The knife is heavier than I expected. That is the first useful thing I learn.
Brennan has placed it in my hand blade-down, hilt angled across my palm, his fingers closing over mine before I can adjust my grip. His chest is against my back — not pressed, not quite — a quarter-inch of charged air between his shirt and my shoulder blades, and my body has opinions about the distance it is not going to share with the rest of me.
"Feet wider," he says. His breath moves the hair above my ear. "Weight on the back foot. Good."
The training yard is empty at this hour. Morning sun, frost on the paddock rails, the straw targets standing at the far wall like men who have agreed to be shot at for a living.
"Arm comes straight back," he says, and his hand guides my elbow into the shape he wants. "Straight forward. Release when the blade points at what you're trying to hit."
"That seems like a lot to think about at once."
"It is. That's why we practice."
He steps back. My shoulders drop a full inch without him against them. I throw.
The knife clips the edge of the target — hilt-first, rotating wrong — and falls into the straw without ceremony. A real laugh comes out of me. Short, surprised, the shape of a sound I haven't made since I was five.
My hand flies to my mouth like I've said something rude.
"Don't." Brennan's voice is low. He is smiling — really smiling, the kind that reaches the corner of his eyes. "Do that again."
"Miss the target?"
"Laugh."
My throat does a thing. I look at the knife in the straw and not at his face.
"Try again," he says. "Closer."
He tucks another blade into my palm and steps in behind me, and this time his hand stays on my waist — just the edge of his thumb against my ribs. My spine locks in a way that has nothing to do with the target.
I throw. The knife hits flat and sticks.
"Barely," I say.
"It counts."
"Does it count if it's the hilt?"
"Ask any soldier."
I am still turning to answer him when I feel it — the shift in the yard before I see it. Boots on the path behind us. Brennan's hand leaves my waist a half-second too late.
Caelan stops at the rail.
He doesn't speak. He stands with his arms crossed and watches us the way a man watches a board he has not yet decided how to play, and the silence stretches out longer than I know how to hold.
"Again," he says.
Not to Brennan. To me.
My mouth has gone dry. I pick up a third knife. Brennan has stepped back into my periphery, arms folded, jaw doing something subtle I don't have the angle to read.
I throw. The knife sticks — blade-first this time, not centered, but close enough that I stare at it to make sure I haven't imagined it.
I turn toward Brennan with a smile starting at the corner of my mouth, and Caelan is already moving.
He crosses the yard in the unhurried pace of a man who has never arrived anywhere late. He stops in front of me. His hand comes up, palm open.
"May I?" he says. Soft.
I place the knife in his palm, and his thumb drags slowly across my skin as his fingers close — a brush that might be an accident if it didn't last half a second too long. My knees do something humiliating.
"Thank you," he says.
He walks past me. Five paces farther back than Brennan had been standing. He turns, shifts his weight onto his back foot, and throws without seeming to aim at all.
The knife splits the handle of Brennan's knife cleanly down the middle.
The crack of it lands in my chest louder than it should. Brennan's jaw locks — I see it from the side, the tendon jumping once under his ear.
Caelan turns back to me. "You'll do better with a lighter blade."
He doesn't look at Brennan. He walks out of the yard the way he walked in, and the frost crunches under his boots in a way that will live in my head all morning.
I stand between the two stuck knives. My breath is coming too fast and my face is too hot, and I don't know which of the two men just won something, only that whatever was won, I was the prize.
Brennan exhales through his nose. "Lighter blade," he says, to nobody.
I do not laugh this time.
By afternoon I have ended up in the small stone room I have started calling the mending room. No one gave it to me. I simply keep ending up here, knees drawn up, a cracked clay bowl in my lap, a glue pot beside me. My hands have work. That is the point.
The candle is burning down when the door opens.
"I brought tea," Torrin says, and sets the cup beside my elbow without looking at the bowl.
The honey jar is the right one. Of course it is.
I glance up — quick, before my face can do anything — and his own face is doing nothing, which on Torrin means everything. He takes the chair across from me and unfolds his father's journal on his knee.
"May I?" he says.
My throat tightens. "Yes."
He reads. A passage about a summit when he was seven — a long table, too much candlelight, a woman at the far end of the room in a green dress.
"Your mother laughed," he reads. "The kind of laugh that makes a child turn his head. I had never heard a woman laugh like that in my father's hall."
My eyes close without my permission.
He keeps reading. His voice is low, even — a man who has spent his life making the dead audible. My mother's laugh, his father's sentence, his voice carrying both — all of it lands in a place inside me that has been locked for seventeen years.
When he finishes, I cannot speak. He does not ask me to.
"I'll leave you the tea," he says, and stands.
He is at the door when I find my voice. "Torrin."
He turns.
"Thank you."
His mouth does something soft. "That wasn't me. That was my father."
He closes the door so quietly I don't hear it.
When I reach for the cup, there is a folded paper under the saucer. I open it.
A drawing. Me — asleep — the curve of my cheek against the pillow, the hair across my temple, the line of my shoulder under the blanket. Pencil strokes so careful they must have taken him an hour. Unsigned.
I press the paper flat against my chest and close my eyes.
Past midnight, boots ring on the corridor outside the war room. I haven't slept. I am sitting on the steps of the inner hall when a scout — mud to the knees, face grey with cold — is waved through the doors.
Caelan comes out half an hour later and stops when he sees me.
"You're up."
"Couldn't sleep."
He hesitates. Something in him weighs a thing and sets it down. "The scout brought word from inside Draven territory. The first real word we've had."
"And?"
"Seraphine has not been seen outside the stronghold in three weeks. The household is saying she's resting her pregnancy. But no one sees her at the windows. No one sees her walk the gardens."
My pulse does a small wrong thing.
"There's one more detail," he says.
"What?"
"Her handmaid was dismissed the morning after the feast."
He walks past me down the corridor, and I sit on the stone step with a drawing in my pocket and a split knife handle in my head and a handmaid I cannot see — turning, and turning, and turning in my mind.