The Talented (29 page)

“
I agree,” Ben said. “We
should let Adrienne take charge of the guards, and listen to her
advice in this situation. It would be the best use of her skills.”
It was a logical argument, and most of the scholars seemed to be
considering it. Ben looked at Adrienne. “Will thirty guards
suffice?”

It was fewer than she
wanted, but it was a start. “Yes.”

“
You don’t think it will
take away from the training time the two of you need?” Elder Rynn
asked Ben.

Ben looked between the
Elder and Adrienne, who was covered in blood and exhausted from the
fight, but still standing there, straight and strong, before the
commission. “I don’t know how much more instruction I can give
her,” Ben said honestly. “What she can do, what she did today…it
was beyond any hopes I had for her abilities. She has exceeded all
of my expectations.”

••••••

Training the Kessering
guards was different than training the Yearlings back in Kyrog.
Adrienne was able to handle and influence the guards new to the
post, but the men who had already been guards before Adrienne took
over the training were belligerent and unwilling to listen to her
instructions.

“
Okay, let’s start from the
beginning,” Adrienne told the thirty assembled men. “Sheathe your
swords.”

“
Is this really necessary?”
asked one of the guards who had been present when the city was
attacked. “We know how to handle swords.” He looked around at the
new additions to the city guard. “Well, some of us
know.”

Adrienne considered it
amazing that any of the guards, new or old, weren’t tripping over
their own swords. As a lieutenant at Kyrog, her word had been law,
and the penalty for disobeying her had been steep. Here, she had no
power over the men she was training except for the meager power
some of them gave her. In Kyrog, she would have demonstrated
exactly how easily she could disarm him right now. Here, she had to
rely instead on her less-honed skills of persuasion.

“
Not everyone is at the
same level,” Adrienne explained to the guard with a patience she
was not really feeling. “I want to train all of you as a unit, from
the beginning, until you are all equally capable of using your
weapons effectively. Now sheathe your swords, and we’ll start from
the beginning.”

She ran them through the
basic sword maneuvers, both offensive and defensive, at a slow and
controlled pace, remembering almost fondly when she had thought
Jeral’s skill was deficient. She had gone to Captain Garrett’s tent
full of fire and anger over Jeral’s lack of skill, but even then he
had been leagues ahead of these men.

She wished she could train
the city guard as she had Jeral. Instead of practice sheathing and
unsheathing swords, Adrienne would start by teaching them to fight
without weapons and build their skills from that most basic level.
But in this situation, regardless of what she knew to be best,
training them as she had trained Jeral was not an option. The
existing guards would never have tolerated it, and even many of the
new guards would probably balk at the idea of waiting to get
trained with weapons for even a few days, let alone
months.

Adrienne had the assembled
guards increase the speed of the maneuvers, and watched as the
careful synchronicity fell apart. Half of them could not follow the
correct form at increased speed, and many of those that could were
tiring already. “Good,” Adrienne said with false enthusiasm when
they completed their forms. “Let’s go for a short run before we
break for lunch.”

“
Why?” It was the same
guard who had questioned her about sheathing their
swords—Charles—and Adrienne wished she could assign him to cleaning
the mess hall for a week. It was the least of what he
deserved.

“
To clear the mind,” she
told him. She gave him a conspiratorial smile, a
we’re-on-the-same-side look. “And to see how the new recruits keep
up.”

Charles nodded wisely. “Of
course. Test them out.”

Adrienne knew that it
would be as much a test for Charles as any of the other men, and
the run had never been meant as a test but a way to work on their
endurance. She disliked having to turn it into a competition.
“Okay, fall in.” She started them off at an easy pace, barely
faster than a jog. The men were mostly young, but none of them were
used to strenuous physical activity.

Adrienne had devised a two
mile loop, and by the end of it many of the men were lagging, a few
even stopping to walk and catch their breaths. Charles was one of
the latter, and Adrienne could see the anger on his face as he
realized he had failed the test. “Let’s break until mid-afternoon,”
Adrienne said. “We’ll practice sparring then. Meet back here at
three.”

She would need the extra
time to prepare some supplies. She did not trust these men to spar
with real weapons and not kill themselves, so she would need some
practice swords for them to use.

“
You look unhappy,” Pieter
said. Adrienne was surprised to see the blacksmith at the training
ground. Neither he nor Louella had shown much interest in her new
assignment other than asking if she was pleased to have it. She had
initially said yes, but now she was not so sure.

“
I have no authority over
the trainees,” she told him, gripping her braid in a fist and
tugging repeatedly. “How am I supposed to train them right when
they can do whatever they want without consequences?”

Pieter looked speculative.
“The commission wants you to train them. Won’t they give you more
control if you tell them it’s necessary?”

Adrienne snorted
derisively. “The commission hardly wanted me in charge of training
at all. If I ask for more control over the guards, they will
probably stop the training where it is.” She sighed and released
the hold on her braid that she had hardly been aware of taking,
letting her hand fall back to her side. “Besides, I doubt they
would understand the need to slow the pace and make sure everyone
is on solid ground before escalating their training.”

Pieter’s muscular arms
bulged as he crossed them. “Doesn’t all training start with
building a base?” he asked. “I was a blacksmith’s apprentice for
six months before I got to do more than stoke the fire and pump the
bellows.”

“
Because you might have
ruined your master’s work, or hurt yourself,” she said. “Soldiering
is like that: dangerous even during training if you don’t know
enough. I don’t think whatever training is necessary to become a
scholar calls for those same checks.” Her lips twisted in a wry
smile. “All scholars would need to worry about is dropping books on
their feet.”

