- The Rule of Ten
She learned early on that everyone at the Dragon monastery was obsessed with the number ten.
“As we agreed. You will stay here ten days, if you can be useful. If you can demonstrate you have the talent, it will be longer.”
“How long?”
“Ten years.”
Lyrianna smiled. Ten years ago today, in fact. She lingered at the edge of the training yard and thought back to the first time she had been there on that first day. Master Maldron had stood on the white gravel holding a smooth bamboo cane, tapping it on the ground to encourage her to step forward. The stones crunched sharply beneath the cane's light tap, the sound echoing in the silent, mountain air of the monastery.
“Timing is essential. I will swing this cane at you. You will evade it. That's the simple premise. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“But you must not move until I move. Is that clear?”
“Yes.”
Maldron twitched and she stepped back, the cane swirled around and hit her on the back. The impact was not a serious blow, but a vibrating sting that instantly corrected her reflexive flinch.
“Do not guess. Know.”
He swung again, she watched the cane move and twisted out of the way. It clipped her ear on the way through. The pain was immediate, a hot, singeing fire that made her eyes squeeze shut.
“Again.”
Lyrianna moved back to the starting dot and waited. Her breath came in shallow, rapid gasps that misted in the air. She watched his hand move, watched the cane whip forward and dropped to her knees and watched it pass over her head. Maldron whipped it back at once and hit her on the shoulder. The strike was faster and harder, catching her while she was still low.
“Hey, not fair. I dodged it.”
“Yes, you showed good reactions. But look. Now you are off balance. You committed too late.”
“You said I shouldn't guess.”
“Watching and reacting. That's what ordinary fighters do. The Dragon Brotherhood know.” He tapped the cane on the gravel. The sound was a crisp, insistent rhythm that demanded her attention. “Again.”
She stood upright and watched again. Her muscles were tense, ready to spring. He scraped his foot on the ground. She did not move. His hand tensed and now she felt it. She felt the space between his hand and herself, the subtle disruption in the air, as clear as a shift in temperature.
Maldron jabbed the cane forward and she stepped a single pace to the side. The cane swirled, too fast to watch. She had to know. Not even looking at him now she rolled forward on the gravel while the cane groped the empty air. The sharp stones dug into her skin through the thin fabric, a dull, secondary pain beneath the focus of the moment.
Lyrianna looked back at him from her crouch. Part in triumph, part in wariness that he might do a third stroke. He pointed the cane down and she relaxed, standing upright to face him.
“That felt different, didn't it?”
“Yes.”
“Have you felt this way before?”
“Yes.” Her voice was rough, barely audible in the echoing quiet.
“When?”
“When… the attack…” The word felt heavy on her tongue.
“Was that the only time?” Maldron continued. He waited patiently, the monastery's silence pressing in around them. She felt instant gratitude that he gave her this escape.
“No.”
“When else have you felt this way?”
“Once, I fell off a pony. I thought I would hit my head but…”
“You suddenly had more time than you were expecting?”
“Yes. I was able to land on my feet somehow.”
“Interesting…” Maldron shifted his weight, and the white dirt grated under the leather sole of his boot.
“What does it mean?” Lyrianna stepped closer, the fresh sting of the cane strikes fading beneath the urgency of the question.
“It means you'll be here for a long time.” Maldron smiled for the first time but it did not last.
“This will not be an easy life. You will train for ten years, ten hours a day, every single day without exception.” He continued. “You will hear people say ten times a day that you shouldn't be here. That a girl can't do what you can do.”
“But I can.” Her voice was tight, thin against the vast, mountain silence.
“And ten times every day you will have to prove it. You will not be a skinny girl with good reflexes. We are warriors. Your body will break, we will build you a new one, stronger than before. Can you face that, Lyrianna? Can you stand being broken again and again?” Maldron let the smooth bamboo cane drop and point straight down, his posture radiating unyielding demand.
“Yes. I can.” She met his gaze, the sting of the cane forgotten in the face of the monumental challenge.
Maldron paused, looked at her, looked at the mud and cuts and the state of her worn clothes against the pale perfection of the yard. “I believe you.”
She watched two junior acolytes spar. They were still at the stage where they alternated between martial technique and using their powers. The air would hum momentarily with captured energy before they returned to simple steel. Seamless integration would come much later.
Once more her mind went to her earlier days, this time to when she was first allowed to use a sword on someone. Brother Dragomir had stood before her shirtless, his chest and shoulders wide and bare, but with his arms covered in thick, padded cloth standing for armour. He dipped the training sword in fresh red paint and handed it to her. The hilt felt heavy and slick in her small, sweat-damp hand.
