Dead Country by Max Gladstone

Author:Max Gladstone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

* * *

The next day Dawn was waiting, bright and composed as always, for their lesson and the practice afterward, her slow education in the principles of Craftwork self-defense. Their encounter the night before seemed to have fallen into her like a stone into a still pool, the ripples already settled. They walked in silence from the breakfast table to the hillside. Tara had quietly replaced Ma’s rake and borrowed a walking stick from Connor to use instead, in case of further accidents.

“Come at me as hard as you can,” Dawn said. “I’m ready.”

“Are you sure?”

She shook her head. “Do it anyway.”

Tara hefted the walking stick and locked eyes with Dawn. Tightened her grip. She chose her target—the upper arm. The worst she’d leave was a bruise.

The stick swept whip-fast through the cool air and bounced off a shell of darkness, inches from Dawn. “Faster.”

She tried again. This time the shell was closer to Dawn’s skin, but no more permeable. A third hit, a fourth. On the first strike, Dawn had flinched and given ground, but she handled each blow more easily than the last. Dawn was smiling. So, Tara realized, was she.

Her next swing was fast as she could manage, full force, full power—and she saw, too late to stop the swing, a flash of cleverness in Dawn’s eyes. She felt Dawn’s argument shift. This is my space, inviolate became force directed toward me is given to me, becomes mine, and I can guide it as I choose.

A cold fist punched Tara in the chest. She landed in the patch of dead grass, blinking away stars. “Good hit.” She gathered herself, brushed off her jacket, and without thinking, reached out. Dawn helped her up.

Tara saw the surprise on her student’s face as she rose, and felt a mirrored surprise in herself: Dawn shocked that she had taken Tara’s hand, and Tara shocked that, rather than rising under her own power, she had reached for someone else. For Dawn. Without feeling she was making some grand Decision, either. There had been no sense of forcing herself through an ice field. She had just reached out, without thinking, and the girl accepted.

Dawn stepped back. Tara thought she might have been about to ask a question, and if she had, Tara thought she might have answered it. But the sun was rising, and they had work, and Dawn remembered, then, what she had just done—her triumph obscured the rest.

They walked together, smiling, to the fields.

The crowds were there, larger than ever, and Connor. Even he had changed, she thought, in the last two weeks—he was tired, but he looked happier, less like a picture cut from a magazine illustration, less alone. The air was cool crystal and the sky’s dry blue its most perfect shade, and the sunlight rolled golden down.

She realized then that she was happy.

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