Chapter 4

Frances woke before Marguerite’s hand ever touched her shoulder, lying still for a moment in the grey pre-dawn light, running through the day already assembling itself in her mind the way a lesson plan assembled itself the night before the first day of school. One day until training started. There was no time to waste on lying in bed feeling sorry for herself, and she had never been much good at that anyway.

Be strong, she told herself, the way she had told herself in Harold Walker’s office, the way she had told herself seated at her desk with her hands wet and her voice wrecked. It worked better here. Somehow, she had found her center.

Marguerite’s hand found her shoulder a moment later, and Frances was already sitting up.

“My lady. You’re awake.”

“I’ve got a lot to get through today. Breakfast first?”

“Already laid, my lady.”

Breakfast was bread, soft cheese, and something like a dense, dark porridge sweetened with honey, eaten quickly at a small table in her chamber while she ran through the list in her head: healing in the morning, the armorer sometime after, rejuvenation in the afternoon, and somewhere in all of it she needed to see Lucien about the Study Pocket, Edmund about the books, and whoever ran the kitchens about feeding herself for what might amount to a month or more of subjective time crammed into the space of a single day. She ate efficiently, the way she ate everything, and was ready before Marguerite had finished clearing the plates.

The healing center was not what Frances had pictured. She had expected something clinical, white and sterile in the way of hospitals back home, and instead found a low stone building with a comfortable sitting room at its front. The room had cushioned benches, a low fire, a scattering of books that looked well-thumbed. Beyond it sat a single chamber that was anything but comfortable in appearance. The walls were covered floor to ceiling in markings that reminded her, with a small jolt, of the chamber where she had first arrived: not quite letters, not quite diagrams. Crystals of various sizes sat arranged around a low bed at the room’s center, unlit and waiting.

“Lie still, if you would, my lady,” Giovanni said, when he entered a few minutes later, his manner brisk and professional in a way she appreciated. “This will take perhaps half an hour. You need do nothing but rest.”

She lay back. Giovanni took a seat beside the bed, laid his hands lightly near her head without quite touching it, and began to speak, not to her, she understood after a moment, but to the working itself. The speech was in a language that was neither English nor the common tongue she’d been hearing since she arrived, a long, low, cadenced murmur that rose and fell like something half song, half incantation. The crystals around the bed began to glow faintly, a soft and steady light rather than anything dramatic.

Frances felt almost nothing. A warmth, perhaps, settling somewhere behind her eyes; a sense of calm that had nothing to do with her own effort to feel calm. She lay still and let her mind wander, toward Celeste and Carrie, briefly, with the ache that came whenever she let herself think of them for too long, and then, because it was useless to sit in that ache, back toward the logistics of the day ahead.

Giovanni’s voice stopped. The crystals dimmed. He sat back, and some of the tension she hadn’t noticed in his shoulders eased.

“It is done,” he said.

Frances sat up slowly, running a mental inventory of her own body, waiting for some sensation of lightness, of absence, of something having been removed. There was nothing.

“I didn’t feel anything,” she said, and was faintly annoyed at herself for how disappointed she sounded.

Giovanni allowed himself a small smile. “In truth, my lady, this was a relatively minor working, for all it concerned itself with your life. There were but a few thousand cells requiring removal, and a handful more that had traveled beyond the original growth but had not yet begun to multiply. Those we found and drew out as well, that they not trouble you later. Most of the half hour was spent not in the removal itself, which is swift, but in the searching, combing the whole of your body, cell by cell, to be certain nothing was left behind to take root again. That is the tedious part of the working, and the part that cannot be hurried.”

“So that’s it. I’m healed.”

“You are healed, my lady. Entirely.” He rose. “I would have you return at mid-afternoon for the rejuvenation. That working is considerably the larger of the two, and will take longer. I shall want assistance for it, and more besides. Rest if you can between now and then, though I expect, knowing what I now know of you, that you will find some other use for the hours.”

Frances felt, walking back out into the sitting room, strangely let down, as though a cancer that had nearly killed her, a cancer that back home would have meant months of appointments and scans and a surgeon’s careful hands and a recovery measured in weeks, ought to have cost her something more than half an hour of lying still and listening to a man murmur in a language she didn’t know. There should have been more ceremony to surviving. But beneath the letdown rose something cleaner and simpler: relief, that a weight she had been carrying in the back of her mind since the moment Giovanni first took her hand in the summoning chamber was now, simply, gone.

She did not waste time sitting with the feeling. There was a day to get through.

“Marguerite,” she said, the moment she found her waiting outside, “take me to the armorer.”

Haldor Steelhand’s forge occupied a long, low building set near the soldiers’ garrison and apart from the rest of the Academy, close enough to the practice yards that the ring of hammer on steel carried out across the open ground in a rhythm Frances found she rather liked. The man himself was built like his trade suggested. He was thick through the forearms and shoulders, a beard gone mostly to iron-grey, soot worked so deeply into the creases of his hands that it looked less like dirt and more like a permanent feature of his skin. He looked up when she entered, took her in with a single unhurried glance from boots to crown, and returned, unimpressed, to the blade he was working without any change in his expression.

“You are the summoned Champion,” he said. It was not a question.

“I am.”

“Gregory of Blackwood has told the Watch Sergeants you will not pass the Trial.” He set down his hammer, finally, and turned to face her fully, arms crossed. “I have heard this from three separate men this week alone. I confess I did not expect to be fitting a woman for arms at all, let alone one the military mage himself has already written off.”

Frances matched his look without flinching, the way she’d learned to hold a stare across a strip when the other fencer tried to intimidate before the whistle. “Gregory of Blackwood hasn’t seen me with a blade in my hand yet. Neither have you. I’d like to see some swords.”

Haldor grunted, the first of what Frances would come to understand was a whole vocabulary of grunts, and led her into an adjoining room stacked with racks of blades.

“Choose,” he said, and stood back with his arms still crossed, watching her with an expression that suggested he expected this to take very little time.

Frances drew the first sword from its rack and knew within a second it was wrong. The balance sat too far forward with the kind of weight distribution that would exhaust a wrist within minutes of real work. The second had a visible flaw along the fuller, a fold in the forging that hadn’t been worked out properly. The third was serviceable but dull-edged in a way that spoke of neglect rather than design. She went through six more with the same result: blades that were, by any standard she’d learned on the strip or in SCA, rejects. It was the kind of stock a shop kept around for decoration, or for arming peasant levies who wouldn’t know the difference, or that no one had bothered to throw out.

She set the last one down with a deliberate, unhurried click against the rack and looked at Haldor.

“These are castoffs,” she said. “I don’t know what you think this proves, but I didn’t ask to be shown your scrap pile. Show me swords fit for a Champion, or tell me that you don’t intend to.”

Something flickered in Haldor’s expression, not quite surprise, but close to it, and he grunted again, turning without a word toward a second room. This one held longswords and greatswords, blades two and three feet past anything Frances would have called sensible for her frame, hilts long enough for two hands, weight meant for men half a foot taller and considerably heavier through the shoulder than she was. She looked them over anyway, out of thoroughness, and then sighed.

“These aren’t suited to me, and you know it.” She kept her voice level. “I need a one-handed sword. That’s how I fight.”

Haldor’s jaw worked once, as though chewing on something he hadn’t expected to have to swallow, and he led her to a third room.