After he saw our stormfighting, Gerlain started putting other quads against us, so that we fought more than anyone else. Most of the fighters didn’t know what to make of us, and I began to see that Gerlain was using us as a touchstone to test the others. Those who tried to learn from us, who adapted as best they could, had the good news with us when Gerlain’s sergeant read out the names at the end of the day; and Gerlain himself stopped Lucky and said, curtly, “You and your quad’ll be teaching the rest an hour a day, after regular training, starting tomorrow afternoon. Work out your program with Sergeant Manto. And don’t get above yourselves. Manto will be watching, and so will I.”
“Hoo hoo!” said Lucky. “Let’s get drunk!” But I was already intoxicated by the day, dizzy with the feel of so many strangers’ skin against mine. And I was a guard. I whispered it to Ad as we walked back to the inn through the streets that now seemed familiar and welcoming. I made it, I told her. Lemon City. I thought of Tom, and my mother: I’m safe, I found a place for myself. I saw Ad with her sheepskin and her special stick; I felt Tom’s tears on my skin, and my mother’s hand on my hair. Then Ro was standing in the door to the inn, looking for me, waiting: and I went in.
It was the stormfighting that kept us out of a job for such a long time. Gerlain and Manto saw it as a tactical advantage and a way to teach warriors not to rely on their swords. Tom would have approved. But many of our fellow soldiers did not. Our frank admissions that it was still raw, as dangerous to the fighter as to the target, and our matter-of-fact approach to teaching, were the only things that kept us from being permanent outsiders in the guard. Even so, we made fewer friends than we might have.
“Can’t let you go yet,” Manto would shrug each month, when new postings were announced. “Need you to teach the newbs.”
“Let someone else teach,” Ro was arguing again.
“Who? There’s no one here who knows it the way you do.”
“That’s because you keep posting them on as soon as they’ve halfway learned anything.”
“Shucks,” Manto grinned, showing her teeth. “You noticed.”
“Manto, try to see this from our point of view …”
“Oh, gods,” I whispered to Lucky, “There he goes, being reasonable again. Do something.”
“Right,” she whispered back, and then stepped between Ro and Manto, pointing a finger at Ro when he tried to protest. She said pleasantly, “We came here to be guards, not baby-minders. You want us to teach, fine, we’ll teach other guards. Until then, I think we’ll just go get a beer.” She turned and started for the gate, hooking a thumb into Ro’s belt to pull him along. Brax sighed and reached for her gear. I gave Manto a cheerful smile and a goodbye salute.
“All right, children,” Manto said, pitching her voice to halt Lucky and Ro. “Report to Andavista tomorrow at the palace. Take all your toys, you’ll draw quarters up there.”
Even Lucky was momentarily speechless.
Manto grinned again. “The orders have been in for a couple of weeks. I just wanted to see how much more time I could get out of you.” She slapped me on the arm so hard I almost fell over. “Welcome to the army.”
“Where the hell have you people been?” Sergeant Andavista snarled at us the next morning. “Been waiting for you for two weeks.” There seemed to be no good answer to that, so we didn’t even try. “Your rooms are at the end of the southwest gallery. Unpack and report back here to me in ten minutes. Move!”
The rooms had individual beds, for which I was grateful. The double-wide bunks at the training camp had made us all more tense with one another as time went on, and I was tired of sleeping on the floor — particularly after a good day’s work, when my body felt hollowed out by the thousand moments of desire roused and sated and born again, every time we grappled, when I only wanted to sleep close to one of my unknowing lovers and drink in the smell of our sweat on their skin.
Andavista handed us off to the watch commander, who gave us new gear with the palace insignia and a brain-numbing recital of guard schedules. Then she found a man just coming off watch and drafted him to show us around. The soldier looked bone-tired, but he nodded agreeably enough and tried to hide his yawns as he led us up and down seemingly endless hallways. He pointed out the usual watch stations: main gate, trade entrances, public rooms, armory, the three floors of rooms where the bureaucrats lived and worked, and the fourteen floors of nobles’ chambers, which he waved at dismissively. I remembered my mother saying ticks on a dog.
He brought us to a massive set of wooden doors strapped with iron. “Royal suite,” he said economically. “Last stop on the tour. Can you find your own way back?”
We did, although it took the better part of an hour and made us all grumpy. “Not bad,” the watch commander commented when we returned. “Last week’s set had to be fetched out.”
And so we settled. It wasn’t much different from living in my village, except that I belonged. We learned soldiery and taught stormfighting and found time to practice by ourselves, to reinforce old ideas, to invent new ones. It was an easy routine to settle to, but I’d had my lessons too well from Tom to ever relax completely, and the rest of the quad had learned to trust my edge. And it helped in a turned-around way that news of us had spread up from the training ground, and there were soldiers we’d never met who resented us for being different and were contemptuous of what they’d heard about stormfighting. Being the occasional target of pointed remarks or pointed elbows was new for Brax and Lucky and Ro; it kept them aware in a way that all my warnings never could. So on the day we found swords at our throats, we were ready.
They came for the king and prince during the midnight watch when we were stationed outside the royal wing. Ro thought he might have seen the king once, at the far end of the audience room, but these doors were the closest we had ever been to the people we were sworn to protect. And it was our first posting to this most private area of the palace. Perhaps that’s why they chose our watch to try it. Or perhaps because they had dismissed the purposely slow practice drills of storm art as nothing more than fancy-fighting; it was a common enough belief among our detractors.
The first sign we had that anything was amiss was when two of the day watch quads came up the hall. Brax stepped forward; it was her night to be in charge. “We’re relieving you,” their leader said. “Andavista wants you down at the gates.”
“What’s up?” Brax asked neutrally, but I could see the way her shoulders tensed.
The other shrugged. “Dunno. Some kind of commotion at the gates, security’s being tightened inside. Andavista says jump, I reckon it’s our job to ask which cliff he had in mind.”
Brax stood silent for a moment, thinking. “Ro, go find Andavista or Saree and get it in person. No offense,” she added to the two quads in front of her.
“None taken,” their leader said; and then her sword was out and coming down on Brax. She struck hard and fast, but Brax was already under her arm and pushing her off center, taking only enough time to break the other woman’s arm as she went down. The other seven moved in, Brax scrambled up with blood on her sword, and then they were on us.
I wasn’t ready for the noise of it, the clattering of metal on metal, the yells, the way that everything reverberated in the closed space of the hallway. I could hear the bolts slamming into place in the doors behind us, and knew that at least someone was alerted: No one but Andavista or Gerlain would get inside now. Lucky was shouting but I couldn’t tell what or who it was meant for. Then I saw Ro shaking his head even as he turned and cut another soldier’s feet out from under him, and I understood. “Go on,” I yelled. “Get help! We don’t know how many more there might be!”