I was just sixteen when we began, and the sky was always gray with the start or end of snow. I learned to move when I was too cold, too sore, too tired. I learned to keep going. All the things I wanted — Ad, my mother, a life of endless hard blue days in the fields, and just one true friend with dark hair and a father still alive — all those precious things became buried under a crust of long outlander muscles. I began to imagine myself an arrow laid against the string, ready to fly. I looked at the village kids with my arrow’s eyes, and they stayed out of my way.
By the summer I knew enough not to knock myself silly. I was tired of the same exercises and hungry now for more than just revenge: I wanted to be a warrior. “Show me how to use a sword,” I begged Tom constantly, sometimes parrying an invisible adversary with a long stick.
“No,” he said for the hundredth time.
“Why not?”
“There’s no point until you get your full growth. You’re tall as me now, but you might make another inch or two before you’re done.”
“You didn’t make me wait to learn how to fight.”
“Swords are different. They change your balance. You’ve got to make the sword part of yourself, it’s not enough just to pick it up and wave it around. It’s true that you’ve learned well,” he added. “But you haven’t learned everything.”
“Then teach me everything.”
“Leave it alone, Mars.”
I had no idea I was going to do it: I had never given him anything but the obedience due a teacher. But I was so frustrated with behaving. “You teach me, damn you,” I said, and swung the stick as hard as I could at his ribs.
He softened against the blow and absorbed it. The stick was dry and thin, but still it must have hurt. It sounded loud, perhaps because we were both so silent.
I stammered, “Tom, truly, I was wrong to do it, I just …”
“You’re stupid, Mars.” His voice was very quiet. “You’re not the strongest, you never will be, and no sword will change that. I’m heavier and faster than you, and there’s thousands more like me out there.” He waved at the world beyond the fields, and when I turned my head, he reached out and twisted the branch away as easily as taking a stick from a puppy. “All you have are your wits and your body, if you can ever learn how to use them.”
What had we been doing, all these months? “I can use my body.”
A bruise I’d given him at the corner of his mouth stretched into a purple line. Then his smile changed into the stiff look that people wear when they are forcing themselves to a thing they’d rather not do; like the day that he’d had to butcher Ad’s favorite nanny goat while she cried into my shoulder. I did not like him looking at me as if I were that goat.
“You want to learn everything.” He nodded. “Well, then you shall.” And he came for me.
I managed to keep him off me for more than a minute, a long stretch of seconds that burned the strength from the muscles in my arms and legs. But he was right; he was too strong, too fast. First he got me down and then he beat me, his face set, his hands like stones against my ribs and my face. His last blow was to my nose, and when he finally stood up, he was spattered with me.
“This is everything, Mars. This is what I have to teach you. Become the weapon. Do it, and no one will touch you in a fight. Otherwise it’s only a matter of time before someone sends you to the next world in pieces.”
I was trying to spit instead of swallow; it made it harder to breathe, and every cough jarred my broken nose.
“I regret this,” he said remotely. “But every time we meet from now on will be like this until you win or you quit. If you quit, I’ll teach you nothing ever again. That’s the lesson. I don’t think you can do it, you know. I don’t think you’re ready. I wish you hadn’t pushed so hard.” He spoke as if he were talking to a stranger on the road.
He left me at the field’s edge, under a creamy blue sky and the alders that were scarred with months of practice; all those pointless hours. After a long time I dragged myself up and limped home, turning my head away as I passed the Homrun cottage so that I would not have to see whether Tom was watching. I let my mother bind my ribs, avoiding her questions and the silence that followed. Then I wrapped myself up in wool blankets and shivered all night, bruised and betrayed, frightened, and hopelessly alone.
He beat me badly half a dozen times in the next year. Between our fights, I practiced and worked and invented a thousand different ways to keep distance between us, to protect my body from his. None of it made a speck of difference.
The day came when I knew I could never win. There was no grand omen, no unmistakable sign. I was milking our goat and I suddenly understood that Tom was right. Someone would always be faster or stronger, and until I learned my place I would always be hurt and lonely. It was time to make peace and stop dreaming of Lemon City. I should be planning a fall garden, and tending Ad’s grave. So there, it was decided; and I went on pulling methodically at the little goat’s dry teats until she bleated impatiently and kicked at me to let her go. Then I sat on the milking stump and stared around me at the cottage, the tall birch that shaded it, the yard with the goat and the chickens, the half-tumbled stone wall that bounded our piece of the world. If someone had come by and said, “What are you looking at, Mars?”, I would have said Nothing. Nothing.
Massive storm clouds began moving up over my shoulder from the west. The shadow of the birch across the south wall faded, and the chickens scuttled into their coop and tucked themselves up in a rattling of feathers. The wind turned fierce and cold; and then the rain hammered down. I hunched on the stump until it occurred to me that I was freezing, that I should see the stock were safe and then get inside; and when I tried to stand the wind knocked me over like a badly pitched fence post. I pulled myself up. Again the wind shoved me down. And again. This time I landed on one of my half-dozen unhealed bruises. It hurt; and it made me so angry that I forgot about my numb hands and my despair. I stood again. There was a loud snap behind me. It took a long second to turn against the wind: By that time, the branch that the storm had torn from the birch tree was already slicing toward me like a thrown spear.
I took a moment to understand what was happening, to imagine the wood knifing through me, to see my grave next to Ad’s. Then the branch reached me, and I slid forward and to the right as if to welcome it; and as we touched I whirled off and away, staggered but kept my balance, and watched the branch splinter against the shed. The goat squealed from behind the wall; and I laughed from my still, safe place in the center of the storm.
I had an idea now, and the only way to test it was by getting beaten again, and so I did: but not as badly. When he’d finally let me up, Tom said, as always, “Do you give in?”
“No.”
He was supposed to turn and walk away. Instead, he kept hold of my tunic with his left hand and wiped his bleeding mouth with his right. He took his time. Then he said, “What was that first move?”
I shrugged.
“Who taught you that?”
I shrugged again, as much as I was able with one shoulder sprained.