Chapter 65: Finally, a Date I

There was a horn hanging by the archway now. Nobody was sure who had put it there.

That was the thing about the sparring grounds, or the training grounds, or whatever you wanted to call them.

That nobody had built them. Not really.

The training grounds simply kept being improved by people a little at a time, and on the first quiet morning of the autumn, a few days after the barley had begun coming off the fields, Emerald had to stop under that archway and take it all in.

When had the dusty corner where Haaland held the first training session become... this?

For a start it was bigger. Nearly twice the ground.

The old corner had been whatever space was left over after the plaza had finished being a plaza, and a dozen people in it had felt crowded.

This one had been measured out with a cord and a peg before a single stone was moved, and there was room in it now for two dozen to swing without anybody standing in anybody's arc.

It had walls too. Low ones, about waist high, laid up out of block the crews had no other use for, so that the wind coming off the fields went over it instead of through it.

Woven rush mats covered the floor, laid edge to edge over the old pavement by the women, who had grown tired of the children coming home full of bruises.

Somebody had also set benches along the inside of the wall.

Though she had no idea who.

It also had racks. Plural. Enough wooden weapons on them that you did not have to wait outside for somebody else to finish their training.

She inspected them now, closer.

The racks did not only hold long swords any more.

They held all types of wooden weapons: daggers, knives, a couple of spears, a hammer, a mace, a few dozen shields.

The variety explained why Haaland had spent every night doing woodwork by the fire.

There were other weapons she had no names for, though she knew the names Haaland used. Some 'flails'. A 'scimitar'. And the massive wooden sword that only Hiccup could lift.

The memory made her giggle.

The younger ones had been trying to get their hands on that big sword since the day it appeared, yet none of them had got it as far as the archway before their arms gave out.

It was simply that heavy.

A grown man could lift it between them and look silly doing it.

Which made it all the more impressive that Hiccup could swing the thing one-handed.

To the side the short blades had their own rack, which was newer than the rest, and which the older students had begun drifting toward.

They had all watched him change over to the short one at the end of the summer, and they had all watched what happened to his sparring afterward, and now every boy over fourteen in that yard had privately decided that the short blade was the secret and that Haaland was keeping it from them out of spite.

So a pair of them were at that rack most mornings, one wooden dagger each, weighing them in their hands and having a very serious conversation about nothing at all.

Haaland sent them back to the long ones every morning, and every morning they tried it again.

She shrugged.

Whatever the case.

The training grounds were not the only thing that had changed.

The trading run a few moons back had brought more than sheep. Salt, iron, needles, a crate of nails, and the bitter grey herb the women boiled in the mornings, which lived in a jar on the storeroom shelf and which nobody had ever bothered to ration.

The sheep had been clipped for the first time at the start of the summer, every fleece taken off them in one piece with a pair of iron shears, and every scrap of that first wool had gone to the women who could spin. It had not been much. Sixteen ewes and a ram do not clothe a settlement.

It was enough for this.

Haaland called them gi, which was a word from wherever he had learned to fight and not from anywhere near here. A wrapped jacket, long in the sleeve, crossed over the chest and closed with a knot at the waist instead of buttons, worn over your own undershirt.

She was wearing hers now.

Greyish in colour, thick enough not to tear in a spar, light enough to move comfortably, and the wool breathed well enough that sweating was not a serious problem.

Plus it also looked good.

Especially on Hiccup.

A devilish smile spread across her rosy lips, and she made no attempt whatsoever to put it away.

Because it did look good on him, in the particular sense that it never stayed shut. It went on closed and it stayed closed for approximately as long as it took him to break a sweat, which was not long, and then the knot at his waist began its daily losing argument, and then the whole front of it hung open, and then there was a great deal of Hiccup Haddock out in the morning air and precisely nothing anybody could do about it.

Not that anybody was trying.

The image assembled itself in her head with no help from her at all: the wet grey wool clinging down his spine, the gi hanging off both shoulders, the sweat going down the middle of his chest, and those cat eyes sunk into the bottomless focus that took hold of him every single time he picked up a blade.

