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I had the seamstress of Shadow’s End fasten me a leather holster for the knife. I want it with me everywhere and I don’t plan on losing this one. I reach down to where it’s strapped around my thigh and pull it out. I kick the sword behind with my foot. It seems to go reluctantly, clattering slowly across the stone ground.
I get into a powerful stance, and get a good, solid grip on the knife when I feel a rush of heat surge toward me, energy that rattles the fillings in my teeth.
Vipunen is at me, so close that I swear I could touch him.
Instead, he touches me.
He presses something sharp into my stomach, which thankfully doesn’t pierce the chain-mail armor.
“You have died,” he says. His voice is now so close it feels like it’s coming from inside my skull.
“Try again?” I ask hopefully, sucking in my belly until he removes the knife. I can barely think, everything is red like I’ve closed my eyes to the surface of the sun and it’s trying to fight its way through.
Don’t open your eyes, don’t open your eyes, I chant to myself, on the off-chance that my mask is providing no protection.
He stabs me again, this time deeper, pressing into me with a pinch of discomfort. Any harder and I think the chain mail might tear.
“Stop it!” I cry out, hating how discombobulated I feel.
The knife withdraws and the energy swirls around me like I’m in a whirlwind, coming at my back now.
He presses the weapon into my spine.
I gasp and whirl, trying to face him.
“You’re disappointing me, Hanna,” he says.
I have to bite my tongue from swearing at him. I don’t think he’d appreciate it.
“You’re too fast,” I manage to say, trying to stab him with my knife but only meeting air. Meanwhile he gets me on the side, on my arm, on my hip, in my chest, relentlessly. I’d be dead a million times over by now.
“You’re too slow.”
Stab. Stab. Stab.
“You wanted to play with your special knife,” he adds. “Show me what you’ve got. Show me its power.”
“It’s not the same knife as I had,” I say, twirling and twirling, swinging at the air. “Maybe it doesn’t work the same way.”
“It’s still selenite, it should behave the same. You’re just not ready. You don’t want anyone getting close to you. You battle with swords because you can keep others at a distance.”
“Yeah! People who are trying to kill me!”
“You have to let others in, Hanna,” he says.
“So they can stab me? Got it.”
“I know in your world they have a saying. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Your most lethal blows should come when you’re close. You can’t understand your opponent from a distance.”
He knocks the knife out right from my hand.
“Pick up the sword, try again,” I grumble. My palm feels naked without it.
I bend down to pick it up and Vipunen stabs me in the back.
Hell!
“You’re clumsy,” he says.
“I’m. Trying. My. Best,” I say through clenched teeth, getting to my feet with the knife in my hand and feeling winded.
“Not hard enough. Not with who you are and what you’ve learned. You talk about your past life as if it held some importance to you. Show me then who that person was. Who was this fighter you seem so proud to be?”
That did it.
This time I sense him coming. I let my body take the lead, just as I had when I first came into the cave.
I go into a roll, summersaulting over and over before pushing up to my feet and immediately jumping to the left, with my knife thrust out to right.
I hit him.
I didn’t expect to, so it takes me by surprise. My knife sinks into something quasi-solid, like I’m stabbing a piece of Jell-O, and I feel energy surge up the knife into my hand until it knocks me flat on my back.
I let myself be stunned for half a second before I roll out of the way, conscious of another stab.
“Very good,” Vipunen says. “I have to say, that hurt.”
“Sorry?” I tell him, getting to my feet. “Maybe you should be wearing armor.”
I feel his force rush toward me again and I’m doing the ginga all over the place, dodging and moving as we do in capoeira, avoiding his weapon.
“Stop running,” he says. “Stop avoiding. Start fighting.”
“Fine,” I say and, as I feel him come toward me, I go low into a rasteira, a leg sweep that should knock any human being off-balance.
My feet meet with that soft substance again and it makes it harder to follow through, like moving through quicksand, but I concentrate, keeping my legs swinging across before I press down on my hands and flip up, coming forward with the knife.
I stab him.
Once again I feel the energy surge into me and I’m blown backward. I manage to stay on my feet this time, though my mask is almost knocked off and my knife feels like it’s fused into my palm.
