The Correction

Deren had grown thinner. That was the first betrayal: Mali had carried an unchanged man inside her anger, and time had been working on him without her permission.

He waited in the small demonstration court, bareheaded, with a wooden sword. Students filled the balconies. A clerk held a slate ready to record the exchange. Mali recognised two women from her first year at Red Eave. Neither waved.

“You left without taking your final examination,” Deren said.

“I'm not here to finish it.”

“Then why bring a blade?”

She laid Sel's second letter between them. “Your lessons are teaching people to obey something that isn't you.”

He read this one. She saw the point at which it offended him.

“The Codex made the comparison tables. I corrected them. No alien archive knows our arts better than we do.”

“The instructor at Bell House knew Returning Swallow.”

“Good principles recur.”

“He knew where I'd put my ribs.”

Deren folded the letter. “You always struck too early.”

Mali picked up a practice sword. She had hoped that hearing him would make him ordinary, a tired man surrounded by clerks. Instead she was seventeen again, holding a bruised ankle off cold stone while he told her pain was information she had failed to read.

They bowed. He came at once, two short cuts and a rising thrust. She knew the sequence. He knew she knew. Her parry arrived where his blade should have been; his wrist turned, and the wood struck her shoulder.

“Early,” he said.

She attacked his flank. He closed the opening and tapped her knee. The balconies were silent. Mali felt herself narrowing toward the next correct answer. Her feet found the old positions. Pain became a diagram. For a moment there was relief in it, in having only one thing to do.

The copper loop blackened.

Deren's eyes went to it. His sword stopped a finger's breadth from her temple.

Mali lowered hers. “It's here.”

“You brought it.”

He struck again. This time she did not parry. She caught his sleeve with her empty hand and took the blow across her forearm. The pain was immediate and disorganising. She clung to it. With her sword trapped against her own hip, she leaned close enough to speak without the balconies hearing.

“Ask me to stop.”

“Yield, then.”

“You. Stop your hand.”

His wooden sword remained raised. Tendons stood out beneath the skin of his wrist.

Mali released him. She stepped back. Let him see the space he could choose not to cross.

His face changed. For an instant she thought he understood. Then the hand moved, bringing the sword down between them with a force that split its tip on the paving.

He stared at the broken wood.

The clerk made a mark on the slate. Deren looked up at the balconies, at the watching students, and Mali saw the decision close over his fear.

“Remove her,” he said.

She could have shouted. She could have held up the blackened copper and made the students choose between their teacher and the sight of his rigid hand. Two guards were already descending the stairs. The women she had known at Red Eave would not meet her gaze.

Mali picked up Sel's letter. “You felt it.”

“Remove her.”

She went without drawing steel. At the gate, Deren spoke again, too softly for the clerk.

“There are people who cannot sleep unless I tell them what to do. Would you take that away?”

“I would tell them why.”

His expression hardened, but his right hand was still trembling when the gate closed.

Outside, Hesh wanted to break the lock. Mali sat beside the wall until the nausea passed. At dusk, the clerk came out carrying a small parcel.

Inside was the broken sword tip. Wrapped around it was a list of the service tunnels, with one door circled.

There was no signature.