Chapter 6

Frances woke to pain.

It lived in her legs first. It was a deep, grinding ache in the quadriceps and calves that made itself known the instant she tried to roll over. It then spread, as she took stock, to her shoulders, her forearms, the long muscles down either side of her spine. It was the comprehensive soreness of a body that had spent years doing nothing more strenuous than carrying groceries suddenly being asked to fight for its life in thirty pounds of mail. She groaned, long and unselfconscious, and sat up with the deliberate care of someone easing a rusted hinge open by degrees.

She stood, swayed, and spent the next several minutes simply moving, slow rolls of the shoulders, careful bends at the waist, the kind of stretching she’d once drilled into teenage SCA recruits who thought warming up was optional. It helped, marginally. Mostly it just confirmed how thoroughly she’d overdone it.

After a quick breakfast, she made her way out of the Study Pocket and was pleased to find Giovanni waiting just outside. She motioned him over, and they stepped back inside together.

The moment the door closed behind them, Frances collapsed into the nearest chair with a groan that had nothing performative about it.

Giovanni’s lips twitched with the amusement of a man watching a prediction come true. “You have overtaxed yourself, and on your first day.”

“Yes.” She didn’t open her eyes. “I know the whole reason I wanted you around was for real injuries, not this. But it might take me days in the Study Pocket just to recover from ordinary soreness if I leave it alone, and I don’t have days to spare. Is there something you can do? Is it too costly in mana to deal with this?”

Giovanni laughed outright. “It is trivial, my lady. I anticipated it, and confess I am more amused that you had not. What you suffer is a great deal of inflammation, born of countless tiny tears within the muscle itself, the natural consequence of hard use upon a body unaccustomed to it. I need only calm the inflammation and hasten the mending of the tears. It is commonly done for nobles who train too eagerly and regret it the next morning. It is a common request for healers from the nobility. Other than a cure for a hangover, of course.”

He murmured a short working, barely longer than a breath, and Frances felt the pain recede with startling speed. It didn’t vanish entirely, but settled into something closer to the pleasant, mild ache of a good workout rather than the punishing stiffness she’d woken with.

She stood, rolled her shoulders, stretched her arms overhead. “Wow. That feels so much better.”

“It accelerates recovery,” Giovanni said, “so the strength you have earned through exercise will still manifest in its own time. I have merely spared you the suffering along the way.”

Frances snorted. “No pain, all gain,” she muttered, mostly to herself.

“But you must stretch regularly nonetheless,” Giovanni added, with the mild sternness of a man who had clearly delivered this caution before. “Healed muscle is not the same as limber muscle. Neglect your stretching, and you may find yourself stiff in ways my working does not reach.”

“Noted.” Frances rose fully, testing her legs with a few experimental lunges. “Let’s go get Haldor.”

Haldor arrived promptly, helped her into the gambeson and hauberk with the same brisk efficiency as the day before, and stepped back once she was fully arrayed to look her over with a critical eye.

“Here are two water flasks, as requested,” he said, handing them across. “Do you judge that sufficient?”

Frances considered the previous day’s thirst, the long stretches of rest between fights, the sheer volume of water she’d gone through just sitting and recovering. “We’ll find out. Thank you.”

She left the Study Pocket and walked back toward the Training Pocket’s arch, where she found Marguerite slightly out of breath, a coil of rope clutched in both hands.

“My lady! I ran the whole way, lest I miss you.”

“Perfect timing.” Frances took the rope and wound it carefully around her waist, overlapping the coils until it sat snug and secure, more a thick belt than a loose burden. She tested it with a few twists of her torso. It held. “All set,” she said, and stepped through.

The forest closed around her as it had the day before, and Frances fell quickly into the rhythm she’d already built, though this time, she was deliberate about not repeating her mistakes. No sprint for the hill. No dragging a disabled goblin for hours across open ground. She killed what needed killing, disabled what bought her a rest, and made sure, every single time, to take a break. She drank water and rested until her heart and breathing had slowed, and then finished off whichever goblin she’d left groaning nearby.

The rope turned out to be only modestly useful. She still had to disable each goblin the same brutal way as before, by breaking limbs, before the rope served any purpose at all, and once disabled, the goblin wasn’t going anywhere regardless. Still, tying one up meant she didn’t have to keep half an eye on it while she rested, and that alone was worth the weight at her hip.

Between the fourth and fifth waves, with time to spare and her curiosity getting the better of her, she set off in a single direction from the hill. She kept the rise as a landmark behind her in order to see how far the forest actually ran.

It did not run far.

What looked, from a distance, like more forest stretching on without end turned out, as she drew closer, to be a mirror. It was a wall of perfectly reflective surface standing among the trees, throwing back an exact copy of the woods in front of it so convincingly that only up close did the illusion break down. Standing directly before it, she could make out the faint curvature in the angle of reflection, a slow bending that told her the Training Pocket wasn’t an infinite forest at all, but something bounded, a dome or a great circle, she guessed, perhaps a mile across.

Interesting, she thought. I should ask Lucien about this. A bounded space meant bounded tactics, and possibly, eventually, a use for the boundary itself.

She walked back to the disabled goblin she’d left waiting, rested a full hour, and finished it.

Her tenth respawn ended the day. She mistimed a block. It was a sword strike she should have caught on the shield, and it instead connected squarely with her chest, hammering into the mail with a sound that was somewhere between a thud and a crunch. White swallowed the world before she even registered pain.

She blinked back into existence outside the Training Pocket’s arch, breathing hard but otherwise uninjured. Marguerite hurried over.