Jay Lake - Green

The Blades were another sort altogether. One girl of our nine, Jappa, had come from a trading house, training with the justiciary aspirants awhile before joining the Blades as an older-than-normal Second Petal. Otherwise our girls were street rats and foundlings and natural children of unmarried daughters.

And one foreigner, of course.

Me.

My skin might be Selistani, but my scarred face was not. A small child with my looks would have been drowned. An older girl would have been cast out for a beggar. Even more so, my speech was not Selistani. Most of all, what I had in my head was very much not of this place.

My fellow aspirants quickly came to prize some of that foreign knowledge. Guttersnipes were not so educated in cookery, but they certainly appreciated food. While some among the women made it their business to be in the temple kitchens at all hours of the day, my special talents in that area were quite different.

We had lessons of every sort. My experiences were truckled out of me in those sessions. We also trained with the Lily Blades themselves; they frequently took us out into the city with them.

Some of those excursions were runs, much as I had done by night with the Dancing Mistress back in Copper Downs. The rooftops of Kalimpura were not so useful as in my old city, but the Below was, if anything, more elaborate. The undercity was inhabited by entire gray-capped castes of people who came to the surface only at night. Armories and cisterns and granaries and dungeons and smithies and a whole life could be found in Kalimpura’s Below.

This was a kind of heaven to me. I knew how to move underground. My falls and drops and dead reckoning were as good as Mother Shaila’s, who led many of the underground training runs, and better than most of the other Blades. She quickly had me drilling the aspirants. I became caught up in reconstructing the lessons once taught me by the Dancing Mistress. How had she led me to my knowledge, what steps had she taken me through to the understanding?

That in turn kept me awake at nights and during our rare free hours, working on paper and slow-stepping through exercises with Samma.

During those months, I also took up my belled silk once more. I had neglected it on the road from Bhopura, lost in my despair, but I had never completely abandoned the thing. I could remake the count of days once more-how often had I lost it before? The other girls mocked me awhile, but eventually they grew accustomed to the momentary sound of tiny bells ringing as I sewed a little while in some late hour of the evening.

As I attached my bells, I thought about children. Federo had stolen me for a special purpose. Not stolen, really. Papa had been paid for me, after all. Here in Kalimpura, there were children on every street. They carried burdens and sold fruit and raced with messages strapped to their forearms and cringed in the backs of carts. How many of them were free? How many of them were with their mothers and fathers?

I could not forget the promises made to myself back in Copper Downs. Would I somehow save all these children? Could I help any of them? How would I find and best a rich man surrounded by blades and bars?

When I was able to set those thoughts aside, the hardest part of my new life was fitting me into the Blade training. Other than the underground, where I excelled, I had missed much that they expected of someone my age.

“Now try to be stepping below my attack,” said Mother Vajpai. Today she wore a simple robe like everyone else, though the waist was cinched and the skirt tied off into legs. We were in one of the lower courts beneath the temple, where the Lily Blades had their passages of arms. When the women of the order were not using it, aspirants were free to collect bruises as we and our training Mothers saw fit.

Mother Vajpai had taken a special interest in me.

Samma, Jappa, and three others of our nine were in the lower court that day. Lanterns hissed with the sewer gas that drove their flames, shedding bright, almost shadowless light across the width of the damp stone room. Straw covered the floor. The edges were lined with rolled bolsters of muslin padded with cotton batting.

I edged around Mother Vajpai. Here we had rules. “Only those steps and movements and blows that are permitted in the circle,” she’d told me.

“When will we fight without rules?” I’d asked Samma later. She laughed and told me that was the last Petal, before we flowered into full Lily Blades.

So we had rules, until we didn’t. Much like my time in Pomegranate Court. Nine years with rules, and a last few moments without. This was a way I could live.

I backed away from her, letting my eyes follow her feet. Stance was everything, I’d been taught, starting the night that the Dancing Mistress had thrown me down to the stone.

When Mother Vajpai struck, I almost missed it. Her stance had not changed at all. Only the posture of her upper body. She swung that flattened right hand. In the stretching moments of the coming blow, it looked like a sword blade to me. I slipped on purpose, sacrificing balance in order to drop out of the line of the blow. I knew I could roll away to recover before her next swing. It would not be a tactic I could use forever, but at the size of my middle youth, it should have worked.

It might have worked, against the other training Mothers or the working Blades. It would have worked against the other aspirants, only because they were all slower than I. Against Mother Vajpai, who had seen me do this before, it only caught me a handstrike from her left, which swung in just out of my line of sight to slap me in the right temple.

I collapsed in a welter of redness and pain. Even breathing seemed beyond me for a time. When I caught up to myself, Mother Vajpai was speaking. “… from the center. Always to be following the eyes of your opponent. There are very, very few who can strike where they do not look.” She glanced down at me, smiling so that the silver edges of her teeth gleamed in the lamplight. “Can any of you take that blow as Green has?”

I heard a shuffling of feet, but no one spoke.

Mother Vajpai reached down for my hand and helped me up. “We do not train so much to forms,” she told me in a conversational voice, as if it were up to the others to overhear. “When one fights in a form, one expects one’s opponent to do so. Most whom you will meet with bared blade and bloody eye are not so obliging.”

“Thank you, Mother.” I struggled not to stutter as my head rang.

Her voice pitched up again, teaching-loud once more. “Green is being here less than two moons, yet she is better than any of you at defense. She can step out of almost any blow save the very trickiest, as I was just delivering. She can fall and come up again before her attacker has recovered their swing. I am wanting you to watch how she centers her body. I am wanting you to watch how she watches me. Once she learns to read my eyes properly, even I shall be having a struggle to land a blow upon her.”

She reached over and brushed her fingers across my face before wagging her index finger in front of me. “Your eyes are being good,” she said. “Shall you be attacking me now?”

“Yes, please.” I’d only ever touched her once, that first day. Mother Vajpai had limped slightly for almost a week. This was a quiet point of pride for me. Now, the only time we’d sparred since then, I might as well have been fighting the warm air from a bread oven for all I could touch her.

Our usual fight trainer was Mother Anai. She had been working with me on attacks, and I’d touched her three times already. I was getting better, and I thought I was ready to try Mother Vajpai again.

A feint was pointless. She was far more experienced. Likewise her reach of arm beat mine by a good margin. If I were fighting for my life, without the rules of the room, I might have gone for her face. As it was, I bowed, spun left, locked my eyes on her right side, then dove out of my own line of vision toward her left leg.