The first drill started before the sun cleared the north wall.
Calen stood at the edge of the yard with his hands behind his back. Seven children stood in front of him. Each one held a blade from the rack by the gate. Most were blunt steel with leather grips. One was wooden.
Nell had the wooden sword. It was the smallest blade in the rack, and the only one that did not have a steel edge. She held it with both hands in front of her chest.
The sign-in register sat on the gate table. Calen had read it at dawn, before the bell. Seven names were written in seven hands. Kade’s name had a flourish under it, and a title in front that took up half the line. Duke Kade Ansel.
Calen had not answered it then. He did not answer it now.
“Guard position,” Calen said. “Show me.”
Nell lifted the wooden sword. The tip shook. She tried to hold it still, and the shaking spread down her arms and into her shoulders.
“Show me again.”
She lifted it a second time. The tip wobbled in a small circle, like a compass needle with nowhere to point. Her knuckles were white. Her breath came short and fast.
The elbows are wrong. The shaking is not the problem.
“Show me again,” Calen said.
She lifted it the third time. Her whole body trembled from the wrists up. The sword dipped, then slid out of her hands and clattered across the stones.
Nell did not pick it up at once. She looked at the sword, and then at Calen’s face. She stood very still, as if waiting to be struck for it.
“Pick it up,” Calen said. “Then show me again.”
“May I?” Nell asked, and nodded at the sword.
“Yes.”
She picked it up. Her fingers were red from the cold, and she had to shift her grip twice before it sat right. She did not say sorry. She lifted the sword again and held it.
The tip still shook. But the elbows had come up, and that was new.
“Better,” Calen said. “Keep the elbows where they are. Breathe out when the tip moves.”
Nell nodded once. She did not look at him. She kept her eyes on the place where the tip should go.
She breathed out. The tip moved. For one count it stayed on the line she had picked, a hand’s width above the stones. Then it wandered. She breathed out again, slower this time, and the tip came back.
“Two,” Calen said.
Nell’s lips moved. She was counting too, but not the same numbers. Calen could see her counting breaths, not counts of the sword. He let it be. The breaths were doing the work.
By the fourth try the tip held for three counts. Her arms were still shaking, but the shaking had moved into her hands, where it was smaller and harder to see.
Calen did not praise her. Praise made children stop and look for more of it. He nodded once instead. She missed the nod. She kept the tip where it was.
From the end of the line, someone laughed.
Kade Ansel leaned on his blade. He had not moved his feet in a full minute. His grip was loose, almost lazy, and his chin was up.
“Is this the lesson?” he asked, loud enough for the wall to hear. “Holding a stick? I was told this was a school, Instructor Orrin.”
Calen did not look at him at once. He looked at the stick in Kade’s hand. Then he looked at Kade.
“It is a school,” Calen said. “Come here, Ansel.”
Kade did not move. “I am a guest of the Ministry, sir. Not a dog.”
“Then you may come here as a guest.”
Some of the others shifted their feet. Liss Corran stopped copying her stance from Hesper and watched them both with interest. Tobin Ash kept his eyes on the cracks in the yard. Dorran Ives looked at the ground, as if the stones might tell him what to do next.
Kade walked the six steps across the stones. He took his time. Calen waited until he was standing in front of him.
“Your grip,” Calen said.
“My grip is perfectly adequate.”
Calen took Kade’s hand in his own. It was warm, and it went stiff at once. He moved the thumb first, and set it along the flat of the grip.
“Here,” he said. “Count it.”
“One,” Kade said through his teeth.
Calen moved the second finger. “Two.”
“Is this a lesson in counting?” Kade asked. “Because I can count, Instructor.”
“Yes. Three.” Calen set the third finger, then the fourth. He let go of the last finger, the pinky, and tapped it once with his own. “Four. Let that one go. It does nothing.”
The pinky came off the grip. Kade’s face went red from the collar up. He did not pull his hand back. He let Calen finish, one finger at a time, with the whole line watching.
Hesper Dray tilted her head. “Is that how it’s supposed to feel?”
“Does it feel right to you?” Calen asked.
“Does anything feel right in this yard?” Hesper asked back.
Calen let that one go. It was not a question he could answer in front of the line.
Kade made a sound that was not quite a laugh. “Thank you, Instructor. That was very instructive.”
“Swing it,” Calen said. “Out to the stone. Back to your shoulder. Count it.”
Kade swung. The tip went out, wobbled, and came back crooked. He swung again, and it was a little less crooked.
“Again.”
“I have swung it twice, sir.”
“Again.”
Kade swung. The tip stayed on line this time, all the way out and all the way back. He lowered the blade and looked at Calen with a plain, hard face.
“Is that all?”
“It is one swing,” Calen said. “Do it a hundred more.”
He turned away before Kade could answer. He did not mention the register. He did not mention the title. The silence behind him was thick enough to lean on.
