"Have you ever swung a sword before?"
The morning was different. Cael had not sent him on the boulder run at sunrise, which was unusual enough to be disorienting. Instead the two of them simply stood outside in the pale orange light that came over the rolling hills at this hour, the kind of light that made everything look temporarily peaceful before the day started doing what it usually did to him.
"Not really," Lucien said. "Never touched one."
"Then we start from the beginning, which is where most things worth learning start." Cael clasped his hands behind his back in the familiar position. "A sword is not optional for a man who wants to travel these seas seriously. Even fighters who rely entirely on their bodies carry one. Until you reach a point where your skin is hard enough that a blade cannot cut you, and such people do exist, knowing how to handle a sword and how to counter one is not a choice. It is a requirement."
Lucien absorbed this. Then he thought about what Cael had just said about skin being hard enough to resist a blade, and then he thought about the boulder runs, and he arrived at a quiet but firm conclusion.
"I assume," he said, "that you are not about to tell me the reason we run every day is that eventually I will learn to fly."
Cael looked at him without expression. "Pick up the sword."
There was a plain wooden practice sword on the ground between them that had not been there yesterday. Lucien looked at it for a moment, then picked it up.
It was heavier than it looked. He adjusted his grip once, then again, trying to find something that felt right. Neither attempt satisfied him.
"Wrong," Cael said, and moved his hand into the correct position without explaining why. Lucien held it. "Now your feet." He nudged Lucien's stance into place with the same impersonal efficiency. "Hold that."
Lucien held it.
A minute passed. Then another.
"This is the training?" he asked.
"Yes," Cael said.
By the time the orange morning light had turned into the flat brightness of midday, Lucien's forearms had filed a complaint that had nothing to do with the boulder and everything to do with holding the same position for three hours while an old man watched him without comment. He had expected cuts, combinations, something that moved. He had stood in one place and held a wooden sword until his arms decided they had opinions about it.
Cael told him to set it down. Lucien set it down.
"Same again tomorrow. Physical training continues as normal for the rest of the day until the spar." He went inside to start lunch without further comment.
Lucien looked at the practice sword on the ground, then at his hands, and wrote two lines in the notebook. The first was about grip. The second was a note to himself that there was apparently no version of training under this man that was not quietly terrible in a new and previously unexplored way.
He picked up the sword and practiced the grip again until lunch was ready.
After lunch and an hour of rest he went back outside and found the boulder waiting for him, patient and enormous as always. After a morning of standing still until his forearms had formal grievances, the boulder felt almost familiar. He bent down, got his grip underneath it, and lifted.
It was, he reflected, slightly less terrible than the sword.
Slightly.
The spar that evening was a different matter entirely. Cael came out with the same unhurried expression he always wore, took his position, and said ready, and then proceeded to move at a speed and with a force that Lucien had not felt since the very first evening on the hill.
The body blow from the previous day had apparently been filed and not forgotten. Every exchange ended faster than the last. By the third round Lucien could not get close enough to touch the old man's sleeve, and the ground had reacquainted itself with him in ways he had started to think were behind him.
"From today the pattern changes," Cael said, looking down at him. "Sword training in the mornings, everything else after. Get some rest." He went inside.
Lucien did not get up immediately. He lay on his back in the cooling evening air and stared at the first stars appearing above the hills, letting the day settle around him. The setting sun had a particular quality at this hour, the kind that invited more thought than was strictly useful.
"Why did I even leave," he muttered at the sky. "I could have stayed home, studied, become comfortable, hired someone else to do the dangerous parts. I just want to see the world. I did not sign up to train like there is a war coming."
He knew the answers to all of it. He had known them before the words were out of his mouth. But knowing something and feeling it were different categories, and after months of the same hill and the same boulder and the same ground meeting his back at the end of every day, the boredom had crept back in the way it always did.
The same restlessness that had driven him to the shipyard as a child, to the cliffs and the forest and eventually to the sea. It did not leave just because the circumstances changed.
"And when exactly did my father become important enough to be owed a favour by an ex-Marine Captain," he added, to no one. "What did he even do. I should have been more suspicious when he waved me off with that enormous smile."
The sun finished going down. The hills went dark. Lucien lay there a moment longer, then closed his eyes and exhaled slowly, letting the thoughts run until they had nothing left to say.
Then he opened his eyes and sat up.
"What would be the point," he said quietly, to the dark and the stars and the empty hills, "of having someone else carry me there." A small smile appeared on his face, unhurried and genuine, the same one that had shown up the day he pushed off from the dock at home. "I want to see it for myself. All of it."
He stood up, brushed the dirt from his coat, and went inside.