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  She would need the extra time to prepare some supplies. She did not trust these men to spar with real weapons and not kill themselves, so she would need some practice swords for them to use.

  “You look unhappy,” Pieter said. Adrienne was surprised to see the blacksmith at the training ground. Neither he nor Louella had shown much interest in her new assignment other than asking if she was pleased to have it. She had initially said yes, but now she was not so sure.

  “I have no authority over the trainees,” she told him, gripping her braid in a fist and tugging repeatedly. “How am I supposed to train them right when they can do whatever they want without consequences?”

  Pieter looked speculative. “The commission wants you to train them. Won’t they give you more control if you tell them it’s necessary?”

  Adrienne snorted derisively. “The commission hardly wanted me in charge of training at all. If I ask for more control over the guards, they will probably stop the training where it is.” She sighed and released the hold on her braid that she had hardly been aware of taking, letting her hand fall back to her side. “Besides, I doubt they would understand the need to slow the pace and make sure everyone is on solid ground before escalating their training.”

  Pieter’s muscular arms bulged as he crossed them. “Doesn’t all training start with building a base?” he asked. “I was a blacksmith’s apprentice for six months before I got to do more than stoke the fire and pump the bellows.”

  “Because you might have ruined your master’s work, or hurt yourself,” she said. “Soldiering is like that: dangerous even during training if you don’t know enough. I don’t think whatever training is necessary to become a scholar calls for those same checks.” Her lips twisted in a wry smile. “All scholars would need to worry about is dropping books on their feet.”

  He made a noncommittal sound. “Perhaps.” He was quiet a minute, studying her. “Are you sure you can’t…intimidate them into listening?” he asked. “They don’t know the limits of your authority.”

  Adrienne nearly laughed. “I stopped being intimidating the moment I became a commission-approved instructor,” she said bitterly. It had been as though, now that the commission was using her, she was no longer dangerous. Even the citizens of Kessering treated her differently now. Despite her bloody walk through the city after the battle, once the commission had put her in charge of training the guards it seemed she was suddenly considered safe. She’d spent months wishing people weren’t afraid of her, but now that they weren’t she realized it was almost worse this way. No fear, but also no respect.

  Adrienne could tell from Pieter’s expression that he saw the problem now, and no easy solution to it. “If there’s anything I can do,” he offered.

  “You can help me find something to use as practice swords,” she told him. “They’re likely to stab one another if I give them the real thing.”

  Pieter nodded but didn’t move. “I didn’t come here to ask you about the training. Or not just that.”

  “Why then?”

  “I helped to bury the bodies today.”

  Adrienne’s face softened in sympathy. “I’m sorry. I know how hard it is.”

  He moved his big shoulders uncomfortably. “That’s not why I’m here, either. I found these.” He held out his hand and in his palm were three coins.

  Adrienne stepped closer and picked one up to examine it. At first it was foreign to her, but with a stab of shock she recognized the markings. “It’s Almetian.”

  “I know. I showed it to Louella, and she identified it.”

  “Louella?”

  “She has some Almetian coins. From her parents.”

  “They were Almetian,” Adrienne said. She’d thought as much.

  “Her mother was born in Almet, her father on the Samaroan side of the border. She doesn’t tell people.”

  Adrienne nodded. Suspecting and knowing were two different things. She looked back down at the coin, then back up into Pieter’s face. “What does it mean?”

  “I don’t know.”

  ••••••

  Adrienne was thankful that the sparring had been done with practice swords. As it was, the men were bruised and bleeding, and she had needed to call for Louella when one of the men tripped over his wooden practice sword and split his scalp on the hard stone pathway.

  Real swords likely would have resulted in multiple deaths.

  “You all did well,” Adrienne lied. She wanted to curse them out, like she would the Yearlings in Kyrog, but she locked the words down tight. “I saw some of you using the moves I taught you over the last few days.”

  Far too few had used the moves, and that was the problem. Adrienne had made it a point to have her trainees in Kyrog as familiar with the moves as they were with breathing before they ever began sparring. Jeral had told her once that he would sometimes dream that he was doing those moves at night. There was less danger and more value in sparring when everyone knew what they were doing. What they had done today had been a waste of everyone’s time.

  “For the rest of the week we will stick with going over forms with real swords before resuming sparring with practice swords next week.”

  There were grumbles from the men, and the ever-troublesome Charles stepped to the front of the group, his legs widespread, hands on his hips. Ricco favored that stance, but Charles looked pompous rather than formidable in that particular pose. “Why can’t we spar again tomorrow?” he asked.

  With supreme effort, Adrienne forced her snarl into a smile. “A few days will give your scrapes and bruises time to heal,” she said. Waiting for scrapes and bruises to heal was a ridiculous excuse, one that would have had any soldier in Kyrog bent over with laughter, but the assembled men seemed to be considering it. Some even nodded their heads in agreement.

  “We could go to the healers,” Charles said, jutting his chin forward.

  “And you can wait a few days to spar again,” Adrienne said firmly, not backing down. Charles was a bully, and if she gave in to Charles on this, she would lose the little control she had over the men.

