This morning it was she who glared at him. He had stopped just short of calling her a coward. She opened her mouth to retort but was stopped by Radimar’s arrival.
He wore a high-collared tunic of bleached linen over dun colored trousers and soft-soled shoes strapped at the calves. His bright hair was combed back from his face and secured at his nape with a thong. The piercing gaze Jahna found both arresting and intimidating swept the room, touching first on Sodrin, then on her.
“You’re both wasting your time talking when you could be practicing your footwork or sparring with each other,” he said.
Sodrin flexed his shoulders and stretched his arms in preparation for the lesson. “Remind me again why I’m sparring with her?”
The swordmaster walked the room’s perimeter, testing the tautness of the ropes Sodrin had strung earlier by swinging on each one. Jahna tried not to gape at the impressive sight of Radimar’s shoulder muscles flexing under his shirt or the way his thighs tightened as he stretched from one rope to another, pulling himself along like a spider on a web. Nimble, quick, deadly.
Satisfied with his student’s work, he dropped to his feet and dusted his hands before answering Sodrin’s question. “Because sometimes an untrained adversary is the most dangerous one. They don’t follow a memorized rule, don’t employ a familiar tactic or strategy. Every once in awhile they get in a lucky hit that can be very unlucky for you. Even fatal.”
“His luck holds this morning, Sir Radimar,” she chimed in. “Today is my day only to observe and record the lesson.”
Radimar’s thin-lipped mouth turned down at the corners. “It will serve you best if you participate as often as possible, my lady. Doing so will anchor it more solidly in your memory.”
“Afraid?”
Sodrin’s taunt made Jahna bristle. She stuck her tongue out at him. “Hardly.” She waved a hand down her front. “I’m not dressed for a lesson.”
Radimar shrugged. “Then dress for it. We’ll be here when you return.”
She raced back to her room to change into a tunic and a pair of Sodrin’s trousers she’d cut and altered to fit her frame, and returned to the solar. The two men had already begun training, with a regimen of tumbling and swinging on and among the ropes. At Radimar’s gesture, she joined Sodrin on the webbing.
The exercise itself seemed like child’s play when Radimar first described it, but brother and sister soon learned it was anything but play. Jahna lost count of the number of times her tumbles landed her in a tangle of limbs and rope or sent her careening into her brother. Radimar’s repeated advice for how to avoid such bodily crashes even invaded her dreams.
“You move like you’re invisible to each other. Always be aware of your opponent. Where they are in relation to you, to the furniture in the room, to the doors and windows. Learn their size, their reach and how to stay out of their way until you choose to bridge the distance between you.”
He often backed up his instructions with demonstrations, allowing Jahna to see how he moved through the ropes around and over Sodrin, quick and agile, sometimes coming close enough to her brother to flutter his hair but never quite touching. He did the same for Sodrin, leaving Jahna winded and a little dizzy as she staggered away from the webbing to catch her breath. It was an exercise in control, in strength, and as he said, a supreme awareness of the space another person occupied on the ropes at any given time.
Lessons always began with the ropes, then moved to footwork—Jahna’s favorite part of the training. Footwork was precise and offered insight into how her body balanced best, moved quickest. Unlike her, Sodrin hated it and complained at first over Radimar’s relentless drills regarding stance, passing steps and shoulder position.
“Nothing about this involves sword fighting,” he complained one morning.
It seemed as if Radimar ignored the complaint as he circled Jahna, motioning for her to widen her stance a little more and turn her shoulder a hair. He raised a hand to signal she stay as she was and with one quick motion, reached out and lightly shoved Sodrin.
The move sent Sodrin flailing backward, and he landed on his backside with a grunt. Jahna watched askance and pressed her lips together to hold back a giggle.
Radimar stretched out an arm to help a flustered Sodrin up from the floor. “Jahna could have easily done what I just did. You’re resting your weight on your heels instead of the balls of your feet, and your center is too high. Knocking someone over with a feather is possible when they stand like that.”
He returned to Jahna and motioned for Sodrin to join him. “Watch.” He shoved Jahna with the same force he used on Sodrin. Her torso rocked back a little, but her feet stayed planted. Radimar pushed again, this time a little harder, with the same results. The third time he did it hard enough that his bicep flexed, and Jahna’s lead foot lost its grip on the floor, slipping sideways.
“I’m easily twice your sister’s size and weight,” he said. “But did you see the effort it took to make her budge? That’s all due to her stance.” He raised an eyebrow at Sodrin. “Footwork is the backbone of sword fighting. You can’t fight if you can’t keep your feet under you. Swinging a blade around doesn’t make you a swordsman, Sodrin.”
Suitably chastised and more willing to listen, Sodrin worked harder at curbing his impatience and listening to Radimar’s instructions. He wasn’t always successful, but he tried. His disappointment when Radimar, one morning, presented him and Jahna each with a wooden waster showed clearly in his expression.
He gripped the wooden sword, tipping it one way and then the other, his upper lip lifting in a scornful curve. “What is this child’s toy?”
Jahna rolled her eyes. She found her brother’s unending complaints irritating. Radimar’s unwavering patience with Sodrin spoke of his abilities as a teacher as well as an expert swordsman. Had she been him, she would have strangled Sodrin by now.
Radimar hefted his own sword, a waster as well. “This ‘toy’ will become your best friend over the next several weeks. You’re going to fight with it, sleep with it, dream about it, and fall in love with it by the time you’re ready to hold a steel blade.” He then proceeded to show Sodrin and Jahna how the “toy” could be a lethal, awful weapon capable of dealing out bruises and split flesh when wielded by a capable hand.
The current lesson incorporated all the things Radimar had introduced in the previous weeks—tumbling, footwork and bladework with the wasters. Sodrin struggled against the tyranny of the training circles painted on the floor.