Chapter 60. A Draw Is a Decision (Pulling a Sword Out Is Just Pulling a Sword Out)

Chapter 60: 60. A Draw Is a Decision (Pulling a Sword Out Is Just Pulling a Sword Out)

She led me out behind the cabin to a flat patch of ground under the pines, where the snow had been trampled down by a few of the Nightclaw riders.

She stood in front of me... in the moonlight, with her white coat buttoned to the throat, and drew her katana with one clean, quiet motion.

Even though that outfit really covers her whole body, but it still didn’t cover her massive tits that treads. And god... it makes it even hotter.

The blade caught the light like a sheet of ice.

"You do not know how to draw a sword," she said.

"What do you even say that? I draw it all the time, can’t you remember back then?"

"What you did is just pull it out... It is not the same." She slid it back into its sheath. "A draw is a decision..."

"It starts in the breath, and it ends in the hand, and nothing in between is wasted."

Huh. That’s actually a pretty wise words. She’s still killing it.

She showed me, slowly. I’d been in the habit of just gripping the hilt and yanking, which she described as "an animal behavior."

She taught me how to settle my weight, how to let my left hand control the sheath, and how to breathe in as I set my feet and out as I drew.

Gate Junior was a straight blade, not a curved one, and Velora said it was "entirely the wrong shape for this," but she insisted that the principle was the same.

I practiced a hundred times. Then a hundred more.

My palms were sweating inside my gloves, and my arms felt like they were screaming to my whole body, and my side ached where the spear had gone in.

Velora corrected me with a tap on the elbow or a cold, precise word, and not once did she raise her voice.

Lowkey, she’s a pretty good teacher... even though you have to survive that fierceful look in her eyes.

After the two hundredth try, she watched me finish the motion and was quiet for a moment.

"Alright... Better," she said.

I nearly burst into tears. I don’t know how many minutes I’ve wasted just for this, but it’s worth it... like really worth it.

I didn’t try a single line. I’d learned my lesson at the lake of cold steel, and besides... I didn’t want to.

I just asked her honest questions about her stance, about the angle of her wrist, and about how she’d learned.

She answered them, briefly at first, then with a little more warmth.

At one point, she showed me how to turn the sheath slightly to deflect a blow, and I was so absorbed that I forgot to be afraid of her.

After a while... I realized I was staring at the ribbon in her hair. Again.

Even though It was just a plain white silk ribbon, tied in a large, perfect bow at the base of her ponytail. My lust over ponytails women still tied into my hurt and soul!

I remember that it was the same one she wore every day, and I had made a joke about it. A stupid joke, meant to rattle her. I felt my face go hot all of the sudden.

"Can I ask you something?" I said. "You can say no immediately."

She looked at me, and I saw her tense, slightly, as if she expected another bad line.

"It’s about the ribbon," I said. "I made fun of it, and I wish I hadn’t... sorry about that."

"I don’t know what it means to you... but I could tell it mattered, and I’m so... sorry." I lowered my hand.

She was silent for so long that I thought she might draw her sword on me after all.

The wind moved in the pines.

Somewhere far off, an owl called.

"It was my mother’s," she said at last.

That answer finally made me shut the fuck up. But I can already tell an interesting story behind her mother.

"Duchess Marchessa Nightclaw." Her voice was very flat. "She was executed in the square of our own city when I was nine years old..."

Rest in piece, mother in law...

"I watched from the roof of a tavern... A human lord, a count... I do not remember his name." She gritted her teeth. "That bastard cut a lock of her hair after it was done."

"He kept it as a souvenir." She touched the ribbon, briefly, with two fingers. "This was in her hair that morning..."

"A servant gave it to me afterward... It is all I have to respect my mother’s death."

I wanted to say a thousand things, and every one of them... felt wrong. So it’s better that I said nothing or I’ll ruin the moment where she finally talks about this important thing.

I looked at her for a long moment, and then I looked away... so that she wouldn’t have to be seen.

"I’m sorry," I said. "I didn’t know that it was such an important treasure of memory..."

"You did not."

"I won’t make a joke about it again."

"I know." She was quiet for a while.

Then she said, in a very different voice, "Thank you for not making one just now."

I can tell that it wasn’t romance. And yes... It wasn’t anything like it.

But I finally felt the crack in that wall, the one she’d been building for twenty years, and I understood that she had just shown me something she hadn’t shown anyone in a very long time.

A little way off, in the shadow of the cabin, Elsbeth had stopped sharpening her sword. She didn’t say a word.

But I heard the whetstone fall silent, and I knew she had been listening.

...

On the fifth morning... we reached the plateau.

It rose out of the foothills like a gray wall, a vast flat shelf of rock and frozen grass.

From a ridge on the edge of it, Bryn pointed down into a wide river valley, where a broad ribbon of ice wound between low cliffs, and a hundred yards from the near bank... I could see a narrow, stony ford.

"The Wolfsbane Gate is there," she said. "In the cliff on the far side, behind that fall of rock."

"Gate...? I don’t see any gate," I said.

"That is the point."

Then I squinted at the cliff. And there it was...

I could see a dark smudge in the stone, a faint line where the rock changed color, but nothing that looked like a door or even a gate.

It was the best camouflage I’d ever seen... Which was a shame, because right in front of it, parked across the ford with a clear view of the whole cliff face, was a caravan.

It was a big one.

Six covered wagons stood in a loose ring, with a cluster of tents and a smoking cookfire in the middle.

Two of the wagons were barred cages on wheels.

A dozen heavy crates were stacked beside them, and about twenty armed men and women in gray-and-gold livery were milling around, eating, sharpening weapons, and throwing dice.

A thin plume of smoke rose from the fire.

"They are resting," Velora said, flatly. "In the one place we cannot go."

"Can we go around?"

"Not without being seen... The ford is the only crossing for miles, and the Gate is in plain view of their camp." Velora looked at us all. "If we pass, they will know where it is."

"And then the Chain can walk right in," Elsbeth said quietly.

"Yes."