The sky was still black when Sito got to the arena, and the Old Master was already there.
He was standing in the middle of the empty training ground leaning on his cane with his back to the gate, exactly the way he had been standing on every morning Sito had ever walked through it, and he did not turn around.
"The boy is early."
"Good morning, Master."
"That was not a greeting. That was an accusation." The old man turned, and the two bushy eyebrows came up like a pair of awnings. "You are early. In two and a half years you have been early once, and that was the day I promised you a sword. So either somebody has died or you want something."
"Nobody died."
"Then you want something."
"I don't want anything."
"Hmph." The Old Master looked him up and down. "You have grown. Turn around."
Sito turned around.
"Again. Slower."
Sito turned around slower.
"Hmph," said the Old Master again, and left it at that.
He threw the wraps without looking. Sito caught them out of the dark, which he would not have been able to do in the spring, and both of them noticed.
"They will be light on you now."
"They feel the same."
"They feel the same because you have been carrying them for four months up a road and back. That is not the same as them being right." The old man held out one hand. "Give them here."
Sito gave them over. The Old Master turned one of the wrist wraps in his fingers, muttering, and something in the weave shifted, Sito could not have said what, and when he handed it back it dropped in his palm like a brick.
"Ow."
"Put them on."
"Master, this is—"
"Put them on, boy, the sun will be up before you have finished complaining and then you will have been late after all."
---
The hundred came in as the sky was greying, and the noise they made at the sight of him nearly knocked him over.
"THE PRINCE IS BACK."
"He's tall!"
"He's even more tan than usual."
"Did you see an elf?"
"Were their women as pretty as the bards say?"
"Did they try to eat you?"
"Why would they eat him?"
"They eat nature, don't they, and he's—"
"Kellan, shut up."
Valor got to him first and hauled him into a headlock with total disrespect for his rank.
"You've grown."
"Everyone keeps saying that."
"You've grown and you've gone soft," said Valor. "I can feel it. There's no muscle on you at all. What did they feed you up there?"
"Barley."
"Ha!"
Raymond came through the crowd behind him, and Raymond had grown too, and considerably more than Sito had.
"My Prince."
"Raymond."
"You are back."
"I'm back."
"Good," said Raymond, and stuck his hand out, and shook Sito's once, hard. "I have been eleven weeks without anybody small enough to practice my footwork against and it has made me lazy."
"That's the nicest thing anybody's said to me since the border."
"It was not intended as a kindness."
"I know," said Sito as he smiled. "That's why it was nice."
---
He found out how far behind he was inside the first hour, and he found out in front of everybody.
It was not the running. The running was fine.
He had spent four months walking and climbing and being systematically dismantled by an elven general on a stone terrace, and his legs and his wind were better than they had ever been.
It was the sparring.
Valor put him down in about nine seconds. Then he did it again in about seven. Then a boy called Hob, who Sito had beaten twice in the spring and who had spent the intervening four months doing nothing but this, put him down in four.
"You've lost your timing," said Valor, offering him a hand up.
"I know."
"It's not gone. It's just slow. You've been off the floor too long."
"I know."
"Do you want to stop?"
Sito took the hand, got up, and put his blades back in his hands.
"No," he said. "Again."
He lost eleven straight, but he didn't stop once and was improving little by little everytime.
The Old Master stood at the edge of the circle with his hands folded on his cane and did not say a single word about any of it.
---
He said something about the belt at midmorning.
Sito had taken it off to spar and left it on the rack, and when he came back to it the Old Master was standing there with one of the knives in his hand, turning it over.
"Master—"
"Be quiet."
The old man held the knife up against the light, then sighted down the flat of it, then tapped it once on the rack and listened to the note it made.
"Mithril."
"Yes, Master."
"Mm." He weighed it on one finger. "Poorly balanced for a man. Correctly balanced for a child who will not be a child for very long, which means somebody had it altered, or had it made, or knew exactly what they were giving away."
He turned and, without any warning at all, threw it.
It went across the arena and into a training post at about forty paces, dead center, and the crack of it going in made two students on the far side jump.
Then it was gone out of the wood and back in the pouch on the rack.
"Mm," said the Old Master again.
"Aren't you going to—"
"Am I going to what, boy?"
"I don't know. Be impressed."
"By an enchantment?" The old man snorted, and it turned into a cough, and he thumped himself once in the chest. "I have held a cup that was never empty, a blade that cut stone like water, a spear that could summon lightning, throwing axes that held a similar enchantment to your daggers, and much more of which I've forgotten most. A returning knife is a fine piece of work and I am glad you have it and it is not the interesting thing on this rack."
"What's the interesting thing on the rack?"
"That somebody gave it to you."
Sito said nothing.
"Mithril," said the Old Master. "Six of them. Enchanted, and altered to fit your build, and handed over by whoever it was without a contract or a price or a betrothal attached to it." He put the belt down. "Who?"
"A general."
"An elven general gave the heir of Epiria a set of mithril knives."
"Yes, Master."
"Why?"
Sito thought about a woman with grey in her cropped hair who had said 'I do not throw, I stand where I am and make the other person come to me' and 'you fight like a man who is going to spend a great deal of time outnumbered.'
"She didn't have a use for them," he said.
The Old Master looked at him for slightly too long.
"Mm," he said, and walked away, and did not raise it again.
---
He raised something else at noon, which was worse.
"Come here, boy."
Sito came.
"Stand there. No — there. With your back to the gate." The old man walked around behind him, slowly, the cane going tap, tap on the stone. "Now. Do not turn around. How many of my students are behind you?"
"Nineteen."
"Where is Valor?"
"Left. Near the water butt with two others."
"Where is Raymond?"
"Behind you and about ten paces off your right shoulder. He's been standing there since you called me over because he thinks you're going to make us fight again."