“You will try to paint a lethal wound on me.” He gestured to the dark cloth on his arms. “This does not count.” He pointed to the faulds around his heavy loincloth and belt. “This no count either.” Lastly he bent down and tapped his shin protectors. “Nor this. Everywhere else is good. Simple, yes?”
“Simple.” Lyrianna agreed. The solution was obvious. His whole torso was bare, all she had to do was get a few drops there and he was dead.
She lunged almost at once. Dragomir twisted away, the movement effortless, and her sword tip stabbed into nothingness. She tried for his back and he knocked away the flat of the blade with his armoured forearm, sending a vibrating shock up her arm.
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She kept trying, she thrust and slashed, her arms burning and screaming with exhaustion, until she could barely lift the sword tip. All the paint was smeared on Dragomir's arms and faulds. Exactly the places he told her don't count. The dull thud of her last, weak strike against his padded thigh a final mark of her failure.
“You know what happens here?” He asked eventually, his breathing perfectly even, contrasting with her ragged gasps.
“You're too good. Too fast.”
“I am fast.” He winked. A bead of sweat tracked a clean path through the grime on his bare chest. “And I am good. But you make it easy for me. I tell you ‘attack me here’ and you follow my commands.”
“You're not saying anything to me.”
“Not with my mouth. But…” He tapped his undefended parts. The bare skin of his chest was cool and dry where her paintless blade had tried to strike. “I show you this and you do what I expect.” He ruffled her hair. “Always make other person work harder than you.”
Lyrianna smiled to herself. Dragomir was supposed to tell her she wasn't good enough. Somehow he always forgot to do that. In truth, they'd all forgotten to do that now.
She thought of all the moments along the way where the disdain had eroded. Days where she kept pulling herself up on the hanging bar when all her contemporaries had quit. Her hands were perpetually raw, the calluses thick and hard.
Some still said it was because she was lighter and skinnier. And then she grew taller than most of the men there and they could no longer say that.
That one was a triumph of her blood. Building her muscles so she was as strong as the rest of them, that was all effort.
Her body had broken and been remade many times to get there but there was one way the rule of ten was not as onerous as she'd feared. It transpired that ten hours of training could be interpreted quite liberally.
So on those days where her body could take no more, reading and training her mind was considered a valid use of her time. Learning to ride a horse counted as training. Sharpening a blade, cleaning her room, exploring the mountain passes all counted too.
In fact, sleeping, eating, drinking and fucking were about the only things that didn't count. And since the latter wasn't allowed on monastery grounds, no one ever had to account for time spent that way in any case.
The acolytes finished their spar and bowed to each other, the grit hissing under their boots as they stepped back and cleared the circle. A low ripple of anticipation moved through the watchers drifting in from the cloisters and the armoury. They knew what came next.
Lyrianna looked at her helmet, catching a glimpse of her face in its brightness. The helm seemed more grown than forged. Living star-iron shaped into a dragon’s snarling visage. Wings swept back along the cheek-guards.
She threw back her thick, dark hair. The helmet slid down. The weight settled perfectly. The fur kissed her skin. The chin-strap buckled with a soft click beneath her chin. Enough of her face remained visible through the open snarling mouth. The curve of a cheekbone. The glint of sea-grey eyes.
With a nod she stepped out onto the fighting area as four other brothers did the same. All eyes were on her.
That was when she peeled off the fur-lined black jerkin and all eyes went wide.
Beneath it she wore only the monastery’s final gift. Brother Larian, the monastery’s master armourer, had really epitomised Dragomir’s principle of controlling attention to severe extremes. If she didn’t know he was the one man in the monastery who didn’t want to have sex with her she might have been more suspicious.
The chest piece was a living thing. Star-iron petals arranged to preserve a semblance of modesty while leaving midriff bare and gleaming, an open invitation to strike exactly where it was easiest to defend.
Matching vambraces climbed her forearms. Fur cuffs brushed her wrists. A narrow belt of the same metal sat low on her hips and held a short fur loin-guard, flanked by steel faulds. Greaves rose to her knees.
In all she seemed at once both heavily protected and provocatively exposed. Just as Dragomir had taught her.
The yard went dead quiet.
Lyrianna only smiled wider.
While the advancing brothers stopped to pick up their jaws from the floor, or so it seemed in their stumbles, she walked over and drew out a pair of training swords to face them.
