Misjudged
A Blood & Steel Short Story
2178.318 · 09:40 | Kiron Hills Locks — Gate 31
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She came in low again.
Kataero gave ground half a step and let her commit, because committing was the lesson and she would not learn it from being told. Her fist went past his hip into empty morning air. He turned his wrist over, caught her forearm, and used the weight she had already spent to put her on the packed dirt.
She landed well. She always landed well. That was the part nobody had taught her.
“Feet,” he said.
“They were fine.”
“They were behind you.” He offered a hand. She ignored it and got up on her own. She had started doing that sometime in the last month and he had decided not to comment on it. “Your hands got somewhere your feet hadn’t agreed to yet. So your hands were alone.”
“They were fast, though.”
“They were fast,” he agreed.
She grinned at him with her whole face, copper hair coming loose from the tie at the back, one sock already gone somewhere in the yard. Her breath showed. Behind her the trucks sat in a crooked row against the warehouse wall with leaves banked up against the tires where the wind had put them. The third one down was leaking again. He could smell it from here.
“Again,” she said.
He set his feet.
The second exchange he gave her more room. She read it as an opening and took it. That much he had built for her. The four inches to the left of where he was waiting were hers.
His block arrived late. Late enough to count. He turned the strike off his forearm and stepped through it and had her wrapped up before the follow-up existed.
He held her there a moment, one arm across her shoulders, her heels barely on the ground.
“What did you do,” he said.
“Won?”
“You did not win.”
“I almost won.”
“You changed your line.” He set her down. “When?”
She thought about it. He watched her think about it. He had learned to do that in the last two years and had come to like it better than the sparring. Peri thinking was a physical event. Her jaw went sideways. Her weight shifted from foot to foot like the thought was something she had to keep away from a dog.
“When your shoulder went,” she said.
“My shoulder went where?”
“Down. Little bit. Like this.” She showed him, badly.
He had not known his shoulder did that.
“Again,” he said.
In the third round she got something through. He took it high on the chest, moving away from it, and did not think about it again.
Connor came out of the warehouse before the fourth and leaned on the fender of the near truck with a mug in his hand, saying nothing, which was how Connor watched things. Kataero registered him and let him be there.
The fourth went the way most of them went. She overcommitted, he moved her past herself, she hit the dirt, she got up. Partway through it she stopped grinning, which meant she was working.
“Good,” he said, when it was done. “That last one, you set your feet.”
“They felt slow.”
“They were slow. Slow arrives. Fast doesn’t, sometimes.” He rolled his shoulder. It had gone stiff in the cold. “You have speed. Everyone in this yard can see you have speed. Speed is not the thing I am trying to give you.”
“What are you trying to give me?”
“Knowing when.”
She made a face at that. Eight years old and she could already tell him an answer was boring without using any of her own.
“When can we use weapons?”
“When your mom stops threatening me with one.”
Connor nearly spit his drink back into his mug.
Pepper came across the yard with her sleeves pushed up and flour on the hem of her apron, the permanent kind that had stopped washing out two winters ago. Kataero watched her come. He had never entirely gotten over the fact that she crossed a yard toward him on purpose.
She stopped in front of him, looked him over, reached up, and pulled a wet leaf out of his hair.
“You’re filthy,” she said.
“She’s improving.”
“That isn’t what I said.” She kissed him. Then she pointed at him with two fingers. She did that with things she had already decided about. “Don’t forget Marcus is coming over with his new wife.”
“Do we have to host dinner?”
“Yes we do. And you need to move all the trucks so people can park and clean the warehouse.”
Connor laughed again, quieter, into the mug.
“Not so fast, Mr. Alconi. You got things to do as well.”
The mug came down. “Yes ma’am.”
Pepper turned. “Come on, Peregrine. You need to clean up and help get the table ready.”
“Why can’t Kitt do it?”
“Katiara is four and she can’t see the table top without climbing on the table. Stop complaining and let’s get it done.” She was already walking. “Katiara is almost done with her nap.”
“She’s been done.”
Pepper stopped. Turned around. “What?”
“She’s over there watching us from behind the dozer.”
Kataero looked.
The dozer sat forty yards off at the fence line where it had sat since the spring, one track thrown, dead weeds up past the idler. A small face was tucked into the gap between the blade and the frame. Dark eyes. His own, people said, and they were right, and it surprised him every time. Peri had her mother’s copper. This one was his.
She saw him see her and did not move. Four years old and she had worked out that moving was the part that got you caught.
Pepper went across the yard at speed. “Katiara Ota. Katiara. You were told — ”
Kataero stood in the middle of his yard with his hands on his hips.
He had been facing that direction for most of the last hour. So had Connor. Neither of them had seen a thing.
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Peri was already trotting after her mother, one sock on, hair coming down.
Pepper came back across the ruts with the four-year-old on her hip and Peri in tow, and stopped long enough to look at both men.
Peri reached up. Katiara had two fingers of her hand before Pepper had finished stopping, and the two of them held on like that, one up and one down, both of them lit up about it out of all proportion to having eaten breakfast together an hour ago.