The tapping stopped.
"And what is behind you, boy?"
"The gate. It's open. There's a cart against the west wall I could get behind, and the stair to the viewing booth is nine paces past it, and the booth's got a door that bars from the inside."
Silence.
Sito, who had answered all of it without thinking about it at all, suddenly heard himself.
"That's… I wasn't—"
"Turn around."
He turned around.
The Old Master was leaning forward on his cane with both hands, and his eyebrows had come down over his eyes entirely, and Sito could not read a single thing in his face.
"When did you start doing that?"
"Doing what?"
"Boy."
"I don't know," said Sito honestly. "I didn't know I was doing it until you asked."
The old man was quiet for a long moment.
"No," he said. "You would not have."
And then, because he was who he was:
"Well. At least the four months were not a complete waste. Go and run."
---
The afternoon was different.
Sito knew it was different about a minute into it, because the Old Master took him off the line and put him at the far end of the arena on his own, and then set up four posts in a square about fifteen paces on a side.
"What's this?"
"Draw."
Sito drew.
"Now. Throw a knife into that post." He pointed at the far one. "And keep both swords in your hands while you do it."
Sito looked at his hands. Then at the post.
"Master, I can't hold a sword and throw."
"No."
"So—"
"So you will learn to," said the Old Master, "and it will be the most miserable six months of your short and irritating life, and then you will be able to do it and you will never once thank me for it."
"Six months—"
"At best. You are ambidextrous, which is the only reason this is possible at all and which is also why I am going to be extremely unpleasant about it." He tapped a post with the cane. "Most men have a sword hand and a throwing hand and they are the same hand, so the choice is always which — sword or knife. You do not have that problem. You have the opposite problem, which is that both of your hands believe they are the main one, and you have spent two years teaching them to work as a pair."
"So?"
"So now they must be able to work as a pair *and* work apart, in the same movement, without either of them asking permission." The old man shrugged. "This is not a thing I have taught before. There has never been anybody to teach it to."
Sito stared at him.
"You've never taught it."
"I have never had a student it was worth the effort on."
"Master, that's almost a com—"
"Do not," said the Old Master, "say the word."
---
It was awful.
It was the most awful thing Sito had done since he was five years old and had been made to hold a horse stance until he was sick.
Every throw went wide, or went in weak, or he dropped a blade doing it, or he got the throw away clean and then found he had opened his entire left side doing it and the old man's cane came out of nowhere and cracked him across the ribs for it.
"Again."
"I—"
"Again."
"Master, my arm's—"
"Your arm is attached and it is the wrong arm to be complaining with. *Again.*"
By the time the shadows got long he had hit the post four times out of about ninety, and had been hit with the cane so many times that he had stopped registering individual instances.
"Enough," said the Old Master.
Sito sat down on the stone where he was standing.
"Do not sit."
"Master—"
"You will be stiff as a corpse in the morning if you sit. Walk it out." The old man watched him get up. "You hit four."
"Out of ninety."
"Out of ninety, on the first day, while holding two swords." He turned away toward the line. "I expected one."
Sito looked up.
"Was that a—"
"No," said the Old Master.
---
The hundred were already grabbing the practice slugs when he got over to them, and Valor was grinning.
"Oh no," said Sito.
"Fifteen minutes," said Raymond, with real pleasure.
"I've been back for one day—"
"You were late," said the Old Master, from behind him.
"I was early! I was here almost before you!"
"You were early this morning and you have been standing about talking for the last four minutes, which averages out to late." The old man's mustache moved in a way that Sito had learned to identify as amusement. "Blades up, boy. They have been looking forward to this since the spring."
---
It was fully dark by the time it finished, and Sito lay flat on his back on the stone in the middle of the arena with both arms out and could not feel his hands.
The Old Master came and stood over him and did not offer to help.
"Boy."
"Mm."
"The knives. The throwing, the square, all of it." A pause. "It was not my idea."
Sito opened one eye.
"What?"
"Your father sent word two nights ago. Before sunrise, in fact, which I appreciated, though I doubt it was for my benefit." The old man twirled one end of his mustache between two fingers. "The King instructs that the boy's training is to be increased. The King instructs that the ambidexterity is to be properly used rather than treated as a curiosity. The King instructs that the blades and the throwing are to stop being two separate things."
Sito sat up.
"Father ordered this."
"He did."
"Why?"
"I was hoping you would tell me," said the Old Master.
Sito's mouth was suddenly very dry, and he was extremely glad that it was dark and that he was sitting down.
"I don't know."
"Mm."
"I don't."
"Mm," said the Old Master.
He turned and started toward the gate, cane going tap, tap, and then he stopped.
"Boy."
"Master?"
"I do not care what happened on that road."
Sito did not say anything.
"I want that understood, because you are eight and you will be sitting up all night worrying about it and I would rather you slept. Whatever it was, you will tell me when you tell me, or you will never tell me, and either of those is acceptable."
The cane tapped once. "I will say only this. You came back into my arena able to perfectly recall nineteen men, their positions, and all your exit routes behind you without turning your head, and you did not know you could do it. Nobody learns this sort of paranoid awareness, nor the ability to remember these things so well, in a wagon."
"Master—"
"Before sunrise," said the Old Master. "And if you are early again I shall assume somebody has died."
---
He went out through the gate and up the corridor, and he waited until he was well past the guards before he let the smile get anywhere near his face.
'Two years and a half,' he thought, 'and the boy comes back from four months of soft beds and elven cooking, loses eleven straight in front of the whole line, and kept asking for another.'
He walked on a way.
'And the King has decided the child needs more work. The King, who has never once asked me what the child needs.'
The cane tapped along the stone.
'Mm,' thought the Old Master, and went to find his supper.