He made a noncommittal
sound. “Perhaps.” He was quiet a minute, studying her. “Are you
sure you can’t…intimidate them into listening?” he asked. “They
don’t know the limits of your authority.”

Adrienne nearly laughed.
“I stopped being intimidating the moment I became a
commission-approved instructor,” she said bitterly. It had been as
though, now that the commission was using her, she was no longer
dangerous. Even the citizens of Kessering treated her differently
now. Despite her bloody walk through the city after the battle,
once the commission had put her in charge of training the guards it
seemed she was suddenly considered safe. She’d spent months wishing
people weren’t afraid of her, but now that they weren’t she
realized it was almost worse this way. No fear, but also no
respect.

Adrienne could tell from
Pieter’s expression that he saw the problem now, and no easy
solution to it. “If there’s anything I can do,” he
offered.

“
You can help me find
something to use as practice swords,” she told him. “They’re likely
to stab one another if I give them the real thing.”

Pieter nodded but didn’t
move. “I didn’t come here to ask you about the training. Or not
just that.”

“
Why then?”

“
I helped to bury the
bodies today.”

Adrienne’s face softened
in sympathy. “I’m sorry. I know how hard it is.”

He moved his big shoulders
uncomfortably. “That’s not why I’m here, either. I found these.” He
held out his hand and in his palm were three coins.

Adrienne stepped closer
and picked one up to examine it. At first it was foreign to her,
but with a stab of shock she recognized the markings. “It’s
Almetian.”

“
I know. I showed it to
Louella, and she identified it.”

“
Louella?”

“
She has some Almetian
coins. From her parents.”

“
They were Almetian,”
Adrienne said. She’d thought as much.

“
Her mother was born in
Almet, her father on the Samaroan side of the border. She doesn’t
tell people.”

Adrienne nodded.
Suspecting and knowing were two different things. She looked back
down at the coin, then back up into Pieter’s face. “What does it
mean?”

“
I don’t know.”

••••••

Adrienne was thankful that
the sparring had been done with practice swords. As it was, the men
were bruised and bleeding, and she had needed to call for Louella
when one of the men tripped over his wooden practice sword and
split his scalp on the hard stone pathway.

Real swords likely would
have resulted in multiple deaths.

“
You all did well,”
Adrienne lied. She wanted to curse them out, like she would the
Yearlings in Kyrog, but she locked the words down tight. “I saw
some of you using the moves I taught you over the last few
days.”

Far too few had used the
moves, and that was the problem. Adrienne had made it a point to
have her trainees in Kyrog as familiar with the moves as they were
with breathing before they ever began sparring. Jeral had told her
once that he would sometimes dream that he was doing those moves at
night. There was less danger and more value in sparring when
everyone knew what they were doing. What they had done today had
been a waste of everyone’s time.

“
For the rest of the week
we will stick with going over forms with real swords before
resuming sparring with practice swords next week.”

There were grumbles from
the men, and the ever-troublesome Charles stepped to the front of
the group, his legs widespread, hands on his hips. Ricco favored
that stance, but Charles looked pompous rather than formidable in
that particular pose. “Why can’t we spar again tomorrow?” he
asked.

With supreme effort,
Adrienne forced her snarl into a smile. “A few days will give your
scrapes and bruises time to heal,” she said. Waiting for scrapes
and bruises to heal was a ridiculous excuse, one that would have
had any soldier in Kyrog bent over with laughter, but the assembled
men seemed to be considering it. Some even nodded their heads in
agreement.

“
We could go to the
healers,” Charles said, jutting his chin forward.

“
And you can wait a few
days to spar again,” Adrienne said firmly, not backing down.
Charles was a bully, and if she gave in to Charles on this, she
would lose the little control she had over the men.

“
If we go to the healers,
we won’t have to wait to practice more,” another man said,
apparently emboldened by Charles’s words.

“
If the minor injuries you
sustained today warrant a trip to a healer’s shop, perhaps you
should consider a different means of employ,” Adrienne snapped.
“Dismissed.”

She left before anyone
else could argue with her, and when she was safely out of view she
removed her leather gloves and threw them down an alley, disgusted
with the men and with herself. She wanted to slap the smile off
that smug bastard Charles’s face. She wanted to spar with one of
them to show them all just how ill-prepared they were. She wanted
to scream and rant and rave, but she had no choice but to keep her
emotions under tight control.

Adrienne took several deep
breaths before going to collect her gloves. As she bent over the
second one, she became aware of another presence in the
alley.

She turned with a smooth,
practiced move and stood to face the young guard at the entrance to
the narrow street.

“
Ad-er-Lieutenant?” he
asked, seemingly unsure how to address her.

“
Lieutenant,” she
confirmed. If anyone in this Creator-blasted city should call her
Lieutenant, it was the men she trained.

“
Lieutenant, the way you’re
training us…it’s not how you would train soldiers, is
it?”

“
No,” Adrienne said, her
answer coming out sharp and impatient. She wanted to escape the
fool guards for just a short time, not relive the disaster that was
their training by talking about it with one of them.

“
Why? That is, I heard you
have experience training soldiers, and I’m wondering why you aren’t
training us like you would train them. Soldiers.” Fear and nerves
had him stumbling over his words.

“
What’s your name?”
Adrienne asked.

“
Flynn,
Lieutenant.”

“
Flynn. My main job in
Kyrog was training soldiers from other camps. Those soldiers would
come to Kyrog for training with the elite, and I would give them
that.” She remembered the epiphany she’d had when training Jeral,
the moment she’d realized the difference she could make by training
even just one soldier. “In Kyrog, months could pass before any of
my trainees even touched a weapon.”