"Thirty," said the Old Master.
The arena made a noise.
"Master—"
"Do not Master me, Hob, you were not asked." The old man swept the cane down the line. "First thirty. That includes the new ones. Blades down, sticks only. Anybody who takes it easy on the little prince will regret it."
"Thirty's half the arena, Master," said Ludo.
"Then half the arena had better be good at it."
Sito walked out into the middle of the ground with a practice stick in each hand and turned in a slow circle while thirty men spread out around him.
Six of them were the new boys. They were standing near the back of the ring looking like they had been told to stand in front of a moving wagon.
"Ready, boy?"
"Yes, Master."
"Begin."
He did not stay in the middle.
Thirty men had spread themselves into a ring around the centre of the ground, because that was where he was standing, and the moment the Old Master's cane came down Sito went straight for the edge of it.
He hit the ring at its thinnest point, where Kellan and two others had left a gap between them, and went through it, and turned around with the wall of the arena at his back.
Now only about six of them could reach him at once. The other twenty-four were behind those six, pushing.
"He's done the thing with the wall," somebody groaned.
He dropped the first three in about as long as it took to say it. Kellan came in high and Sito went under him and put a stick across the back of his knee. The man on Kellan's left tried to swing over Kellan as he fell and caught Kellan's shoulder instead of Sito's head. The third man stepped back to get room and stepped directly into Hob.
"Hob!"
"You walked into me—"
Sito was already gone from where he had been standing.
---
It was like watching somebody knock over a very badly stacked pile of crates.
Every time a man went down, he went down in somebody else's way, and every time they tried to spread out again to come at him from different sides, he was somewhere else — along the wall, then off it, then back to it, never once letting more than five or six of them have a line on him at the same moment.
Ludo lasted longer than anyone, the way Valor used to. Ludo had worked out that the only thing to do was hold his ground and let the others be the ones who ran, and he got two solid blocks in and made Sito work for about twenty seconds.
Then a man on Ludo's left went down backward into his legs and it was over.
"That's thirteen," said somebody.
"It's fifteen, keep up."
---
The new boys had been hanging at the back of it, the way new boys do, and by the time the numbers had thinned they were the ones left standing.
Tobin was the smallest of the six. He had never been on a training ground like this in his life, and when Sito came around the end of the pile of bodies toward him, he did the thing every beginner does, which was panic and swing as hard as he could at nothing in particular.
Sito was already turning away from him to deal with the boy on his right.
Tobin's stick caught him square across the left forearm.
The crack of it went round the arena. Everybody heard it.
There was a second in which nobody moved at all, because in three and a half months of this nobody had landed anything on the prince that sounded like that, and certainly not a boy who had been on the ground for only eleven days.
Then Sito put the boy on his right on the floor, and put Tobin on the floor next to him, and put the last two down about four seconds after that.
"Point," said the Old Master.
Twenty-nine boys and men lay on the stone. Tobin sat up, still holding his stick, staring at it.
"Good hit," said Sito.
Tobin looked up.
"I — sorry — I didn't mean—"
"Don't be sorry." Sito held his left arm out and looked at it. There was a red line across the forearm that was already going dark. "Nobody's hit me clean in weeks. That was a good one."
"It sounded awful."
"It felt awful."
"Ooh, look at that," said Hob, from the floor, craning his neck. "That's going to go properly purple, that is. That's a beauty."
"Tobin," said the Old Master.
Tobin scrambled up. "Master."
"What did you do there?"
"I don't know, Master."
"Correct," said the Old Master. "You got lucky. Remember what it felt like, because it will be a great deal of time before it happens again, and you should know luck when you meet it."
"Yes, Master."
"Go and run. All of you." The cane tapped. "And somebody help Master Kellan up, he is lying there looking pleased with himself for lasting eleven seconds."
---
By the evening session the arm was purple from wrist to elbow, and Sito could not close his left hand all the way.
He went to bed on his right side and held the arm across his chest and did not think much about it.
---
He woke up the next morning and held his left arm up to the light from the window.
Nothing.
He turned it over. He made a fist with it, and then opened it, and made another one.
It was a bit sore and tender but there was no mark on it
It had kind of always been like that. When he was four was when he first noticed it after he had fallen down the full flight of the estate stairs and split his lip open on the bottom step, and Aunt Lia had held a cloth to it and cried. By supper it had closed, and she had turned his face left and right under the lamp and said his bloodline must run strong in his veins.
