I learn to throw it, like you and Piper?’
She laughed, taking the dagger from me. ‘You’d be more likely to take your own ear off. This isn’t a throwing knife, anyway – not balanced right.’ She spun it casually between her forefinger and thumb. ‘And I’m not giving you any of my knives. But you can learn some basics, so you won’t be completely useless if we’re not around to save you.’
I looked up at her. Despite our arguments, it was hard to imagine her not being around. Her sarcastic asides were as familiar to me now as her wide shoulders, her restless hands. When we sat around the fire at night, the flick of her blade on her fingernails was as normal as the cicadas’ rasping.
‘Are you thinking of leaving?’
She shook her head but dodged my eyes.
‘Tell me the truth,’ I said.
‘Just concentrate,’ she said. ‘You need to learn this stuff.’ She tossed my dagger on the ground. ‘You won’t need that for now. And forget about high-kicks or backflips or any of that dramatic-looking stuff. Most of the time it’s grappling, close and ugly. There’s nothing pretty about fighting.’
‘I know that,’ I said. I’d seen it on the island: the clumsiness of desperation. Swords slipping in bloodied hands. Bodies that became slashed sacks, emptied of blood.
‘Good,’ she said. ‘Then we can get started.’
For the first few hours, she wouldn’t let me use my blade at all. Instead, she showed me how to use my elbows and knees to strike in close quarters. She showed me how to drive my elbow backwards into the guts of an attacker holding me from behind, and how to throw my head back and upwards to connect with his nose. She taught me how to bring my knee up to bury it sharply in an assailant’s groin, and how to throw my whole body weight behind the sideways jab of an elbow to the jaw.
‘Don’t hit at somebody,’ she said, ‘or you’ll make no impact. Hit through them. You have to follow through. Aim for a spot six inches under the skin.’
I was sweaty and tired by the time she let me try with the knife. Even then, at first she didn’t teach me anything but defence: how to block a strike with my blade, shielding my hand with the hilt. How to stand side-on so that I presented a smaller target, and to keep my knees bent, legs wide, so that I couldn’t easily be knocked over.
Then she got to the blade itself. How to strike without signalling it beforehand. How to go for the arteries between groin and thigh. How to make a low slash at the stomach, and how to twist the blade on the way out.
‘I don’t want to know this,’ I said, grimacing.
‘You’re enjoying it,’ she said. ‘For once you’re not slouching around. You haven’t looked this animated in weeks.’
I wondered if it were true. There was a satisfaction in the mastery of each move, in feeling the actions become familiar. But at the same time I was repulsed by the idea of gutting anyone. Could actions and their consequences be so neatly separated? The movements permitted no uncertainty, and no ambiguity: you did them. That was it. All morning we’d repeated them, again and again. It was comforting, in the same way that biting my nails was comforting: a mindless action that gave some respite from thought. But when I bit my nails, all I ended up with was my own fingers raw-tipped and sore. The routines Zoe was teaching me would leave a body sundered, robbed of blood. Somewhere a twin, too, would bleed out, and it would be my hand dealing that double death.
Zoe resumed the fighting stance, waiting for me to mirror her.
‘There’s no point if you don’t practise,’ she said. ‘It needs to be so that your knife’s in your hand before you realise you need it. It needs to feel seamless – so it comes to you without thinking.’
I’d seen how she and Piper moved, and fought – their bodies fluid, not responding to their thoughts but becoming their thoughts. It was true what she’d said – There’s nothing pretty about fighting – and I knew that however striking Zoe’s and Piper’s movements, the results were the same: blood, death. Flies swarming on sticky bodies. But I still found myself admiring the certainty of their bodies as they inscribed their answers on the world with a blade.
It was past noon when we stopped.
‘Enough,’ she said, when I clumsily blocked her final parry. ‘You’re tired. That’s how stupid mistakes happen.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, as I slipped my knife back into my belt. I smiled at her.
She shrugged. ‘It’s in my interests to give you a better chance of getting yourself out of trouble, for a change.’ She was already walking away. She was a door, forever slamming shut in my face.
‘Why are you like this?’ I called after her. ‘Why do you always have to cut me down and stalk off?’
She looked back at me.
‘What do you want from me?’ she said. ‘You want me to hold your hand, and braid your hair? Have we not given you enough, me and Piper?’
I couldn’t answer. More than once, she’d proved that she was willing to risk her life to protect me. It seemed petty to complain that she didn’t also give me her friendship.
‘I didn’t mean to see your dreams,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t help it. You don’t know what it’s like, being a seer.’
‘You’re not the first seer,’ she said, and she walked away. ‘I doubt you’ll be the last.’
*
It was dawn, two days later, when the bards came. We’d made camp just a few hours before, at a spot Zoe and Piper knew. It was a forested hill overlooking the road, with a spring nearby. Since The Ringmaster’s ambush we’d been edgy, flinching at every sound. To make it worse, for two days it hadn’t stopped raining. My blanket was a sodden load, dragging my rucksack until the straps chafed at my shoulders. The rain had thinned to a drizzle when we arrived, but everything was soaked and there was no chance of a fire. Piper took the first lookout shift. He spotted them in the tentative dawn light – two travellers making their way along the main road, in the opposite direction from where we’d come. He called us over. I’d been wrapped in a blanket in the shelter of the trees, and Zoe had just returned from a hunt, two freshly-dead rabbits swinging from her belt.
The newcomers were still only small figures on the road when we heard the music. As they drew closer, through the thinning fog we could see that one of them was thrumming her fingers on the drum hanging by her side, sounding out the rhythm of their steps. The other one, a bearded man with a staff, held a mouth organ to his lips with one hand, exploring fragments of a tune as they walked.
When they reached the point where the road curved away, they broke with it, instead heading up the hill through the longer grass, towards the woods where we sheltered.
‘We need to leave,’ said Zoe, already shoving her flask back into her bag.
‘How do they know the spot?’ I asked.
‘The same way that I do,’ Piper said. ‘From travelling this road many times before. They’re bards – they’re always on the road. This is the only spring for miles – they’re heading right for it.’
‘Pack
