The horn did not wake me.
I had never slept.
The broken leg had festered all night. The skin had split open like overcooked sausage, pus and black blood leaking in slow rivers. The swelling was monstrous; the limb looked like a club of rotting meat nailed to my hip. Flies had laid eggs hours ago. I could feel the maggots writhing inside the wound, chewing their way deeper with wet, eager mouths.
Rulf's boot found my face first.
The impact snapped my head back against the wall. My remaining eye opened on a world of red. Teeth rattled loose. Blood filled my mouth.
"Time to crawl, lordling."
I tried to rise. My one hand clawed at the dirt. The leg would not move. It was no longer a leg; it was a tumor of bone and infection dragging behind me like a punishment.
They dragged me out by the hair and the stump.
Grinder waited in the trench, the cane-sword slung across his shoulder like a sleeping prince. The silver ferrule caught the first sick light of dawn and threw it back like a sneer.
Rulf dropped me in the mud at Grinder's feet.
"Look," he laughed. "The noble learned a new trick."
Grinder's single gray eye looked down without warmth.
"Today we break the rest of him."
Grinder's single gray eye looked down without pity looking ...
"Five hundred swings. Then the run. Then we finish what we started last night."
I crawled
It took an eternity. One arm. One knee. The ruined leg dragging behind me like a corpse I refused to bury. Every inch ground the bone ends together. I felt them scrape, felt the marrow leak. Pus burst from the splits in hot pulses. Blood and rot painted a trail any child could follow.
The other thirteen were already swinging. Their clubs rose and fell in perfect rhythm, grunting, alive. I reached my three posts last. My hand closed around the club. The wire from yesterday still bit into the grooves; fresh blood slicked the handle.
I swung.
The first blow tore a sound from my throat that belonged to no living thing. The second tore skin from my palm. By the twentieth the shoulder joint popped like wet wood. By the fiftieth I was pissing blood down my good leg. By the hundredth the world was white at the edges.
They watched.
Some laughed. Some spat. Some simply stared, waiting for the moment the thing finally stopped moving.
It did not stop.
At two hundred the wire snapped. The club fell. Grinder walked over without hurry, picked it up, and brought it down across my spine until something cracked like green kindling. I found the club again. I swung.
At three hundred I vomited a torrent of black bile that splattered the post and ran down the rotten cloth. I kept swinging through it.
At four hundred the world narrowed to a tunnel. All I saw was the post, the club, the next swing. All I tasted was iron and rot. All I heard was my own heart trying to hammer its way out of my chest and die.
At four hundred and ninety-eight my arm gave out. I collapsed face-first into the post. My forehead split. Blood poured into my remaining eye.
Grinder crouched. His iron hook lifted my chin.
"Two more."
I swung the last two from my knees, screaming without sound, screaming with every cell that still pretended to be alive.
Then the run.
Ten laps.
They jogged.
I crawled.
The mud was a living thing, thick and hungry. It sucked at my hand, my knee, my belly. Every drag of the ruined leg left a red-black furrow behind me. Bone ends grated. Pus burst from the splits in hot pulses. Flies followed the trail in black clouds, laying eggs in the open wound while I moved.
On the second lap Rulf ran past and drove his heel down on the break. The leg folded completely backward. Something tore with a wet rip. I felt the lower half detach inside the skin, connected now only by meat and tendon.
I kept crawling.
They pissed on me as they passed. Warm streams across my back, my neck, my face. Someone hawked and spat a thick wad that caught in my hair and stayed there. Someone else shat beside the path and kicked it into my mouth when I dragged past.
By the sixth lap the sky was white fire and the trench stank of my blood. Flies feasted. Maggots hatched before my eye. The leg had swollen to twice its size, skin stretched translucent, veins black beneath.
On the ninth lap I vomited again. This time it was mostly blood and pieces of yesterday's potato. I crawled through it.
When I crossed the final mark Grinder was already there. He upended a bucket over my head. It was not water. It was the night-soil bucket from the officer's latrine. I opened my mouth because I had to breathe and swallowed what went in.
Then sparring.
They gave us spears.
Not the beautiful ash-wood spears of my childhood. Not the ones my father had drilled me with since I was five. These were crude, heavy things; rough pine shafts tipped with blunted iron. Penal battalion trash. The balance was wrong. The weight was wrong. Everything was wrong.
