Sianim 01 - Masques

word or a touch. Edom had the normal flaws of adolescence—all elbows and awkwardness. The others were in the middle range. Given three or four years of steady sword work, they would be passable, maybe.
    It didn’t really matter, she thought. If it came down to hand-to-hand fighting, they were all doomed anyway. But it was something to keep the people busy and make them feel as though they were working toward a common goal.
    She fought her first bout with Haris, deciding to face the best fighter first—when she was fresh. It was a good idea. He might not have had much experience with a sword, but he had been in more than one dirty fight. If she’d had to rely on only her swordsmanship to fight him, she might have lost, but she’d been in a few dirty fights herself.
    When she finally pinned him, Haris gave her the first genuine smile she’d seen on his face. “For a little bit of a thing, you fight pretty well.”
    “For a hulking brute, you’re not too bad yourself,” she said, letting him up. She turned to the observers. “And that is how you fight on a battlefield. But not in a training session on swordsmanship. The sword got in his way more than it helped him. If he were fighting in a battle today, he’d be better off with a club than with a sword. That will not be true in a month, for any of you—I hope.”
    The others were easier, so she lectured as she fought. By the time she was facing the last student, Edom, she was short on breath. Cleaning the inn had been good for keeping in shape, but a two-hour workout with a sword was enough to test her powers of endurance.
    She opened with the same move that she’d used in all the other fights—a simple sidesweep that all the others had been able to meet. Edom fell, which should have shown him to be an utter idiot with a sword. She heard a few suppressed sniggers from the audience. But something about the fall struck her as a little off; if he had fallen from the force of the blow, he shouldn’t have fallen quite as far as he had. She wasn’t big enough to push him that distance without more leverage than a sidesweep allowed for.
    She helped him up and handed him his sword. Grasping his wrist, she showed him the proper block and swung again. He met it that time, clumsily. She worked slowly with him at first, gradually speeding up. He progressed slowly, with nothing more odd than ineptness showing in his fighting.
    She worked with him on three blocks, aiming different attacks at him and showing how each block could be used. She was getting tired, and made a mistake that a better swordsman would never have made. She used a complex swing, difficult to execute as well as counter, and misjudged it. Horrified, she waited for her sword to cut into his leg.
    He blocked it.
    He shouldn’t have been able to, not at his level. She wasn’t sure that she could have blocked it. She certainly couldn’t have executed the combination that he used. She stepped back and met his eyes. Softly, so that no one but she could hear, he said, “Can I explain in private?”
    She considered a minute and nodded. Turning back to the others, she dismissed them, sending them to watch Myr, still fighting nearby.
    Alone, Edom met her gaze. He shuffled a foot in the dirt. “You . . .” His voice cracked, and he cleared his throat and tried again. “You know that I’m not quite what I appear to be. I’m not even Rethian; I’m from Darran. I don’t know if you know it, but Darran is under the ae’Magi’s influence, too.”
    “Darran?” Darranians hated magic. People who could work magic left, or risked being killed. Impossible to imagine Darranians approving of the ae’Magi.
    He saw her expression.
    “Yes. It was pretty obvious when it happened,” he said. “Scary. I said the wrong thing, and I had to run for my life.” He shrugged. “I don’t know why I came here. Something . . . drew me here, I guess. It seemed as good a place to go as any. I found the valley full of people like me, hiding from the ae’Magi. But they were all Rethians. Given current feelings between Darran and Reth, I could hardly tell them that I was a noble-born Darranian.
    “So I told them that I was the son of a Rethian merchant. I thought that it was a good idea, I speak Rethian with a faint enough accent that I could pass for any number of western provinces—and it explained the richness of my clothes.
    “Then Myr came and started this swordsmanship training. Where would a merchant’s son