DREAM QUEST

Chapter 5: An Hour of Skill

Vasha found him first.

The gray-violet light of early morning was filtering thin through the canopy when she and Lyset returned from their night's meditation, and Vasha's steps slowed the moment the training ground came into view — Daren slumped against a tree trunk, bow still loosely clutched in one hand, a dozen or more arrows scattered in a rough, telling pattern around the target ahead of him. She took in the scene with a single sweeping glance, the way she took in everything, and let out a slow breath through her nose.

"He didn't sleep," she said.

Lyset came up beside her, robes whispering, and studied the pattern of arrows with open interest. "He didn't fail, either. Look at the grouping." She nodded toward the target — most of the shots clustered tight around the center ring, a marked, undeniable improvement from the scattered chaos of the previous afternoon. "Something happened."

"Something happened," Vasha agreed grimly, and Daren, half-roused by their voices, didn't hear the rest of what passed between them.

They let him sleep a little longer — not out of softness, Vasha would have insisted, but practicality; an exhausted student learned nothing — and woke him gently only once the sun, such as it was, had climbed higher.

Daren came awake stiff, sore, disoriented, the memory of the alley rushing back before his eyes had even fully opened. He told them everything — the screaming, the blood, the abandoned boot, the claw marks scored into stone — and watched Vasha's expression harden with each detail, watched Lyset go very still and quiet in the particular way she did when she was filing something away to think about later.

"You should have woken us," Vasha said, when he'd finished.

"There wasn't time."

"There's always time to wake us." But there was less heat in it than Daren expected, and after a moment Vasha exhaled and crouched down in front of him, the way she had back in Solenne's golden chamber, bringing herself level with his eyes. "You did the right thing, not chasing it. That took more discipline than I expected from you." A pause. "Doesn't mean do it again."

"I won't promise that."

"I didn't ask you to promise. I asked you not to do it." But something in her face, grudging and small, looked almost like approval.

Lyset, meanwhile, had crouched by the target, studying the tight grouping of arrows with the focused intensity of someone solving a puzzle. "He's better than yesterday. Considerably better. Fear and grief are excellent teachers, when they don't get you killed first." She rose, brushing off her robes, and turned to Vasha with a glint in her eye that Daren was beginning to recognize as the precursor to an idea she found more amusing than she'd admit. "I have an idea."

"Your ideas worry me."

"Most good ideas should." Lyset turned to Daren. "How would you like to know what it feels like to actually win a fight against her?"

Daren sat up straighter despite the ache in every limb. "I'm listening."

"It's a binding working — temporary, contained, costs me very little to cast on someone with as much raw, untrained potential as you clearly carry. For the span of an hour, I can grant you the instinct of a trained swordsman — not the years of practice, not the memory of training, but the body's knowledge of how to move, how to read an opponent, how to commit to a strike without your mind getting in the way and ruining it, the way it ruins your archery." She tilted her head. "It fades within the hour. No lasting harm. But for that hour, you'll fight like someone who's held a blade for years instead of zero days."

"And then he goes right back to having held a blade for zero days," Vasha said flatly, "which seems like a fine way to get him overconfident and then gutted."

"Which is exactly why he should fight you while the spell holds," Lyset said, entirely unbothered. "Lose properly, against someone better, while he still has the skill to actually understand why he's losing. There's no lesson in being bad at something you don't understand yet. There's a great deal of lesson in being good — genuinely, temporarily good — and still not good enough."

Daren looked between the two of them, the ache in his shoulders forgotten, something eager and reckless rising in him that he recognized, distantly, as the same hot feeling that had carried him out into the alley the night before. "Do it."

"Daren—" Vasha started.

"Do it," he said again. "I want to know what it feels like. Even for an hour."

Vasha studied him for a long moment — searching, Daren thought, for the same fear or hesitation she might have expected and finding instead something steadier than either of them had anticipated — and finally, with visible reluctance, drew her sword from its scabbard and stepped back into the clearing.

"Fine," she said. "But when I beat you, and I will, you don't get to sulk about it."

"Deal."

Lyset's working was nothing like the violent, dramatic magic Daren had half-expected from stories. She simply knelt before him, pressed two fingers lightly against his sternum, and murmured something low and rhythmic in a language Daren didn't recognize — old, layered, full of soft consonants that seemed to bend the air slightly around her words. A warmth spread out from where her fingers touched, not painful, more like the first rush of warm water in a cold bath, climbing up through his chest, down through his arms, settling finally and strangely into his hands — both of them, fingers tingling as though they'd been asleep and were only now waking.

"It's done," Lyset said, rising. "One hour. Make it count."

Daren picked up the practice sword Vasha tossed him — a dulled blade, weighted properly but edgeless — and the moment his fingers closed around the hilt, something in his understanding of the weapon simply clicked into place, the way a word on the tip of your tongue suddenly arrives. He didn't think about how to hold it. He simply held it correctly, weight balanced, wrist loose, blade angled with an instinct that felt borrowed and entirely his own at the same time.

"Whenever you're ready," Vasha said, settling into a low, easy stance across from him, her own blade held loose and confident in one hand.

Daren moved first.

He came in with a diagonal strike aimed at her shoulder — fast, committed, the kind of opening move that, an hour ago, he wouldn't have had the first idea how to execute. Vasha's blade met his with a sharp, ringing clash, deflecting the strike wide with barely a shift of her wrist, and before Daren had even fully recovered his stance she was already moving, stepping inside his guard, the flat of her blade tapping lightly but unmistakably against his ribs.