In this life he had never had a bruise last past the next morning, and the older he got the quicker he seemed to heal.
---
"I hit you."
"Morning, Tobin."
"I hit you." Tobin had been waiting at the arena gate, apparently for some time. "Across the arm. Right there. I heard it crack and I watched it go purple."
"It was a good hit."
"So where is it?"
Sito held his forearm out. Tobin took hold of it and turned it over and looked at it very closely, as though a bruise might be hiding on the underside.
"You must've drank a healing potion."
"No, I just heal fast."
"That's not fast. That's… that's impossible."
"Oh, don't bother, Tobin," said Hob, coming past with his gear over his shoulder. "He does that."
"Does what?"
"That." Hob waved a hand at the arm. "He's always done that. You could break his nose on a Tuesday and it'd be straight by Wednesday supper."
"That's not normal."
"It's normal for him," said Ludo.
"It is not—" Tobin looked around at the three or four older men who had drifted over to watch. "I'm not mad. It's not normal. Nobody heals like that."
"The prince does," said Kellan, shrugging. "Been that way since he was five. We've all tried, mate. I cracked him across the ribs once, proper, my first year. Went to find him at supper to say sorry and he'd forgotten about it."
"So you just—"
"Stopped noticing," said Hob. "You will too. Give it a month."
Tobin looked up at Sito.
Sito shrugged.
"Sorry," he said. "It's just how it is."
Across the ground, leaning on his cane, the Old Master had watched the whole of it.
He had watched a new boy look at an arm and say 'that is not normal', and he had watched four men who had been on that ground for years tell him that it was.
He did not say anything. He twirled the end of his mustache, very slowly, and kept watching.
---
Gideon Maxwell came to the King's study a little after the eighth hour, with a leather folio under his arm and the particular brightness of a man who has good news and has been trying not to look pleased about it all the way up the stairs.
"Your Majesty."
"Scholar Gideon. Sit."
Gideon sat. He was a narrow, stooped man with ink worked permanently into the side of his middle finger, and he held the folio on his knees with both hands.
"The adjustments," said Xerxes.
"In place since the summer, Your Majesty. As instructed. I have increased the concentration twice and I have altered the preparation once, and I have kept notes on every single night of it."
"And?"
Gideon opened the folio. He did not need to. He knew every page of it. He opened it because it gave his hands something to do.
"Your Majesty, I would like to say plainly that I do not have a precedent for any of this. There is no precedent. I have been through every archive in this castle and two in Coldren and there is nothing, because nobody has ever tried it. I am not reading the literature on this, I am writing it."
"I know that."
"I say it because I want you to understand what I mean when I tell you that it is working better than I projected." Gideon turned a page. "His growth is ahead of every measure I set for this point. His bone density has increased to the degree that I had to recalibrate my instruments, because the first reading I took I assumed was an error. His muscle is — "
He stopped and started again.
"His recovery is the thing I did not anticipate at all. The Old Master's training produces injuries that ought to keep a Third Circle man off the ground for a week. The boy is back on the ground the next morning. Every morning. There is no delay in it at all."
"The healing was always there."
"It was, Your Majesty. It was there when he was small. It is considerably more there now."
Xerxes turned a cup on the table.
"The risk."
Gideon closed the folio.
"It is experimental, Your Majesty. I will not pretend to you that it is anything else. Every night he takes it is a night that no one has lived through before, and it will stay that way until his Rite, because there is nothing to compare him against until he awakens."
"But."
"But every measure I have is going up." Gideon's voice had a thin excitement in it that he was plainly trying to keep out and could not. "All of them. Not one has levelled off. Not one has fallen. I have had a great many bad nights over this, Your Majesty, and I will have a great many more, but I have not yet had a bad reading."
"And the Rite."
"The projection has not changed. Fire and earth. Both of them, just like the great Kazer." Gideon hesitated. "And whatever they are poured into on that day, Your Majesty, it will be unlike any vessel your family has ever produced. I do not think I am exaggerating when I say that."
"Continue it."
"Yes, Your Majesty. The supply—"
"Night will see to the supply."
Gideon bowed and gathered himself and went out, holding the folio against his chest like a man carrying something that might spill.
---
In the corridor outside, going the other way, he passed the Old Master.
Gideon bowed. "Master."
