Jesse rembered its first words.
She rembered the way he used to fight in the camps. Not wild, not showy—just... right. Even when he barely had any rank. Even when his only advantage was how fast he learned and how little he cared for tradition.
That hadn’t changed.
But everything else had.
The court clothes.
The posture.
The weight behind his na, even if it still wasn’t a real na.
He felt further away now.
And she? She wasn’t the sa either.
She’d bled since those days. Killed. Survived. She’d beco soone who walked with purpose in courts like these, soone the prince himself trusted to act without crumbling.
She wasn’t just a girl dragging herself through drills anymore.
She had a place.
A reputation.
But standing across from him now... it all felt muted.
Like she’d stepped sideways into a version of the past where things could have gone differently.
Maybe—just maybe—in this courtyard...
She could relive so of it.
Not all.
Not the ache, not the silences that stretched between deploynt and disappointnt.
But this.
Lucavion’s eyes t hers.
And for a mont, it was like the war never ended.
The noise of the courtyard faded—nobles, politics, everything. All she could see was him. The sa black eyes. The sa unreadable calm.
But behind it?
There was a glint. Sothing quieter.
mory.
And Jesse felt it in her chest like a bruise.
He rembers too.
Back then, when they were just half-starved grunts in rusted armor, when the nights were colder than the steel they carried, he’d said sothing. One night after drills, when the others had already collapsed into their tents, and she was still fumbling her blade in frustration.
He stood beside her, arms crossed, watching her form collapse for the fifth ti.
And then, with that lazy grin she’d co to associate with pain hidden beneath confidence, he said:
"You’re trying to fight with a sword. Don’t."
She blinked at him. "What?"
"Talk to it. Listen to it. You’re not swinging a tool. You’re holding a conversation. The mont you stop listening, it stops protecting you."
She never forgot that.
Even when he left.
Even when she was alone.
She’d carried that phrase like a shield in the years after. When the war turned darker, when the air felt thick with ghosts, when he wasn’t there to spar or joke or tell her what she was doing wrong—his words were.
Jesse had to survive the rest of it without him.
And it hadn’t been clean.
Not by a long shot.
The n who ca to her tent didn’t want camaraderie. They wanted access. To her, to her proximity to command, to what little warmth she had left.
They weren’t like him.
They didn’t speak to her like she was real.
But she shaped herself in those monts.
In the silences.
In the refusals.
In the fights she picked, and the ones she walked away from with blood on her knuckles.
She survived.
Not by being soft.
Not by asking anyone to stay.
But by becoming soone no one could bend.
And now—
Now she stood across from him.
All of it pressed forward now.
The weight. The past. The silence between them.
Standing there, before Lucavion once more, Jesse felt everything she’d buried knot itself behind her ribs. Not like sorrow. Not like rage. Like sothing fuller. Whole.
She looked at his blade.
It was new—strange. The estoc didn’t carry the sa chipped familiarity of the training sword he once used to knock her onto her back for five sparring rounds straight. It looked refined. Dangerous. Detached.
But the way he held it?
That hadn’t changed.
Still loose in his fingers.
Still reverent in its distance.
Like he wasn’t wielding it.
Like he was listening.
Jesse’s lips curved—barely.
A smile, not of amusent or pride.
Sothing quieter.
It wasn’t as she imagined.
She’d pictured this mont countless tis. Thought she’d et him again in a more private place, after the war had passed from their bodies, maybe after the blood had dried. She imagined a table, or a street corner, or even just a letter. Sothing clean.
But this?
This was better.
Here, in the open, in front of everyone who ever doubted her, she stood with the one person who had seen her, once.
And now?
She was about to speak the only way he ever truly respected.
Steel to steel.
The referee stepped forward, voice crisp in the chill air.
"On the signal. Combat until disarm, yield, or incapacitation. Competitors—are you ready?"
Before Jesse could answer, another voice cut through the stillness.
"Do not embarrass us."
Adrian.
His tone didn’t hold cruelty. But it didn’t have to.
Because that word—it echoed deeper than it should have.
Embarrass.
The first word her father ever used when her na was read aloud in court.
An embarrassnt.
Not because she failed.
But because she existed.
The illegitimate daughter of a house that only recognized what could be grood and paraded. A tool. A number. An afterthought.
She’d been sent to war not for glory.
But to disappear.
Let the battlefield deal with her.
Let the reports bury her na in the mud.
But she didn’t die.
She learned to fight.
To bleed without weeping.
To build a sword-hand steady enough to silence the word embarrassnt every ti it surfaced in soone else’s mouth.
And now—
She took a breath.
Still looking at Lucavion.
Still feeling his gaze locked with hers, saying nothing, as always, but letting it all speak anyway.
She didn’t turn back toward Adrian. Didn’t respond.
She simply stepped forward into stance, one hand resting on the hilt, the other loose at her side.
And with that sa ghost of a smile, she whispered—not for the referee, not for the nobles, not for the prince:
But for him.
"I’m ready."
The referee turned slightly.
"Lucavion?"
He didn’t answer imdiately.
Didn’t adjust his stance or glance at the crowd like so many others would.
His eyes stayed on Jesse.
Unflinching.
Still reading her the way he used to read enemy movents—quietly, carefully, like her very breath was a paragraph in so living book he already half-knew by heart.
And then—
He smirked.
Not the forced kind nobles wore in debates or salons.
But the old kind.
The real kind.
The one she rembered from the barracks. From campfires. From blood-soaked mornings when he still mocked her footwork between salvos.
"I’m ready," he said, his voice low and smooth.
As if this was just another sparring session after curfew.
Another night under a different sky.
The referee stepped back, hands raised.
The courtyard exhaled.
Jesse lifted her sword.
A long, classic blade—unfussy, unadorned. ant for control and montum, not showmanship. It glead in the lanternlight as she shifted into form—weight balanced, shoulders squared, eyes never leaving his.
’I want to show you...’
It wasn’t pride.
It wasn’t vengeance.
It was the quiet, stubborn wish of a girl who had been shoved into the battlefield and told to survive it.
A girl they thought would break.
A girl who almost did.
But didn’t.
Not fully.
Because sothing in her rembered this—
This mont.
This weight in her hand. This silence before the strike. This gaze eting hers like it always used to when they stood across training lines, half-starved and laughing between bruises.
Jesse had changed.
She wasn’t that trembling cadet anymore. The one who used to fumble her draw, who flinched at feedback, who stayed silent when the others joked about her parentage like she wasn’t there.
No.
She’d built herself blade by blade, scar by scar, under a sky that never looked warm again.
’Let show you what beca of the girl you left behind.’
Her feet braced.
The sword rose higher—shoulder-aligned, clean angle, no hesitation.
Let the court watch.
Let them weigh her stance, her rank, her origin.
None of it mattered.
Not here.
Not to him.
She dashed forward.
No flourish.
No warning.
Just pure, honed intent.
A streak of motion through the lanternlit silence.
CLANK.
Steel t steel.
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