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T he morning was wet, dark, and gloomy—perfect weather for learning the true business of death. Ali faced her sword master and found herself for the first time doing more than just mirroring his strokes, or standing next to him and trying to copy them. She was actually crossing swords with him.

And her head was still atop her shoulders.

Each clash of her blade against his rattled her very bones, but she found, after a bit, that it didn’t trouble her.

Nor was she troubled anymore by sore muscles.

Indeed, lifting her sword came easily to her now, and all those hours she’d spent practicing each stroke provided her with a goodly repertoire of things to use against Colin as they parried.

She found herself smiling in spite of the rain.

“I will,” Colin said suddenly, “now come at you as if I intended to slay you. Slowly, of course, and you can trust that it is with no malice. ’Tis but for practice.”

Ali braced herself for the worst, but it was only as he said.

His strokes were slow and sure, and she was easily able to identify what he intended to do before he did it.

Still, she could see why men quailed at the thought of facing him.

He was enormous, his sword was enormous, and just the sight of him coming at her—albeit slowly and with no malice—was enough to make her want to drop to her knees and plead for mercy.

Or it might have been, had she not been able to keep him at bay.

It was tempting to permit herself the same look of arrogance that Colin usually wore when feeling quite pleased with himself.

She looked at him to find that he was regarding her with supreme satisfaction, as if he were actually pleased with what she was doing.

And that, to her surprise, was almost enough to bring tears to her eyes.

Quite suddenly, she found his warm, callused hand surrounding hers that held her blade, and his face not but a pair of hand’s breadths from her own.

She had to tilt her head back to look at him, of course—he was huge, after all.

But as she looked into his dark eyes, she realized how easy it would be to drown in those pools.

And, for the first time ever, she felt absolutely no fear of him.

“You have,” he said quietly, “done well.”

He was holding on to her sword hand, so she was forced to fan herself with the other hand. She tried to do it as unobtrusively as possible.

“Think you?” she squeaked.

His eyes crinkled the slightest bit, as if a smile might have considered coming forth had it not been Colin of Berkhamshire’s visage to wear it, and then he nodded just the slightest bit.

“Aye. Now, you must think on what you can do with this skill. You can always protect yourself, from any enemy. The more skill you have, the safer you will feel. And then, when the time comes that you have an enemy you must slay—and that time will come, believe me—you will have the skill to do so.”

She looked up into eyes that were still a mossy shade of green with brownish mud near the center and couldn’t help but wonder who it was that he had killed over the course of his years, who drove him to the lists every day, why he had trained himself to be the kind of warrior he was.

“Who is your enemy, my lord?” she asked.

He shrugged. “I’ve had many.”

“Who drove you when you first began your training?”

“Can you not guess?”

It wasn’t hard. “Your sire.”

“Aye. I daresay you can understand why.”

She smiled. “Aye, I can.”

He looked down at her for a moment or two, then abruptly released her hand and stepped back a pace. “You have your enemy as well. Think on him should you need inspiration to fight well.”

She didn’t think she needed any more inspiration than the mere thought of Sir Etienne and his callous slap the night before, but she would take Colin at his word.

And when he stepped back and raised his sword, she no longer thought of him and his reputation.

She thought of herself and whom she might face in the future.

And how desperately she wished she could humiliate him.

“Now, let us be about this business with a bit more seriousness and see if you can bear it.”

Ali gulped as he came at her with quite a bit more seriousness. His first few strokes rattled her bones and shook the teeth in her head. Her hands stung. Her arms ached from the force of the blows.

But she didn’t quit.

Neither did Colin.

He merely continued to swing his sword at her, slicing, cutting, thrusting. And she found, to her continued surprise, that she was able to fend off his attack.

Perhaps she had found something she could master after all.

That it was swordplay shouldn’t have surprised her in the least.

When her arms began to tremble from weariness, Colin pulled his sword back and resheathed it.

“Enough,” he said. “Now we will move on to other things.”