The Old Master nodded to him, as he nodded to every scholar in that castle, and walked on without giving the man a second thought.
He did not knock.
The guards on the King's door knew better than to stop him and did not try, and the Old Master walked into the study and shut the door behind him with the end of his cane.
Xerxes looked up.
"Master."
"What have you been doing to the boy?"
"Good evening to you as well."
"What did you do to him, Xerxes?"
The King set his cup down.
"I do not know what you mean."
"You know exactly what I mean." The Old Master came forward and put both hands on the head of his cane, and he did not sit down, because nobody had asked him to and because he would not have done it if they had. "I have watched that child every morning for four years. I know his body better than you do. I know it better than his mother does."
"Then you know that he is gifted."
"I know that he is wrong."
The room was very quiet.
"His strength is wrong for his size. His speed is wrong for his size. The way he takes in a thing and keeps it— anything, a drill, a book, a language, — that is wrong. And do not start me on the way he heals."
The old man's voice had not risen at all. "One of my new boys landed a clean blow across his forearm yesterday. I saw it go purple. This morning the boy took hold of his arm and turned it over looking for it, and there was nothing there to find. And then four of my men walked over and told that boy it was normal."
"He has always healed quickly."
"He has always healed quickly and he has healed more quickly every year. I have been hitting that child with a stick since he was five and have never once seen a mark on him the next day, and I have been paying attention." The Old Master leaned on the cane. "It is as though he is made of mithril, Xerxes."
"He is a Meridius," said the King.
The Old Master raised an eyebrow sarcastically. "Oh?"
"With a divine bloodline comes divine attributes. It has always been so in this family. It is the reason there is a family."
"Do not feed me that." The Old Master said it flatly. "I have trained your grandfather. I have trained your father. I have trained you, and you were very good, but you were nothing like this. Not one of the three of you was anything like this."
"Kazer—"
"I have read every word ever written about Kazer Meridius. Every word. There is not one line anywhere in any of it that says he healed a split arm overnight at nine years old or took thirty grown men on at once with ease before his Rite." The cane tapped the floor once. "Kazer was a great man with a very flattering historian. That boy is something else, and you know he is something else, and I want to know why."
Xerxes looked at him across the desk for a long moment.
"I have done nothing to my son that a king ought not to do."
"That," said the Old Master, "is a disturbing sentence."
Neither of them said anything for a while.
"Do not tempt fate, Xerxes," said the Old Master at last. "I will say this once. If I find out that you are doing anything obscene to that child — anything at all — I will take your head. And I will not hesitate over it."
The King's face did not change. But his voice, when it came, had gone very cold.
"Need I remind you of your oath to the crown."
The Old Master turned toward the door.
He got his hand on the latch, and then stopped, and looked back over his shoulder.
"Do not tempt fate, King," he said. "Your type use oaths as weapons, and I've broken many weapons that have been pointed at me before."
He went out.
---
Xerxes sat in the study for some time after the door had shut.
Then he got up and went to the window, and stood looking down at the dark shape of the arena on the far side of the courtyard.
"Night," he said, without turning round.
"My Crown." Night was standing by the bookcase. He had been standing there throughout.
"You heard that."
"I did."
"He does not know."
"He does not know," Night agreed. "He knows there is something. He has no idea what. If he had even a guess, he would have said it, because he is not a man who holds on to things he can use."
"And now he will watch."
"He was already watching, my Crown. Now he will watch you."
Xerxes said nothing to that.
---
The Old Master was on the ground before the sun, the next morning, same as every morning.
The boy came in through the gate a quarter-hour late, same as every morning.
He had the new rook on his back that he had taken to carrying up to the cliff to play at sunrise, and a stolen roll in his hand, and his hair sticking up at the back.
"You are late."
"Sorry, Master."
"You are always sorry, and you are always late." The old man threw the wraps at him. "Put those on."
Sito caught them.
The Old Master watched him do it. He watched the hand come up, and he watched the forearm that a boy had turned purple two days ago work quickly without a stutter, and his face showed nothing whatsoever.
'Something is being done to you, boy,' he thought.
'I do not know what it is. I do not know who is doing it, though I have a fair idea. I do not know if it will hurt you.'
He twirled one end of his mustache.
'But I am going to find out. And I am going to be watching every single day until I do.'
"Well?" he croaked aloud. "What are you standing there for? Run."