“Oh, and boys, doesn’t look like the first snow is far off. We need to finish winterizing the locks before things freeze.”
Connor put a hand over his eyes. “I forgot about that.”
“I was hoping to.”
He looked up while he said it. She was right. The sky had gone the low flat white it went a week or so out, no weather in it yet, just the promise of some.
Peri pulled her lower lip down with her free hand and crossed her eyes.
Katiara came apart. She threw herself backward laughing with her whole body, which took Pepper’s shoulder with it, and Pepper went sideways two steps in the mud before she got her boot down.
“Peregrine, that’s enough. Katiara, settle.”
Neither of them settled. Katiara had her face down against her mother’s collar and was still going, and Peri stood there looking innocent with her lip back where it belonged.
Kataero decided his boots needed looking at.
“Stop logs first,” Pepper said, hauling the four-year-old up into place. “Then blow the lines before there’s ice in them, and the pintles want grease. Marcus can look at that upstream gate seal after dinner.”
“I can help,” Peri said.
“You can help mommy in the warehouse while Kataero and Connor do the gate work.”
“I don’t want to be inside. I want to help them. Please?”
“Peregrine. Remember what I said?”
“I know.” She said it down at the mud, flat, in her mother’s cadence, the way you say a thing you have had to say before. “Boys work is boys work.”
Then all at once, up, both hands. “But I can do it. Please, momma?”
Kataero had the sentence most of the way built before he caught it. That she had good hands. That she could hold a light steady in the cold for two hours, which was more than Connor could say. That there was no reason.
He put it down.
“Peri. It’s best you listen to your mother.”
Pepper looked at him for a second. Not long. Then she shifted Katiara higher on her hip and turned for the warehouse.
“Peregrine. Inside.” She got Peri’s hair in one hand on the way past and gathered it back off her face without breaking stride.
Peri turned around backward without slowing, walking heel to heel across the ruts.
“Promise me we can do more tomorrow?”
“Promise.”
She spun forward again and was gone around the corner of the warehouse.
The yard emptied out. One of the truck engines was still ticking.
Her sock was out there in the dirt. He could see it from where he stood, twenty feet off, one small gray thing that had come off during the second round and neither of them had noticed.
Connor pushed off the fender and came over, and the two of them started gathering up what the morning had scattered. Mats. Wraps. The water jug.
“She’s got you,” Connor said.
“Don’t laugh too hard. If she has anyone wrapped around her finger, it’s you.”
“Probably.”
Kataero picked up the second mat and something in his chest complained about it. He put a hand on the spot and pressed.
“She’s fast,” he said. “Think I misjudged that last spar. Think she bruised a muscle.”
Connor grunted. Coiled a wrap around his fist, tucked the end.
“She’s getting to be more like Lin.”
Kataero didn’t answer right away.
He had one moment of the man. It ran about four seconds and it had a weight in it and a hand on his collar and after that it stopped, and everything else he knew about Lin Blackwood had come to him secondhand from the woman who had married him and the man standing four feet away coiling a wrap.
He had a debt and no memory to attach it to. It was an unusual way to owe somebody.
“I can see that,” he said. “Was he that quick?”
“Ran circles around me.” Connor scratched at the stubble under his jaw. “I had a hard time keeping up.”
Kataero looked at the corner of the warehouse where she had gone.
“I think we both have our hands full with her as she gets older. She needs discipline and focus.”
“Ain’t getting that from me.”
“Maybe.” He got the collar of his shirt and pulled it down off his shoulder, twisting to see. The mark sat high on his chest, under the collarbone, darkening. “Look here. That’s already turning color. Didn’t think she got me.”
Connor leaned in and looked at it with the flat professional interest of a man reading a gauge.
“Maybe a little conditioning wouldn’t hurt before the spar. Some laps maybe.”
“Good idea.” Kataero let the shirt go. “Might help get some of that wildness out of her before the lesson.”
They started for the warehouse with the mats under their arms.
“What’s that technique?”
Kataero stopped.
“What do you mean?”
“Your fighting style.” Connor kept walking a step and then stopped too, half turning. “It isn’t from here. I’ve trained at Fort Delvaine and I’m familiar with most techniques, save yours.”
The river moved behind the fence.
“Just something I picked up a long time ago,” Kataero said. “Nothing special.”
Connor looked at him a second longer than he needed to.
“Keep your secrets.” He shifted the mats to his other arm. “I will say this. After squaring off with you, special or not, that shit hurts if you are on the receiving side. I know.”
Kataero laughed. “I still haven’t got over that punch you landed.”
“You deserved it. After you knocked the wind out of me.”
“Oh yeah.” He held the door. “I forgot.”
They went in still laughing, and the yard behind them was empty, and the dozer sat at the fence line with the dead weeds up past the idler and nobody behind it at all.
JT Baldwin writes a lot of stuff, some of it is pretty good. Check out Wilted Crowns and his other works. More at → Blackwood Press
