Catching the sword Yalaz threw in midair, Yavuz felt not the coldness of the metal in his palm but the throbbing of the veins in his arms.
But this wasn't because he was consciously channeling Erk in that moment; in fact, after the battle in the grove, there wasn't a speck of Erk left in his body. In a single day he'd managed to accumulate only a drop of energy.
The real reason for the pain he felt was simply that his body remembered that intense flow of energy and the trauma.
This time there was no mercy in Yalaz's eyes, but the hardness of a hammer coming down on an anvil. The old man had reminded him that a warrior without a sword was nothing on these lands but a corpse-in-waiting, and was now preparing him for his hardest trial.
Yavuz didn't draw the sword from its sheath. The words he himself had spoken the night before were still in his ears; he'd wanted to learn to hold the energy in his arms, in his fists. He hung the sword, sheath and all, at his waist and clenched his fists. That helpless ache from the grove was now seeking ground to turn into a fire.
When Yalaz saw that Yavuz had clenched his fists instead of drawing the sword, he straightened his stance; his eyes locked onto the young man's trembling hands.
"Why are you still keeping that sword at your waist?" he roared. His voice echoed off the rocks. "The thing across from you isn't a wooden post, child—I'm your executioner. Draw that sword! Show me not your potential, but your will!"
Yavuz hesitated for a moment. His palms had grown slippery with sweat and blood. With Yalaz's command, the image of that rusty sword in his mind gave way to the weight of the long steel in his hand. He gripped the sheath with his left hand and the hilt with his right.
"SHRIIING!"
A sharp ring of metal cut through the deep silence of the village. Yavuz saw the sword's familiar gleam in the daylight. But Yalaz still stood with empty hands, motionless as a statue.
"Attack!"
Yavuz lunged. This time he gathered not only his body but all the will inside him into the tip of the sword. He swung the sword in a diagonal stroke toward Yalaz's shoulder. Yalaz didn't retreat; on the contrary, he plunged right into Yavuz's strike.
The old man's fist struck the flat of the blade dead center.
"CLAAANG!"
That high-frequency sound coming off the metal set Yavuz's teeth on edge. The veins in his arms throbbed with pain at the force of the blow.
Yalaz didn't stop; he drove his left fist like a spear into Yavuz's exposed stomach.
As Yavuz was flung backward, the sword nearly slipped from his hand despite himself. For a brief instant a familiar fear surfaced again inside him. As he was thrown back, he gripped the hilt tight so as not to lose his sword again. When he came to a stop, dragging along the ground, a bloody spittle came out of his mouth.
As he looked at Yalaz's silhouette through the cloud of dust, the sharp air of these ill-omened lands entering his lungs burned his throat. But this time he didn't drop the sword; his fear had given way to stubbornness.
"The sword is a part of you, child—it should be like a new limb for you!" Yalaz shouted, clenching his fists again.
Yavuz got to his feet again. That ambitious red in his eyes had slowly faded, giving way to his own natural sea-blue. Like everyone else, his eyes too had returned to their normal color; later than the others, but still.
When Yalaz saw Yavuz rise from the dust cloud and fix his sea-blue eyes on him, he didn't loosen his fists; on the contrary, he planted his legs more firmly.
His Erk had long since run out. But with every rising, he turned the throbbing pain in his arms into a weapon.
"Attack!" Yalaz roared.
Yavuz gripped the hilt of the sword as if he'd crack his own bones and lunged forward. This time he swung the sword in a horizontal stroke toward Yalaz's belly. Yalaz bent furiously away from the incoming attack and, with his palm, shoved the long sword and changed its direction entirely.
Yavuz's balance was broken once more; the weight of the sword and its swung momentum dragged his body into the empty air. Yalaz didn't miss the chance; he sprang up from his crouch like a bow loosing.
"Focus!" the old man bellowed.
Yalaz's right fist came down like a cannonball on Yavuz's defenseless ribs. With one last reflex Yavuz tried to pull the sword to his chest as a shield. The blow collided with the metal; the vibration spread through Yavuz's whole skeleton, as if his bones were being ground to dust by the resonance.
As he staggered backward, his blue eyes narrowed with pain. His blond hair was plastered to his face, and the sweat trickling from his brow had begun to sting his eyes. But this time he wasn't flung down. He braced his heel against the soil and stopped, leaving a deep furrow in the dusty ground.
Yalaz kept coming at him with astonishing speed. The old man's empty hands were more dangerous than the sharpest swords of the Ruined Lands. Each of his steps shook the earth; Yavuz felt the pressure grow heavier every second.
