Eight months later, Valor came off the line, put his hands on his knees, and said a word that would have got him three days of latrines if the Old Master had been closer.
"Again?" said Sito.
"No."
"You said that last time."
"I meant it last time as well," said Valor. "I am going to sit down over there and think about my life, and you are going to leave me alone."
---
The morning run had gone the way the morning run now went.
Sito had finished it third behind two men that were nineteen and twenty, and that's with the wraps on.
The Old Master had adjusted them twice more since the spring and they now sat on his wrists and ankles like somebody else's hands trying to pull him into the ground.
Nobody said anything about it anymore. That was the strangest part.
In the autumn there had been noise every time— 'the prince beat Hob', 'the prince beat three of them at the same time'— and now there was a nine-year-old in the front third of a hundred men and it had simply become a fact about the morning, like the weather.
Weights had gone the same way. He could not out-lift Raymond, who was built like a barn door, but he had stopped being anywhere near the bottom, and there were men of sixteen on that ground who had quietly started training in the evenings so that a child would not out-lift them either.
The sparring was where it had got ugly.
---
"Three," said the Old Master.
"Master—"
"Three, Valor. You, Hob, Ludo." The cane pointed. "And do not look at me like that. You are three of my better men and he is a child with two sticks. If this offends your dignity then win."
It took a minute and a half.
Sito took Ludo first because Ludo committed earliest, put him on the ground with a sweep that came out of a stance nobody in that arena taught, and was already turning when Hob came in from the left.
He did not meet Hob. He moved so that Hob had to come around Ludo to reach him, which took Hob about a second, and in that second Sito was somewhere else entirely and Valor was in Hob's way.
"That's the—" Hob got out, and stopped, because a practice blade had touched him under the arm.
Valor lasted about eleven seconds longer than the other two, because Valor was viciously quick and had spent eight months learning exactly what this child did.
It did not help.
"Point," said the Old Master.
Valor lay on the stone looking at the sky.
"You did the thing with the ground again."
"I did the thing with the ground again."
"You always do the thing with the ground. I know you do the thing with the ground. I stood here this morning and told myself, do not let him do the thing with the ground." Valor put an arm over his face. "And then I walked exactly where he wanted me to walk, like a sheep."
"Sorry."
"Do not apologize to me, your highness, it makes it worse."
---
The throwing was the part nobody had got used to.
The Old Master had kept him at the far end of the training grounds with the four posts for the first two months, but then the far end had stopped being far enough away to hide anything, and the hundred simply watched.
Sito came out of a parry on his right, and the left blade went out of his hand.
That was how it looked. That was all anybody saw — a blade leaving a hand it was supposed to stay in — and then the knife was already in the post, and the left hand that had thrown it had the sword back in it by the time his foot came down.
The first time he had done it cleanly, Hob had said "how," very loudly, in the middle of a silent arena.
Eight months, and Sito still did not have a good answer.
"It's two things," he had tried to explain, once. "It's not one thing. The sword hand keeps doing the sword thing and the other hand does the knife thing and they don't talk to each other."
"But they're your hands."
"Yeah."
"They're both your hands."
"Yeah," Sito had said. "That's the bit that took eight months."
---
The slugs came at the end, the way they always did.
It had been a punishment once. Then it had been a tradition. Now it was the last fifteen minutes of every session and a hundred men looked forward to it all day, and the Old Master had long since stopped pretending it had anything to do with Sito being late.
He stood in the middle of the circle with both blades out.
"Ready, boy?"
"Yes, Master."
"Begin."
---
They came from everywhere.
Sito had been doing this since he was seven, and for the first two years it had been a matter of covering up and taking most of them and being proud when he got out of the way of four or five. Then it had been half. Then, through the winter, he had started getting through whole minutes clean and then losing concentration and taking six in a row.
Today he did not take any.
He deflected, or he moved, and he did both of those without looking at most of them, because by the second minute he had stopped watching the slugs and started watching shoulders. A man's shoulder told you where the thing was going before the thing had left his hand, and there were a hundred shoulders in that circle, and he had been looking at the same hundred shoulders for two and a half years.
At eleven minutes somebody in the back tried to be clever and threw two at once.
Sito caught one, deflected the other with it, and put the caught one back into the crowd hard enough that the thrower went down on his backside to more noise than anything else that had happened all day.
"ENOUGH," croaked the Old Master, and the arena fell about laughing.
---
"Line up."
They lined up.
