Prologue
~ THEN ~
“What is the art of the sword master?” the ku-sai asked.
Joslyn did not know. But she was afraid to admit she did not know. She stood in the little clearing in front of his hut, a short sword dangling loosely from one hand.
“The art of… fighting,” she said at last.
“Wrong.”
He attacked — a blur of whirring steel that came so quickly she scarcely had time to lift her sword before he disarmed her. Her short sword clattered to the ground. The hand that had been holding it vibrated painfully from the shockwave his blade had sent through hers. She reached for the dagger at her other hip, but the flat of his blade came down on her wrist so hard that she was sure he’d shattered it at first. Instinctively she pulled her hand back with a sharp breath, and with a fast flick of the tip of his great curved sword, he caught the hilt of the dagger and flung it out of her sheath and ten feet behind him.
Joslyn bent to retrieve her sword from the ground, only to feel the cold edge of the ku-sai’s blade against her throat. It barely touched her, yet she knew that if she moved even half an inch, it would slice into the artery that pulsed just beneath her skin.
“I have killed you,” said the ku-sai. “Come back tomorrow when you have the answer.”
He tossed his sword into the air. It spun end over end, a spinning killing machine glinting in the sun. Then he snatched it by the hilt midair and sheathed it at his waist. Without another word, he turned his back on Joslyn and walked away.
Hot tears threatened, but Joslyn wouldn’t let them fall. She hadn’t come all this way just to cry like a little girl when the ku-sai turned her away.
She didn’t pick up her own rust-spotted sword from the ground until he disappeared into the hut and closed the door behind him.
What is the art of the sword master? she asked herself. What is the art of the sword master?
Joslyn looked down at her pitiful short sword. It was completely unlike the ku-sai’s sword: His was a broad, curved scimitar, polished so well that it shone like a mirror, brilliant as a magic sword from one of the Terintan tall tales told around the evening campfire.
To say her sword was “common” was a compliment it didn’t deserve. It looked older than the ku-sai himself, with the steel blade notched in places and dotted with circular spots of tarnish. She’d stolen it off a drunken foot soldier of the Imperial Army that she’d met on her journey north.
As best as Joslyn could figure, she was about fourteen. It was an age that might still be considered “young” for more privileged girls, but Joslyn’s fourteen years had made her old enough and hard enough that she knew the drunken soldier had intended to rape her as soon as he got the chance.
She’d slipped away from him before a workable plan could blossom in his mind, watched from the shadows of the tavern as he drank more and more with his mates. Then she followed him into the alleyway and hung back as his speech slurred and his mates disappeared one by one with women they might or might not pay at the end of the night. Finally, the soldier passed out in the alleyway, a pile of garbage serving as a makeshift pillow, his feet dangling dangerously close to the small gully that carried the neighborhood’s sewage. Joslyn kicked him lightly to make sure he was really asleep, then stole the sword as a punishment for so much as having the mere thought of asserting himself over her.
She examined what had been the drunken soldier’s short sword as she remembered how she’d acquired it, used a fingernail to scratch at one of the tarnished spots. The spot came off without too much effort, leaving a smudge of black grime beneath her nail. Joslyn retrieved the dagger next, the only item she’d managed to take with her from her former master when she ran away. It, too, was tarnished. The blade was dull, hardly good enough to slice bread. Perhaps the ku-sai would show her how to make it sharp again.
If the ku-sai would show her anything at all.
Joslyn sighed heavily.
What is the art of the sword master?
She sat down cross-legged on the ground, opposite the ku-sai’s wooden hut. She sat far enough from the hut to be respectful, close enough to show she would not leave. Beyond the hut, the sun had begun to disappear behind the mountains, the last oranges and reds of the day melting into the sky.
Joslyn rested the sword across her lap, and with a tattered corner of her tattered brizat, she started to scrub at the tarnished spots. When she saw the ku-sai tomorrow — if she saw him — he would see that her sword gleamed as brightly as his own. Perhaps then he would know that she was serious about learning his craft, the art of the sword master.
She fell asleep a few hours later in the same spot, curled like a comma against the cold earth. She clutched the short sword to her chest in the same way other girls a little younger than herself might have clung to their dollies.
Joslyn had never had a dolly. But she had this sword, and that was enough.
It would have to be enough, since she had nothing else.
#
Joslyn woke with the toe of a soft-soled boot nudging her side. She struggled to open bleary eyes. The cold had kept her from sleeping most of the night; she’d only finally fallen asleep in the hours just before dawn. Now she was groggy and stiff as the unwelcome toe prodded her awake.
“What is the art of the sword master?” asked the ku-sai.
He looked bigger than he really was from her prone position against the earth. In reality, the ku-sai was a small man, only a few inches taller than Joslyn and almost as skinny. The rising sun was directly behind him, making his white beard and bald head glow unnaturally. When she was little, the tinker’s wife used to entertain Joslyn and her older sister with tales of desert angels who would descend from the clouds and grant water to the righteous, and that was what the ku-sai made Joslyn think of now — an angel who had walked out of her dreams and become manifest.
“What is the art of the sword master?” repeated the ku-sai angel.
Joslyn lifted a hand halfway, though she didn’t know what she was reaching for. “Please…” she said, though she didn’t know what she was pleading for.
He only stared at her, face hard and severe.
“The art of the sword master is…” she said, groping through her bleary mind for something that might satisfy him. “Defense?”
“No,” he said, and walked away.
Joslyn spent the day foraging around the hut for what little food she could find, since the ku-sai had offered her none. Behind his hut was a smokehouse that gave off a mouth-watering smell of meat, but she knew better than to enter there, just as she knew better than to disturb the ku-sai’s clucking hens or the fat eggs that probably laid in their hen house. The ku-sai came out to feed the hens at one point late in the morning, speaking to them in a cooing, soothing voice that contrasted so sharply with the tone he used for her that he seemed a different man. She couldn’t quite understand what he told the hens; he addressed them in a rough, northern Terintan dialect that she didn’t entirely understand.
In the forest behind the hut, Joslyn found some half-rotten acorns, which she dined on with enthusiasm, squatting beside the small game trail and digging out the acorn meat with her increasingly grimy fingers. She needed to backtrack today, find the stream she had crossed on the way up the mountain, and refill her water skin. Maybe she would take a bath while she was there. If she could smell herself, so could whatever animals roamed the mountainside at night — lions, most like. Maybe wolves, too. Certainly foxes, though they probably wouldn’t bother her. But as long as she was sleeping outside, it would be better not to attract their attention.