Chapter 18

The next ten days went very fast.

Frances had learned, over a year in the pockets and sixteen years before that in a house in Ann Arbor, that the trick to getting a great deal done was not to do it all yourself. And so, for perhaps the first time in her adult life, she didn’t.

She had handed the design of the new weapons and the whole business of mass production to Haldor, and Haldor had taken hold of it with both of his enormous soot-stained hands. She had handed the testing of weapons and tactics to Prince Corin, who was in and out of the Training Pocket with Sir Ulric’s knights and Bram’s spearmen so often that the guardsman at the archway had stopped saluting him every time he passed. The drek collar was out in Wat’s fields. The spinning wheel was taking shape in Leofric’s workshop.

And she had a plan for her archery.

She went back to the beginning.

This time she did it properly, the way she had done the swordwork. Giovanni stood outside the Training Pocket’s archway, ready to mend her each time she came out. Marguerite kept the Study Pocket stocked with food, and Frances slept there between sessions, in Lucien’s borrowed childhood bedroom. Within a few cycles the three of them had found their rhythm again, and the machine began to run.

She trained. She went out to Giovanni. She ate and slept. She trained again.

The Dark Knight tutor never tired and never let anything pass. It moved her from the forty-pound bow to fifty, and then to sixty, and finally to a heavy war bow of seventy-five pounds. Each time, her form fell apart and had to be rebuilt. Each time, her shoulders and back and fingers screamed for a week, and Giovanni mended them, and they came back stronger. Her arrows began to cluster at a hundred feet, then at two hundred. Then the tutor set out a great marked oval on the grass at four hundred feet, the size of a body of men, and taught her to drop arrows into it in a high, falling arc, again and again and again, until her body knew the angle without her having to think about it.

But a drawing arm could only take so much in a day, so she cross-trained. When her arm began to tire and her arrows began to wander, she did not stop. She asked the Pocket for mail and a kite shield instead, and went back to fighting Dark Knights until her shoulders had recovered enough to draw again.

And every so often, she asked the Pocket to put a bill into her hands and teach her to use it: the thrust, the hook, the drag, the short, brutal work of the back spike. Just in case, she thought, remembering the Baron’s thin smile. But you might wish to practice a little.

It was during one of those stretches in armor that a thought struck her, and she lowered her shield.

“Pocket,” she said. “The knights who’ve trained in here over the years. Do you remember them? How they fought?”

The Dark Knight in front of her stopped mid-stride and stood still.

“Affirmative. I hold a clear model of the capability of every warrior who has fought within this pocket. Any of them may be fielded.”

Frances felt a slow smile spread across her face. “Then I’d like to fight the best of them. The finest knights of the Ringholders. The finest of the inner baronies. Whoever you judge strongest.”

“Acknowledged.”

So she fought them, one after another, across many sessions. There were champions of Highcrag and Stonegate, and knights of the interior who had come to Ironwatch in their youth to be broken and remade. They were men whose names meant nothing to her yet, but some of them would almost certainly be sitting at tables in Aldricspire. Some were strong. Some were quick. A few were genuinely clever.

None of them was anything like Sir Gareth the Unbroken.

It was not even close. She had expected the best knights in the realm to push her, the way the Dark Knights had pushed her for a year. Instead she found herself defending with something close to ease. Again and again she saw an attack coming long before it arrived: the cut gathering in a shoulder, the bash building in a hip, the feint that was so obviously a feint. Her shield was where it needed to be before the blow had properly begun.

After a while, it began to bother her.

She held up her hand, and the knight in front of her stopped.

“Pocket. Why are these men so poorly trained? Every one of them is telegraphing his attacks. I can see each move coming a mile off.”

There was the briefest pause.

“The knights are not telegraphing their attacks. Their models are accurate. I have analyzed your defenses, and I now conclude that you are using Foresight to react to attacks precisely the moment preparations to attack begin.”

Frances stood very still.

“In retrospect,” the flat voice went on, “it is clear that you did this against Sir Gareth the Unbroken. Your shield was in position too quickly for normal human reaction time.”

She thought of the courtyard. The canted shield, already waiting when Gareth’s first cut came down. The low cut at her knee, and her leg already lifting out of its path. She had put all of it down to a year of Dark Knights, to reading weight and shoulder and hip. She had told herself it was instinct: a fraction of a second’s warning, built from thousands of deaths.

Perhaps it had never been instinct at all.

“Are you telling me,” she said slowly, “that I’m an Oracle?”

“To some small degree. It is certainly clear that you use Foresight as part of your defenses. I recommend honing this ability. To do so, you would need to consult the appropriate mages.”

Magnus, she thought at once. And then, just as quickly: not yet. Magnus would want to study it properly, test it and write it all down, and there was no time for that before Aldricspire. She filed it away carefully, at the very top of the list for her return to Ironwatch.

The knight stood waiting. The grey forest was quiet. Something rose in her chest that she had not felt in a very long time. It wasn’t satisfaction, or relief, or the cool pleasure of a plan coming together. It was glee: pure, ridiculous, ten-years-old-on-Christmas-morning glee.

I’m a mage, she thought. I’m a mage!

That has got to be the coolest thing ever.

She laughed out loud, alone in a forest that did not exist, and the faceless knight waited patiently for her to finish. Then she raised her shield again.

By the time she stopped, she had spent well over six months of subjective time in the two pockets. Outside, barely a day had passed.

On her last visit to Giovanni, she asked him the question that had been nagging at her.

“The endurance,” she said, as he worked on her shoulders. “The thing we built in the thin air. I haven’t been doing altitude training. I’ve only been training in ordinary air. But my endurance never seemed to leave me, and neither did my strength. How long will they last?”

Giovanni frowned, and took her hand in both of his, and went looking. He was quiet for a long time. When he finally let go, he was smiling, a slow, puzzled, delighted smile.

“I had expected both to fade, my lady, unless you kept up the proper training,” he said. “A body made for thin air should, in time, forget it, once it lives in thick air again. That is what the old accounts of the Rathmere expeditions suggest. But I see no sign of it fading in you. None at all. And your strength is as it was.” He shook his head. “It may be that the workings, laid on you so many times over, have fixed these changes in your body for good. Whatever we built in you, it seems to have stayed built. I shall have to add a page to the codex.”