But a spear is a spear.
Grinder walked the line, tapping each shaft with his hook.
"Thrust. Recover. Thrust. That is your entire world for the next week. Nothing fancy. No noble footwork. You are meat with a stick. Act like it."
His eye stopped on me.
I was on my knees in the mud, the broken leg splayed behind me like a dead animal. My one hand clutched the spear like a drowning man clutches driftwood.
Grinder smiled.
"kaiel," he said, tasting the dead name. "Heard you were born with a spear in your hand. Show us."
The circle formed without being told.
five men. One cripple.
I tried to stand. The leg buckled instantly. Bone ends ground together with a wet crunch. I fell forward, catching myself on the spear. The shaft sank six inches into the mud.
Laughter.
Grinder crouched, hook under my chin, forcing my face up.
"On your knee then, little lord. Let's see that famous style."
I knew what he wanted.
I knew what they all wanted.
I rose to one knee.
The spear felt alien and familiar at once. Muscle memory stirred like a ghost in the ruins of my body. I set my stance the way my father had taught me; feet positioned even though one leg was useless, weight forward, hips coiled.
I thrust.
The motion was slow, clumsy, wrong without mana, without fire, without hope. But the line was still there. The old geometry of reach and explosiveness and control.
For one heartbeat the trench was silent.
Then Grinder's hook flashed.
He caught my spear just below the blade and wrenched it down. The shaft slammed into the mud. My shoulder screamed as the joint nearly tore from its socket.
"Is that it?"
he asked softly.
"That the best the great that family of yours can do without their precious ice?"
Rulf laughed. The others followed.
Grinder released the spear and stepped back.
"Again."
I thrust again.
This time his own spear; blunted, heavy, brutal; came up under my guard and smashed across my cheek.
The world exploded into white fire.
I fell sideways, tasting blood and broken teeth. The spear slipped from my numb fingers.
Grinder planted his boot on my chest, pinning me like an insect.
"Look at him," he told the circle.
"This is what becomes of nobles when you take their toys away. Just meat. Just mud."
He ground his heel until something cracked in my ribs.
"Remember this sight, dogs. On the battlefield no one cares where you were born. No one cares about your pretty forms. You thrust forward or you die screaming."
He lifted his spear and pressed the blunted tip to my remaining eye.
"You are worth nothing."
The words were a brand.
He let the tip rest there, just hard enough that I felt the pressure on the eyeball.
"Say it."
I spat blood.
He pushed harder.
"Say it, cripple."
"You…" My voice was a croak. "Are worth nothing."
He smiled.
"Good dog."
He stepped back.
"Dismissed. Eat. One hour. Then we do it again."
They left me lying in the mud.
Breakfast was the usual joke: a fist-sized lump of stale bread, one cold potato, a strip of salt pork that tasted of corpse.
I crawled to the edge of the yard and ate alone.
Every bite was agony. My cheek had swollen until the eye above it was a slit. Teeth floated in blood when I chewed. The potato tasted of ash and humiliation.
I sat with my back against a broken crate and stared at the spear across my knees.
How ironic.
The weapon I had trained with since I could walk. The legacy of a family that had abandoned me. The art that had rejected me long before the Empire did.
I remembered my father's voice in the burning yard.
"The spear an thesword both are control,. Control of distance. Control of ice. Control of life and death."
I remembered the day I failed to form the core.
the day i failed to make him proud.
I remembered the disappointment in his eyes turning to disgust.
I remembered the day they stopped calling me son.
I remembered everything.
And none of it mattered.
Because the spear in my hands now had no fire.
The boy who had once dreamed of becoming the next light knight was dead.
Only the meat remained.
I finished the bread. Licked the blood from my fingers.
Somewhere behind me the others were already laughing again, planning tonight's entertainment.
I closed my one good eye.
Tomorrow there would be more spears.
More beatings.
More lessons in worthlessness.
I would crawl to meet them.
Because the alternative was dying here like a dog.
And I had decided, sometime between the boot and the spear-butt and the word nothing, that I would not give them the satisfaction.
Not yet.
The cane-sword leaned against the parapet twenty yards away, beautiful and untouchable.
I looked at it for a long time.
One day, I thought.
One day that silver blade would drink every throat in this trench.
Starting with the man who carried it.
I closed my eye.
The shittiest day of my life was not over.
It had only just begun.