Chapter 5

Frances woke with the tight, pre-dawn alertness she used to feel on the morning of a regional tournament. The body was already half-braced before the mind had caught up to why. She lay still a moment, cataloguing it, and reminded herself, firmly, that this was not one test. It would not be over in an afternoon with a ribbon pinned to her jacket and a drive home with the radio on. This was going to be a grinding, repeating thing, over and over, for as many days as her mind could stand it.

She got up before Marguerite could fetch her.

Edric had delivered two sets of working clothes the evening before. There were underclothes of linen, plain wool shirts, sturdy trousers cut close enough not to catch on anything but loose enough to move in. Nothing that so much as hinted at a skirt. She dressed in one outfit, rolled the second into a tight bundle, and tucked it under her arm. Her plan was simple: wear one set, wash the other while she rested, and never again be caught needing clean clothes with none to hand.

Breakfast was quiet, taken quickly, and then Marguerite was walking her through the Academy’s corridors toward the Training Pocket as the ninth bell drew near.

Frances arrived early enough that no one else had yet gathered at the squat stone archway that marked the Training Pocket’s entrance. She did not wait idly. She crossed instead to the unassuming door a short distance away that led into Lucien’s Study Pocket, pressed her palm to the symbol as she’d been shown, and stepped through into the quiet of the study beyond, just to confirm with her own eyes that everything had actually been done.

It had. The shelves that had held a modest scholar’s collection the day before now groaned under the weight of Edmund’s books, stacked in towers on the desk and the floor where the shelves themselves had run out of room. One of the bedrooms had been stripped of its bed entirely and turned into something closer to an armory. The swords were racked along one wall, the mail hauberk and gambeson laid out on a long table, the kite shield propped in a corner. The kitchen, when she checked it, was packed floor to ceiling with sealed crates and sacks that smelled, faintly and pleasantly, of bread and dried meat.

Frances thought for a moment. She allowed herself a small, satisfied nod. It was the pleasure of a lesson plan that had mostly survived contact with reality.

Haldor arrived just as the bell began to toll, a bundle of leather and mail slung over one shoulder despite everything already being staged inside. Frances nodded to him, and they went in together.

Even with his help, lacing the gambeson, settling the hauberk, buckling the arm leathers, fitting the helmet, belting the baldric with its sheathed sword across her hips, took very nearly fifteen minutes. Not long, in the ordinary run of a day. But Frances thought of that fifteen minutes multiplied across however many entries she meant to make, and felt private satisfaction that she had insisted on staging everything inside the pocket rather than hauling it back and forth from the armory each time. Fifteen minutes saved ten or twenty times over was hours she wasn’t going to waste.

“Ready, my lady?” Haldor asked, stepping back to look her over with the critical eye of a craftsman checking his own work.

“Ready.”

They left the Study Pocket together.

Near the Training Pocket’s arch, Lucien was waiting with a small object on a leather loop held out in his open palm.

“An exit stone,” he said. “Should your wounds become more than you can bear, and you have no wish to endure to the last, crush it in your fist. It will end you cleanly, and swiftly, and you will wake outside the pocket rather than within it.”

Frances took it. It was a small, smooth stone, cool against her palm, unremarkable to look at for something that held so much weight in what it promised. She slipped the loop over her head and tucked the amulet down beneath her mail, where it settled cold against her sternum.

She frowned faintly the moment it was in place. If her hands were occupied, or broken, or pinned, reaching beneath a hauberk for a stone the size of a knucklebone was not going to be the work of a casual half-second. Something to fix later, she thought.

She waited at the archway as the ninth bell tolled its last note, and caught sight of Edmund arriving at a measured pace near the entrance to the Study Pocket, a satchel of scrolls under one arm. She nodded once in his direction, and he returned it with a small, solemn bow.

Then she turned, walked with Marguerite the last few steps to the Training Pocket’s entrance, and stepped through.

It occurred to her, in the half-second before the world changed around her, that the standard way out of this place was supposed to be her own death.

Well, she thought. I will need to make a habit of accepting death.

The forest was laid out around her with trees of various sizes spaced loosely, ten to twenty feet apart. A grey, overcast sky was visible in patches through a canopy gone half-bare. The air was cool. She had perhaps a second and a half to take it in before a screech cut through the quiet and something came crashing toward her out of the trees.

It was perhaps five feet tall, green-grey skinned, carrying a rusted sword in a two-handed grip far too large for it, and it closed the distance with a reckless, committed speed that told her instantly it had never once faced an opponent who knew what they were doing. It swung in a wide, telegraphed arc at the side of her body, the kind of cut a first-year fencer threw in the first week of lessons with a saber, before anyone had taught them economy of motion.

Frances stepped back, let the blade sweep past her middle with room to spare, and thrust the arming sword forward in a single clean motion straight into its eye.

That was easy, she thought, almost disappointed, as the goblin crumpled. A few moments later, its body and sword dissolved into a drift of fine dust that scattered on the breeze and left nothing behind.

She had perhaps ten seconds to process this before a chorus of shrieks rose from two directions at once, and two more goblins came crashing through the trees, splitting as they ran to come at her from front and back at the same time.

Oh, no you don’t. She shifted her angle sharply, cutting the geometry so that both attackers were forced to converge in front of her rather than catching her between them. It was the same instinct that had kept her alive through a dozen SCA melees against more opponents than she could track at once. She closed the distance to the goblin on her left before it had finished adjusting, bashing it hard with the kite shield to stagger it, then spun to catch the second goblin’s cut on the flat of her blade, flicking its sword wide before opening its throat in a single slash. Blood fountained, more of it than she’d braced for, and she was already turning back to the first goblin in time to catch its recovering strike on her shield.