Chương 19: Wooden Swords

Through the second-floor windows, a thin silver line was being drawn across the ceiling, over and over, like somebody writing on the air. That was the form, at six in the morning, on the day. Abe watched three passes of it from the wet path. Then he turned around and went to get ready in his own way, because watching any more of it was going to be bad for him. He spent the morning down at the harbor, eating the end of a loaf on a bollard and not doing the one thing everybody would have expected him to do.

There would be no stopped hours today. He'd tried to get quiet once, out of habit, and quit halfway. There was nothing in a frozen world that could teach him Miles Croft, and he'd learned that much outside a gym two weeks ago. So he was going to do this one as himself, in real time, with what he had. A month of nights, a killed monster, his father's stance, and nine days of swinging at a trash can lid. By ten the hall was the fullest Abe had ever seen it, and there wasn't a teacher in the building.

There never was, for this. School taught the safe work, carries and sprints and unarmed bouts, the kind two hundred people can all be put through at once. Swords were a thin free shelf in the library that nobody with money ever opened, because the families with money already knew which half of that shelf was wrong. So this happened on a Saturday instead, with the doors unlocked and nobody signing off on it, and that was why the whole year had come.

They sat four deep on the stacked benches and stood along the window ledges. Freshmen packed the doorway, come to see the boy from the feeds. Phones went up before either of them had touched a blade. Nobody was laughing. Nobody had laughed at Abe Dolan since Monday, and anyone still nursing a theory about him was keeping it quiet in a room this full. Ellis Naylor stood on a bench running bets, loudly. Nobody would bet on the winner.

The money was on how long it lasted, and whether Abe went out of the square or down inside it. When Nell Mott put two marks on neither, three people wrote it down. Croft stood in the middle of the floor with his sleeves pushed up, in a big chalked square he'd drawn himself. He'd brought four practice blades, lined up against the wall bars, because Croft had done this before and everybody could see it.

"The square's the fight," he said, and the room quieted for him.

"Out is a loss. Down is a loss. Or you say you're done."

"First to five touches?" Ellis Naylor called, from his bench.

"Touching isn't beating somebody," Croft said.

"Watch." He threw Abe a blade. Abe caught it, mostly. His left hand closed around the grip with the two crooked fingers sitting wrong, the same as they sat around everything now. Then Croft walked to the far side of the square and stopped being a boy Abe knew. The first swing Abe threw would have taken Croft's head off if it had landed. It didn't land. It didn't come anywhere near landing.

But the crowd's breath caught all the same, because a swing with a month of nights behind it doesn't have to land to frighten people. Croft's guard came up an inch higher than it had been. Then wood cracked across Abe's ribs, and Croft was smiling again, and the fight was on. That was its shape from the start. Abe swung like he meant to end things, and Croft was simply never there, quick and small and half a step ahead of every idea Abe had.

Each miss came back at him on the way past: the shoulder, the forearm, once across the back of the hand that had already been broken once this year. Abe kept coming. Careful had never worked for him, and he hadn't climbed those stairs to be careful. Then Croft made his first mistake of the morning. He caught one of those swings square on his blade instead of turning it aside. The crack went off the walls like something snapping in a quarry. Croft went back half a step with his arms rung to the elbow.

Abe's blade split along its length, and the two of them stood there a second, looking at the ruined thing in his hands.

"Hold," Croft said, a little too evenly. He walked to the wall bars and threw Abe a fresh blade off his own rack.

"Stop hitting my sword. Hit me."

"I'm trying," Abe said honestly, and the whole hall laughed, and for once it wasn't at him. Somewhere in the next stretch Croft tried to finish it the ordinary way. He stepped inside a swing, hooked an ankle, and shoved with his shoulder, the move that had put half the year on the mats at one time or another. Abe didn't go anywhere. Croft tried again, with his whole weight in it.

Then he locked blade against blade and drove, both hands, boots squealing on the floorboards, the full strength of a Body the whole school knew was the best in the building. Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit. Abe slid half a step and stopped, like something bolted to the school. Set Stance was doing the one thing it had always been for, and it did not care in the slightest who was pushing. The hall's noise dropped low and hungry.

Two hundred people had just worked it out at the same moment: out, down, or done, and the first two weren't coming, and Abe Dolan had never once said done in his life.

"Again," Abe said. Croft's mouth did something that wasn't quite a smile. He rolled his shoulders, went back to his mark, and stopped holding anything back. He ran the form. The real one, pointed at a person for the first time Abe had ever seen. The blade left its thin silver line hanging in the air behind it, fading slow, like a finger drawn through fog, and the hall made a sound like a held breath being let go all at once.

It was the most beautiful thing Abe had ever seen indoors, though it hit him three times before he could so much as answer it, each one harder than the last. And then Abe got inside the fourth pass. Because the form ran the same way every time. He'd watched it twice a week for two months, and three more times that very morning through a window, and the fourth pass ended where the fourth pass always ended. For once in his life, his blade was already there.

