Divine System: Land of the Abominations-Chapter 313: The Burdens of Hand and Crown (3).

The training yard was at the back of the Red House, behind the infirmary and the storage halls, and in the morning it was loud enough to hear from most of the building’s eastern half. Nero had walked past it every day for weeks without being permitted to use it. That was Lyon’s rule, enforced quietly, without explanation — the yard was for candidates, and until the trials were concluded, Nero was not one.

He was one now.

The yard was larger than he had expected, given how the Red House presented itself from the outside — a square of packed earth roughly a hundred feet across, enclosed on three sides by stone walls and on the fourth by a low iron fence that separated it from the alley behind the garrison. The ground had been worn down to near stone hardness by years of boots and bodies, and in certain spots it was darker than the surrounding dirt, which Nero did not look at too closely. A rack of practice weapons stood along the western wall: blunted spears, short wooden batons, a handful of swords with their edges wrapped in cloth. Beyond the rack, two candidates were already paired off and circling each other with the careful, probing economy of people who had been at this long enough to know that the first exchange rarely decides anything.

There were eight others standing in loose, watchful clusters around the yard’s edges, and not one of them looked at Nero when he walked in.

He had expected that. He had not expected the degree of it — the particular quality of not-looking that was not indifference but its opposite, the studied non-acknowledgment of someone being very carefully observed. He counted nine candidates total, himself included, and he noted without surprise that he was the only one who had arrived without armor. A few wore leather reinforced at the joints, one had what looked like a proper scale cuirass, and the two already sparring in the middle of the yard moved with the practised sureness of people whose bodies had been trained since childhood to expect weight on their shoulders and find it ordinary.

Sergeant Vane was sitting on an upturned crate near the weapons rack, and he did not stand when Nero came through the gate.

He was the oldest person in the yard by twenty years at minimum — broad-shouldered despite the age in his face, with the kind of physical stillness that came not from relaxation but from a body that had long since stopped wasting motion on things that didn’t require it. His hair was cut short and mostly grey, and the line of an old scar ran from his left ear to the corner of his jaw in a way that suggested whoever made it had been trying for the throat and had been stopped by something other than aim. He was looking at the two candidates sparring and he had the expression of a man watching a performance he has seen performed badly many times before.

He did not look at Nero.

Nero went to the weapons rack, chose a spear from the available selection — longer than his arm length but heavier than he would have preferred, the balance slightly forward of center — and moved to the yard’s edge to wait. He did not introduce himself. Nobody here needed him to, and announcing his presence to a room that was already pretending he was not there would achieve nothing beyond making the pretense more obvious.

After another five minutes, Vane stood up.

"Right," he said, and the two sparring candidates stopped immediately, stepping apart with the reflexive precision of people accustomed to responding to that word quickly. Vane looked at the yard without any particular expression and said, "You lot are going to spend the next three months developing an intimate and extremely tedious relationship with the basics. If you have come here expecting to learn something interesting, I would encourage you to adjust that expectation now, before disappointment makes you difficult to be around." He picked up a blunted spear from the rack and turned it over in his hands, examining the shaft. "The Church has sent me candidates who trained for a decade and still could not survive their first real engagement because nobody had spent sufficient time drilling the fundamentals into them. I would rather not add to that tradition."

He looked at the practice spear, then set it back against the rack with the mild contempt of a man who finds the available tools inadequate but has made his peace with working around them.

"Pair up. I do not care how. Anyone without a partner is with me."

The yard shuffled into motion. Nero watched the candidates divide themselves with the unsurprising efficiency of people who had already identified their social hierarchies during whatever waiting period preceded his arrival. Two of the scale-armored ones went together. The leather-reinforced candidates sorted themselves by apparent familiarity, and the cluster near the eastern wall resolved into two pairs with the ease of prior arrangement.

This left Nero, a boy with red hair who could not have been older than fifteen, and a woman with short cropped hair and the measured, patient expression of someone who had learned very young not to display what they were thinking. The red-haired boy looked at the woman. The woman looked at Nero, briefly, with the quality of someone conducting a rapid and efficient assessment, and then looked back at the boy.

"You," she said to Nero, with the neutrality of someone describing a fact rather than making a choice. "I’ll take the sergeant."

The red-haired boy exhaled quietly, which was either relief or something he was trying to suppress, and he moved toward Nero with his practice sword already in hand, holding it with a grip that was technically adequate and functionally tense.

Nero watched him position himself across the three feet of yard between them, noted the way the boy’s weight sat too far forward on his front foot, and said nothing about it.

Vane’s voice came from the other side of the yard, already in motion. "I am not interested in watching you display what you already know. I am interested in watching you discover what you can’t do. Those are different exercises, and the second one is more useful. Begin."

The red-haired boy lunged first.