Free Web NovelChapter 5: Our Last Beautiful Day
That last morning, Elsa didn’t toss me a training blade. She drew two real ones, their steel catching the light.
"Today we stop playing for good," she said. "The two of you, against me. Show me what a week has made of you."
Alice took her place at my side, palms open, perfectly calm. I gripped the hilt of my sword. My heart was pounding — not from fear, this time. From eagerness.
Elsa didn’t give a signal. She vanished.
One second she stood ten paces away, the next her blade was diving for my temple. My Eye saw it coming and tore the instant into slow fragments: the angle, the speed, the point of impact. And for the first time, my body obeyed the order my gaze was screaming at it.
I parried.
Steel bit steel in a shower of sparks, the shock ran up to my shoulder, but I held. A week earlier, I’d already be on the ground, one more lump on my skull.
A flash of surprise crossed Elsa’s eyes. Then she smiled, and sped up.
The blows rained down. Too many. Too fast. My muscles, new or not, gave out before my will did — and that was when Override flared in my chest. A fraction of a second stolen from exhaustion, where my arm went where the flesh refused to go.
And the Dance of the Widow unfurled.
I stopped backing away in a straight line. I began to turn. Around her, in spirals, body low, my blade tracing arcs that no longer called for force but for evasion — slipping the blow by a hair, letting it glide along my thread, and biting into the gap it opened. The way a spider dances around its prey, I danced around Elsa, turn after turn, never offering her a full target.
Her blade hissed a finger’s width from my throat; I’d already shifted away. Mine darted toward her ribs; she was no longer there. Dust rose under our feet, sweat stung my eyes, my breath tore at my chest — and I held. I wasn’t touching her. No one touched Elsa. But I wasn’t falling anymore, and from the look on her face, that, she hadn’t seen coming.
"Garden of Salvation!"
Alice’s voice cracked behind me, and the world changed.
Beneath our feet, the cold stone of the armory dissolved into thick green grass. Flowers burst up in a ring around us, white, open, bathed in a light that came from nowhere. A garden. A real one, idyllic, impossible, spread out in the very heart of a training hall. And everywhere its light touched me, the burn in my muscles ebbed away, my scrapes closed over, my breath came back.
I drank it down in great gulps and threw myself back at her, quicker, carried. And for the first time, I knew what it was to fight at her side — her light at my back, my blades in front of her. We were one. In that moment, nothing in the world seemed able to separate us.
Elsa frowned. She was beginning, at last, to have to try.
That was when Alice struck for real.
"Sacred Dawn!"
A blast of white light exploded full in Elsa’s face. Blinding, total, the kind of flare that prints black spots behind your eyelids for a full minute. Anyone else would have staggered back, hands clapped over their eyes.
Elsa simply closed hers.
And kept going.
Seeing nothing, she deflected my feint, stepped back half a pace exactly where she needed to, and her blade found my wrist as if she’d had it in plain sight. She was reading the fight by ear, by the shift of the air, by something I didn’t even have a name for.
"What kind of monster is this," I breathed.
She answered by ending the duel.
Still with her eyes shut, she swept my guard aside like drawing a curtain, scythed my legs out with a sweep I saw coming and couldn’t stop, and before I’d even hit the floor, her second blade froze a hair from Alice’s throat. freewёbn૦νeɭ.com
The garden withered all at once. The armory returned, gray and bare.
Elsa opened her eyes, her breathing slightly uneven for the first time in seven days, and a wide grin split her face.
"You held," she said. "The two of you, against me, after a single week." She sheathed her blades. "We pushed you like animals, and you answered like animals. I’ve drilled noble brats for years without ever turning out a single one of your caliber."
She held out a hand to pull me up.
"You’re ready. And good thing, too, because I’m the one dragging you down those roads starting tomorrow." Her smile recovered a touch of its usual edge. "So don’t count on me to carry you out there. Now that I know what you’re capable of, I’m going to be twice as hard on you."
I think that was her way of saying she liked us.
And so it was that, a few hours later, I finally walked through the gates of the palace.
The city had nothing left of the postcard I’d gazed at from the balcony. Up close, it was loud, alive, teeming. Smells of warm bread and horse dung, the cries of merchants, kids darting between the stalls.
They’d saddled us with a dozen guards who pretended to look elsewhere while never straying more than three steps off. The cage, even outdoors. But it was outdoors all the same, and I gorged myself on it.
Alexia played guide with obvious delight.
"Above all, never pay the first price," she said, dragging me toward a fruit stall. "Here, haggling isn’t an insult, it’s a courtesy. If you accept right away, the seller is almost offended. Watch closely."
