Chapter 20
"Okay, pair up – wait! You've been practising in the same pairs for weeks, let's mix you up a bit." Bill gestured with his knife as he spoke. "Daniel and Charles, Fred and Sebastien, Mikhail and Paul, Jorge and Eleanor – and Mack over here with me, for now. Come on, quickly, we don't have all day."
The way Daniel had steered their group clear of the Venncastle students meant that Eleanor had hardly exchanged two words with Jorge since their first day, and after the way he'd reacted to her then, she hadn't particularly wanted to get to know him. She took a deep breath and stepped across to where he was waiting, determined not to show any nerves though he was easily twice her size.
"Ready?" he asked, flipping the practice knife slowly from hand to hand, somehow managing to make even the wooden blade look threatening. He didn't wait for an answer, but lunged the moment she moved within range. She ducked sideways, surprised by his sudden assault, and almost lost her footing as she turned to block his second thrust.
She stepped back, temporarily out of his reach, and ran through the new technique again in her mind. Twist, feint, switch, strike. She imagined her muscles turning into each movement, but Jorge's attacks bore little resemblance to the elegant sequence Bill had demonstrated; he came straight towards her again and though she blocked his knife-thrust he ploughed on, knocking her to the ground with the weight of his body.
"You're not even trying to practise what we've been taught, are you?" she asked as she got to her feet.
He shrugged. "Don't know what you think you're doing, but I'm practising winning. Ready to go again?"
She didn't have chance to reply before he moved towards her, lifting his knife like a club above his head. She raised her own dagger to block him, but misjudged her angle and the wood struck heavily against the bone of her wrist.
The pain shot along her arm and she glared at him. It was a meaningless exercise if they weren't even trying to learn anything, but there was no way she was going to let him win: he was enjoying this too much. Her mind skipped across everything she'd studied since arriving at the academy. She analysed the shifting of his weight and the way he gripped the hilt of his dagger, and recalled endless patterns of attacks and counters. There had to be something in there to help her defeat him.
A twitch in his bicep gave her warning of his next movement and she dodged behind him, taking the opportunity to slam her foot into the small of his back before he had chance to turn.
He growled as he spun to face her and launched himself forwards, letting his wooden dagger clatter to the floor as he opened both hands to grab her. He wrapped his fingers around her throat and lifted her clear off the ground; the whole class had stopped to watch them, but despite Bill's disapproving expression it was too late to do anything except fight on.
Struggling to breathe as Jorge tightened his grip on her neck, she pounded her knee into his groin and brought her hands up to tug at his fingers, all formal techniques forgotten in a wave of pure anger that was only compounded by the urgent need to free herself before he throttled her.
Eventually she twisted his fingers back far enough to force him to drop her. She rolled as she hit the ground then pushed herself to her feet and swung a punch up into his face. He reeled backwards, blood gushing from his nose.
"Enough?" she asked, still gasping for breath.
His face twitched with anger. "I'll get you for this, Eleanor."
"That didn't look much like what I asked you to practise," Bill said coolly, as Jorge began to mop the blood from his face. "So I take it you're both already perfect. Would you care to demonstrate, Eleanor?"
"I didn't start it!" she said, but she could hear the whine in her own voice as she spoke and knew it had been a mistake to say anything.
Bill just glared at her, and beckoned her forwards.
Twist, feint, switch, strike. She rehearsed the sequence in her mind again as she moved forwards, then tried to force her tired limbs to comply as she reached him.
She was in the middle of the switch when Bill stepped suddenly forwards, forced her arms apart with a double block, then slammed into her chest with both palms, sending her flying backwards. She landed with a painful bump and swore under her breath. After a moment's recovery she got to her feet feeling sore and humiliated, wishing the whole class hadn't been watching.
"Not so perfect, then?" Bill asked as she straightened her shirt. "Maybe next time you'll practise what you've been told to."
She struggled not to snap back at him, wanting to object that what he'd done hadn't been part of the set piece, either; he'd simply been determined to spite her. But she was in enough trouble already, so she bit her tongue and kept quiet for the rest of the lesson.
"So what actually happened?" Mikhail asked as they sat down to lunch. "By the time we noticed what was going on, he had his hands round your neck, and I've no idea how you got there from that sequence."
Eleanor glanced across to where Jorge was sitting. He looked preoccupied, laughing at whatever Paul had just said, but she lowered her voice anyway.
"He just wouldn't play fair," she said. "He was determined to 'win,' irrespective of actually learning anything, and I wasn't going to let him."
"Do you start to see what I mean about them?" Daniel asked. "They are all the same."
