55. Sneaks (V) (Patreon)

Believe it or not, I've never been fond of combat. Competition? Definitely. And sparring, even very vigorous sparring? That can be great fun. But combat is, at its essence, the use of force against somebody who will cause you harm, often deadly harm, if you don't succeed. The only time that combat isn't terrifying is when you so thoroughly outclass your opponent that their odds of success are a mouse's cough in a gale. This is why we train.

Our Basic Combat class was held out in the dusty field northwest of the residence halls. It was an area utilized for school competitions, large enough to play a regulation game of stickball, though it was rarely used for that. Currently, our class occupied the north end of the field while a more advanced combat class occupied the south. The worn brick bleachers had enough seating for perhaps a thousand attendees - though I doubt they'd seen that many in years. Currently, about a dozen onlookers were clustered near the advanced combat class, cheering and shouting strategy and encouragement. Our class, on the other hand, was attended by nobody but us and our teachers.

The class was headed by Ashota Soto, a corporal in the Shadowguard. For those not in the know, all Shadowguard are former Collegium students - the officers are all full Shadows while the enlisted are Greycloaks who never fully matriculated. Even so, being a Greycloak with an additional decade of combat experience makes you one of the most elite fighters on the planet, and Soto was no exception. He would demonstrate each move 'at speed', often knocking the wind out of his hapless Greycloak volunteers, and would then demonstrate the technique slowly, breaking it down into parts.

He paced back and forth, inspecting the thirty or so Sneaks in class, sometimes stopping to adjust our military 'at-ease' stance. He adjusted my own stance no fewer than four times - feet shoulder-width apart, toes forward, hands clasped behind the back, spine straight, shoulders squared, eyes fixed forward ('feetoes claspine squareye' as the children's mnemonic goes). "Tell me, Sneaks, when an out-of-control carriage comes barreling down the street at you, what do you do?"

"Get out of the way!" some of us shouted - not me. I had no idea what was going on.

"That's right! There's no safe way to stop a carriage with your body. A blade is the same - first and foremost, you get out of the way! No fancy blocks, no joint locks. Not yet - not for a long time."

I should note: there is an effective technique for stopping a blade with your body. It just happens to involve not getting too hurt when somebody stabs you… needless to say, it's fairly advanced.

We went through warm-ups before breaking into pairs to run through drills. Unfortunately, my injured leg meant I couldn't pair up with Mailyn. Instead, I was paired with an older boy named Heinrico, a dusky, effortlessly handsome boy who'd sprained his ankle a few weeks ago and was clearly using the injury to skimp on class. While everybody else was practicing how to roll and dodge away from a knife, he and I ran through a strike-and-block exercise that required relatively little lower body movement. Even so, it was clear that Heinrico didn't have much use for the brace around his ankle.

"You could participate in the normal exercises," I said, jealous eyes turning toward where Mailyn had paired up with a light-haired boy who wielded his wooden dagger with real gusto.

"Maybe. I wouldn't want to reinjure my ankle, though. It's still tender," Heinrico said unconvincingly. "I'm not much of a fighter," he added.

As I've said, I'm not much of a fighter, either. I dislike actual combat. That said, it's objectively better to be very good at combat, should the need arise, than it is to be very mediocre. Even on my second day as a Sneak, I was well aware of this. Heinrico winced as I struck his forearm with my own.

"Lighten up - we're going to bruise," he said.

I rolled down my sleeve to demonstrate that I was already well-bruised from yesterday's seamanship class. A few extra marks wouldn't make much difference. Heinrico shut up after that, perhaps thinking I didn't like him. It wasn't that - I just didn't like to half-ass anything ever, let alone when a Shadowguard corporal was there to see it.

Shortly afterward, we transitioned to another exercise involving hanging upside down from a metal bar, doing a sit-up, and then striking a sandbag between our knees with our fists and elbows. This was deemed gentle enough on the legs that I could participate in the regular exercises and, to Heinrico's dismay, so could he. I pinned my hair up and climbed up next to Mailyn, both of us hooking the bar with our knees and giggling as the rest of us dangled upside down.

"In combat, you may find yourself in a position of poor leverage or with a poor angle of attack. Your job is to get as much leverage and as much of a target as you can, and then to act quickly. And you will be well-served by strengthening your core." I couldn't see from my current vantage, but I imagine Soto gestured around his midsection. "When Flint blows the whistle, sit yourself up, strike the target at least twice… more if you can… and then ease yourself back down. Begin!"

The exercise was a lot harder than I'd have thought - it burned the backs of my knees as my weight pulled me toward the earth, my abdomen was soon screaming in protest with each exhausted sit-up, and punching the sandbag felt like fighting gravel. But Mailyn was next to me, going through the exercise without complaint, and I wouldn't let her see me being weak, not even with my injured leg. Though I didn't think I had that definition in my midsection… whenever she hung upside down, her shirt flipped up and I could see her muscles straining like steel cords beneath her skin. But I was no slouch, and I wouldn't complain.

