine fascination was Valentina Orsini. She had looked at the subject with the alert expression of a scholar encountering a new field—which was more or less how Nishina had felt, except that Nishina had spent the whole conversation watching the knights' ears for signs of reddening.

'I was watching the knights the whole time to see how they'd react!'

She opened the parcel with a sense of foreboding that proved entirely justified. A book. The cover was demure, which made it worse.

'So—demure on the outside. And inside—well. That kind of story.'

She couldn't honestly say she felt no curiosity. But the more pressing problem was what to do with it. She couldn't put it in the imperial library. She couldn't shelve it in her own rooms without risking very specific misunderstandings from Joy, Ellis, or Sir Hilton—and Hilton was already hard enough to face lately. If something like this gave him the wrong idea, she feared he would simply decide it was a confirmed fact.

Speak of the devil: the door opened without sound, and Hilton appeared to relieve the knight who had been stationed inside. The moment she saw him, Nishina performed a feat of remarkable speed and buried the book in the farthest corner of the nearest drawer.

Her heart was pounding as though she had been caught doing something incriminating. She ignored the cold sweat tracing a line down her back and addressed Hilton with the most casual voice she could manage.

"You've seemed quite busy lately. Is something going on?"

"Ah—my apologies, Your Highness. I've been assisting with the apprentice evaluations while Sir Richard is away from the post. Filling in for him—"

"Evaluations?"

"Yes—in practice it's nothing more than a formal version of the sparing the apprentices do every day, but held before the senior knights. The tournament format—"

"Sir Russell mentioned none of this. Not a word. How long has—"

"Since last week, Your Highness."

Hilton elaborated—early summer was the usual time, it was done by tournament bracket, and so on—but Nishina was no longer fully attending.

She hadn't known the tournament existed.