Lesson Ends

“Dismiss them,” Mali said.

Deren looked at the court. The first ranks had turned, blades held at the opening angle. He knew the posture, had corrected it in children and adults until a glance could tell him who had learned by watching and who had been struck into place. Now the sight seemed to give him nothing he could use.

“You have to dismiss them.”

He tried to answer. His mouth formed the count for the next movement.

Mali caught his sleeve.

“No.”

The word came out too much like every correction he had ever given her. She loosened her grip without letting go.

“Tell me what you need.”

He looked at her hand. The cut in her palm had opened across the skin where the shutter took the sword. Blood darkened the edge of his sleeve.

Vale saw them. His face hardened. He lifted one arm, and the nearest teaching rank advanced toward the platform.

Deren drew breath. Another count came out.

Mali slapped his face.

She had imagined striking him for years. In every version it brought an end to something: the old authority, the shame of leaving, her need to be recognised by the person who refused to recognise her. Here there was only the sound of her palm against his cheek and the shock in his eyes.

His face reddened. Anger moved through it, ordinary enough to make her almost glad.

“Ask me,” she said.

He gripped the rail. His mouth opened and closed. Across the court, people were shouting about the west door, the beds coming through, the cancelled song. The carrier's lesson had given all that noise a single answer. Complete the movement. Everything would settle after the movement.

“Help,” Deren said.

Mali took his right hand. She could not open it. His fingers held the rail with more force than she could break, and using force there would turn her into the thing he had taught her to be good at: a person able to decide where another body must yield.

She put his left hand over hers.

“Come down.”

He looked at the drop beyond the platform stair.

“Not there. With me.”

They went toward the steps. A student reached the foot of them, sword point lifted. Deren said the count again, too softly this time to carry. Mali pulled him off the last step into the narrow space between the first rank and Vale.

A blade brushed her sleeve. Another opened Deren's robe across the shoulder. He felt it; she saw his head jerk, the eyes suddenly present inside the face.

“Lesson ends,” he said.

Nobody moved.

“Lesson ends.”

Anet stood three places from the stair.

Her cropped head turned a fraction. The blade in her hand trembled. Mali had not seen her since she signed the inspection request, and had spent part of that absence wanting more. Now Anet stood inside a movement she had spent years learning to complete and was trying to find the interval in which not completing remained possible.

Vale stepped toward her.

“Complete the form.”

His blade struck hers from above, driving it back toward the correct line. The sound carried through the first ranks. Several people flinched. Anet looked at the point, then at Deren's hand clamped against the torn robe.

She let the sword fall.

It hit stone with no grace at all.

The court's count broke. Not everywhere. Not enough. Two students turned their heads. Another lunged at the space Mali had left on the stair. Deren pushed her aside and caught the blade in a twist of his loose robe, turning until the student stumbled.

Anet was on her knees, looking at the sword as if it might demand to be picked up again.

Mali dragged her beneath the platform rail as another blade struck the wood above them.

“Tell someone else,” she said.

“I can't make them stop.”

“I know.”

Anet looked at her. The fact that they both knew it, and Mali was asking anyway, seemed to give her something other than failure to carry. She crawled toward the next rank.

Deren held the student whose sword was tangled in his robe. The young man had begun to weep. His free hand struck Deren's chest once, weakly, as though the body would go on fighting after the person inside had stopped believing in it.

“Name?” Mali asked.

“Torren.” Deren's voice was rough.

“Not for me. Tell him.”

Deren did. Torren did not answer. The master went on speaking, stumbling over the words because there was no sequence for this part. He remembered the boy arriving with a chipped practice blade, the younger sister who had insisted on being taught too, a rainstorm when everyone had moved into the corridor and made the cook furious.

Torren's fist loosened enough to be held.

Mali did not let that become a demonstration. In the next rank a woman could hear her own name and still not lower her blade. Her friend stood outside its reach, talking until someone could help move the weapon safely. A man sat down suddenly and vomited onto the paving. Two students ran toward the north gate and were stopped by Hesh's shout to make room for a trolley.

Calling names had not cured the city. It had given some people a way to find one another in it.

Vale turned toward the disc.

Light ran down its branches into the bronze collar. The withdrawal of the nearest students had left irregular spaces in the pattern. He moved to close them, guiding one shoulder, lifting another wrist. His own hands had steadied completely.

Mali saw the appeal. No tremor, no cup on the floor, no bowl held against a shaking chest. Every task arrived with its answer already fitted to the hand that would perform it.

“Vale.”

He looked at her, then at Deren.

“You invited us,” he said. “You said this was safe.”

Deren had no sword. The student's blade lay on the stone between them. He did not reach for it.

“I was wrong.”

The words did not empty the court of danger. They did not free Torren's other hand, still closed against his own thigh. They were only words Deren should have said five days before, and Mali felt both relief at hearing them and an anger so deep she could barely stand.

Vale's face twisted.

“Now?”

He crossed the space before Mali could stop him. His short sword struck Deren across the mouth with the hilt. Deren fell against the rail. Blood ran onto the muted red collar.

Mali put herself between them.

Vale turned the blade toward her. For a moment she could see the next exchange with dreadful clarity. She had no steel. The broken rail might catch his wrist. Her right hand was torn, the left arm cut, her ribs unable to take another full blow.

She was not going to win the fight he had brought.

Below them a sound came through the bronze, not a bell and not a voice. A distant pressure, rising toward the disc.

The return was still drawing.

Mali caught the broken rail and waited for Vale to move.