  “If we go to the healers, we won’t have to wait to practice more,” another man said, apparently emboldened by Charles’s words.

  “If the minor injuries you sustained today warrant a trip to a healer’s shop, perhaps you should consider a different means of employ,” Adrienne snapped. “Dismissed.”

  She left before anyone else could argue with her, and when she was safely out of view she removed her leather gloves and threw them down an alley, disgusted with the men and with herself. She wanted to slap the smile off that smug bastard Charles’s face. She wanted to spar with one of them to show them all just how ill-prepared they were. She wanted to scream and rant and rave, but she had no choice but to keep her emotions under tight control.

  Adrienne took several deep breaths before going to collect her gloves. As she bent over the second one, she became aware of another presence in the alley.

  She turned with a smooth, practiced move and stood to face the young guard at the entrance to the narrow street.

  “Ad-er-Lieutenant?” he asked, seemingly unsure how to address her.

  “Lieutenant,” she confirmed. If anyone in this Creator-blasted city should call her Lieutenant, it was the men she trained.

  “Lieutenant, the way you’re training us…it’s not how you would train soldiers, is it?”

  “No,” Adrienne said, her answer coming out sharp and impatient. She wanted to escape the fool guards for just a short time, not relive the disaster that was their training by talking about it with one of them.

  “Why? That is, I heard you have experience training soldiers, and I’m wondering why you aren’t training us like you would train them. Soldiers.” Fear and nerves had him stumbling over his words.

  “What’s your name?” Adrienne asked.

  “Flynn, Lieutenant.”

  “Flynn. My main job in Kyrog was training soldiers from other camps. Those soldiers wo
uld come to Kyrog for training with the elite, and I would give them that.” She remembered the epiphany she’d had when training Jeral, the moment she’d realized the difference she could make by training even just one soldier. “In Kyrog, months could pass before any of my trainees even touched a weapon.”

  Flynn frowned. “Then why did you let us spar today?” he asked.

  “How long would your fellow guards be content practicing without swords?”

  “So you don’t think we’re ready for swords,” he asked, sounding disappointed.

  “You’re about as ready to use swords as a bunch of children are,” Adrienne answered roughly. “Having the lot of you spar is a joke, but the commission will replace me if they’re not satisfied with my methods, and I’m the only person in the city qualified to train you.”

  “I want to be trained right,” Flynn said softly, staring down at his scuffed boots with an expression very close to shame.

  “What?” Adrienne asked, sure she’d misheard him.

  Flynn looked up and locked his determined brown eyes on hers. “Lieutenant, I want to be trained right. The way you would train someone meant to be a soldier.”

  Adrienne looked the young man over again. He was just under six feet tall, by her estimate, and starting to replace the gangly build of youth with muscle. He was probably a year or two younger than she, around Jeral’s age. His eyes were an unremarkable shade of brown, but there was a passion in them that Adrienne recognized. A desire to be the best.

  It was something they shared.

  “If that’s what you want, you should go to Kyrog,” she told him. “I can write a letter—”

  Flynn shook his head. “I want to be a guard here in my city,” he said, “but I want to be…good. Great.” He flushed beneath his dark skin. “I heard about what you did with those men who attacked. Before the fire part, when you were just using your sword like a regular sword, I mean. I want to be able to do that.”

  Adrienne remembered taking out the first two men. She was surprised that anyone had repeated that tale in a complimentary way. That anyone even remembered that part in light of what had come after. “I can train you,” she told Flynn. “You’ll have to do what the other guards are doing when we practice as a unit, but meet me outside my inn tomorrow morning, half an hour before sun-up, and we’ll begin your private lessons.”

  “Really?” Flynn asked. “Thank you, Lieutenant.”

  “Don’t thank me yet.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Of the thirty men Adrienne trained every day as guards, six of them had decided to join Flynn for extra training, and only one of those had been a guard before Kessering had been attacked. Edward Witter had been seriously injured in the attack on Kessering, and this time he planned to improve his odds of not getting stabbed in the gut, a wound that would have been fatal in any city that was not home to Talented healers.

  “You’re all showing a lot of improvement,” Adrienne told the seven men engaged in extra training before she released them for breakfast. They would meet again, with the rest of the guards, in just over an hour. “You did a good job today.” A brisk five mile run, in addition to the meditative moves and sword forms, had become their morning ritual. Their stamina and balance had improved the most; their ability to handle swords was impressive only when compared to those that did not join them for extra practice, but they were improving just the same.

  “I want to thank you for this,” Edward said. At thirty-eight, he was also the oldest of the small group receiving extra training, and their unofficial spokesman. “Training us like this, it’s as much extra work for you as it is for us.”

  Adrienne nodded her head, not bothering to deny that truth. “I wish more of the men were willing to put in the extra effort.”

  It was both frustrating and baffling to her that so many of the guards were not interested in learning more than the basics necessary to deal with the average thief or drunk. It was as if the attack had taught them nothing. Even those who had been guards before and seen firsthand what happened when they went up against more skilled adversaries were not much interested in improving.

