Lessons in Silence

Commander Crane did not believe in gentleness as a teaching method, and he saw no reason to begin now.

"Again," he said.

Solaia picked herself up off the frozen sand of the practice yard, wiped the snow from her palms, and took her stance. The wooden sword felt heavier than it had a minute ago. Her shoulder ached where the last blow had landed. Around the edges of the yard, a few off-duty guardsmen leaned on the rails and pretended not to watch, steaming faintly in the cold morning like horses at a gate.

"Your feet are wrong," said Crane.

"They're where you told me to put them."

"They were. You have moved them since." He came at her, not hard, and tapped her left knee with his blade. "You think too much. A sword is not an argument, my lady. It is a hand that happens to be long."

She swung. He turned it aside as easily as a man turning a page.

"Again."

She did it again. And again. By the fortieth time she had stopped thinking about her feet and her wrist and the angle of her elbow, and had stopped hearing the guardsmen's low talk, and had stopped, at last, being someone who was learning a thing. Her body simply knew. It did not feel like memory. It felt like a door she had never noticed in her own house, swinging open on a room full of furniture she recognized by touch.

Crane's blade slid off hers. Hers came back around and rapped him sharply on the ribs.

For a moment nobody breathed.

"Hm," said the Commander of the Black Guard.

He lowered his sword. His weathered face did something complicated. Behind him, one of the guardsmen let out a low whistle and was kicked by his neighbor.

"Who taught you that?" Crane asked.

"Nobody."

"That was a Vraelyran cut. The high-left feint into the low turn. I have seen it once, in an old illustration, in a book that was not supposed to exist." He studied her face. "My lady, you did not learn that in a beggar's ditch."

She said nothing. Her pulse was going, hard and fast and strangely happy.

"I do not ask," said Crane. "I only say that the Emperor should see this."

"Why?"

"Because," said a voice from the edge of the yard, "I would very much like to be hit by it."

…

He had come down in his shirtsleeves.

It was so odd a sight that for a moment she did not know him. No coat, no chain, no circlet. Just a plain dark shirt open at the throat and a pair of riding gloves, and a practice blade held loosely in one hand. His hair was tied back with a bit of black cord. In the harsh light off the snow, he looked younger than she had ever seen him, and so thoroughly tired that something turned over in her chest.

"Majesty," said Crane, and bowed. The guardsmen, with a rustle of leather, straightened as one.

"Clear the yard, Halvard."

"Majesty?"

"I want to find out what it is I have been keeping in my house."

Crane looked at the Emperor, and at the girl, and at the Emperor again, and for the first time in her acquaintance with him Solaia saw the old soldier fight not to smile. He barked an order. The guardsmen vanished from the rails like leaves in a gust. The gate clanged. And the yard was suddenly very large and very empty, and the cold lay on her skin like a hand.

Kieran stepped onto the sand.

"You will not go easy on me," he said.

"I wasn't going to."

"Good." He lifted his sword. "Neither will I."

…

She had expected him to be good.

She had not expected him to be beautiful. He did not fight like Crane, who fought like a man laying bricks. Kieran moved as though the air were an instrument he had learned to play. There was no wasted motion, no hesitation, no pause between the thought and the cut. The first blow almost took her wrist. The second took her breath. She went back across the sand under a storm of strokes, and each one landed a half-inch from where she was, and each one was careful, so careful that she could feel the restraint in it, like a hand held out to catch a falling glass.

"You are holding back," she gasped.

"Yes."

"Stop it."

"I will hurt you."

"You can't."

Something flickered in his eyes. A spark, sharp and almost incredulous. And then he did not hold back.

The world narrowed.

There was only the sword, and the man behind it, and the beat of her own blood in her ears. She parried a cut that would have split her skull. She slipped under a thrust and heard the blade hiss past her ear. Something in her laughed, a low, fierce, delighted sound, and her body took over entirely: high-left, low-turn, step in, there. The flat of her blade caught his forearm. His sword spun out of his hand and into the snow.

For a moment they stood quite still.

Her chest was heaving. Her hair had come out of its pin, and the cold stung her cheeks. Kieran stood three feet from her with his empty hand held out to the side, looking at it. A bruise was already blooming along his forearm.

"I did not teach you that," said Crane faintly, from the gate. He had not left, apparently.

"Go away, Halvard."

"Yes, Majesty."

The gate clanged shut for the second time.

Kieran slowly raised his eyes. They were very bright, and very dark, and not at all the eyes of a man who had just been disarmed by a beggar. They traveled over her face, her loosened hair, her throat, and rested on her mouth.

"Where did you learn that?" he said.

"I don't know."

"Of course you do not." His voice was low and rough. "You do not know anything. You walk into my palace and break my chains and break my enemies and I look at you, and I cannot tell if you are a gift or a punishment." He took a step toward her. "I have been trying for weeks to decide which."

"And?"

"And I think I am too far gone to care."

"Kieran—"

"Say my name again."

She did not mean to. It came out of her like a breath. "Kieran."

He closed the distance between them in two strides.

…

It was not gentle. She had not expected it to be. His hand slid into her hair and tilted her face up, and his mouth came down on hers, hard and hungry and shaking, like a man who has been starving a long time and is afraid to find out that the food is real. She made a sound against his lips. Her fingers closed in his shirt. The wooden sword fell out of her other hand and hit the sand.

She had been kissed before, she thought distantly. She had no memory of it. But she would have known, in any life, in any dark, that nobody had ever kissed her like this: as though she were the first warm thing in a cold world, and he were afraid she would go out.

When he drew back, both of them were breathing hard.

"That," said Kieran unsteadily, "was not wise."

"No."

"You hit me with a stick."

"You told me not to go easy."

A helpless sound came out of him, half laugh, half groan. He pressed his forehead to hers. For a long moment they stood like that in the white morning, his breath mingling with hers in small clouds, and she felt his heart through his shirt, wild and fast and absolutely steady.

"The black is gone," he murmured.

"What?"

"The veins. I looked, when you struck me. There is nothing." His thumb moved along her jaw, wondering. "I have not felt this quiet since I was a boy."

She smiled against his mouth. Then she remembered where they were, and who might be watching, and her gaze slid sideways, over his shoulder, up the pale stone wall of the yard to the balcony that overlooked it.

Someone was standing there.

A slender figure in ice-blue silk, one gloved hand resting on the carved rail. A golden braid over one shoulder. A face as smooth and cold and perfect as a porcelain cup.

Lady Ysolde Orloff was not smiling. She was not frowning, either. She simply stood, quite still, with her eyes on the Emperor's back, wearing the expression of a woman who has just watched something precious fall down a very deep well.

As Solaia looked, Ysolde's gaze moved. It met hers across the whole width of the yard.

Then the lady inclined her head, a small, perfect, courteous nod, as one duelist might acknowledge another. She turned. The blue silk whispered. And the balcony was empty.

"What is it?" said Kieran.

"Nothing," said Solaia.

But she kept her hand fisted in his shirt a little longer than she needed to, and she thought, so that is who loves him.