I woke to the smell of boiled herbs and clean linen. Light pressed through the shutters in thin gray stripes, the fading color of evening. My head throbbed in rhythm with every pulse of light. The pillow was warm beneath my cheek, hair tugging against bandages. My tongue felt thick, coated with the taste of dust.
Father sat at the edge of the bed, his weight pulling down the mattress. For a time he stayed there in silence, watching me as if words might splinter if spoken too soon. Then he rose, pulled the chair closer, and lowered himself into it with a heaviness that made the wood creak. He was turned a little away from me, elbows on his knees, hands locked together as if he held the room shut. His cloak hung on the chair back. There was a dark line along his jaw where the shave had missed. He did not look like a count. He looked like a tired man who had forgotten how to sit.
I shifted. The sheet rasped against my shoulder. Father lifted his head at once.
"You are awake," he said.
My voice came out small, like something fragile that had been stepped on. "Yes."
He studied my face as if I were a map that had been redrawn in the night. His eyes were red at the edges. He took a slow breath, as if steadying himself against something that could not be seen.
"I know I have not been a good father," he said. The words were careful, like he was lifting hot stones. "I knew the weight of walls and ledgers. I knew how to measure grain and men. I did not know my own son's shoulder carries a scar I cannot name."
His gaze slid to my right shoulder. The bandage beneath the loose shirt tugged when I breathed.
"When did that happen," he asked.
I did not answer. The room held still. Outside, somewhere along the inner yard, someone called a count and another voice answered. The sound climbed up the wall and broke against the shutter.
Father tried again. His voice softened. "I am asking because I should have known. Because a father should see before a soldier does. I did not. That is on me."
I watched his hands. They opened and closed, as if deciding whether to reach for mine. They did not.
He looked down at the floor. When he spoke again, his voice had changed. It carried something old in it. Something that did not belong to this room.
"When the Janisarions came for Arthur," he said, "I did what you did. I burned and I broke. I shouted at my father the way you shouted at me. But I had what you did not. I had a better father. He did not strike me. He did not throw his anger back at mine. He took every word I threw and put it down where it could not hurt me."
He swallowed. His eyes did not lift.
"I begged them not to take my brother," he said. "I begged. I went to my knees. I wept in front of men who were not worthy of the tears. I offered land I did not yet own. I offered years of my life I had not yet lived. They did not listen. They did not give me a chance as I gave you. If they had, I do not think I would have done better. I am not blind enough to tell myself that story."
He drew a breath that caught a little in the throat. "I struck you," he said. "I should not have. I see it now as if someone else had done it. I cannot pull it back. I can only say I am sorry. And I can say this. I am proud of you."
The words fell into the quiet and did not echo. They stayed between us and made a new place in the room.
I looked at him. He looked away as if the sight of his own pride would burn his eyes. The corner of his mouth shook. For the first time I noticed how many gray strands had found their way into his black hair.
"I am sorry too," I said. My voice was steady now. "I should not have said what I said. Father."
He turned at that. His eyes opened a fraction wider. His breath left him as if he had been struck in the chest.
"You called me Father," he said. He stared down at the floor, then away toward the shutter. He wiped his face with the heel of his hand. When he looked back his eyes were wet and fierce. "You have never called me that. Not without a title attached to hold it at a distance… maybe when you first learned to speak, you did. I wish I remembered."
He blinked hard. The wet set itself back behind his eyes. He straightened on the chair and set his hands on his knees like a man bracing to rise but not yet standing.
"The scar," he said, voice hoarse. "When."
"When I went hunting," I said. "The day I found the villagers. One of the bandits drove a torch into my shoulder. It burned the instant it touched me… and the scar has remained ever since."
Father closed his eyes. His lips moved around a word he did not say.
"You paid a price to bring them back," he said. "And today you tried to pay another, standing so your brother would not. As your father, the debt is mine to keep. I will see that what you paid is not wasted."
He stood. It was not the quick motion I had seen a hundred times in the hall. He rose like a man who had worn armor too long and remembers it even when he is unarmored.
"Rest today," he said. "Tomorrow, come to my office. We have much to speak about."
He paused. There were a dozen things he could have said. He chose none of them. He reached to the blanket and pulled it one finger's width higher, as if I were a child asleep by the hearth. Then he turned to the door.
My lips moved before I could stop them.
"Arthur and Lugo…?"
Father paused in the doorway.
"They've returned to the capital. Don't burden your head with them now. Rest. We'll talk tomorrow."
At the latch he looked back. The light made a line on his cheek where a tear had considered falling and decided not to. He nodded once. Then he left.
The door closed with a small sound that should not have mattered. It mattered.
For a while I listened to the quiet the way a man listens for wind behind walls. It came in pieces. A cart wheel somewhere over a stone. Someone's laugh cut short. A bird under the eaves. Then voices, small through the wood, from the other side of the door.
"Not today," Father said. He had lowered his voice but the hall carried it. "Do not let anyone disturb him. He is hurt."
A softer voice. Mother. "He is all right, yes."
"He is," Father said. "He will be."
Their voices thinned with distance. Footsteps faded. A servant's whisper floated and fell.
I lay back and looked at the beams above. The herbs in the bowl by the window had gone cool. The light changed as the evening passed its first hour. The ache behind my eyes settled into a steady pressure that I could measure.
