Curses and Will Chapter 13: Chapter 7: Trial by Will

Read chapter 13 of Curses and Will by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

They had once called him the Blade Demon. Jonathan, the ever composed butler whose footsteps made less noise than falling snow, had been a swordsman feared enough that entire battalions reportedly laid down their weapons the moment he stepped onto a field. I'd heard the title mentioned once by a passing guard, in the kind of hushed, half-disbelieving tone people use for things they've heard but never quite witnessed. I never imagined he'd be the one training me. But he was. Not with kindness. He didn't offer encouragement, didn't soften anything for my benefit. What he offered instead was clarity, which turned out to be a harder thing to receive but a more useful one. "A sword isn't something you wield," he told me on the first morning, beneath a stand of plum blossoms, the wind carrying fallen petals across the training yard in slow drifting spirals. "It's something you become." He taught me to move the way someone surrenders to a rhythm rather than fights against one, the rhythm of death itself if his metaphors were to be believed. Blade to hand. Breath to steel. Step to silence. Every motion built on the one before it until the whole sequence stopped feeling like separate actions and started feeling like a single continuous thought. It was beautiful to watch him demonstrate. It was considerably less beautiful to attempt myself. Each day my bones found new ways to complain. Each night my arms shook too badly to hold a spoon steady at dinner. I trained anyway, because the alternative, the version of myself that stood beside Annya with nothing to offer but good intentions, wasn't acceptable to me anymore. I had no magic. No inherited power. No destiny written into my blood the way it seemed written into everyone else's around this palace. So I decided to carve something through pain instead, since pain was the one resource I had in genuine abundance. Jonathan never mocked the effort. Never offered the kind of pity that would have made it worse. Some afternoons, when I collapsed in the training yard with my legs simply refusing to hold me any longer, he carried me inside without comment and healed what needed healing with hands that glowed faintly blue, warm and steady, hands that had apparently once ended the lives of kings now spent their evenings mending a servant boy's broken ribs. When I couldn't walk, he walked beside me at a pace slow enough to match. When I couldn't get a full breath into my lungs, he simply stood there until I could, saying nothing, needing to say nothing. Not as a friend exactly. Not quite as a mentor either, though it had elements of both. Just as a man who understood, in some specific and hard-earned way, what it meant to be broken and choose to stand back up anyway. Then one evening, during a meditation exercise Jonathan had set for me, I felt it. A presence. No, that wasn't quite the right word for it. A will. Dark. Old in a way that didn't map onto ordinary time. Pulsing through the hilt of my training blade like something with a heartbeat of its own, like blood moving through veins that happened to be made of folded steel instead of flesh. It studied me. Not with eyes, since it had none that I could find, but with the accumulated weight of what felt like a thousand battles pressing down at once. My spirit. The one waiting inside the sword, the one Jonathan had mentioned only in passing, in the careful, deflecting way he mentioned things he didn't want me asking further questions about. It had been waiting for me, apparently, this whole time. "You feel it," Jonathan said from somewhere behind me on the steps. He hadn't moved closer. "You're not ready." "Then I'll never be ready," I said quietly. "I don't have mana. I can't bind a spirit through magic the way the texts say it's supposed to work." "Then it will kill you." "Let it try." That was the first time I saw real fear cross Jonathan's face, brief and quickly smothered, but unmistakably there. He didn't try to stop me again after that. He sim