### The Training Ground at Evening

The light had gone orange.

It came through the trees at the low angle of late afternoon — the training ground catching it on the flat side, the packed earth and the wooden posts and the rope courses all going amber in the failing day, the shadows long and soft across the ground where, scattered at intervals like fallen leaves, four women lay.

Celia was face-down.

Her cheek against the dirt. Her arms out. Her chest moving — she was breathing, that was confirmed — but the rest of her was committed entirely to the ground’s support, her body having apparently decided some time ago that down was the only viable direction.

Nara was on her back.

Her eyes were open. She was staring at the orange sky with the particular expression of someone who has had a revelation about the relationship between ambition and muscle failure and is not yet sure how she feels about it.

Marla was sitting.

Technically. Her legs were folded under her, her thick body upright by the narrow margin of a spine that had not fully committed to collapse yet, her hands flat on her thighs. She was staring at nothing. Her chest moved in the deep, deliberate rhythm of a woman managing pain through breathing because the alternative was making a sound.

The fourth woman was on her knees.

Not by choice. By the simple arithmetic of legs that had stopped cooperating and knees that happened to be the next surface available.

Lady Edda stood before them.

She had been standing before them for the better part of six hours and she looked exactly as she had at the start of those six hours, which was the most demoralizing thing about her — the complete absence of visible fatigue on a woman who had spent the day producing it in others.

She looked at them.

Her expression was the expression she had been wearing since midday — not contempt, not satisfaction, but the particular quality of disappointment that belongs to a teacher who had expected more and is currently auditing the distance between expectation and result.

"The dragon lord," she said, to no one in particular, "chose you."

Her voice was not loud. It did not need to be. In the quiet of the training ground with four women too exhausted to make noise, it carried without effort.

"I looked at you this morning and I thought—" She paused. The pause was not for effect. It was the pause of a woman actually searching for the word she had thought. "Extraordinary. I thought: he chose these women because they are extraordinary. Because there is something in them that I will see when I push."

She looked at Celia’s face-down form.

She looked at Nara’s open-eyed stare at the orange sky.

She looked at Marla’s upright-by-will body.

She looked at the fourth woman’s knees.

"I pushed," she said.

A beat.

"I am disappointed."

The word landed in the tired air of the training ground.

Nara’s eyes moved. Not her head. Just her eyes, tracking sideways to find Edda’s feet at the edge of her vision.

Celia’s fingers pressed into the dirt.

Marla breathed.

The fourth woman’s jaw tightened.

Edda turned.

She had said what she had to say and she had assessed what she needed to assess and the assessment had produced a result she was still deciding how to hold, and she turned because there was nothing more to do here tonight and she had her own appointment to keep — one she had been not-thinking-about for the better part of the afternoon with the focused discipline of a woman who has had a great deal of practice not-thinking-about things.

She took two steps.

"Teacher."

The voice came from behind her. 𝙛𝒓𝒆𝙚𝒘𝒆𝓫𝙣𝓸𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝒄𝒐𝓶

She stopped.

Not because the word commanded her to stop — because the voice was wrong. The voice was not the voice of the women she had been pushing all day. It was not the thin, exhausted, barely-there voice of a body that has run out. It was — something else.

She did not turn immediately.

She waited.

"Teacher."

Same voice. Steady. The particular steadiness of a woman who has found the floor of her endurance and is now standing on it.

Edda turned.

They were standing.

All four of them.

Not well. Celia had gotten to her feet and was swaying slightly, the dirt on her cheek still there, her hands at her sides. Nara had rolled to upright and was now fully vertical with the careful stillness of someone managing the vertical on willpower alone. Marla’s thick body had completed its rise with the slow, deliberate quality of something heavy moving by conviction rather than energy. The fourth woman was on her feet, her knees still dirty, her hands at her sides.

They were looking at her.

Edda looked at them.

The light was orange and long on their faces. The dirt on their skin. The set of their jaws. The particular way a woman stands when she has nothing left except the standing.