Do not give him the satisfaction of a reply.
Calen walked back to the gate table. He could feel the line watching him. Ysra’s face showed nothing at all. Hesper’s eyes flicked from Kade to Calen and back again.
Dorran looked at his shoes, then at Kade, then at his shoes again, as if he were trying to decide whose fault it was.
Tobin said something very quietly to the stones. Calen caught only the word two. He did not ask what it meant.
Liss had her practice blade on her shoulder now, the way Calen had shown them. She copied the stance exactly. She held it there, and her arm did not move.
“Good,” Calen said to her. “Hold it there.”
“Hold it there,” Liss said, and kept holding.
Dorran’s blade clattered to the stones. He went red and bent to pick it up. “Sorry, sir. Sorry. It is only heavy.”
“Then hold it with both hands,” Calen said. “Sorry is not a grip.”
“Sorry,” Dorran said again, very quietly, and then he did hold it with both hands.
At midday, the jailers brought the bread in a basket. Each loaf sat on a slip of paper stamped with the Ministry’s crest. The slip was the grain chit. It listed the seven names in neat Crown ink. Under the names was one word, standing.
Ysra held her slip up to the light. “It says standing,” she said. “Standing for how long?”
“Until someone cancels it,” Calen said.
“Then someone will,” Ysra said, and folded the slip into her sleeve. She did not look worried. She looked like someone filing a note for later.
Kade took his loaf without a word. He broke it in two and gave one half to Dorran, who had not asked for it.
Nell ate hers standing up, by the wall, with the wooden sword leaning against her hip.
“May I count the swings this afternoon?” she asked.
“Yes,” Calen said. “Count your breaths. Not the swings.”
She nodded. It was the first time all morning her answer had not come with a shake in it.
Calen watched her wipe the crumbs off her fingers. She counted breaths, not swings. The list had no column for that. He wrote nothing down, the way he always did when something mattered too much to put on paper.
Kade came to the well that afternoon, when the line had broken up and the others had gone to wash. He stood on the far side of the rope and let the bucket drop without a word. It hit the water with a flat, dull sound.
“Instructor.”
“Ansel.”
“You read the register.” Kade hauled the bucket up. Water ran down the wood. “I watched you read it.”
“I read it.”
“And?”
Calen did not look up from the sword he was checking. “Your grip is better.”
Kade’s jaw moved. “You know what that name is worth, sir. In this Ministry.”
“I know who signed it,” Calen said. “Hold the rope with both hands. You will drop it otherwise.”
Kade looked at his own hands. Then he took the rope in both of them, and the bucket swayed, and he did not drop it.
“You have a Ministry grant and seven students,” Kade said. “The Ministry does not give a grant to a man it means to save.”
“No,” Calen said. “It gives one to a man it wants to watch.”
Kade stared at him for a long moment. Then he turned and walked away, and he did not look back at the well.
Calen watched him go. The boy walked like someone who had been raised to be watched. Calen knew that walk. He had seen it in Halvane, on the sons of ministers who had never once been told no.
The afternoon cooled fast in the Grey Hills. Wind came over the north wall with the smell of wet stone and horses. Calen pulled his coat closed and waited. Hoff never came to the yard without a reason.
The gate opened late in the afternoon. Captain Hoff came through it with a bucket of whitewash in one hand and a stick of chalk in the other. He was a broad, grey man with a bad knee and a voice that did not need to be raised.
He walked to the wall board by the gate and looked at the line of children for a long time. He did not look at Calen once.
“Stop,” Hoff said.
Every blade in the yard stopped. Even Kade’s.
Hoff set the bucket down. He did not wash the board. He simply began to write in large square letters, with the chalk squeaking on the slate.
Calen watched the letters take shape. He could read them from twenty steps away.
YARD TRIAL.
Under that, Hoff wrote the day. DAY 7.
Under that: ONE BOUT EACH. 60 SECONDS.
Across the yard, Tobin’s lips moved. He was counting the chalk strokes under his breath. Calen did not need to ask how many. Tobin would tell him when he was ready, and not before.
Hoff tapped the chalk against the slate twice. The sound carried across the yard like a dropped stone.
“Every student fights,” Hoff said. “Every student fights once. Win, and you eat well. Lose, and you still eat. Do not fight, and the Ministry writes down what it saw.”
Nell’s sword had dipped again. Calen saw it from the gate, the tip touching the stones. She did not lift it.
“Day seven,” Hoff said. He turned from the board and looked down the line. For the first time, he looked at each child in turn. He stopped at Nell longest.
Seven days. Count them.
Calen counted them without meaning to. He had planned the first week on the cart. He had not planned for a sixty-second bout, or for a girl whose sword kept hitting the stones.
“The Ministry wants to see what you’re worth,” Hoff said. “So do I.”