"And I don't see why Bill singled me out," she went on, spearing a carrot with unnecessary force, imagining Jorge's broad nose under her fork. "I wanted to practise what he was teaching us, but you can't do paired practice on your own, can you?"
They had a throwing lesson after lunch, though, and after an exhausting, enjoyable session of aiming backwards over her shoulder Eleanor had finally worked off most of her frustration. Jorge, on the other hand, was still looking daggers at her every time their paths crossed.
The next morning was free for their own training, and Eleanor went out with Mikhail and Daniel to experiment on the practice frame, a wooden construction designed to allow them to perfect their balance while sparring. It was comprised of various fixed and rotating beams set at various heights above a sandy surface. Any misstep would probably be followed by falling headlong into the sand, and the rotating beams in particular meant that they had to pay as much attention to their footing as to their knife-work, adding an extra dimension to the fight.
"Eleanor."
She was on the least stable of the rotating beams when she heard her name, so she skipped along to the end where she could stop in safety before turning to see who'd spoken. Jorge was standing a few feet away, daggers in both hands.
"Time for a rematch," he said, scraping his knives together so the metal screeched.
"Actually, I'm already busy," she said, indicating Mikhail and Daniel, who had stopped their sparring to watch her. "Maybe some other time."
"Now. You and me, right now, no rules."
"No thanks." She turned back to the others, but he wasn't put off.
"You can't run away, Eleanor. You caught me by surprise once, but you won't do it again." He marched across and grabbed her leg, pulling her down into the sand. "I won't let you get away with it."
"Get away with what?" she asked as she scrambled to her feet. "You're just sore that I won, but you're the one who decided to change the rules."
"No rules this time. Come on, girl – if you really think you belong here, come on and show me what you've got when it's real weapons with real blades."
"I don't have to prove anything to you," she said, but even as she spoke she knew it was futile. He was too angry, and it made him doggedly persistent. She knew she'd faced far more troublesome opponents in the past, but maybe she'd have to do something drastic to get him to shut up.
"Stop making excuses," he growled.
"Fine. No rules, you said?"
"No rules."
She slid her throwing knife from its sheath and as he lunged at her she launched it straight towards his ear, then rolled out of his way. As he gripped the side of his head, letting out a low cry of pain
, she scrambled back up onto the frame.
"Are you really sure you want to play this game?" she asked, second thrower poised and ready in her hand. "Because next time, I don't think I'll aim for your ear."
"That's not fair."
"Really? You said no rules. So, do you want to do this or not?"
He muttered something under his breath, sheathed his daggers, and stomped away. Eleanor breathed a sigh of relief and went to retrieve her knife from the ground, wiping the blood off on the grass before she slipped it back into its sheath. She hadn't really wanted to kill him – that would have been tricky to explain.
"Where were we?" Eleanor asked, turning back to the others. They were both staring at her like she was some creature that'd just crawled out of the lake; any progress she'd made in persuading them she wasn't crazy had evidently been wiped away with one easy stroke.
In the following days Jorge went back to ignoring Eleanor completely, and the other students were strangely quiet around her, though she suspected they were talking behind her back. She told herself it was better that way. If they didn't really want her to be there in the first place, she'd prefer them to leave her to her own devices. It simply meant she spent more of her spare time jogging or practising complicated throwing sequences rather than sparring with the others.
It was a couple of weeks later when she woke one morning feeling oddly stiff, her arms twisted awkwardly beneath her body. It took her a moment to realise that part of her discomfort was because she wasn't in her own bed, but lying on a hard surface. The floor? She wondered if she could've fallen out of bed, though she hadn't done that since she was an infant, but when she opened her eyes to look she discovered she was blindfolded.
Something very strange was going on.
Her arms and legs were bound and she felt groggy and stupid, her head pounding and making it difficult to concentrate. She needed to work out where she was, that much was obvious, but her mind refused to co-operate. Her first thought was Jorge – had he crept into her room in the night to take his revenge? But she would've expected to wake in time to put up some kind of fight.
She could see nothing, not even light, through the thick fabric of the blindfold. She could tell only that she must be indoors – the room was quiet, there was no movement in the air, and the surface beneath her cheek was a smooth and polished floor.
With some difficulty she managed to roll herself into a sitting position, but she couldn't work her hands free of the ropes which lashed her wrists together. She'd gone to bed with a small stiletto in her wrist sheath, as usual, but now the sheath was empty.
"Eleanor."
"Where am I?" she asked, wondering who the voice belonged to, and how he knew her name. She hadn't worn her identity bangle since reaching the academy, but the speaker certainly wasn't anyone she knew.
"Don't try to struggle." He spoke quietly with a flat Almont accent.