  Training in Kyrog had spoiled Adrienne. She was astounded by the reality that many people would choose ease and mediocrity over the effort it took to become truly accomplished at something. “I’ll see you all in an hour,” she said.

  She made her way through the city streets, and despite the people on the streets, she felt oddly alone. Some of the people meandered through the street with no clear destination, stopping to browse the carts and tables selling wares or to look in the shop windows. Others hurried on their way, blind and deaf to those who made their livings as street hawkers. No one looked at Adrienne.

  Adrienne pushed away the loneliness, refusing to feel it, as she instead took in the city as a whole. She had become accustomed to the chaos of Kessering. Not that it was loud and noticeably unruly, Kessering was hardly big enough to have the true noise and bustle of a large city, but it lacked the unity of purpose that Kyrog had. Perhaps that unity was why Adrienne had never felt lonely in Kyrog, even when her friends were out on a mission and she was not. The commission had a mission, and Adrienne was supposed to be a part of it, but she didn’t feel like it.

  She saw a child running down the street, being chased by two others in what she took to be a game based on the laughter from all three of them. It had taken time, but after half a year in Kessering she had become accustomed to the disorganized nature of civilian life. She might not feel a part of it, but it was familiar now.

  Adrienne turned onto Market Street and became aware of a new tension. Individual tensions over pricing and arguments were common on the busy commercial street, but this was…more. It was unified. Something had happened to bring these disparate people into a group mindset.

  She had not felt such intense group thought since before she had started training the guards. Before then, as a group, the people of Kessering had viewed her as a dangerous outsider, and they had come together in such a way. But Adrienne knew that this time it was not her that they were reacting to.

  Adrienne looked around, but she could not see anything in the crowd of people that would warrant such behavior. She heard no screams or shouts to signal another attack, and it would be nearly impossible to find the source of this tension in the crowded streets. She was suddenly grateful that Kessering was not a typical city where newcomers could fade into anonymity by entering an inn or tavern or moving to a less populated street. In Kessering, all visitors to the city made an appearance before the city leaders sooner rather than later.

  She changed directions and headed for the library, no longer meandering through the crowds to pass the time. She cut through the milling people with a clear purpose, wondering what she might discover when she reached her destination.

  As she neared the library where the commission convened, Adrienne caught snatches of conversation from the crowd. Most of it was just excited whispering that Adrienne did not stop to listen to, but one word was repeated again and again. M’bai.

  Adrienne picked up her pace until she was nearly running through the crowds. People jumped out of her way, and a cynical part of her wondered if she would again be feared for such action, or if the people of Kessering would accept it as normal simply because they expected inappropriate behavior from a soldier.

  The clerk waiting at the door of the commission’s meeting room didn’t bother trying to stop her, but he did rush forward to announce her presence to the commission before she could enter the room herself. “Lieutenant Adrienne Rydaeg,” he said stiffly as she brushed past him.

  “I hope that your presence does not mean trouble in the city, Adrienne,” Elder Rynn said patronizingly. Unlike the guards, or even the uptight clerk, he had never deigned to address her by rank. Instead, his tone often suggested he was speaking to a misbehaved child.

  Adrienne ignored him and scanned the room. Ben seemed surprised to see her, no doubt because she had made it a point not
to cause trouble since being placed in charge of the guards. Franklin, dressed today in florid orange, looked as though he disapproved of her presence; the faint smile on Lady Chessing’s face suggested she was hoping Adrienne got in trouble for barging in the way she had.

  But it wasn’t the commissioners’ varied reactions that held Adrienne’s attention. It was the three unknown men standing off to the side that captured her interest.

  One of the men was older, perhaps forty, with a tall, slender build. He was dressed plainly in a brown shirt and darker brown trousers. The man beside him was shorter, burlier, with a cudgel at his hip and a longbow strapped to his back. Amazingly, Adrienne thought he could probably use both. The first was a scholar, Adrienne surmised, and the second served as his guard. It was a setup similar to the one Tam and Ilso had had when they had gone to Kyrog looking for a soldier, and she dismissed both men as momentarily unimportant.

  It was the other person who captured her attention. He stood slightly apart from the other two, and she knew it was this man who had caused the unified tension in the people of Kessering. The man was tall, well over six feet, with shoulders broad as an axe handle. His short-cropped black hair was tightly curled, and his eyes were a stunning ice-blue in comparison to his ebony skin. Though he was not as heavily muscled as Pieter was, there could be no doubt of his strength.

  “No, but there is a problem,” Adrienne said heatedly, tearing her eyes away from the stranger to rest the Elder. “You placed me in charge of the city’s defense, but didn’t tell me when a potential threat arrived in the city.” Her eyes shifted from Elder Rynn to the stranger and back again. She clenched and unclenched her hands to keep them from shaking with anger, and knew she would have to speak with the guards who had been assigned to watch the gates. They should have informed her the instant the trio entered the city. She had told the guards to alert her to any group that they thought might pose a danger to Kessering, and they had failed to do so.