"That was adequate." The old man walked the line with his hands behind his back. "Ludo, your left foot is lazy and it will get you killed in front of people who matter. Hob, you are still telegraphing the overhead and I have told you this since you were fourteen and I am running out of patience and years. Valor."
"Master."
"You have improved considerably this year and I want you to be aware that the only reason you cannot see it is that you have been measuring yourself against a freak."
Valor snorted.
"Yes, Master."
"Go and cultivate. Evening session at the usual hour and I will personally drown anybody who is late."
---
They went. Sito stayed, because he always stayed, and the Old Master leaned on the cane and looked at him for a while.
"How many did you take?"
"None, Master."
"Mm."
"Was that a co—"
"Do not start."
"I only—"
"Boy." The old man twirled the end of his mustache. "You are nine. You have been throwing a knife while in combat with dual blades for eight months and you have stopped dropping the sword.
Soon enough you will be able to do it without a second thought, and afterwards I will have nothing left to teach you about your hands and I will start on the rest of you, which is considerably worse. Until then you may live without praise and it will build your character."
"My character's fine."
"Your character is that of a smug little stoat and we both know it."
A guard came in through the arena gate and stood at a respectful distance.
"Your highness. Master."
"Yes?"
"Master Cagle's compliments. The Farrar party is expected before dark and his highness is wanted to be washed and changed by the sixth hour."
Sito stared at him.
"The Farrars?"
"Yes, your highness."
"Which Farrars?"
"The Duke and Duchess," said the guard. "And the Lady Rachel."
"Oh no," said Sito.
The Old Master's eyebrows came up.
"Ah," he said, with enormous satisfaction. "Your bride."
"Master—"
"Oh? Is that blushing I see?"
Sito gave a deadpan stare at the Old Masters teasing smile as he continued.
"Your betrothed. Your intended. The lady who shall one day be queen of this kingdom and to whom you have been promised since before you could hold your own head up."
"I know who she is."
"Do you? You have never met her." The old man was enjoying this more than Sito had seen him enjoy anything in two and a half years. "Go and wash, boy. And do something about your hair, it looks like something died in a hedge."
"You're loving this."
"I am an old man with very few pleasures left," said the Old Master, "and I intend to squeeze every drop out of this one."
---
They came up the hill road an hour before dark.
Sito stood in the courtyard between his mother and father in a coat with a collar that had been made for somebody who cared more about looks than functionality.
"Stand straight," said Amestris.
"I am standing straight."
"You are standing like a boy who has been hit in the ribs all day."
"That's because I've been hit in the ribs all day, Mother."
"Then stand straight anyway."
Xerxes said nothing at all, and then, as the first carriage came through the gate, he said:
"You will like Ealhelm."
Sito looked up. It was, as far as he could remember, the first thing his father had ever told him about a person that was not about what the person was for.
"Yes, Father."
---
Duke Ealhelm Farrar came out of the carriage like a man arriving at his own house.
He was broad and going grey and he had a face that had clearly spent its whole life a moment away from laughing, and he crossed the courtyard, and bowed correctly, and said "Your Majesty" in a voice pitched for the guards to hear.
Then he straightened up and said, much quieter, "Xerxes."
"Eal."
"You look terrible."
"I look like a king."
"You look like a king who has not slept since midsummer," said Ealhelm, "which is what I said. Jenna, come and look at what our majesty has done to himself."
Duchess Jenna Farrar was deaf to her husbands words as her eyes were locked on Sito.
"Oh," she said. "Oh, he's the image of her."
"Jenna."
"He is. Amestris, he is the absolute image of you, it is uncanny." Jenna came over and took Sito's face in both hands in a manner that reminded him so strongly of Aunt Lia that he nearly laughed. "The last time I saw you, you were four hours old and screaming at everybody."
"Was I?."
"Oh heavens yes, it's like you knew your mother was unconscious and you were furious about it." Jenna let go. "Rachel. Come and be introduced."
Sito had not seen her get out of the carriage.
She was his age, more or less, and she had her mother's face and her father's coloring, and she had been dressed for this by somebody who had thought about it for a long time — dark green, with her hair up and pinned in a way that must have taken two people an hour.
She came forward and curtsied, and it was flawless.
"Your Highness."
"Lady Rachel."
Then she looked up at him properly, and Sito watched her eyes widen and her lips part.
Behind her, three girls had got out of the second carriage and were standing in a knot, and one of them made a noise.