She turned her head towards the sound of his voice. "Tell me how I got here."
"You were drugged. No, don't try to move, you'll only hurt yourself."
Drugged? Well, that made sense of the fuzzy, achey feeling behind her eyes. She wished she knew which drug so she could at least guess how long it would take for all the side-effects to wear off.
"Where am I?" she repeated. "Who are you?"
"Think of me as your friend."
It was all she could do not to laugh.
"I can keep you from the people who'd like to hurt you," he continued. "But only if you trust me."
"That's a lot to ask, after all the drugging and the kidnapping."
"I'm not sure you have very much choice."
She tried again to dislodge her blindfold, pushing at the fabric with her shoulder, but it was tied securely and there was little she could do with her hands bound behind her back.
"Can I have some water?" she asked. If he was going to claim to be her friend, he could hardly deny her such a simple request.
He didn't answer but she heard him walk away, and he returned a few moments later to press a glass against her lips. As he leant across her she could feel the hilt of his dagger pressing into her leg; so close and yet so far beyond her reach. She gulped mouthfuls of cold water and emptied the glass easily, suddenly realising just how thirsty she felt. Maybe that was another effect of the drug.
"So why am I here?" she asked. If she'd learnt one thing from her experiences in Taraska, it was that she couldn't bear being tortured for information she didn't have. "What do you want from me?"
"You're going to help me."
"I don't think that's very likely."
"I don't think you have much choice. You don't want to make me involve my colleagues, believe me."
"Tell me what you want," she said, leaning towards the sound of his voice. "And I'll tell you whether you stand a chance or if you're just going to have to kill me."
"I wouldn't like it to come to that."
"Just tell me what you want."
She heard him stand up. "I'll see you tomorrow, Eleanor. Maybe by then you will have had chance to think things through."
She stuck her tongue out at his back as she listened to his footsteps retreating. Being drugged and snatched from her bed hadn't done much for her mood, and she was even less impressed with her captor's reticence. This was threatening to be Taraska all over again.
It was a long, headache-filled day before the man returned. Eleanor slept fitfully, unable to judge night and day from under her blindfold. At least the room was comfortably warm, and there were few distractions.
This time he brought water without her having to ask, and a hunk of bread.
"Are you going to tell me what you want from me?" she asked once she'd finished eating.
"We need your help with the Association."
"You came in and took me from my bed. What help can you possibly need?"
"Oh, we know where you're based," There was a hint of laughter in his tone which seemed quite out of place. "That was almost too easy. But we need to know how things work. I need you to tell me about the structures, the people, the traditions."
"Why?"
"Ah, Eleanor, if only you could understand. But the Association is very old, and you are very new."
"Why me, then? If I'm too new to understand anything, how can I possibly be any value to you?"
"You know enough. And you're the Association's first woman. That must put you in a very difficult position, surrounded by all those men. If you help us, we can help you."
"I don't need your help."
"It can't be easy for you, being so alone."
Eleanor found herself merely irritated by his pathetic attempts at sympathy. "It's not all that easy talking to someone I can't see," she said. "Why don't you take off this blindfold, and maybe we can talk."
"I want to help you, Eleanor, truly, but you must know I can't trust you. Not yet."
"What exactly do you think I'm going to do? I can't move – I just want to see who I'm talking to."
"Sorry. That's simply impossible. Maybe once you've proved yourself to me, I'll consider it. But so far you've given me nothing."
"You haven't asked me for anything that means anything." The frustration crept into her voice again. "You can't expect me to just guess what you want."
"I want your knowledge, Eleanor. Only you know what you can offer me." He moved away. "I'll be back tomorrow."
She still had a dull headache, and was starting to wonder if it was ever going to wear off. Whatever they'd given her, the effects were unpleasant. As she lay there, trying to sleep, she fiddled with the ropes around her wrists. She didn't expect to achieve anything, but it made her feel better that she was at least trying to escape. If she could just get her hands free, she'd have options.
Suddenly, she realised she'd actually managed to free one strand of the rope. She hadn't been anticipating even that much progress. Spurred on by the unexpected success, she continued working at the knot. Gradually, the fibres were moving.
It took her two days, and two more visits from the softly-spoken stranger, before she finally managed to loosen the knots to the stage where she could slip her hands out from between the ropes. She continued to express frustration over his oblique questions, but there was thankfully no sign of a torture chamber here, and she was secretly glad of the delay which gave her the time to work herself free.