Ahh. Oh gods. I cannot possibly be this far gone.

Emerald let out a chuckle and focused back on her steps.

She came in as the sun was coming up over the eastern wall.

Up on the roofline above the far end of the yard a long black shape lay with its chin on its paws and one ear turned toward the mats. He had been turning up for the mornings since high summer, and nobody down there looked up at him any more except the newest of the children.

The yard was already going. That was the other thing that had changed: nobody waited for Haaland any more. You came, you took a blade off the rack, you found your place in the rows and you started, and if you were the first one there you started alone.

Well, that too has changed.

Last winter, every pair of hands on this island had been needed to keep a hundred people from dying in a cave.

Now most of the younger ones spent the first hour of daylight hitting each other with sticks, and not one person thought it was a waste.

They started with the four basic swings of the blade, because they always started with that.

The children had been moved to the front rows a long time ago. Not because they deserved it better, but because they got bored quick, and Haaland insisted on keeping them where he could see them, or else out.

So the older ones took the rows behind.

It was still mostly the kids and the young adults training, plus a couple of older men who had joined in late spring and stood at the back.

They were the exceptions. Everyone else in that yard was young, and a good few of them were women.

Haaland came through the arch a while after the first cuts had started, which was usual, and which fooled nobody. He was always somewhere within earshot before he arrived.

He did not talk much. He was not the talkative type. He came down the row with his wooden sword resting on his shoulder, and when he found a wrist turned wrong he tapped the inside of it with two fingers until the point came down, and then he moved on.

He did not praise. Everyone in that yard had worked out long ago that him not correcting their form was the praise.

Emerald was in the middle rows now.

Down. Up. Down. Up.

Across. Up through. Down again.

It had taken her the better part of a summer to get those four right. The footing. The weight going from one leg to the other before the hands did anything at all. The breath coming out on the cut and not before it. The blade travelling flat instead of slapping in sideways like a boy swatting flies.

A whole summer of mornings, for four swings of a stick.

There had been a week in the middle of it when she had genuinely considered walking out of the arch and never coming back.

Now her arms did all of it without asking her, and she had stopped counting somewhere around the harvest.

She was not remarkable.

She had no illusions about that.

There were boys who were faster than she was and who would be stronger than her inside a year, and one girl of thirteen who could already rival her for talent and would pass her before the next snow.

She was happy for all of them, genuinely.

In the end, her goal had never been to become the strongest.

She was content with not being powerless.

Though she would be lying if she denied feeling pride at being in the top ten students.

She had come a long way.

Because the first lesson had not been in a yard at all.

It had been on the shore, at dusk, in the first fortnight after they came ashore, when the tide had long since taken their slavers off the sand and the whole camp was still building rafts that were never going to float. Haaland had come and found her with a dead slaver's short sword in his fist and put it in her hands and closed her fingers around the grip himself, and shown her how to stand so that a bigger man could not simply push her over.

You are not very tall, he had pointed out. So you will never win by overpowering anybody. That does not mean you cannot win. It means technique matters a great deal more.

She had been clumsy, and slow, and had taken it seriously from the very first evening.

And then it had stopped, because there were rafts to build and a night spawn roaming somewhere on that island, and a handful of evenings with a stolen blade was all a man had time to give.

So when the grounds finally opened, months later, she was the first person standing in the front row with the children.

And he gave her nothing. No allowance, no easier place in the line. He came down the row and took the sword out of her hands and put it back in them the right way round and moved on without a word, exactly as he did to a boy of nine.

That was the honest version and she did not dress it up.

Haaland had been protecting her since she was thirteen years old. He had taken whips across his back that had been meant for hers, more than once, and had never mentioned a single one of them afterward. And when they came off that beach he had decided, without consulting her about it, that this was never going to be the arrangement again.

You have to learn to protect yourself, but you already know that much, he had told her. There are evil people in this world.