"Are you waiting to die just because you have no Erk?" Yalaz's voice wasn't mocking but goading. "If your body remembers that energy, make that memory your fuel! Don't feel the pain—command it!"
Yavuz clenched his teeth so hard his jaw began to throb. The ache in his arms was no longer an enemy but the only living thing flowing through his veins. He gripped the sword with both hands.
To break his guard, Yalaz swung a low kick with his left foot. This time, instead of swinging the sword, the old man planted its tip in the soil and vaulted his body over it, dodging the kick. While in the air, Yavuz wrenched the sword from the ground and, as he landed, brought it down with all his strength toward the top of Yalaz's head.
This wasn't just an attack; it was the pent-up explosion of a week's helplessness, of that rusty sword left in the cave, and of Granny Miren's spilled blood.
Yalaz crossed his two arms into a block against the steel coming down on his head. When the steel struck the old man's forearms, hardened with Erk, a rain of metallic sparks scattered all around.
Yalaz's knees buckled slightly under the weight of the blow. He raised his head and looked deep into Yavuz's sea-blue eyes; it was the first time he'd seen that cold stubbornness this close.
"There it is…" said Yalaz, his voice low but in a dangerous tone. "…now we're starting to fight."
As time flowed over the ill-omened steppes and the shadows shortened, Yavuz and Yalaz attacked each other countless times. They'd thrown themselves into the fight so completely that they didn't notice the five pairs of eyes fixed on this silent but savage duel from the edge of the training ground, in the shade of a ruined wall.
Tunay, arms folded across his chest, weighed every move of Yavuz and Yalaz with analytical attention.
Beside him Hazar gripped the shaft of his spear, watching Yavuz's acrobatic strikes. The ice-blue resolve in Yavuz's eyes was stoking the fire of competition inside him.
Garrun, for his part, breathed in the tension on the field with a master's eye. When Garrun saw the sparks slipping off Yalaz's crossed block, he nodded slightly. That Yavuz didn't give up was proof he'd learned the greatest rule of these lands.
Little Devran looked from the fighters to the small daggers in his hands.
Sevda, meanwhile, watched with an expression more tense than all of them. Her eyes were brighter, more eager than the others'.
"Me too…" she murmured, gripping her sword as if to shatter her own hands.
In the middle of the training ground the cloud of dust scattered for a moment.
Yalaz suddenly shoved the pressure on his arms upward and bounced Yavuz back. A single bead of sweat slipping from his brow fell onto the dusty soil.
"Good," he said, his voice sharp. "You're learning to command pain. But you still move too much. Your enemy isn't only the one in front of you; it's the soil beneath you, this poisoned air filling your lungs too."
Yavuz was out of breath, but he didn't take his eyes off the master warrior for a single second. Though he could feel the onlookers, he didn't turn to look; he had no intention of breaking his focus.
Tunay, without taking his eyes off the dust cloud, turned to Garrun beside him.
"How much longer do you think this clash between the old man and this madman will last?"
Then he pointed to Sevda, who, right next to them, was trembling like an arrow ready to leap from a bow, breathless with excitement.
"We already had one madman. There was no need for a second."
Sevda's answer came not in words but in a whistle tearing through the air.
Tunay noticed at the last instant that small but iron-hard fist coming at his face with the speed of lightning. His reflexes didn't fail him; with a mix of panic and agility, he took a step back.
But his cleverness wasn't enough to account for the treacherous ground beneath his foot. When his heel struck a sharp stone half-buried in the soil, his balance collapsed like a sandcastle.
A momentary cry of surprise gave way to a hard thud. Tunay found himself on the ground like a sack, smeared in the dirty soil of the Ruined Lands.
As he floundered in the dust, Sevda's shadow fell over him. The girl's fist hung in the air, her knuckles white with rage. Without even turning her gaze to Tunay, she gave her full attention back to Yavuz's incredible fight.
"If you ever call me a madwoman again," said Sevda, her voice as hard and sharp as the punch a moment ago, "I'll bury you under that stone, Tunay."
Tunay didn't answer for a while. When he noticed Sevda's focus had already shifted to the fight, the only sound from his lips was a quiet laugh.
"Heeheehee!"
A few minutes later Yavuz found himself on the ground again. Each time, the old man somehow broke his balance and forced him to topple into the dust.
Before Yavuz could even get up, Yalaz spoke.
"Rest a bit."
Reluctantly, Yavuz sank down beside the others. Yalaz, meanwhile, walked off from the training ground with quick steps. The sentence he left behind as he went made some shiver and others thrill.
"When I come back, you'll all go through the same thing. All four of you. Get ready."