Once she finally had the use of her hands, she made much faster progress. She loosed the knots around her feet and twisted the rope around so that, until she moved, it would still look like her ankles were bound. She wanted to look around, but though she shuffled the fabric of the blindfold up as far as she could, it was only enough to see a glimmer of light. She played with the knots at the back of her head for a while, but couldn't find a way to loosen them without removing the blindfold entirely, and if she took off the blindfold he'd know something was wrong. She needed him to come close enough for the rest of her plan to work, so she'd just have to work by sound. She tucked her hands behind her back and held the rope out of sight.
The man arrived with a glass of water as usual. While he was holding the glass to her lips, she swung her arm around to pull the dagger from his sheath.
He jumped up in surprise and she flung the dagger towards him. She leapt to her feet, hearing the clang of metal on metal as he blocked her throw, then the clatter of the knife bouncing to the floor; her aim must've been good enough to worry him, then. She wished Ivan could see her now, with a moving target and a full blindfold. This was a step beyond even what he'd asked her to do.
"Eleanor! Stop!"
She rolled towards where the knife had fallen, sliding her hands along the floor until she regained her weapon. Only then did she take the time to pull the blindfold from her eyes, blinking as she adjusted to the light again.
"Look around you," he said. "You're still at the academy."
She glanced around without dropping her guard. The room was similar enough to plenty of the academy's smaller halls, but she wasn't ready to trust her life to that resemblance.
"So who are you?"
He was a short, blond-haired man, whose appearance was as unfamiliar as his voice had been. He held his knife sideways in front of his body, no more willing than she was to disarm.
"My name's Gerald. I was given the task of testing the students this year."
She wasn't quite sure what to say, still not certain whether to believe him. "Who gave you that job, then? And why?"
"The council wanted to find someone the students hadn't met," he said. "They didn't want you to recognise my voice."
"Have I passed your test, then?" she asked. "And if I'm still at the academy, are you going to put that knife down and let me get a proper meal now? I'm hungry."
"I don't know whether you passed. You weren't supposed to escape."
"What?"
"Those were good knots, and you'd had a lot of locksure. There's no way you should've been able to move, let alone fight."
Locksure. A potent drug to paralyse the muscles, and one whose preperation Eleanor had never quite mastered, though she knew the theory of it. That explained the groggy, achey feelings all too well. She wondered how much they'd given her.
"So what, exactly, was the point of the exercise?"
"To teach you – but it seems you have no wish to learn." He looked disappointed.
"I'm very interested in learning how to escape," she said. "But no, I'm not very interested in learning how to lie still and helpless. And I can't think why you'd want me to acquire that skill. Now, if you don't mind, I'm going home."
She strode past him, watching to see whether he'd move towards her, but although he kept his knife up he let her pass. She found herself in a familiar corridor – so she was indeed in the academy. She went first to the kitchens to get something to eat, and then back to her room.
It was two days before any of the other students returned. As there were no lessons to go to, Eleanor occupied her time with running and target practice, and ever-increasing indignation. She planned the complaints they'd take to the council once the others were back, objecting to such a meaningless setup and insisting that no challenge should be set without a real possibility of success.
She was resting in the common room when Daniel and Sebastien eventually arrived back.
"What happened to you?" Sebastien asked, sitting down across from her. "Andreas said you'd been causing trouble again."
"Is that what he said? I only escaped."
"Escaped?"
"Yes – which I would've thought any one of us would've tried, in that situation. And then they had the nerve to suggest that I was the one doing something wrong. It's ridiculous, isn't it? I thought, as soon as you all got back, we should really go and complain about the whole setup."
"Complain about what?" Daniel asked.
"The whole idea! A test you're not expected to pass. Setting up a situation you're not supposed to get out of. It's crazy! Stupid!"
"Do you think you may be overreacting?"
"No." She looked up at him. "Do you?"
"Perhaps. It was only another lesson – a different format, but still a lesson."
"But what's it supposed to teach? Futility? The art of giving up? It's nonsense!" She flung a knife hard towards the target board to punctuate her point. "Nonsense."
"Maybe it was to teach patience."
"What, so it's impatient to try and get yourself out of a difficult situation? How was I supposed to know it was a silly game to wait out? For all I knew, they were going to kill me."
"I'm surprised you were able to move, let alone fight your way out, with the amount of drugs they kept feeding us," Sebastien said. "What did you say it was called, Daniel?"
"I believe it was locksure."
"It was."
"How do you know?" Daniel looked surprised. "You have never been good at identifying poisons."
"They told me," she snapped, irritated by his comment despite the truth of it. "I really shouldn't have been able to move, by all accounts, but apparently locksure doesn't have such a strong effect on me, after all."
"How can that be?"
"You tell me – you're the expert. Maybe it doesn't work on women."
"Impossible."
"Well, you'd better work it out before you ever come to rely on it. Whatever went wrong, it surprised them, too."