She had seen this before.

Not often. Not in the first six hours of a training. But she had seen it — the moment where the body’s argument runs out and something else takes over, the thing that does not negotiate with fatigue because it does not recognize fatigue as a relevant authority.

Edda’s gaze moved from face to face.

She closed her eyes.

Behind her closed lids, she thought: ’is this what you saw, dragon lord?’

’Is this why you chose them?’

The orange light pressed against her eyelids.

She thought of his voice. The particular tone of it when he had told her — not asked, told — what she would wear when she came to the waterfall.

Her mouth twitched.

She opened her eyes.

She turned again.

She walked.

"Teacher."

Celia’s voice. Louder this time. Carrying something.

Edda stopped.

A pause.

She heard them moving behind her — the soft sound of cloth, of something being handled, the particular rustle of something being offered.

"Don’t you want to wear this?"

Edda’s eyes closed again.

Not in thought this time. In something that was not entirely annoyance but was presenting as annoyance because the alternatives were more complicated.

"For our master," Nara added.

The word ’master’ in Nara’s mouth carried a warmth that had not been there this morning. The particular warmth of someone who has spent all day being destroyed by someone and has arrived, through the destruction, at something that looks surprisingly like loyalty.

Edda stood very still.

She did not turn.

"He said specifically—" Celia started.

"Do not," Edda said, "use that word."

A pause.

"He said," Celia continued, carefully, "that you were to wear a skirt. And come to the waterfall."

The silence stretched.

Edda was looking at the tree line. The orange light through the branches. The long shadows of the training posts across the packed earth. The evidence of a long day — the scuff marks, the rope burns on the posts, the places where bodies had landed repeatedly.

She thought about the waterfall.

She thought, with the flat clarity of a woman who has thought about something too many times, about exactly what she had been told would happen when she arrived at it.

Her mouth twitched again.

She turned.

They were looking at her.

Dirty. Exhausted. Standing on nothing but the will she had spent six hours testing. And holding — Celia, specifically, had it in her hands — a skirt. A plain thing, dark fabric, nothing remarkable about it except for the fact of its existence in this context and the looks on four faces that were carefully not being smug and only partially succeeding.

Edda looked at the skirt.

She looked at Celia’s face.

She looked at Marla, who was looking at the ground with enormous neutrality.

She looked at Nara, who was looking at the middle distance with the expression of a woman deeply focused on something other than the current situation.

She looked at the fourth woman, who met her gaze directly and said nothing.

"Do I," Edda said.

Not a question. The falling tone of a statement. The statement of a woman who knows the answer and is taking one more moment before accepting it.

She looked at the skirt.

She thought of his voice. ’You will come to the waterfall. You will wear a skirt.’ The absolute certainty of it. The tone that had not been negotiating.

She thought of the waterfall.

She thought about whether she was afraid of it.

She was not afraid.

She looked at her own legs — the training trousers, practical, worn, the evidence of decades of preferring function. She looked at the skirt in Celia’s hands.

She looked at these four women who had stood up when they had no reason to stand up.

Her mouth moved.

Something that was almost a smile. Very small. The kind that an old woman produces when something has surprised her and she has not yet decided whether to acknowledge the surprise.

"Fine," she said.

The word came out with the particular quality of a woman surrendering a position she had already decided to surrender and doing it with dignity.

She crossed the training ground.

She took the skirt from Celia’s hands.

She did not look at any of their faces as she did it.

"Not a word," she said.

Four women said nothing.

Very loudly.

Edda turned toward the trees and the fading orange light and the path that led, eventually, to the waterfall where a dragon was waiting with his particular brand of patience and his particular brand of promises.

She thought: ’I am too old for this.’

She thought: ’I have been too old for this for thirty years.’

She thought: ’I am going anyway.’

She walked.

Behind her, she heard — very quietly, very carefully controlled — the sound of Nara failing to entirely suppress something.

"NOT. A. WORD."