It came up under Croft's guard and cracked him flat across the forearm. Croft made a sound that wasn't a word and lost half a step, and the hall went up so loud that somebody two floors down came to see what had happened. Croft stared at his own forearm like it had lied to him. Then he came back in, faster, and there was nothing playful left anywhere in the square. And he never ran the form in its proper order again. After that Abe stopped being able to count. Croft landed nearly everything.

One shot caught Abe across the left knuckles, the crooked ones, and the edges of the world went white for a while, and he kept hold of the blade anyway. Letting go never occurred to him as a thing he was allowed to do. And twice more the hall got what it had really come for. Once a graze along Croft's shoulder that would show by lunch, once a swing Croft had to throw both arms and his whole balance at, and both times the room roared like a goal had gone in.

By then neither of them was smiling, and Croft had started saying things he didn't seem to mean to say.

"Your grip is wrong." It came out of him mid-exchange, like a sneeze.

"It's costing you half a second on every swing. It's painful to watch." Abe didn't answer. He didn't have the breath.

"And your feet don't talk to each other," Croft said, a minute later, sounding almost angry about it, hitting him while he said it. He seemed unable to stop doing either one.

"Again," Abe said, for maybe the tenth time, bleeding from one hand. Croft stepped back. He lowered his blade and stood there with his chest heaving, sweating in a way nobody had ever seen him sweat in class, and looked at Abe for a long moment.

"No," he said. The hall came apart on the word. Nobody agreed about what they'd just watched, and both halves of it were shouting before Croft's blade was even down.

"Sixty hits," Sam Ottley said, from the window ledge.

"Sixty, and he could not put him on the floor once. Not one time."

"Croft schooled him from bell to bell," said Lena Ward.

"Three touches back, out of sixty. That isn't close."

"He hit him all morning and never dropped him once," said Ottley.

"That's not winning. That's just hitting." They were both right, and the argument was going to run for weeks. Abe stood in the chalk with his ribs on fire and blood on one hand, listening to a room full of people disagree about him at the top of their voices. It felt nothing at all like the F-tier jokes had felt. Croft let it run a while. Then he raised his voice, and the room went quiet for him, because it still did that.

"I've hit him more times this morning than I've hit anybody in my life," he said.

"We could stay till dark and I'd hit him sixty more. So, no. I'm done for today." He looked at Abe properly then, for the first time since the fight ended.

"I offered him our first form once. October, in the shop where he works. He said no." The room made a noise like a kettle coming on. That had never been in anybody's version of the story.

"Take it this time," Croft said.

"And nobody in this room had better call it kindness. I've got no idea what you are. Next time I want a proper blade and everybody watching, and I want you at your best, so there's no arguing about it after." Abe had said no to this once, in a quiet shop, and the reasons had felt enormous at the time. Standing in the chalk with his ribs on fire, he couldn't remember what a single one of them had been. And a broken blade and three touches on Miles Croft felt like they'd earned him the right to stop being proud.

"Yes," he said. Croft blinked. Whatever he'd braced for, it wasn't one word, on the spot, without conditions.

"Right," he said.

"Good. A week from Sunday, two o'clock. Bring that grip so I can burn it." Then he gathered his blades, including the broken one, and walked out through a crowd that couldn't decide whether to cheer, with about nine people asking him questions the whole length of the hall. He didn't answer one of them. Ellis Naylor paid out by the doors and looked sick about every mark of it. Nell Mott had bet on neither, and collected, and told everybody within earshot to be quiet about it, loudly.

June was at the kitchen table when he got home, and she didn't ask whether he'd won.

"All of it," she said.

"You promised. Start at the doors." So Abe sat down, moving like an old man, and gave her all of it. The chalk square and the terms. The bets. The blade coming apart in his hands like a green stick, which made her yelp and demand it again from the beginning. The part where Croft ran the real form and the air went silver got her quiet, and she made him tell that twice too, and her eyes went wide in exactly the same place both times. He didn't leave out the bad bits, because that was the deal.

Sixty-odd hits, near enough, and he showed her the knuckles to prove it. Then he told her about the three he'd landed back, and she made him do Croft's face.

"You got hit sixty times," June said.

"About that. I stopped counting."

"You never stop counting," she said, and he laughed, and had to stop fast because of his ribs. Then he told her the last part, and saying it out loud made it real in a way the walk home hadn't. Miles Croft was going to teach him the Croft first form. Sixty years of somebody's family, coming to a boy from Marley Street with a grip its owner wanted to burn. June was quiet for a moment. She turned her mug around once.

"You hate him," she said.

"I know."

"You've hated him since the first week of term. I've heard speeches. One of them had historical examples."

"I know," Abe said.

"I said yes anyway." June looked at him a while longer. Then she nodded, like something had been settled, and pulled her homework back toward her.

"The board reads again on the first of December," she said.

"That's three weeks. If he teaches anything like he hits, I want a new speech out of you by then."

"He said he wants to burn my grip."

"I like him a bit for that," said June.

"Don't ever tell him."