The road to Fort Hope ran through low hills scrubbed bare by an early winter, and for the first hour Sir Red didn't say a word about the thing they both knew was coming.
Henry rode Sir Red's own horse, the same one Sir Red had handed off to him at the start of his leave so he could cover the distance home fast. Sir Red himself had taken a gelding out of the Sinclair stables that morning, unfamiliar under him and clearly not bothering him in the slightest.
He rode a half-length ahead, easy in the saddle in a way that made the borrowed gelding look like an afterthought, humming something tuneless under his breath. Henry watched the back of his head and waited.
"So," Sir Red said finally, not turning around. "Let's talk about how late you actually were."
"Half a day. I know."
"Half a day." Sir Red glanced back over his shoulder, and there was no anger in his face, just a flat sort of amusement that somehow felt worse. "You want to know how many recruits have tried that exact math on me? 'It's only half a day, what's the harm.'"
"There was a situation at the border. My father needed me there, and I couldn't just leave."
Sir Red cut him off before he could finish. "I know what happened at the border. Sir Black got word the moment your father's report on that fracture point crossed the right desk. A find like that doesn't stay quiet, not from where he sits." He faced forward again. "Doesn't matter. Half a day unaccounted for is half a day I had to explain to people who don't like explaining things. The number was supposed to be zero, Henry. Doesn't matter if it's an hour or a month past that."
Henry kept his mouth shut. There wasn't a version of the explanation that made the principle of it smaller.
"Here's the thing about me," Sir Red went on, conversational, like he was discussing weather. "I run things loose. I let my people breathe. I figure a recruit who trusts me works harder than one who's scared of me, and so far that's worked out fine." He rolled his shoulders. "You took advantage of that, even a little. Even for half a day. If I let it slide because it was small, the next kid figures small is negotiable too. I gotta be a little more serious for a while, or none of this holds."
"What does that mean?"
Sir Red's grin showed up slow, and it had teeth in it that hadn't been there a second ago. "It means for the next two weeks, you and I are going to spend a lot of quality time together. Every day. Just the two of us."
"That sounds like training."
"It is training." Sir Red's tone stayed light, almost cheerful. "It's also going to hurt more than anything you've done since you got to Fort Hope. I want to be honest about that up front so you can't say I didn't warn you."
Henry believed him.
They reached Fort Hope on the evening of the second day, gray walls rising out of flat brown ground, and Sir Red didn't give him time to settle in. He was pulled out to the training yard before he'd finished setting his pack down, the sun already low and orange over the wall.
"Weapon up," Sir Red said, drawing a plain short sword of his own. "Let's see what two months in the mountains taught you."
Henry lasted four exchanges before Sir Red's blade caught him across the ribs, flat side but hard enough to fold him over.
"That's one," Sir Red said. "We'll be doing a lot of those."
The days that followed blurred together into a single shape: dawn, breakfast eaten too fast, then hours in the yard with Sir Red closing distance before Henry had finished reading the first movement. Sir Red didn't fight like Adar. There was nothing patient in it, nothing that waited for an opening. He simply came, fast and low and constant, forcing Henry to answer before he'd decided what the question was.
"You're thinking too much," Sir Red told him on the third day, after putting him on the ground for the sixth time before noon. "My style doesn't give you room to think. That's the whole point of it. Some fighters want to be precise, want every opening mapped out before they commit. I just want to be there first."
"Doesn't seem like there's a defense for that."
"There isn't, not really. Not one you can plan around." Sir Red offered a hand down, hauled him up. "Best you can do is get faster than the problem. So that's what we're doing."
By the end of the first week Henry's whole body had become a catalogue of bruises, some old ones layering fresh ones before the first had a chance to fade. Sir Red never let up and never seemed to enjoy it either, which was somehow the part that got under Henry's skin the most. It would have been easier to hate someone who looked satisfied doing this to him.
He caught Hannah once, late on the fourth night, both of them dragging back toward the barracks from opposite directions.
"You look terrible," she said.
"Feel worse."
"Ma'am White made me run the wall course backward today. Twice." She said it without any particular complaint in her voice, just reporting a fact. "I think she's trying to see how many ways she can make me hate stairs."
"Small comfort, but you're not alone in the misery."
A ghost of something that might have been a smile crossed her face before she kept walking. Neither of them had the energy to make it more than that.
Tate and Caleb he saw even less. Once, crossing paths near the mess hall, Caleb limping slightly and radiating his usual stubborn refusal to admit it, Tate a step behind him looking unbothered in the specific way that meant he was pacing himself smarter than everyone else in the group.
"Sir Blue doesn't talk," Caleb said, when Henry asked how it was going. "Just points at things and expects you to already know how to do them."
"Sounds efficient."
"Sounds like hell," Caleb said, but there wasn't much heat in it. Whatever rivalry usually lived between them had gone quiet under the weight of everyone being equally exhausted.
The second week hurt in a different way than the first. Henry's body started catching up to what Sir Red was asking of it, and the fights stretched longer before he went down, three exchanges becoming six, six becoming a dozen. He still lost. He lost every single time. But the losses started teaching him things instead of just hurting.
"There," Sir Red said, on the ninth day, after Henry managed to slip clear of an opening strike for the first time all week. "That's it. That's the whole style. You don't out-fight me. You get somewhere I'm not fast enough to follow."
"Feels like luck."
"Everything feels like luck the first few times you do it right." Sir Red reset his stance, already moving again. "Then one day it isn't luck anymore. Again."
Henry went down twice more before the light failed.
On the last day, Sir Red didn't spar him at all. He sat on the low wall at the edge of the yard, watching Henry run drills alone against a wooden post, arms crossed and unusually quiet for a man who filled most silences without being asked.
"Two weeks," he said eventually. "You still limping?"
"A little."
"Good. Means you're paying attention to what your body's telling you instead of ignoring it." Sir Red hopped down off the wall. "You've got somebody's evasive footwork in the back of your head, I can tell. Won't be that clean for a long while, if it ever is, and that's fine, because I'm not trying to make you into a copy of whoever that is. You're supposed to be fighting like you, and right now you fight like somebody who just spent two weeks learning to survive somebody faster than him. That's worth something."
"Are we even?"
Sir Red laughed, short and genuine. "Kid, we were never keeping score. I just needed you to remember I could." He clapped a hand on Henry's shoulder, hard enough that Henry felt it in the bruise underneath. "Go eat something. You've earned one night where nobody hits you."
Henry limped back toward the barracks in the last of the light, every muscle he owned complaining in some new register, and found Hannah already sitting outside the mess hall door, waiting without quite admitting that was what she was doing.
"You made it," she said.
"Barely."
"Barely counts." She stood, and for the first time in two weeks there was nowhere either of them needed to be in the next hour. "Come on. I hear the food's actually decent tonight."
He followed her in, and for the length of one meal, nothing hurt as much as it had an hour before.