SBTMK Chapter 12

Behind the Emperor's palace lay the Dawn Knights Headquarters.

Compared to the palace itself the building was relatively understated, but for a person who had spent her whole life in a castle where mold crept up the dark walls, even this was astonishing.

The whole walk had been one thing after another. Then, without quite tracking how she'd gotten there, she was at the training grounds.

The knights of the imperial guard were working at their limits. She could see it in them.

"These are my personal guard. What do you think?"

"I don't think it's my place to evaluate them…"

She meant it.

The people in front of her were the Emperor's own guard. She had known the reputation of the Dawn Knights since before she'd left Cenkan—known it from the outside, from intelligence reports and second-hand accounts.

Some of them could weave magical power into swordsmanship. But even the ones who couldn't—each one carried a force of impact that was simply tremendous.

"You've arrived, Your Majesty."

Someone had approached and inclined their head respectfully.

"Ah. Sir Evan."

"The Commander is waiting for you."

An older man. The corners of his eyes turned slightly downward—an expression that made him look gentle even in a neutral face.

The knights who had been training noticed the Emperor's arrival and stopped simultaneously, as though the signal had been silent and shared. They knelt in unison. It was worth looking at.

Then one man walked out from among them. The same man who had been standing in the corridor earlier, keeping position near Simen.

'That's the Commander?'

Flora couldn't look away. Lightly sun-darkened skin. Calm brown hair. A build that read like something constructed over many years rather than trained into existence.

He looked young in one light, and severely competent in another. But it wasn't only that.

His deep violet eyes were full of killing intent. They had been in the corridor too, and she had told herself it was a guard's heightened state, the natural vigilance of someone in proximity to the Emperor.

It wasn't that.

The killing intent was still present. On these training grounds, the only person who should be producing it was herself. And yet.

"Do you know how to use a sword, Flora? All I've seen from you is a bow."

"Yes. Far from proficient, but—I know how."

'Does he know I'm the one who put a blade in the Emperor's thigh? If that's it, then the killing intent makes complete sense.'

The space had become uncomfortable in the specific way of a room where every surface is potentially hostile. Flora did the only thing available: she avoided the man's gaze.

"It seems Erne would like to spar with you, Flora."

—Spar? She had not agreed to that.

"I'd also like to see your abilities for myself."

'In this outfit?'

"Ah—the clothes are rather restricting, I suppose."

'Is this it? They kept me alive to use me as entertainment—watch the foreigner try to survive the imperial guard's Commander? Some kind of game?'

Her mind had taken a turn she hadn't directed it toward.

"With the injury not fully healed and the clothes as they are, Erne will adjust accordingly. And as a special consideration—I'll lend you my own sword."

Fine by me. Not available. I'd like to decline. Also not available.

Flora looked up at Simen with an expression she couldn't quite govern.

Here she was in a restricting dress, being handed a live blade for a sparring match. The frustration was at the back of her teeth. But she couldn't say it—she did not have the right to say it.

The ambiguous smile from earlier, when he'd handed her the blue dress. She understood it now.

This had always been where they were going.

Simen produced his sword and held it out. There was no longer any ground to retreat to.

'If they mean to kill me, I run. Can I actually run, though?'

She was inwardly in pieces when she accepted the Emperor's sword with both hands.

She rendered the full appropriate thanks for His Majesty's profound and boundless generosity.

"Right. You don't have a sword."

Simen had said something. Her mind had been elsewhere and she'd missed it—but the training grounds were still quiet around her.

'I can still hear Simen's voice, so at least I'm not deaf—'

She looked up, confused. Simen's mouth curved slightly, and he gestured toward the man beside him.

"This is Sir Erne Pohl Raizen, Commander of the Dawn Knights. He's unable to speak directly at the moment—I hope you'll understand that I'm making introductions on his behalf."

Flora gave a respectful inclination of her head.

"…I'm Flora. It's an honor to meet you, Commander."

Erne returned it with the smallest movement of his head that could still qualify as acknowledgment.

She had received this particular quality of gaze in Cenkan and knew what it meant. A rigid face. Eyes with killing intent threaded through them. This man wanted her dead.

Meeting his eyes made her feel like her chest might dissolve.

She managed to look away.

"Then let's begin. This should be entertaining."

At Simen's word, Flora found herself installed in the middle of the training grounds as the subject of spectacle. The Dawn Knights had apparently decided this was not a thing they were willing to miss, and stood in a line without moving. Dozens of eyes, all pointed at her.

The hand holding the Emperor's sword trembled. Not from fear of the fight itself.

It was the gaze. The collective animal-watching-animal quality of it. It was making her sharper in a direction she didn't want to go.

A woman in a formal dress and court shoes, holding an emperor's sword. A fairly ridiculous picture.

And the Commander's killing intent was ongoing. It had not diminished. This was not the kind of thing you aimed at a sparring partner—not from someone at the level she knew he was at.

He couldn't be unaware of what he was projecting. A fighter who had reached the rank he held would not project it accidentally.

