Leaning his scarred forearm against the scored granite of Pillar Four with his broad short sword sheathed at his hip, Daro Kesh looked down at Seyun on the nook bench and challenged the entire pedagogical foundation of the afternoon’s drill. Daro didn’t deny that Seyun’s staff taps had unstuck Pass Two and Pass Three against Vaska’s quartz lamp.
Yet Daro had fought in the mud of the siege road, in the burning courtyard of White Heron Hall, and inside the crushing white glare of the northern chamber. Speaking with the hard-edged gravity of a veteran who had buried men when formations broke, he warned Seyun that a courtyard lamp didn’t break ribs or shear off fingers.
In real combat, when the noise of a falling mountain drowned out voices and the person beside you took a blade through the thigh, human beings didn’t have the leisure to hold a philosophical seminar on whether a flat stone slab’s purpose had expired.
A battle plan that needed its fighters to disagree with each other’s protective instincts and revise their obligations in the middle of lethal pressure, Daro argued, would collapse into chaotic pause the instant the first real blood hit the stone. A school—and a squad—survived the worst hour because its members could count on a fixed, iron-hard plane standing exactly where it had promised to stand.
