Shattered Innocence: Transmigrated Into a Novel as an Extra

Chapter 1244: Recovery Footing

"Vaulden?"

At the hearing of the name, Jesse’s spoon stopped.

Valeria knew that kind of stop. Jesse did not pause for nothing. She paused when she had decided to say something and was still choosing where to put it.

"The spear one?" a second voice asked at the next table. "I thought they were arguing over the pass."

"They were, until Vaulden started in on Elowyn Caerlin." The first voice dropped, then climbed back the way such voices do. "I didn’t catch all of it. I caught ’beggar.’"

"Over a lecture drill?"

"Over nothing. Then Reilan stepped over the chalk, and I saw his boot go." A fork tapped a plate. "The swing rang off the barrier instead of Vaulden’s arm, and that was Lucavion."

"Lucavion? He was in the reserve."

"I know. I never saw him move. He was just there, saying ’let’s not go overboard,’ like Reilan had asked for seconds."

Beside Jesse, Lucavion’s spoon had not changed speed. It was a remarkable thing to watch, a man discussed by name two tables over and eating on schedule.

Someone added that Vaulden had looked ill afterward and called it a joke, and that no one had laughed. Then the voices moved on to the question that had followed Reilan across the yard, where a coastal baron’s retainer had learned to swing like that, and nobody at the next table had an answer.

"You kept it short," Jesse said.

Valeria had expected the remark, though not how flat it would be. Jesse had stood in that yard and heard the assessment given, so it was no accusation.

"It did not need to be long. He crossed the line and hit too hard. It is written down."

She picked up her spoon, which closed the matter as far as she was concerned. She had heard the rest from outside the barriers, every word Vaulden had thrown across that lane. The record had not asked for it, and a lunch table was no place to amend it.

Jesse tore a piece from the loaf and did not eat it.

"A man who talks like that doesn’t stop on his own," she said. "He keeps going until somebody stops him. Today somebody was standing in the lane." She looked straight at Valeria. "Next time, nobody might be."

Valeria let the words stand for a moment, because they deserved that.

Jesse was speaking from a line. Valeria had heard which one in the lecture, with its man who couldn’t put weight on one leg and its shield on the wrong arm. Someone who had counted who could still move while an Arcanis advance came on did not use "stopped" lightly. The yard bore her out, too. Reilan had told Vaulden to stop and he had gone on. A blade coming at his arm had done what the word had not.

Vaulden was no great name. House Vaulden kept the frozen passes of Darsenhold, a border house nobody at a banquet would have seated above the salt. Valeria knew it anyway; she made a point of learning every name that came through the Academy gates, the small ones above all, since they had a way of turning relevant at inconvenient moments. A son of that house had argued in lecture, with irritating competence, for fighting at the mouth and withdrawing while the line could still move. He knew what a lane was for, and he had still spent his breath on a woman who was not there to answer.

From outside the barriers she had marked, as she marked everything, that Vaulden had briefed every fighter on his side but one. He had chosen the door that would open, Reilan, and had walked through it. When Lucavion’s eyes finally came round to him, the ease had left his voice in the space of one sentence. Vaulden measured, and went on until the cost arrived.

Jesse had the man right. She had the remedy wrong. Nobody needed to be standing in the lane; it only had to cost something to talk there. Costs could be written down, and a cost on paper did not need a body to carry it.

"I disagree," Valeria said.

Jesse looked up. It held no offense, only attention, the kind she gave a gap in a line. "Which part?"

"That it takes someone standing in front of him." Valeria laid her spoon across the bowl. "A man like that stops when it costs him. The cost should not have to be a person."

"He stopped when Lucavion turned around," Jesse said. "I watched it. That’s my whole point."

"I will not speak to the lane. I am speaking of the next one. It should not depend on who happens to be standing in it."

Jesse worked that over along with the piece of loaf she had finally decided to eat. It was not agreement, but she did not argue the arithmetic. Her eyes went sideways instead, to the man between them.

"You’ve got nothing to add?"

Lucavion lifted his head from the second bowl. "The soup is very good."

"Right," Jesse said.

Nobody pursued it. He had been the other half of the incident for a quarter of an hour and had contributed a review.

"When Reilan swung," Jesse said, turning back to Valeria, "that last one. Where was his weight after?"

It was a sword question, and Valeria answered it as one. "All of it went through the cut. He had spent his weight past the line and kept nothing back to recover with."

"Yeah. I saw." Jesse was quiet a moment. "Like you at the end of that reversal."

Valeria knew the sentence before the rest of it arrived. "Your footing afterward was shit." It had come back with its edges changed. In the courtyard it had been a verdict, delivered over a shoulder on the way out. Now Jesse had stopped in front of her and stayed.

"I am aware," Valeria said, as she had then.

"I know. I’m not asking if you’re aware. What breaks first, after the continuation? Where does it go?"

Valeria answered as she would have answered Gregor’s cross-examination: in full, and in order.

"The rear knee. The second cut carries my weight past the stance, and the knee takes the load before I can recover."

"That’s where it shows up." Jesse barely let the sentence close. "I asked what breaks first. You’re giving me the bill."

Valeria’s jaw set. People who corrected her usually did it with a title attached and a pause in front for softening. Jesse offered neither. Beside her, Lucavion ate on without lifting a brow; he had heard this register before and long ago stopped hearing it. Valeria had not, and heard every word.

She made herself do what had been asked. She set the cut in her mind and ran it slowly: the Zweihander rising and crossing, the first strike landing, the weight going round with the turn that carried the blade into the second attack. Then the rear foot at the end of the turn, planting, and the knee beneath it.

"It is the knee," she said.