There was no other conclusion available: they were in it together.

She knew a man who treated people brutally, the way someone does who believes holding the leash makes them a god.

She had been in his hands for a very long time. She had thought she was out. Apparently she had been wrong.

If everywhere is like this, dying here isn't the worst thing.

A faint shadow passed across Flora's face.

"Begin."

At Simen's word, Erne drew his sword.

There was no exchange of courtesies. She had no interest in offering them to someone projecting killing intent at this volume.

'So this is how it goes.'

She was a knight whose talent had always been for assassination. And her ability amplified at range rather than in close quarters—the first weapon she had been given by a king had been a bow, for that reason.

By every available measure, this fight was absolutely against her.

She breathed out. Short. The hand on the sword had stopped trembling.

She had decided to do what she could. If she was going to be made to perform like a trained animal in front of these people, then she would perform until there was nothing left. If the fault lay anywhere it lay with her—she had been hurt this badly before and still she had walked into service again.

'I don't think there's anyone who wouldn't want to be your friend.'

Pathetically, she had believed a person's words again. Three inches of someone's tongue.

Everything he'd said on the way here—had all of it been false?

The anger wouldn't settle. This was a wound she carried from Cenkan. One of the many.

Laviu Obelia, King of Cenkan, visited Meryn Castle regularly, and every visit included the training grounds. He would select knights and have them fight. It was not a sparring match. It ended only when a knight cut down a comrade.

What was happening in front of Flora now looked exactly like that.

'Fine. If a dog's death is what the gods have arranged, so be it.'

At least it wasn't Ayden or Laviu's hands she was dying by.

'But I'm taking you with me.'

She looked at Erne and readjusted her grip. As company on the road to whatever came next, his was not the worst face available.

She began thinking through the problem.

He was the imperial guard's Commander. She would not underestimate him. The way it was going, she probably couldn't land a single wound before she died—that much was obvious.

'But if I close the distance—'

One critical injury might be possible.

Close range or extreme range—those were where she was most dangerous. She had no room for the second option. She would have to try the first.

Erne moved first.

The sword came for her throat. Not a sparring move. She had been right not to assume otherwise from the start.

Flora deflected with competence and came back at him.

She dropped lower to build speed and closed the distance. She drove forward with the sword—he read her intent and stepped clear with no apparent effort, opening the gap again.

Erne watched her from the new distance. Steadily. This time Flora didn't look away.

Their eyes clashed—the same intensity as the swords. His deep violet eyes were beautiful in an impossible way, and somehow not quite human. Like something that existed at the edge of a category.

Like what they had always said, everyone who ever looked that long into her eyes—yes. Eyes that hold death.

Clang. Their swords met and separated fast. In that brief instant, the hem of the dress—trailing in the wrong direction from a misdirected cut—caught the edge of Erne's blade. Srrk—and a strip of expensive fabric came free, clean as paper tearing.

Live blades gave a particular dizziness. Breath sealed tight at the top of the chest, vision close to inverting—and still, underneath it,  something vast moving deep in her chest.

The desire to win came up through her like a tide. It always did, with strong opponents.

Erne had no visible opening. Not in his footwork, not in his guard. No unnecessary movement. No cheap feints.

Their swords clashed and separated, clashed and separated. Flora held her ground: blocked, searched for a gap, drove in again.

Ching. Ching.

Her anger quieted as the match went on.

The more the fight continued, the more became visible that hadn't been at the start.

She understood it through the blade.

He was matching her. He was not fighting at full capacity.

She had thought herself brought here to die. She reassessed.

And as she watched him—the specific control of his movement, the way he managed the distance—the second thing became clear.

The killing intent was not chosen. It was his. Something in his constitution. Not a directed weapon.

She had spent years watching someone with killing intent as an involuntary condition. Ayden Hezener, lord of Meryn Castle—a person who needed to kill at intervals, the way a body needs air, and who unraveled between those intervals into something that wept and struck itself and sometimes tried to end what it couldn't otherwise relieve.

Erne had the same thing. That cold, persistent, adhesive quality of death.

But their blades were speaking differently from that. The more she fought him, the less fear she found when she looked for it.

The understanding was building with each exchange: he isn't going to hurt me.

The trust was accumulating with each impact—quiet, solid.

Flora read Erne as a fighter capable of far greater violence than this. If he had decided to kill her in the first exchange, her head would have gone with it. He had not decided that.

The more that knowledge settled, the more her own killing intent receded.

And at that, Erne narrowed his eyes, as though something did not suit him.

"…Hh."

The air changed weight.

Flora had come back to herself a fraction too slowly. She moved to block Erne's cut and missed the timing. The attack that followed was at a speed she couldn't track with her eyes.

Sss-uuk—something strange grazed her arm. She understood she'd been cut a moment after it happened, when the pain arrived behind the sensation.

Her wrist ached from driving the blade in the wrong direction. A rough exhale pushed through Flora's lips.

Then Erne withdrew. She saw the brief, composed bow he gave her, and understood: this was over.