Mnex cleared his throat inside my head, as if announcing a lecture to a class that had wandered in by mistake.
"Report. Or as I like to call it: the autopsy of your pride," he said. "We will keep it simple. One, grip. Your hands were too high on the staff. You shortened your lever and traded reach for nothing. Two, feet. He moved in a line and you followed. You let him draw your circle for you. Three, breath. You held it when you should have let it go. Your muscles starved and then failed. Four, eyes. You watched the staff when you should have watched the hips. Hips lie less."
"Five," he added after a pause. "You let pride pick the first attack."
I stared at the beam and counted the splinters along its edge. "Keep going."
"Angles," he said. "He tested your parry at three heights and two sides. You answered the same each time. That is a pattern. He punished the pattern. Next, pace. He made you think you could escape on the fourth beat, then stole the fourth beat and made it his. Train for fifth beats. Then steal those. Next, pain. You wore it on your face. You moved away from it in straight lines. You must learn to step into it, not out of it. Pain is a map. You can use it to find the open place."
He paused. The pause lasted the length of two breaths. "Last, will. You had enough. That matters. It will matter more if you live long enough to use it."
I turned my head toward the shutter. The light made a dull nail head in the crack, fading as evening pressed on, and I tried to focus on it until the blur took over. Pride, huh? Then I need to engrave it into my bones, into my muscles: discipline over pride. That has to be my rule now.
"Do you think," I asked, "that if I had trained more, I would have won?"
"Define more," he said at once. "Hours. Days. Years."
"More," I said.
"No," he said. There was no cruelty in it. "Lugo has ten years and all ten bent toward a single point. He is drilled by men who do nothing but make boys into weapons. He has fought other boys made for the same end. You were meant to learn to read ledgers, speak to crowds, mend fences in a storm, lie without being a liar, and tell a truth without causing a riot. You were meant to split yourself between many points. This is not failure. This is the shape of your life."
I swallowed. The bandage pulled. "Then there is no path."
"There is always a path," he said. "It is not the same as his. Yours must use what he cannot. He can train three hundred perfect cuts. You can learn where not to cut and still win. He can break a rib. You can turn a city. He can win ten fights. You can make one fight matter."
I closed my eyes. Inside the dark the yard replayed itself. The circle of faces. The red armor at the edge. Theo with his jaw locked. Lugo light on his feet. Wood coming down. Wood coming down. Wood coming down.
"Could I have beaten him," I asked. I did not know why I asked again. Maybe I wanted a different answer. Maybe I wanted to measure the size of the lie I could forgive.
"Not todoay," Mnex said. "Not with your body as it is and your mind as it was. With time, with work decided by need and not pride, perhaps you could have made it a question worth asking. But you did not have time. And you did not need to win. You needed to keep your word."
Roderic's face rose in the dark. He was small and always a little sticky, and he laughed at the wrong places and made them right anyway.
I opened my eyes. The room looked the same and felt different.
"Tell me how to be less useless," I said.
"Very well," he said, brisk now, as if relieved to have a list to write. "We will break it into three pieces. Breath, feet, hands. Breath first. In through the nose, out through the mouth, count to three on the in, two on the out, never hold unless you are under a blade. Practice while you walk, while you read, while you lie there being dramatic. Feet next. Walk the room in squares, then in circles, then in figure eights. Never plant both at once. Learn the turn that keeps your shoulders square while your hips step away. Do it until you forget how not to. Hands last. Grip lower. Thumb along the wood, not choking it. Wrist straight. Strikes travel from the ground through the hip into the arm. Arms alone are lies that feel like truth."
He kept going. He told me how to look past a blade. He told me how to pretend to fall and mean it. He told me how to listen for breath and how to steal it. He told me to stop thinking of winning as a moment and start thinking of it as a slow work that begins before a fight and ends after a door closes.
I listened. Some of it stuck. Some of it slid away and would have to be caught later when my head hurt less.
"Enough for now," he said at last. There was a change in his voice. The sharp edges folded back. "You will sleep soon. You should. One more thing."
"What."
"I will say this once," he said. "I will not repeat it. I am proud of you."
The room did not move. The words moved. They crossed from the inside of my skull to the space above the blanket and sat there like a small fire that did not need wood.
I did not answer. My throat would not let me. Also, he had said he would not repeat himself, and if I made him explain I would break the spell the way a child breaks a web with a stick.
He did not push. "Very well," he said, quiet now. "We will pretend you did not hear. Tomorrow you can scowl at me as usual."
I shut my eyes. Sleep did not come. I watched the fight again because my mind demanded it, because sometimes the only way to stop a memory from owning you is to walk through it on purpose. I watched from my place and then from above. I watched where Lugo's eyes moved and where mine should have. I watched myself drop the staff and I watched my hand close late and I watched the moment before the last blow where I could have stepped in instead of out.
The light shifted along the shutter. Voices came and went in the hall. Once, footsteps paused at my door, then moved on. A breeze slipped under the frame and carried the faint smell of oil and rope from the yard. The ache behind my eyes did not leave. It sat like a stone that would not move and did not need to.
When night came it did not fall all at once. It climbed the wall and folded the room into itself, piece by piece. I lay there and counted my breaths until counting stopped meaning numbers and started meaning time. Somewhere far off a bell touched the air and let it go.
I did not sleep. I learned.