“Not proper fighting,” Alyson said, as if Amelia were being silly. “Practice fighting.”
“That is not as reassuring as you think it is.”
Another clash of steel sounded, sharp enough to send a jolt up her spine.
The logical part of her knew that Thomas was a soldier. She had known it since the moment he found her in the hay, since she had seen the sword at his hip, the scars on his hands, the way men moved when he spoke. She had heard enough from Hob, Edith, Walter, and the silences that gathered around Evesham to understand that Thomas had not merely survived battle. He had been shaped by it.
Still, there was a difference between knowing a man had fought and hearing steel ring in his yard. Somehow, she’d missed the sound of steel and the practices during her time here thus far.
Amelia found herself walking toward the sound before she’d decided to.
The lists lay beyond the stables, in a cleared stretch of hard-packed earth enclosed by a rough rail. It wasn’t the grand tournament field her mind had conjured out of too many movies and half-remembered museum exhibits. There were no bright pavilions, no ladies leaning over embroidered banners, no trumpets or polished armor gleaming in the sun. This was a working place, scarred by hoofprints and boot marks, bordered by barrels of blunted practice weapons, shields hanging on a rack, and a post so hacked and battered it looked as if generations of men had taken out their grievances upon it.
The smell hit her first. Sweat, leather, dust, horse, oiled metal, and the faint green sweetness of trampled grass where the field met the yard. Men stood in shirtsleeves or padded gambesons, some with mail hoods shoved back from red faces, others bareheaded, hair damp at the temples. Their hose were dusty at the knees, boots scuffed, belts heavy with knives and small pouches. A bucket of water and another of ale sat under the shade of an ash tree, beside a board holding bread, hard cheese, and a crock of something that smelled like onions and vinegar.
Hob stood at the rail, arms folded, watching two men in the center trade blows with wooden wasters.
No. One man traded blows. The other endured Thomas.
Amelia stopped so abruptly that Wat collided with the back of her legs.
He moved like nothing she’d ever seen.
Not flashy or cinematic. There were no spinning leaps, no heroic flourishes, no dramatic pauses in which the hero smiled at the camera. He was brutal and economical and terrifyingly beautiful in the way a storm was beautiful when one was foolish enough to stand beneath it.
He wore no mail, only a linen shirt open at the throat beneath a sleeveless leather jerkin, his forearms bare, the muscles shifting under sun-browned skin as he moved. Sweat had darkened the hair at his temples. The scar along his jaw looked sharper in the light.
His opponent swung high. Thomas stepped inside the blow, turned it with a crack of wood on wood, and tapped the man’s ribs with the flat of his practice blade hard enough to make him grunt.
“Dead,” Thomas said.
The man backed away, breathing hard. “Again.”
Thomas tilted his head. “You died.”
“Aye, but I’d like to improve before the grave.”
A few men laughed.
Thomas’s mouth twitched. He reset his stance. “Then do not leave your ribs open as if you hope to cool them.”
Amelia pressed her lips together.
The man came again, more cautious this time. Thomas let him close. For three heartbeats there was only movement, quick and hard, wood striking wood, dust rising around their boots. Thomas shifted his weight, feinted left, caught the other man’s blade, turned it aside, and somehow had the tip of his waster beneath the man’s chin before Amelia had even understood the sequence.
“Dead again,” Thomas said.
The man sighed. “That’s becoming tedious, my lord.”
“Dying often is.”
Hob made a pleased sound. “Next.”
Another man stepped in.
Then another.
And another.