That was why she had started.

She stayed because she enjoyed it, which was an entirely different thing, and she knew exactly which morning the one had turned into the other.

Her eyes were on the wooden blade. Flat on the wood, all the way through the cut, exactly where they were supposed to be.

But they did not stay there.

They never did.

At the far end of the yard, past the last row, both of them were going at it properly.

They had sparred every morning since the day Haaland accepted the hybrid as a pupil. Not most mornings. Every one, without a single gap, from the dawn after their first duel until now.

The rows drilled and those two fought at the end of the mats, everybody had learned to keep their eyes front, and everybody failed to.

Hiccup fought with a blade in each hand.

That was not new. He had fought with two since the morning after the duel, because Haaland had taken one look at how he moved and prescribed it. Two blades, no shield, everything forward.

What was new was that they were no longer both long.

All spring and most of the summer it had been a matched pair of them, one in each fist, each the better part of a yard of wood, and he had made decent progress that way.

Now the long one lived in his right alone. A tachi, Haaland called it. Curved, heavy, single edged, with a shallow bend along the whole length of it and no cross guard worth the name.

The short one lived in his left.

Double edged, curved, no longer than a forearm. A dagger, near enough, if a dagger could be that mean about it.

The change had happened at the end of the summer, and it had happened because Haaland invited him into an empty house on the upper street and fought him inside a cramped room with a table in it.

Emerald had not seen what happened.

She had only heard about it afterwards. Half the street had heard the noise and the other half had heard about it from them.

The story everybody agreed on was that Hiccup had come out of that kitchen looking at his own hands with an expression of dawning personal insult.

The reason was not complicated once somebody had said it out loud. A long blade needs room.

In fact, that is what it is for.

All of its worth is in the extra reach it provides, and inside four walls there is no ground.

Worse than that.

A long blade in each hand needs two clear lanes in front of a body that only has room for one. So the second one spends the whole fight waiting its turn behind the first.

Which is precisely the same as not being there at all.

He had been put on the floor of that kitchen three times in about as many minutes.

And the beating had been worth every second of it, because he came out of it having learned the thing Haaland had been waiting all summer for him to learn on his own: that a short blade is not a lesser sword. It is a different tool, for a different distance, and a man who owns only one length of steel owns only one kind of fight.

Half the yard learned it with him, second hand, over the following fortnight. That was why the short-blade rack existed at all.

Inside a week, Haaland had cut him a shorter one.

And that had been the end of it. He never went back.

She could see why, watching him.

Everything he did went forward and close.

The tachi was the heavy end of it. Long, weighted well out toward the tip, so that it came round with the whole mass of itself behind the edge and there was no stopping it once it had committed. It opened the ground. It bought him the extra half step of reach that decides who touches whom first, and it let him take distance back safely whenever he wanted the fight further away than it currently was.

The short one gave him everything the long one could not.

It did not need a lane. It travelled a hand's width from wherever it happened to be, including out from behind the long blade, and it went at a speed the tachi could not physically manage because there was simply less of it to move. In a doorway, in a press, inside a man's arms, it was the only one of the pair that was any use at all.

The long blade was for getting to a man. The short blade was for where he actually wanted to end up, which was inside a man's reach, near enough to touch.

And then there was the bind.

She had learned that word this summer and had needed it explained twice. It was what happened when two blades met and neither of them went anywhere: both men committed, both edges locked, and the whole fight stalled into a shoving match with steel in the middle of it.

A man with one sword in a bind has to win it or break it.

A man with two has a spare hand.

She had watched Hiccup end three spars that way in a single week. Long blade caught and going nowhere, and the short one coming up underneath the stall like an afterthought, and the exchange finishing before Haaland had finished deciding what to do about it.

Wait.

She blinked. Twice.

Then she looked down at her own wooden blade, which was hanging at the end of her arm doing absolutely nothing, and worked out that she had stopped swinging at some point and had no idea how long ago.

She started again.

But she still kept watching, and did not much care who saw her doing it.