“I guess my meeting with him went even worse than I thought, huh?” Kip said.
“You’re a couple years before you can play those games with these people, Kip. Don’t worry why they’re doing what they’re doing. It probably has nothing to do with you anyway. What you need to do is figure out you. Do you want to quit, or do you want to stay?”
Kip straightened up. Teia handed him a cup of water. She’d heard everything, but her eyes were a cipher. Kip’s arm felt wobbly even as he lifted the water to his lips. He swished. Spat it aside.
He was the worst person in the class. Of forty-nine people, he did the fewest push-ups. He ran the slowest. He finished last. He couldn’t do a single pull-up. If he stayed, he would probably vomit every day. Every week, he would get his ass kicked more times than he could count. Every month, he’d get beat up in the testing, probably many times.
It wasn’t even a fair contest: his left hand was still injured, raw, tight, painful to fully open, agony to put pressure on.
His father had put him in this position, against the express wishes of Ironfist, expecting Kip not to be good enough to make the cut on his own. Expecting him to fail. And now his grandfather wanted to destroy him.
“Am I even going to be able to stay at the Chromeria?” Kip asked. “If I’m not a Guile, I don’t have a sponsor, do I?”
A brief, satisfied smile flickered over Ironfist’s face. “The funds had already been transferred to your account. Your tuition is fully paid. And believe me, once the money goes in, the abacus jockeys over there don’t let it go out.”
The funds had already been transferred. Past tense. So Kip’s grandfather had tried to go after them, but had been foiled. And the quick smile meant Ironfist had done that—and was pleased to have stymied Andross Guile in this one small thing.
“But the situation is worse than that,” Ironfist said. “From here on out, it’s all you. You understand?”
Kip understood. Ironfist was being delicate because Teia was standing right there. He wouldn’t help Kip. Couldn’t stack the odds for him. If Kip got in to the Blackguard, he’d have to get in on his own. It was impossible.
And yet freeing. If Kip did this, he’d do it on his own. Not because of his father, but on his own merit.
So, it comes to this: an easy life as a student who doesn’t even need a sponsor, or a terrifically hard life as the worst of the scrubs, and a slim chance to actually make it into the Blackguard on my own and be something.
“Fuck ’em,” Kip said. “I’m staying.”
“Good,” Ironfist said. A fierce pleasure filled his eyes. He took a deep breath that expanded his giant chest and brought his massive shoulders proudly back. “Good. Now, five laps. Blackguards guard their tongues, too.” Suddenly he was back in command, sharp and stern and all professionalism.
“F-five?”
The commander said, “Don’t make me repeat myself. Adrasteia, you, too. Partner runs, you run.”
Chapter 28
The next day, the girls in Blackguard scrubs class were split off from the boys and brought into another training area. As in many of the training areas, one wall was covered in weapons, but here the weapons were bows of various sorts, from short horse bows to the great yew longbows from Crater Lake, to the composite bows of Blood Forest that packed as much power as those yew bows into a much smaller frame. Crossbows of a dozen sorts completed the armory. There were numerous targets in the area where the girls were walking. Several female Blackguards were at the front, standing with arms folded, waiting for the girls to approach. As Adrasteia followed the other nine girls, she studied the women. Though their body types ranged from the squat thick Samite to the willowy Cordelia, they all had something that Adrasteia wanted badly: they were confident, at ease in their bodies, with the world and their place in it. Somehow, that made even the plain look luminous.
Not sure what else to do, the girls lined up before their teachers.
Petite, curvy Essel spoke. “There is a legend about warrior women of old on Seers Island. They were peerless archers, but—” She picked a bow off the wall, drew a practice arrow from a quiver over her shoulder, and aimed between Adrasteia and Mina.
At first all Adrasteia felt was alarm. The target wasn’t very far away from her, and she had no idea what the Blackguards were trying to teach. It could well be How to Take an Arrow and Keep Fighting.
“Anyone see a problem?” Essel asked.
Aside from you pointing an arrow at me?
“Your breast’s in the way,” Mina said. Teia felt a surge of jealousy—first, that Mina wasn’t fazed by having an arrow nearly pointed in her face, too, and had been able to answer, and second, that Mina had probably thought of it because she had breasts, too. Unlike Teia, whom Kip had thought was a boy.