Ali managed to get her sword home before she looked at him in surprise. “Other things?”

“Knife work.”

The saints preserve her. “Knife work?” she echoed.

“A sword doesn’t always serve you. There will be times in the night, in the dark, in close places where all that stands between you and death is a beautifully sharp dagger.”

She shut her mouth and tried to swallow. She could see the wisdom in it, and she could only hope she was equal to the task of learning what she needed to protect herself.

“Of course,” she said weakly.

“Will you quit?” he demanded suddenly.

She didn’t even have to give that any thought. She shook her head vigorously. “Nay, I will not.”

He looked supremely satisfied. “I thought you wouldn’t.”

She blinked. “You did?”

“You’ve a decent amount of courage about you, um, Henri.”

She could scarce believe her ears. “Think you?”

“Aye, but you surely don’t expect me to blather on about it, do you? Come, let us be about our work. Courage you might have, but your skill is still lacking. I wish to remedy that as quickly as possible.”

By the saints, had the man actually paid her a compliment? Given her words of praise? She could hardly believe what she’d heard, but her ears certainly weren’t deceiving her.

Nor were her arms, for they were soon burdened with the task of holding Colin off with one whilst the other strove to poke at him with her knife.

And when she thought she could go on no further, he changed tactics and taught her how to fend him off with just her fists—which went less well than her other lessons, but she did her best.

By the time she was allowed to stop, she was shaking from weariness and strain.

But she was smiling. Perhaps she shouldn’t have been, for she surely didn’t have the skill to defend herself should a man come at her truly.

But she had more skill than she’d had a fortnight ago and perhaps that was enough for now.

T he next pair of days passed in like manner, full of as much swordplay and knife work as she could stomach—and at times much more, truth be told.

But she didn’t argue. Colin seemed just as driven as she felt.

And she had more reason to press on than just keeping Sir Etienne far from her.

Should she by some unhappy chance find herself in Marie’s sights, she didn’t want to be completely defenseless.

Not as she had been before.

One of the happy turns of events during those days was the absence of Sir Etienne. Ali suspected that he was either drinking or wenching himself into oblivion. At least he was gone and for that she was grateful.

After the first morning, Jason spent most of his time watching her train.

He offered no opinion, but readily took the chance to hone his own skills against Colin’s when Colin had finished with her for the day.

It was those times that she rediscovered humility.

She might have been able to hoist her sword, point it in the right direction, and swing it about with a very small bit of skill, but she was a bumbling page compared to Jason.

And nothing at all compared to Colin.

But that didn’t stop her from watching him just the same, and marveling at his skill.

The man was enormous, to be sure, but he moved with a grace that was riveting to watch.

And once he and Jason began to truly hack at each other, Colin became nothing more than a part of his blade, an extension of the metal that flashed in the stray bits of sunlight.

Jason was almost as tall as he, and would no doubt one day be as muscled, but even with his considerable skill, he could no more have bested Colin than she could have.

She was gaining, she had to admit, a great appreciation for the skill of her erstwhile betrothed.

Perhaps he wasn’t as erstwhile as she might have thought. And for the first time since she’d first heard his name fall from Marie’s lips, she managed to look at him occasionally without any feeling of fear at all.

If that was not terrifying in the extreme, she didn’t know what was.

Too much training, no doubt. It was having an ill effect on her common sense.

W hen they finally did take up their journey again, she found that she very much disliked having Sir Etienne rejoin the company.

She hadn’t missed him, for more reasons than just his unpleasant personality.

Colin, though, seemed to have decided that no matter what Sir Etienne said to him, he wasn’t going to rise to the bait.

Ali wondered what price she would pay for that.

Their first night away from the inn, she had the first watch.

It was the easiest, to be sure, for ’twas rare that Colin wasn’t still sitting at the fire when she returned to her own blankets.

More often than not, she would find him on his feet, watching her as she watched over them.

She supposed he didn’t trust her with their safekeeping. Perhaps he had reason.