The training yard sat at the north edge of Ashfen beside the old garrison wall, which had not been needed as a garrison for long enough that people had forgotten why there was a wall there in the first place. The militia captain used the yard for drilling on second and fourth market days. On the other days, anyone willing to get bruised was welcome to use the posts, the rope frame, and the practice weapons, under the premise that a bruised townsperson was a townsperson who had not been bored enough to cause actual trouble.
I found it when I was nine.
I had been looking for it for two years.
The captain was a woman named Davan with short gray hair and the particular economy of movement you only got from a lifetime of not wasting effort. She watched me stand in the yard entrance for a full minute before she said anything.
"How old?" she asked.
"Nine."
"Come back at twelve."
"I would rather not."
She looked at me properly then. Adults usually heard nine years old and made a corresponding adjustment to how seriously they took the next sentence. Davan seemed to hear it and do something more complicated.
"You are going to get hurt," she said.
"I know."
"And?"
"And I would like to be less bad at it over time."
She was quiet for a moment. Then she tilted her head toward the practice posts.
"Two days a week," she said. "You do what the older ones do. You do not complain about the gap. You leave when I tell you to leave."
"Yes."
"And you tell your parents. I will not have a nine-year-old sneaking bruises home."
That was the part I had been less enthusiastic about.
Nessa did not receive the news well.
She received it with a very specific stillness that I had learned meant she was deciding how much of her reaction to show, which was in practice more alarming than the visible version.
"You want to train with the militia," she said.
"With the yard. Not the militia itself."
"The distinction being."
"I am not joining anything. I am learning things."
Cael was at the table with his supper and the general posture of a man who had decided this conversation was going to be between the two of us and he was present only as a witness.
Nessa looked at me. "Why."
Not as a question. As a weight she was placing on the table to see what I did with it.
I could have said: because the last time violence arrived I was too small and too slow and lost everything. I could have said: because I know, in a way I have no language for, that this world will not spare the people I care about simply because I am not ready, and I would rather not be unprepared again.
What I said was: "I do not want to be helpless."
Nessa was quiet for a while.
Then she said, "You are nine."
"Yes."
"And already worried about being helpless."
"I have been worried about it for a while."
She looked at Cael.
Cael looked at his supper.
"He has my permission," he said.
Nessa gave him the expression that meant this conversation was not over.
Then she looked at me. "You will eat before you go. You will come home when you say you will come home. You will tell me if something is wrong."
"All right."
"And you will tell Davan that I will be hearing about things. Regularly."
I suspected Davan would not mind that arrangement at all.
The first month at the yard was exactly what I had expected, which meant it was difficult in ways I had anticipated and humiliating in ways I had not. The older students were eleven and twelve and had a year or two on me in physical development that did not close overnight. I was smaller, slower on the footwork, and got put on my back four times in the first session alone.
I got up each time.
Davan did not comment on my falling. She commented on my getting up.
"Too tense in the shoulders," she said after the second session. "You are bracing before the contact instead of moving through it."
"How do I stop."
"By doing it enough times that your body stops expecting to survive by stiffening."
That turned out to be true, and also to take longer than I wanted.
I went home each training day with new aches in places I had not known could ache independently. Nessa inspected the bruises with her mouth pressed thin and asked if Davan was supervising properly. I said yes each time, because Davan was supervising properly. The bruises were not from negligence. They were from learning a physical skill through a child's body that had never practiced it before.
That was simply a long and uncomfortable process, and there was no shortcut through it.
Cael said nothing about the bruises.
He did, once, take my hands and look at the calluses forming at the base of my fingers. He turned my hands over the way Fenwick turned over coins.
Then he put them back and picked up his own work.
"Good," he said.
I thought about that word for the rest of the evening.
He was not telling me I was doing well. He was telling me he had seen the effort and did not feel the need to make it into anything larger. That was its own kind of acknowledgment. Different from praise. Quieter. More stable.
I went back the next training day.
And the one after that.