"Dead," she said. "Again."

He came in lower the second time, sweeping toward her legs, and felt a fierce, startled satisfaction when she had to actually step back to avoid it — a real retreat, however small, however controlled. He pressed the advantage, driving forward, blade flashing in a quick combination his borrowed instincts strung together without conscious thought — high, then low, then a feint toward her shoulder that became, at the last instant, a strike toward her exposed side.

Vasha caught the feint half a heartbeat too late, and Daren felt the genuine shock of almost landing a hit ripple through him, electric and thrilling, before her blade snapped around and caught his wrist, twisting, sending his sword spinning out of his grip to land in the grass.

"Better," Vasha said, breathing slightly harder than before, something like genuine surprise flickering across her face. "Pick it up."

The fight that followed was longer than either of the first two exchanges — Daren's borrowed instincts carrying him through strikes and parries and footwork that felt, in the moment, like something he'd always known, his body answering questions his mind hadn't even finished asking. He drove Vasha back twice. He landed, once, a glancing blow against her forearm that drew a hiss of surprise rather than pain. For a handful of long, breathless minutes, the fight felt, almost, even — two trained swordsmen testing each other in the dappled violet light of the training ground, steel ringing against steel, the river murmuring somewhere beyond the trees.

But Vasha had eleven years, and Daren had an hour, and eventually — inevitably — the difference told.

She read his next feint before he'd fully committed to it, sidestepped the strike meant to follow, and in one smooth, economical motion swept his legs out from under him and had the flat of her blade resting against his throat before he'd even finished hitting the ground.

"Dead," she said, for the final time, though there was no triumph in her voice — only a kind of thoughtful, assessing quiet as she offered him a hand up. "You fought well. Better than well, for someone who's never held a real blade. But better than well still isn't good enough, Daren. Not against me, and absolutely not against whatever did that to those guards last night." She hauled him to his feet. "You have so much to learn."

"I know," Daren said, breathing hard, sweat sticking his hair to his forehead, and found, beneath the ache of losing, a strange and stubborn satisfaction. "I want to learn it."

The warmth in his hands faded gradually over the next hour, the borrowed instinct receding like a tide going out, until by midday his hands were simply his own again — unskilled, untrained, ordinary. But the memory of how it had felt to move with purpose, to read an opponent's strike and answer it, stayed with him in a way Daren suspected wouldn't fade nearly as quickly as the spell had.

That night, sleep came harder.

Daren lay on his cot long after Vasha and Lyset had slipped out for their meditation, staring at the low thatched ceiling, replaying the fight in his mind, the screaming from the night before threading through the memory like a dark current beneath bright water. He thought he wouldn't sleep at all. But exhaustion, it turned out, didn't care much about a racing mind, and he drifted off sometime past midnight into a thin, restless doze.

It was the sound — not quite a scream this time, more a strangled, terrible cry, cut short — that snapped him awake again.

He was on his feet before he'd fully processed it, this time grabbing not just his cloak but the sword Vasha had left leaning by the door — his own now, a gift she'd given him without ceremony after the morning's fight, a real blade, sharper and heavier than the practice weapon. He didn't think about whether he should wake the others. He didn't think much at all. He simply moved, the same hot, clean fury from the night before rising in his chest, faster this time, more certain of itself.

He found it three streets over, in the deep shadow between a granary and a low stone wall: a creature easily seven feet at the shoulder, hunched over something Daren's mind refused, for one mercifully blank second, to identify — fur the color of old iron, claws longer than Daren's fingers, a wolfish snout currently buried in the ruin of what had, until very recently, been a person.

The wolf-thing's head came up at the scrape of Daren's boot against stone, eyes flashing a flat, hungry yellow in the dark, blood slick around its jaws.

Daren didn't think. He didn't have the luxury of an hour's borrowed skill this time, no magic humming warm in his hands, nothing but a sword he'd held properly for the first time only that morning and a fury that had been building, unspent, for two nights running.

The creature lunged.

Daren moved on pure instinct and pure rage, sidestepping the first vicious swipe of claws by a margin so narrow he felt the wind of it against his cheek, and as the creature's momentum carried it half a step past him, off-balance for one critical instant, he brought the sword around in a single, clean, two-handed arc — not elegant, not the kind of strike Vasha would have approved of in form, but committed entirely, every ounce of two sleepless, furious nights behind it.

The blade caught the creature at the base of its skull and didn't stop.

It was over before Daren had fully registered what he'd done — the wolf-thing's head striking the cobblestones with a wet, final sound, the rest of it collapsing in a heap beside the person it had been devouring, already past saving. Daren stood over it, chest heaving, sword still raised, blood — not his own, this time — dripping slow and dark from the blade.

He didn't stay to be found.

He turned and fled the scene the way he'd come, sword still in hand, the adrenaline only now beginning to curdle into something closer to horror at what he'd just done, what he'd just been able to do.

He didn't see the second shape watching from the granary's shadowed rooftop — smaller, leaner, eyes the same flat yellow — until it, too, turned and fled, in the opposite direction, racing back toward the deep dark of the hills beyond Aldenmoor's walls, carrying word of what it had seen back to the only creature in the Thornwood it feared enough to report to.