I already knew how to scrap from my time as a Scamp, and I had a decent front kick, but in my first combat class, I learned to throw a proper elbow and I learned three ways to bring somebody down if I was already on the ground, even if that person was significant bigger than me (which, let's face it, most adults were). Corporal Soto called fighting on the ground the 'great equalizer', where strength, speed, and endurance, while far from irrelevant, ranked distantly behind training and tactics.

"But don't forget the greatest equalizer of them all," he warned… "having better weapons."

"What about magecraft?" one of our classmates asked.

"Thaumaturgy is the greatest weapon of all - but even the greatest war magus doesn't throw nothing but spells. This is why we learn how to move. If you cannot position yourself to use your best weapons, then your weapons are useless. Class dismissed!"

I limped away from combat class even sorer than I'd been after the mantis-shark attack (though, admittedly, I didn't have the expertise of Dr. Silvestria to ease my pain). I was sore and exhausted, and I wanted to do nothing more than sleep - after I took a bath.

Fortunately, most of the older students were out and about in the mid-afternoon, enjoying the several hours of daylight before suppertime, and the Perspine Hall baths were unattended. We filled up two adjacent tubs, activating their heating glyphs, and waited for the water to finish running. My bandage wasn't to be removed for the rest of the week but, fortunately, it was waterproof. Otherwise, my litany of scrapes and mild contusions were untreated. Likewise, Mailyn's nose and lip had been treated at the infirmary yesterday, but her constellation of minor injuries was just as dense and widespread as mine.

I slid into the lukewarm water, its slight coolness doing a bit to ease my aches. Mud, blood, and sweat swirled off of me and into the water, turning the clear water translucent before I'd even fully settled. For a moment, I just floated with my face above the water, my boneless limbs barely grazing against the side and bottom of the basin. "I don't think I can take another day of this," I moaned.

"One more day," Mailyn said. "The day after tomorrow is Saintsday."

"I never thought I'd thank the saints," I giggled. I made the sign of the circle in the air above me, my fingertips immediately cool in the room's slight draft. "Thanks, saints."

"That's sacrilegious," Mailyn chided me. In the corner of my vision, I watched her bring two fingers to the center of her chest. "This wayward child thanks the Most High."

"Are you looking to convert?" I asked.

Mailyn snorted in response. "I've got no parents, no country, no religion, and no husband. I didn't get a whole lot of choice about coming here, and I'll be damned if I ever let anybody make my choices for me again. I'm still here for the same reason you are, sister."

"Revenge?" I asked. Mailyn hummed noncommittally to that. "To become strong."

"To become strong," she agreed. "I'm worth more than five octavos."

The next day, we were right back to it - privy duty in the morning (I was still on shovel duty), mathematics after breakfast, and then a sloop sail out to Alhred Island for seamanship class. This time, Rose didn't challenge the blue sloop to a race. She simply touched the glimsilk cord to the white sloop's sails and we all watched as the blue sloop fell further and further behind - invigorated sails beat numbers any day of the week and twice on Saintsdays. While we waited for the blue sloop to catch up, we reviewed our knots and added two more: the anchor hitch and the stevedore knot, explaining the use for each and that we'd be expected to tie and use them properly in the day's exercises.

"Can't we just use the faster knot?" Janus Gorio asked.

Rose shot him an amused look. "Sure. And I'll expect you to run on the water instead of swimming - after all, it's faster."

"You can run on the water," Janus insisted. "I seen some of the Greycloaks doing it. Those funny shoes called water walkers let 'em…"

"And when you can meld rope, you can do away with knots entirely," she added. With a casual ease, she unlashed the halyard, pulled it taught, and pushed a fiendishly complex bit of thaum into the rope itself. It wasn't even a glimsilk rope, but she somehow managed to weave the end of the rope back into itself in a single unbroken loop. "And, unless you know your knots, you won't know how to make a melded rope strong, so it's a moot point. Now… I won't get mad at you for questioning me, but I do know what I'm talking about. Oh!" Rose pointed at the blue sloop, just now pulling aside. "Look who decided to show up. Okay! Same drill as yesterday, four groups of eight or ten!"

We got to work - and Rose didn't even let me take it easy, bluntly stating that none of the exercises was particularly hard on the legs. It was a lie so audacious I didn't even know how to respond to it. I spent so much time being angry and flabbergasted that, by the time I remembered to be terrified about swimming around in the shark-infested Largotto, I'd already been doing it for ten minutes and the time for terror had passed. Deliberate or not, it was possibly the best thing she could have done to keep me from reliving the attack every time I jumped into the water. As Mailyn and I tumbled off of our floating log for the third time, I glanced out at the little buoy in the middle of the Stills and decided that I'd be fine as long as I stayed away from there. And then, later, as Mailyn and I paddled our way to another first-place finish in the rowmaster exercise, I decided that the buoy might not be so bad, either, as long as I sat in the back. And, even later, as I tried to tie an anchor hitch while being poked and buffeted by bamboo poles, I decided that, if a mantis-shark really did get me amid all this, it was probably fated to be and it just wasn't worth worrying about.

I limped home to bunkroom 61, blisters on my hands, bruises blooming across my body, and blood and tree sap liberally spattered over my sleeves, and I decided that being a Sneak wasn't so bad. I was very glad that tomorrow was Saintsday, though, because it was hard.