Chapter 44 : Knight's Training
"I taught her," Evan said.
Katherine's attention shifted to him. Their eyes met, and some automatic process happened in both of them — Evan's presence carrying the particular quality of someone whose primary element was death, but underneath it something he had come to suspect was the nameless technique's work: a vitality threaded through the stillness, the way ice has water underneath it. Not what a lich should feel like.
Katherine was a Great Knight. Her senses had been refined past what most people could manage. She registered the death-magic signature, and the contradiction beneath it, and didn't know what to make of it. What she knew without thinking was that she was looking at someone dangerous, and her body had already made the adjustments it made around dangerous things: everything in her ready without appearing to be.
Evan looked at her hands. He had learned to read people through their hands. Hers were the hands of someone who had trained for decades, except they weren't — no calluses, no thickened joints, the skin as fine-grained as someone who had never gripped anything harder than a pen. Whatever the advanced knight's training did, it had taken the evidence of effort and absorbed it into the body so completely that the effort was invisible. Evan thought of an old phrase about the bones being washed clean, something from the traditions of his original world that he'd read about without understanding, and felt that he might understand it a little better now.
"The foundation is clean," Katherine said. She looked back at Evan. "Why bring her here instead of continuing yourself?"
"I've taught her everything I know. I only learned the basics — I'm primarily a mage, and I came to swordwork because it interested me, not because I trained for it systematically. She's already past what I can show her."
"How long has she been training?"
"A little over a month."
Katherine looked at Tina, then back at Evan. "One month."
"She took to it immediately. The first time I watched her ride, her body moved with the horse as if they were one thing. That told me what she was."
Katherine was quiet for a moment. "She has no internal method — the approach has been from the outside in, pure physical form without the cultivated energy behind it. But the physical form is excellent. Tina, you'll train with the others for now. Starting tomorrow, two hours with me in the morning while I assess your foundation and figure out what approach suits you."
"Thank you, teacher." Tina bowed properly.
The five other students had stopped pretending to practice. Teresa was watching with an expression that had shifted into something more interested than she'd intended to show. Katherine noticed. "You want instruction as well. Not in this tradition — your weapon is a dagger, and that's a thief's school, not a knight's. Markoff teaches the short-blade discipline here. The fee applies."
Teresa turned to Evan with the look of someone who has already decided the answer is yes. "You're very wealthy. Lend me a hundred gold coins. I'll pay you back double when I return to Kansas City."
This text was taken from NovelFire. Help the author by reading the original version there.
"A hundred gold is a hundred years of ordinary income," Evan said.
"You have tens of thousands sitting in a ring. Don't pretend it matters."
He gave her the hundred gold coins.
That evening Leonardo heard the account of Katherine's assessment and laughed. "I assumed you were a dual practitioner — magic and blade together. Generally a mistake. Life is short and the world of magic is enormous. Don't dilute yourself."
"The swordwork doesn't interfere with the magic," Evan said. "It's something I do when I'm not in meditation. They don't compete." He paused. "What actually happens in the advanced stages of knight's training? How does sword-aura work?"
"I've never practiced it. But I have a book — written by an Epic Knight, of all things. It's in the library. Take a look."
The book was called The Knight's Light. Handwritten on treated magical beast hide, it smelled faintly of something botanical rather than animal. Books were rare in this world — woodblock printing had come west from the distant East, but most volumes were still hand-copied, and a copy of something like the Creationist Sacred Text took three years. Leonardo's library of over a hundred volumes was extraordinary by any private standard.
Evan took the book to his room and read it.
The foundation material he recognized — the forms, the force-generation methods, various exercises. The book added something he hadn't seen before: static postures. You took a position, which was simply one of the guard or attack forms held still, and then paid attention to the subtle movements happening in the muscles that maintained it, feeling the internal structure of the stance rather than its external shape. It seemed simple.
The advanced section explained the rest.
There was a drawing of a centaur. Half-human, half-horse, the fusion complete. And an explanation: the guardian archangel of knights, Gabriel, was traditionally depicted in this form in his moments of full power. The depiction was not decorative. It was instruction.
Evan put the book down and tried it.
Left foot forward, body softened, every muscle in the body making the constant micro-adjustments that a horse's muscles make at rest — that perpetual internal motion. Head pressing upward. Chest drawn in. Back curved like a shell. And simultaneously, holding in the mind the image of the centaur, and the intention of becoming it — not imagining it externally but feeling the body as if it were already that.
The nameless technique responded immediately. The cool energy in his organs accelerated — more than he'd ever felt it move before. Something changed in his skin. Not the soul's-eye awareness that he'd been using since his first night in this body, but actual sensation, the feeling of having a surface that was his own. He went somewhere quiet in his mind without choosing to.
Two hours later he came back.
He drew the sword and drove a thrust forward — no magical array engaged, just the blade — and the edge caught light in a way it shouldn't have. A pale shimmer ran its length for the half-second of the strike, then faded.
Not sword-aura. Not yet. But something that was in the same direction.
He was satisfied. He put the sword away and went downstairs.
Tina and Teresa had returned from the school. Tina was animated in the way of someone who had been given new things to think about. Katherine's methods were rigorous and formal, and it showed in the precision with which Tina was already trying to describe what she'd been shown.
Leonardo found Evan later and said: "You should spend less time on the blade and more time dissecting things. Death magic in its origins was a tradition of investigation — inquiry into what death is and how life works. It's closer to medicine than to combat. Most of its practitioners chose the violent path and obscured that."
Evan considered this. "You're right. The anatomy and surgical knowledge in the tradition is genuinely significant, and most practitioners ignore it entirely."
"Exactly. The Maker didn't put those capabilities there to be wasted."
Evan didn't mention that he wasn't entirely persuaded about the Maker's role in the matter. He agreed that the knowledge was being wasted, which was the point.