She heard the yard before she reached it.
Steel against steel, the sharp percussion of controlled drills, precise and rhythmic.
She'd been heading to the herb room after James's midday rest, had made it as far as the ground floor corridor when the sound came through the outer wall and her feet made a decision without consulting her.
She told herself she wanted the air. It was a reasonable thing to want.
She stepped out into the light and stood against the wall with her arms folded.
Twelve men, working in pairs, each pair moving through a pattern with the efficiency of long practice.
Not a brawl, something more deliberate, every strike measured, every block exact.
She'd been near enough to violence before to know the difference between men fighting and men training, and this had the quality she associated with skill that had been tested enough to know its own limits and work past them.
Anthony was in the middle of it.
She'd watched him move before. Across a courtyard, through a corridor, and noted it the way she noted anything useful.
But that was walking. This was something else.
He was bigger than most of the men around him, but size wasn't what she was watching. She was watching economy.
The way each movement connected to the next without gap. The way he absorbed a strike from a man six inches taller and redirected it in the same breath, a counter that stopped an inch from the man's throat with absolute precision.
The man nodded. They reset.
"Ye stare boldly."
He said it without turning. She still didn't know how he'd known she was there.
"I study survival," she said.
He held the training sword at rest for a moment. Then his chin lifted fractionally toward the men around him.
They cleared the yard with the practiced discretion of people who had learned to find urgent business elsewhere at specific moments.
He turned to face her fully. Held a wooden sword out toward her.
She looked at it. "Nay."
"Ye said ye study it."
"I study it. Nae perform it."
"Then learn the difference."
She saw the look on his face that told her he was going to win this particular exchange and was simply waiting for her to arrive at the same conclusion.
She crossed the yard and took it.
The weight landed wrong in her grip immediately. Too far back on the hilt, balance off, and she knew it before she saw his expression confirm it.
"Ye hold it like a kitchen spoon," he said.
"I cook better with spoons."
The corner of his mouth moved before he caught it.