"It’s not." Jesse’s thumb worked the callus under her forefinger, the only part of her that looked as though it was choosing words. "Your old form’s still in there. You swing the second cut, and about halfway through the turn it wakes up and thinks you’re finishing the first one. It decides where your feet go. Sets you up for a stop that isn’t coming." She said it flatly, like reading off a casualty list. "Then you’re already committed, and the knee’s just the one that gets handed the bill."

Valeria saw it, which was worse than hearing it.

The Olarion recovery was a stair built into her bones, each step passing her weight to the next: hip, rear foot, ground. It had been drilled into her until it was reflex. Her continuation did not remove the stair. It ran the blade past it, and somewhere in the turn the stair noticed it had been left behind and began its descent anyway, handing her weight to a foot that was no longer under it.

For months she had been reinforcing the floor. The fault had been in the staircase.

Jesse glanced at her face. "Don’t make that expression. It’s not about your house. Everybody’s old training does this to them."

"And what do you do about yours?"

Jesse did not answer at once. Her eyes went to Lucavion first, short and flat, and came back.

"Mine’s not simple like yours," she said. "Nobody finished teaching me the Burns forms before I got sent where the fighting was. There was no clean old sequence to wake up and take over. There was whatever kept me alive."

Lucavion’s spoon, which had held its pace through the whole of the incident, lost half a beat. He did not look up.

What Jesse left out, and Valeria could not have guessed, was the rest of it. She had been a maid’s daughter whom the Burns name acknowledged late, and she had gone to the front before any house form could be set in her. What she carried instead had come to her piece by piece from one man, who taught her how to stay alive and corrected her sword where it was getting her killed. The shortened turn was not among his lessons. She built that herself in the years after he was gone, out of what he had shown her and a great many close calls.

Valeria heard only the short version, and noted the look that went with it.

"So I don’t let a turn finish," Jesse went on. "I cut it short before anything gets a vote. It won’t feel clean. Yours has been clean your whole life, so you’re going to hate it."

It was rude, and it was also exact, which made it hard to resent on principle.

Valeria had shortened the rotation too, in the hand, after the fact, a smaller adjustment made too late to matter. Jesse was describing the same cut made earlier, at the turn itself, before the old sequence woke.

’The rotation. Not the leg.’

Under the table, her rear foot found the floor and tried the turn at half its length.

"I do not hate corrections," Valeria said. Her foot went still. "I dislike being told in advance what I will feel about them."

"Then don’t feel it where I can see."

"You are being crude."

"I’m being quick." Jesse tore the loaf in half as though it had said something. "You asked. That’s what I do."

"Olarion fundamentals have two centuries behind them." Valeria’s voice had climbed a step without asking her. "They are not a defect for you to cut around."

"I’m talking about one turn."

The talk at the next table had faltered somewhere in the middle of that. Lucavion set his spoon down.

"If I might," he said, in the mild tone of a man offering to carry something. "The commitment isn’t actually at the turn. It’s a half beat before, when the back hand—"

"Not now," Jesse said, without looking at him.

He lifted both hands a little off the table, conceding, and for exactly as long as it took Valeria to draw breath, he stayed conceded.

"I only meant the point where it—"

"No." Valeria did not raise her voice for that one. "You found it once. I would like to find the rest myself."

Jesse said nothing. She did not nod either, but the half of the loaf in her hand stopped moving, and that was agreement enough. It was the first thing the two of them had held in common all afternoon, and Lucavion was on the wrong side of it.

"Noted," he said.

He picked his spoon back up. He had dodged one conversation today and had just been refused entry to the next, and he carried both with the same pleasant, slightly lowered face. Valeria knew that expression. She was not certain it was the true one. She noticed it, and set the noticing aside for later.

Her foot had barely moved when Jesse spoke again.

"You’re doing it in the foot."

"I am testing the turn."

"In the foot. It’s not the foot." Jesse put the bread down, and the argument went down with it. "The old form’s already moving by the time it gets to your hands. The hip decides first. Cut it there."

Valeria went over it once, then again, and the second pass was not kind.

"I had it in the hands," she said.

"Everybody does. Hands are what you can see." There was no weight on it, no pause left open for Valeria to feel corrected in. Jesse passed it across the table like a tool, handle first.

"Thank you. I was sharp earlier. I withdraw ’crude.’"

"It was a little crude," Jesse said. "Hip, not hands."

They stayed on it after that. Neither of them had decided to. The hall began to thin around them, trays going back in clattering stacks, and the two of them worked it through in short pieces. How early was early. What the blade’s weight was doing when the hip began to turn. What it felt like, Jesse said, when it was done right: like taking a shield’s weight before it lands on the arm. Valeria asked questions she would not have asked anyone she had to impress. Jesse answered them without once asking why they mattered.

Lucavion collected the bowls, stacked them on the nearest tray and carried it to the return rail. Nobody had asked him to. Valeria noticed only as he came back for the loaf, and by then the conversation had closed behind him.

When the first bell sounded the quarter hour, Jesse stood and slid her sword from beside her leg.

"If it holds, tell me," she said.

"I will."

She went. Lucavion lingered a moment at the end of the bench, as though there might be a place for him in the silence, found none, and went the other way with a lifted hand.

Valeria stayed seated a little longer than the bell allowed.

She kept accounts. It was the habit of years: what she owed, what she was owed, what each favor would cost her to repay. The rivalry had a column, and Jesse had one too, never labeled. This was neither. Jesse had told her what was wrong with her sword and had asked for nothing, and Valeria, searching, could find no entry to make.

She rose, settled the substitute sword at her hip, and went to her afternoon lecture, trying the turn at half its length with every step.