Rachel's ears went pink.
"Beatrice."
"I didn't say anything."
"You made a sound."
—-
Supper was long and it was the best-natured meal Sito had ever sat through in that hall.
The reason was Ealhelm, who talked about a flooded bridge and a tenant's dispute over a boundary hedge and a puppy he had bought that turned out to be terrified of sheep, and who told all of it directly to Xerxes, and who laughed at his own stories before he got to the end of them.
And Xerxes — Sito watched it happen and could not have explained it to anybody afterward — answered him.
Not as a king. He put an elbow on the table, which Sito had never seen, and said "how much did you pay for it," and when Ealhelm told him, he laughed.
Out loud. Once. It was over almost immediately.
Sito looked at his plate so that nobody would see his face.
"So," said Rachel, from his left. "You have been to Vradia."
"I have."
"What is it like?"
"Big," said Sito. "Loud. The trees are three hundred feet high. There are bridges everywhere and the whole city's up in them, and there's a mist over the top of it that never lifts and they've got a song about it that's about an hour long."
"Oh," said Rachel. "Did you meet their king?"
"Yeah."
"Was there a great deal of gold?"
"Not really."
"Not any?"
"They don't do that much," said Sito. "The King sits in a chair made out of a root."
Rachel considered this with the polite dismay of somebody who has been told a thing that cannot possibly be true.
"A root?"
"A very old root."
"But he is a king."
"He's a king in a chair made out of a root," Sito agreed, and Rachel laughed, and it was a nice laugh, and the three girls at the far end of the table all leaned in at once like grass in a wind.
---
She was not stupid and she was not unkind, and Sito decided about halfway through the meal that he liked her fine.
She asked him what he did all day and listened to the answer. She was very talkative and told him many things including funny stories about her music tutor.
When Jenna said something sharp about somebody called Lady Wenn, Rachel caught Sito's eye across the table with an expression that said 'my mother is doing it again' and Sito grinned into his cup.
She also asked him, in order, about the size of the royal apartments, whether it was true the Queen had a jeweller who came from Ashina, what the crown was actually like to wear, and whether he would be expected to hold tournaments when he was king, because she had never been to a tournament and had always wanted to.
"I don't know about the crown," he said. "I've never worn it."
"Not ever?"
"It's not mine yet."
"But you have tried it, yes?"
"No."
Rachel looked at him as though he had told her he had never tried bread.
"I would have tried it," she said.
"I believe you."
---
"Play something," said Jenna, afterward, in the long room. "Amestris, he does play, doesn't he? Aaliyah wrote to me about it."
"He plays," said the Queen.
"Then play something, child, I have been sitting in a carriage for four days and I should like to be entertained by somebody other than my husband."
Sito went and got the rook.
He did the road one first because it was safe, and then Ealhelm wanted something with words he could join in on, so Sito gave him the horse one, and Ealhelm Farrar sang 'and I'll sit when I'm sat down' in a booming, cheerful, entirely wrong key while his wife put her face in her hands.
Then Jenna asked for something quiet.
He played the sparrow song.
And when he looked up at the end of it, Rachel Farrar was looking at him with her chin on her hand and her eyes very wide, and the three girls behind her had stopped whispering entirely, and Sito thought, with a kind of dim alarm-
'Oh no. That's worse.'
---
"She is lovely," said Aaliyah, that night, folding something that did not need folding.
"She's all right."
"She is lovely and she is well brought up and she will be extremely beautiful in five years, and the whole of that household has had one job since the day she was born, which was to put her in this castle." Aaliyah set the thing down. "And she looked at you this evening the way a woman looks at fancy jewelry."
Sito laughed.
Aaliyah did not.
"My sweet Sito, I am being serious with you."
"I know. So am I." He sat on the end of the bed with his elbows on his knees. "Aunt Lia, she asked me four things about Vradia. One of them was whether there was gold."
"Ah."
"And she asked about the apartments, and the jeweller, and the crown, and whether I'd hold tournaments." He shrugged. "And she's nice. She is nice — she's not mean about people and she listened when I told her about the training and she thinks her mother's ridiculous, which is correct. I liked her. I'd rather have her than somebody horrible."
"But."
"But she looked at me for about two seconds before she decided anything," said Sito. "And I don't think it was about me."
Aaliyah stared at him.
"What?" said Sito.
"Nothing."
"You're doing a face."