She launched into a duel with the vendor, laughing, fierce, and came away with three fruits for the price of one. She slapped one into my hand, triumphant.
"You see? It’s an art."
A little further on, she stopped dead in front of a stall of secondhand books, and her face lit up like a child’s.
"Oh. Wait, wait."
She started digging through the pile with a child’s greed, a world away from the composed tutor the court had introduced to me. She brandished a dog-eared volume, eyes shining.
"An account of the first expedition beyond the Lands of Night. I’ve been hunting for this for years." She clutched it to her chest like a treasure. "People toss these to the flea markets without even knowing what they’re worth. It’s a crime."
"You buy books when you’re already drowning in an entire library?"
"You never drown in too many books." She haggled for it with the same ferocity as the fruit and carried it off for a pittance, delighted. "This one, I’ll lend you when you come back from the road. If you promise to take care of it."
"Promise," I said. And I realized I meant it.
We wandered like that for hours. She taught me the coins, the customs, the gestures written down nowhere: when to lower your eyes, when never to, how to tell a temple from a tavern, what you gave at a wedding. She even taught me to spot counterfeit coins by the sound they made when dropped, and laughed her head off when I got it wrong three times in a row.
And between two lessons, we laughed. At everything. At nothing. At the face I made when I’d bitten into a fruit far too sour.
I’d forgotten how long it had been since I’d simply felt good.
It was only late, while looking around for Alice, that I noticed.
She was following us, a few steps behind. She said nothing. She didn’t smile, didn’t marvel at anything, didn’t haggle. She watched us, Alexia and me, and between her teeth, without even seeming to realize it, she was gnawing at the nail of her thumb.
It wasn’t sulking. Sulking has a face, sighs, little barbs. Not her. She was simply elsewhere. Her gaze fixed, resting on Alexia, following her every gesture with an attention I’d never seen in her before. The way you study something. The way you commit it to memory.
I felt a pang of guilt. I was neglecting her. I went back to her, took her hand to draw her in.
"Are you having fun?" I asked.
"As long as I’m with you," she said softly, without taking her eyes off Alexia. "Always."
She let me, docile, her fingers folded over mine. But her gaze — her gaze never let go of Alexia for a single second.
I chalked it up to tiredness. To the journey drawing near. It could only be that.
The day was fading when Alexia walked us back to the palace gates.
"Right. Tomorrow, you leave." She turned to me, and something in her tone had shifted, more hesitant. "Say, can I ask you something?"
"Of course."
"I saw, while we were walking... your body’s covered in bruises. From Elsa, I’m guessing." She blushed a little, looked down, looked back up. "I bought an ointment, yesterday. For that. It really helps, I swear. So I was thinking... would you like me to come put some on you tonight? I’ll bring something to drink, too. To celebrate the departure."
She rattled it off a little too fast, like a line rehearsed in advance, and I understood that this "for the ointment" maybe wasn’t entirely just for the ointment. The blood rushed to my cheeks like a complete idiot.
"I... yes. Yes, I’d love that."
"Perfect." Her smile lit up, relieved. "See you tonight, then."
I turned to Alice, on reflex, to share the moment.
But Alice wasn’t smiling anymore.
No façade, this time. No softness. She was staring at Alexia, motionless, and her gaze was darker than I’d ever seen it. Something in it had gone out, and something else had lit up that I had no words to name. One second. Maybe two. Then the veil dropped again, the smile returned, perfect, and I thought I’d imagined it.
Back in our quarters, I washed, gathered the little I owned for the next day’s departure, and waited.
I’ll admit I was watching for her. The slightest sound in the corridor made me lift my head. I caught myself smoothing my shirt, putting the same thing away twice. Idiot, I kept telling myself. It’s a friend coming to tend some bruises, nothing more. But my heart didn’t seem to believe it.
Evening fell. Then night.
Alexia didn’t come.
I waited longer, sitting on the edge of the bed, my ear strained toward the corridor. No footsteps. No knock at the door. Nothing but the silence of a palace drifting off to sleep.
She must have been held up, I thought. Some last-minute protocol, an unexpected errand, anything. We’d see each other tomorrow anyway, before leaving. I’d ask her then.
A little disappointed, without quite understanding why I was so disappointed, I lay down, and eventually fell asleep.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
[ IMPORTANT SYSTEM NOTICE ]
The next Chapter is optional.
You may proceed directly to Chapter 7, or read Chapter 6 first.
Chapter 6 contains information the host does not possess, it may change how you read what follows.
Skip it, and you will learn what he learns, when he learns it.
The System cannot determine which path offers the superior experience.
Decision delegated to Reader.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