Their expressions were priceless, eyes stuck to her latticed half-breastplate and abdominal muscles in equal fascination. The breeze still clung to her skin, raising faint goosebumps along her ribs.
“Uh, hello?” She assumed a high blade stance, the blunt steel training blades light in her grip. “My swords are up here.”
Some of the Brothers allowed themselves a chuckle. Everyone was nicely relaxed. Except her.
She moved like a coiled snake. A Brother with just a longsword found it caught in her crossed blades at once. In a flash it was spinning from his grasp and her foot slammed against his stomach. The blow drove the air from his lungs in a sharp grunt.
Belatedly they moved, but to her they may as well have been stumbling through quicksand. A halberd hit the ground where she had been seconds before, the shaft thudding hard. In the present she was sweeping low and slapping her right-hand blade against the back of its wielder’s knee. The dull steel rang clear against leather.
Groans and spitting pebbles rasped over the courtyard as she took on the last two simultaneously. They were both out on the back foot, trying not to watch her cleavage and focus on the swords, as if it were remotely possible.
She caught one of them on the elbow and then the wrist. His sword fell from his hand with a dull clatter. A moment later he bent double from the blade across his belly, breath whooshing out in a wheeze.
And now there was only one.
They circled each other, his one sword to her two.
“This is unfair.” Lyrianna admitted. She dropped the sword in her left hand. The blunt steel landed point-first in the gravel with a soft crunch. She took a fencing guard while her opponent did the same. And she waited. Not watching. Not guessing. Waiting for him to give himself away. He tried not to watch the movement of her chest and focused intently on her sword. He struck at it but it wasn’t there.
Lyrianna swerved away, coiling for a strike. He raised his sword in anticipation but he was looking at the wrong hand. Meanwhile her left hand extended to rest the sword tip just under his chin.
Lyrianna smiled. “I’ll let you in on a secret.” She leaned close, the faint scent of cold iron and sweat drifting between them. “I’m left-handed.”
He dropped his sword in surrender. When she withdrew her sword tip he shook his head.
“I don’t understand. I saw it. I saw the move in your head.”
“You saw what I wanted you to see.” She kicked his sword back toward him, the blunt steel scraping across to him. She looked around at the others, breath steady, skin still cool from the mountain air. “Again.”
At the fourth repetition her opponents gave up and the crowds dispersed. The yard emptied fast, voices fading into the cloisters. For all that she was only partially clothed on a mountainside, a warm film of sweat clung to her skin and steamed faintly in the chill.
She towelled herself quickly before the sweat turned cool and pulled the fur-lined black surcoat back on. The heavy wool settled over her shoulders like an old friend. Only a single figure remained, dressed in midnight-blue robes that caught the wind and snapped like a banner.
Lyrianna twirled the practice sword in her hand and looked at him.
“Want to give it a go?” she asked.
Brother Maldron chuckled warmly. “You’re good. You’re very good indeed.” He smirked. “But you’re not that good… yet.”
“Have you come to say goodbye or send me on my way?”
“Both.” Maldron drew back his hood. There were more greys in his hair than when she arrived ten years ago. That was the sum of the difference. In the same time she had changed beyond recognition. Now taller than him. Stronger than him. But he was right. Still not a match for him… yet.
“You know how it works, Lyrianna. After the ten years a Brother, or in your case our first Sister, must spend time away without returning.”
“How long? Ten years?”
“Let’s say ten months.” His expression became more serious. “What are our rules?”
“We must never travel in a group of more than ten Brothers outside the Dragon Horns. We must do good. We protect the innocent. We can be paid for good deeds but we never sell ourselves for ill deeds. Our arms and armour can be replaced but must never be sold to outsiders. We do not take sides in wars between lords and nations. Have I missed anything?”
“We are the first and last line of defence against the Abyss. We are the sword and shield between darkness and the light. We are the Brothers who stand against the night even unto the nights of the Dragon moon.”
“And that, yes.”
“Lyrianna Wolfheart. Go now into the world and do good.”
“I will.”
Maldron bowed and turned to walk away, robes whispering behind him. He stopped at the last moment.
“Will you seek him out?”
“No. I’m not running back to the past.”
“That is probably as well.”
He left without another word. The yard felt suddenly huge and empty, the cold air pressing against her skin through the surcoat. Ten years ended today, and ten months stretched ahead like an open road.
She sheathed the practice sword, slung her real blades across her back, and walked toward the gate without looking back.
The Intended.