"I am doing a face because I have spent the whole of this evening working out how I was going to tell you all of that without breaking your heart," said Aaliyah, "and you have got there first, at nine, without any help, and I am not certain how I feel about it."
"Is that good?"
"It is not good at all," she said, and came and put a hand on the top of his head. "Nine-year-olds ought to be daft about girls. That is the whole purpose of being nine."
"Sorry."
"Do not apologize. Go to sleep."
She got to the door.
"Aunt Lia."
"Mm?"
"It's fine. Honestly." Sito lay back on the bed. "It's not like I've got a choice about it anyway, so I'd rather she was nice than not. That's about as far as I've thought about it."
Aaliyah stood in the doorway for a moment.
"That," she said, "is the saddest sentence I have heard all year," and shut the door behind her.
---
The crystal lit about an hour later.
"You are late."
"There were people." Sito replied in vradian.
Lately his elvish had improved so much that their conversations were mostly in vradian minus the occasional epirian Sito used to fill in the words he didn't know yet.
"What people?"
"Farrars," said Sito. "The Duke and his wife came for a visit. And their daughter. They're here for a week."
There was a pause on the other end that was slightly too long.
"The daughter," said Naeva.
"Rachel."
"Rachel."
"Yeah."
"Sito," said Naeva. "Is Rachel the one you are going to marry?"
Sito sat up.
"How do you know about that?"
"Because my mother told me. Four days after you left." Naeva's voice was doing something complicated. "She came into my room to talk about a tutor and instead she told me that the human boy is betrothed and has been since he was very small, and that it will not be undone, and that he has probably known his whole life."
"Naeva—"
"So I have known for eleven months," she said, "and you did not tell me, and now you have said it like it is nothing"
"That's because I forgot."
"You forgot."
"Yes!"
"You forgot that you are getting married."
"Naeva, I was one year old!" Sito had both hands in his hair. "They wrote it down before I could talk. It's not a thing that happens, it's a thing that's already happened, it's like — it's like being told what day my name-day is. I don't think about it. Nobody's ever asked me about it. My own father has mentioned it twice in my whole life and both times it was to other people."
The crystal was quiet.
"Truly?" said Naeva.
"Truly. I'd have told you. I'd have told you on the branch if I'd thought of it." He flopped back down. "I swear, the first time I thought about it properly was this afternoon when a guard came into the arena and said her name and I said "oh no" in front of my master, who has not stopped enjoying it since."
"You said 'oh no'?"
"Out loud."
"Good," said Naeva.
There was a silence.
"Is she pretty," said Naeva.
Sito, who had a grown man's mind said-
"I mean — yes? She's — "
And then, about four words in, he heard it.
He heard it the way a man hears a stair crack under his foot at night, and he stopped, and there was a pause in that room that he would remember with embarrassment for a considerable number of years.
"...no," he said.
"No?"
"No. No, she's — she's got a sort of a face. On the front of her head. It's fine. It's a fine face. I didn't really look."
"You did not look at her face."
"Not properly."
"You sat next to her at supper I assume?"
"Yeah, but I was — there was a lot of food."
"Sito."
"It was really good food!"
Naeva made a noise that he had never heard her make before and did not entirely trust.
"Is she taller than me?"
"Nobody is taller than you."
"That is true," said Naeva, mollified. "Is her hair nice?"
"It's up. It's got about nine pins in it."
"Mhmm."
"Somebody spent an hour on it."
"An hour?" A pause. "Was it nice?"
"Naeva, I'm going to be honest with you, I don't know what you want me to say."
"I want you to say the correct thing."
"What's the correct thing?"
"If I tell you," said Naeva, "then it does not count."
---
They talked for another hour.
She asked a dozen more questions in the same vein and he got about half of them wrong, and at one point she made him describe the three friends and then went suspiciously quiet about Beatrice, and by the end of it she had extracted a complete inventory of the supper, the long room, the songs he had played and in what order, and precisely where everyone had been sitting.
"You played the birds one," she said, at the end.
"Yeah."
"For them."
"Her mother asked for something quiet."
"Mm," said Naeva.
"Naeva—"
"It is fine."
"It doesn't sound fine."
"It is completely fine," said Naeva, "and I am going to sleep, and tomorrow you will call me before supper and not after, and you will tell me one true thing about Rachel Farrar that is not about her hair."
"What kind of true thing?"
"A real one. I do not care which."
"All right."
"Good." There was a pause."Goodnight."
"Goodnight Naeva"