Graceling (Graceling Realm #1)(24)

Po nodded. “If you agreed to train with me,” he said, “that might serve as an excuse.”

She began to put out the torches. “What do you mean?”

“People would understand,” he said, “if I stayed in order to train with you. They must see that in our view, it’s a valuable opportunity. For both of us.”

She paused before the last torch and considered his proposal. She understood him completely. She was tired of fighting nine or ten men at once, fully armored men, none of them able to touch her, and she always tempering her blows. It would be a thrill, a pure thrill, to fight Po again. To fight him regularly, a dream.

“Wouldn’t it seem as if you’d given up the search for your grandfather?”

“I’ve already been to Wester,” he said, “and Sunder. I can travel to Nander and Estill under the guise of seeking information, can’t I, using this city as my base? No city’s more central than Randa’s.”

He could do that, and no one would have reason to question it. She put out the last torch and walked back to him.

Half of his face was lit by the light in the hall outside the door. It was his gold eye, his blackened eye, that was illuminated. She looked up at him and set her chin.





“I’ll train with you,” she said. “But don’t expect me to take more care of your face than I did today.”

He burst into laughter, but then his eyes sobered, and he looked at the floor. “Forgive me for that, Katsa. I wished to make an ally of Lord Giddon, not an enemy. It seemed the only way.”

Katsa shook her head with impatience. “Giddon is a fool.”

“He reacted naturally enough,” he said, “considering his position.”

He brought his fingertips to her chin suddenly. She froze, forgetting the question she’d been about to ask, regarding Giddon, and what in the Middluns his position should be. He tilted her face to the light.

“It was my ring.”

She didn’t understand him.

“It was my ring that scratched you.”

“Your ring.”

“Well, one of my rings.”

It was one of his rings that scratched her, and now his fingertips touched her face. His hand dropped, returning to his side, and he looked at her calmly, as if this were normal, as if friends she’d only just made always touched her face with their fingertips. As if she ever made friends. As if she had any basis for comparison, to decide what was normal when one made friends, and what was not.

She was not normal.

She marched to the doorway and grabbed the torch from the wall. “Come,” she said. For it was time to get him out of here, this strange person, this cat-eyed person who seemed created to rattle her. She would knock those eyes out of his face the next time they fought. She would knock the hoops from his ears and the rings from his hands.

It was time to get him out of here, so that she could return to her rooms and return to herself.





CHAPTER TEN




He was a marvelous opponent. She couldn’t get to him. She couldn’t hit him where she meant to, or as hard as she wanted. He was so quick to block or to twist, so quick to react. She couldn’t knock him from his feet, she couldn’t trap him when their fight had devolved into a wrestling match on the floor.

He was so much stronger than she, and for the first time in her life, she found her lesser strength to be a disadvantage. No one had ever gotten close enough to her for it to matter, before this.

He was so finely tuned to his surroundings, and to her movements; and that was also part of the challenge. He always seemed to know what she was doing, even when she was behind him.

“I’ll grant you don’t have night vision if you’ll grant you have eyes in the back of your head,” she said once, when she’d entered the practice room and he’d greeted her without looking round to identify her.

“What do you mean?”

“You always know what’s happening behind you.”

“Katsa, do you never notice the noise you make when you burst into a room? No one flings doors open the way you do.”

“Perhaps your Grace gives you a heightened sense of things,” she said.

He shook his head. “Perhaps, but no more than your own.”

He still got the worst of their fights, because of her flexibility and her tireless energy, and mostly because of her speed. She might not hit him how she wanted, but she still hit him. And he suffered pain more. He stopped the fight once while she grappled to pin his arm and his legs and his back to the ground and he hit her repeatedly in the ribs with his one free hand.

“Doesn’t that hurt?” he said, gasping with laughter. “Don’t you feel it? I’ve hit you possibly twelve times, and you don’t even flinch.”

She sat up on her heels and felt the spot, below her breast. “It hurts, but it’s not bad.”

“Your bones are made of rock. You walk away from these fights without a sore spot, while I limp away and spend the day icing my bruises.”

He didn’t wear his rings while they fought. He’d come without them the first day. When she’d protested that it was an unnecessary precaution, his face had assumed a mask of innocence.

“I promised Giddon, didn’t I?” he’d said, and that fight had begun with Po ducking, and laughing, as Katsa swung at his face.