Karigan limped back to the castle past the wondering looks of others, her hair in total disarray, her face grimed with dirt and probably bruised, and her fine dress ripped and coated with dust, but she held her chin high. Dresses could be fixed, but pride was more difficult to patch back together.

She may never see her love for a certain man fulfilled, and she may have lost a friend today, but by the gods, she still had Drent.

A NEW ASSIGNMENT

In the days and weeks that followed, Karigan had to reassess her sanity for wanting to continue her training sessions with Drent. He took her desire to learn how to fight in fancy attire to heart. He didn’t make her wear corset and dress, but he found other ways to simulate the difficulties presented by restrictive garments. He made her strap on a forty pound pack to represent the weight of her skirts, then ordered her to run around the practice grounds and participate in weapons practice while wearing it.

To train her in footwork, he buckled modified horse hobbles around her ankles to limit her movement as skirts would. He used the device, he said, on his swordmaster initiates to teach them economy of movement. Swordmastery, he said, was not about jumping around and flailing the sword through the air. It was about making each action count. There was an elegance and efficiency in simplicity.

Karigan agreed for she had seen such skill at work among swordmasters and Weapons during practice bouts and in battle. It turned brutal conflict into beauty in motion; deadly beauty.

Trying to make that economy of movement work for herself, however, proved to be another matter entirely. She could not keep count of the many times the hobbles tripped her up and she spilled unceremoniously out of the practice ring and hit the ground hard enough, thanks to the weight of her pack, that dust rose up around her. Her opponents won automatic kill points each time she fell, and while she couldn’t keep track of the points, she knew Drent and his assistants did. The points were posted at the field house at the end of every week, and competition was fierce among the trainees to attain the most points, a matter of pride and honor and desire to win Drent’s approval. Invariably Karigan was at the bottom of the list.

Her sessions left her bruised, exhausted, cut up, limping, and discouraged, but slowly, ever so slowly, she noticed her strength improving and her swordplay becoming more precise.

If trying to fight while hobbled made her feel ridiculous, knife throwing humiliated her even further. She realized, to her chagrin, that clobbering the thief at the museum with her shoe had not been a matter of skill, but of luck.

“Retain your line of sight,” Drent said during one such session. “Focus and see the knife in the target.”

Karigan squinted at the straw-stuffed dummy hanging from a wooden frame some yards away. The weight of the knife felt good in her hand. It was specially balanced for throwing. When she first received the pair, she had been quite impressed with herself and showed them off to her fellow Riders, wearing them around in her new boot sheaths. However, when Drent saw how abysmal she was at throwing, he decided to hold onto them when she wasn’t training so she wouldn’t endanger herself or others, which resulted in a good deal of ribbing from her friends.

She licked her lips and concentrated. She held the tip of the blade in her fingers just as Drent had shown her. As soon as the other trainees saw her with a knife in her hand, they scattered out of throwing distance. One wild throw had nearly killed one of them during her first session and now only Drent had the nerve to stand anywhere near her.

She would hit the target this time. She would show them. She stared hard at the dummy’s “heart” imagining the knife sticking through it. A bead of sweat trickled down her lip and she tasted salt.

Her expression set and determined, she flung her arm back for the throw, but the blade slipped from her fingers and flew over her shoulder. Someone yelped from behind. Grimacing at what she might find, she slowly turned around. The knife was planted in the ground between the feet of a Green Foot runner.

“Oops,” Karigan said. She snuck a glance at Drent whose veins were popping out on his neck.

“Oops?” he repeated quietly. Too quietly.

Karigan flinched in anticipation of the storm that was about to blow over her, but it never came. Drent passed his hand over his spiky hair, nostrils flaring. “You are hopeless,” he said, his voice full of despair. “Absolutely hopeless.” And he wandered away shaking his head and mumbling to himself.

Karigan blinked in surprise, then turned her attention to the runner who had not moved, as if still shocked by her close call with death. “Sorry,” Karigan said. “I, um, I didn’t meant to—” She gestured at the knife.

“Ung…” The girl shook her head, her eyes bulging. Moments passed before she was able to focus on Karigan and speak. “Um, the captain would like you to join her and the king in his study.”

Chills prickled along Karigan’s nerves at the girl’s words. “Thank you,” she managed to say.

The runner nodded and took off at a trot. Karigan pulled her knife from the ground and slipped it into the boot sheath, wondering what this summons might be about. She avoided the king as much as possible for all the pain and desires he stirred in her, but she knew that in the course of her duties she could not avoid him indefinitely. And now she had been summoned.

She glanced in Drent’s direction. He was busy bellowing at a pair of swordsmen across the practice field. She shrugged off the weighted pack and informed one of his assistants that she must leave, and she hurried to the castle, stopping in her own chamber in the Rider wing just long enough to change out of her work tunic and pull on a fresh shirt and shortcoat and to splash water on her face. It would not do to appear before the king covered in dust and sweat.