I have been thinking.
This is, admittedly, not my preferred pastime. Thinking implies uncertainty, and uncertainty implies there exists a question I cannot yet answer, which implies — briefly, insufferably — that I am not the most informed person in the room. A condition I tolerate poorly and resolve quickly.
And yet.
I have been thinking.
The Hekeheke fight plays behind my eyes at inconvenient moments. Not the whole of it — I have no interest in the whole of it, the whole of it is a long and complicated piece of theatre with too many moving parts and insufficient lighting. What replays is the specific moment. The one where my body decided, without consulting me, that it had given everything it had. Where my legs stopped cooperating and the ground came up to introduce itself personally.
I was knocked aside.
Ikaroa of the Kris Life Arts. The prodigy. The leading man.
Knocked. Aside.
I did not black out, which I note as the sole mercy of the occasion. I was conscious for all of it. Including the part where Kael — Kael, the outsider, the boy who three months ago did not know what any Art was — stood at the center of it when the rest of us could not.
And then the breath came out.
I saw it from the ground. Which is perhaps the worst angle from which to witness something extraordinary. Flat on your back, vision swimming, watching a beam of directed fire cross the air above you while the boy you claimed as your rival ends a fight you could not.
The gap between us, which I had been pleasantly narrating as a temporary condition — the rival who has not yet caught up, the underdog arc before the real confrontation — revealed itself in that moment to have a specific, measurable width.
Wide.
Wider than I had been performing it.
I lay on the ground and watched and thought: he has done this twice now. The trial. And this. And both times I was present and both times I was — not losing, not exactly, but not winning either. Not where the story needed me to be.
This is unacceptable.
Not in the theatrical way I usually mean unacceptable, where I say the word with a flourish and move on. In the quiet way. The one that sits in the chest without asking permission.
So. I have been thinking.
The thinking arrived at a conclusion.
The conclusion is humiliating in the specific way that only correct conclusions can be.
I need to go see Elder Anuenue.
I practice the approach three times in my head before I actually make it.
First version: I arrive, I gesture expansively, I explain that I have identified a gap in my development which I have graciously decided to allow her to address. Generous of me, really. She should feel honoured.
I dismiss this version. Even I can see its flaws.
Second version: I arrive, I say nothing, I simply look at her until she intuits the problem through sheer proximity to my greatness. She solves it. I leave.
Also dismissed. She is not the intuiting type.
Third version.
The third version I do not practice. I simply walk.
Her training ground sits at the northern end of the island where the rock is oldest and the wind has no patience for pleasantries. I have been here exactly twice since being assigned to her: once to confirm the assignment, once to watch a demonstration she gave that I did not ask for and mostly did not need. The ground is bare and dark, volcanic stone worn smooth by years of footwork. No decoration. No flourish.
Very much her, in that way.
She is there when I arrive. Of course she is. She looks like someone who is always exactly where she intends to be, doing exactly what she intends to do, at exactly the right temperature about all of it.
She does not look up when I approach.
"Ikaroa," she says.
"Elder." I spread my arms in a greeting gesture of moderate grandeur. "What a fine morning to find my master exactly —"
"Why are you here."
Not a question. A removal of the preamble.
I lower my arms. Adjust. The audience, such as it is, is not interested in the opening number.
"I have," I say carefully, "identified a strategic insufficiency."
Silence. She looks at me now. Her expression is the expression of someone who has heard many things and ranked them, and this one has not yet made the list.
"In my development," I add.
More silence.
"As a warrior."
She waits.
I have outwaited many people. She is not many people. The silence she produces is load-bearing — it holds weight and does not shift under it.
"The Hekeheke engagement," I say finally. "And before that, the Nuku trial. I was —" The word resists briefly. I say it anyway. "— behind. On both occasions. The outsider was ahead of me."
"And?"
"And I do not intend for that to be a permanent condition."
She studies me for a moment longer than is comfortable. Not hostile — or not only hostile. More the way one studies a mechanism to understand what drives it.
"Your weapon arts," she says. "What's your current progression?"
I tell her. Efficiently, because she is clearly not here for elaboration.
She nods once, the nod of someone confirming a thing they already knew. "That's not the problem."
I wait.
"You progress through your arts quickly," she says. "Faster than anyone I've taught. Faster than most anyone on this island." A pause that is not a compliment, just a measurement. "You learn a technique and it is correct. You move to the next one. You don't need to fight to learn it. You don't need to train it into your body for months. You just —" she makes a short gesture, "— have it."
"Yes," I agree. This is not new information to me.
"So you don't fight," she says. "Not really. Not in the way that costs you something. In the tournament you performed. Against Nuku's trial you used what you knew and found its limit. In the Hekeheke mission you were in genuine danger for perhaps the first time in your life."
She stops. Lets that sit.
I do not argue with it. I find, with some surprise, that I cannot.
"The gap," she continues, "is not technique. It is not talent. It is not even power." She looks at me flatly. "It is battle experience. The kind you can only get by being in battles you are not certain you can win. Which you have avoided. Because you have never needed to seek them out."
The morning wind moves across the volcanic stone. Somewhere below, the sea argues with the cliffs.
She is right.
Of course she is right. That is the most irritating thing about correct conclusions — they have the decency to remain correct regardless of how one feels about them.
"Technique enters your hands faster than it enters your judgement," she says. "You have arts you cannot yet use properly because you haven't learned to think in a fight. You've never had to."
I absorb this. I absorb it in the way one absorbs a critique of a performance that one knows, privately, is accurate — with external grace and internal turbulence.
"Elegant diagnosis," I say. "And the prescription?"
For the first time, something shifts in her expression. Not warmth exactly. More the subtle recalibration of someone who had expected more resistance.
"Experience can be manufactured," she says. "Within limits."
She turns. Three short, sharp whistles, piercing and directional, aimed toward the ridge above the training ground.
Movement on the rock.
Five women descend from the ridge in a loose formation that is not casual — nothing about it is casual — but wears casualness as camouflage. They move like people who know exactly how much space their bodies occupy in the world and have made peace with it being more than most. Their weapons are varied: two spearss, an Ihe at the hip of the one in the center, something wrapped at the back of the smallest one that I cannot immediately identify.
I know what they are. The Tide Maidens. Anuenue's unit. Not the Oath of Ember — not that authority, not that rank — but not something to miscalculate either.
I have never particularly took notice of them.
I recalibrate that assessment slightly as they arrange themselves across the training ground.
"They will spar with you," Anuenue says. "Not to teach you technique. To put you somewhere you haven't been." She looks at me sideways. "Somewhere you have to think."
The one in the center — spear across her shoulders, posture like punctuation — looks at me with the expression of someone completing a task they consider straightforward.
I look back.
My hand finds the hilt of my kris the way it always does, easy and familiar. The gold at my wrist catches the morning light. My hair moves in the wind.
The stage is bare volcanic stone. The audience is the sea.
It is, I decide, exactly the right kind of stage.
I roll my shoulder, let the grin find my face — the real one, the one with teeth, the one that means the blood has remembered what it is for.
"Well then," I say, and drop into my stance.
"Shall we begin?"