"Feet apart, weight low, like you're rooted rather than standing," Ragna said, settling into the stance he'd drilled a thousand times over five years until it no longer required thought to assume. "Not stiff. Ready. There's a difference, and you'll feel it once you've held it long enough."
Levi attempted to copy him with the earnest, determined focus of a man who'd clearly decided to take the lesson seriously, and achieved something that looked, charitably, like a very tall, very muscular bird attempting to balance on unfamiliar ground.
"That's — not quite it," Ragna offered, trying and mostly failing to keep the amusement out of his voice.
"I'm aware it's not quite it. I can feel that it's not quite it." Levi adjusted, overcorrected, and very nearly toppled sideways into the roadside grass, catching himself with a short bark of laughter rather than any wounded pride. "Five years, you said? Five years to make this look natural?"
"More or less."
"Then I've got roughly a day and a half to compress five years of training into something that doesn't get me killed on my first real fight. Excellent odds." Levi straightened, tried the stance again, and managed something marginally closer to correct before shaking his head, frowning slightly, considering something. "Can I be honest with you?"
"Please."
"This doesn't feel right in my hands." He hefted the practice motion Ragna had shown him — a simple guard position, nothing elaborate — and grimaced at how foreign the whole shape of it sat against his own instincts. "I've spent years swinging a pickaxe, Ragna. Heavy, blunt, close-range work — you put your whole back into a single strike and let the weight do the rest. This—" he gestured at the imaginary blade in his hands "—wants precision. Distance. A dozen small careful movements instead of one big committed one. It's not that I can't learn it. It's that it fights against everything my body's already spent years learning to do instead."
Ragna considered that, watching Levi's stance a moment longer, and found, somewhat to his own surprise, that the objection made a great deal of sense once he actually looked past the awkward footwork to the raw shape of the strength underneath it.
"What would you actually reach for, if it were entirely up to you?"
Levi didn't hesitate. "An axe. Or better — something smaller, quicker. A hatchet, maybe, something I could swing fast and heavy in close, use my reach and my weight instead of fighting against them. Mobile enough to keep moving, hard enough to end things quickly once I'm in range." He said it with a confidence that hadn't shown up once during the sword drills, something clicking into place behind his eyes as he described it.
"I've thought about it more than you'd expect, actually. Watching the overseers' guards in the mines, working out which of them I could take and which I couldn't. Never had the coin or the freedom to test the theory."
Ragna was quiet for a moment, weighing his own knowledge honestly against the temptation to simply keep pushing forward because starting felt easier than admitting a limit.
"Then I think we should stop," he said finally.
Levi blinked. "Stop? We've barely started."
"That's exactly why." Ragna sheathed his own blade, shaking his head slightly. "I know swords, Levi. Five years of drilling, sparring, real instruction from people who've spent decades mastering the discipline properly. I don't know axes. I don't know hatchets, or the weight distribution, or the specific footwork that actually suits close, heavy strikes instead of the reach and precision a sword demands. If I keep teaching you what I know and pretending it transfers cleanly, I'm not helping you — I'm just handing you bad habits built on the wrong foundation, and bad habits from a well-meaning teacher are considerably harder to unlearn than no habits at all."
He met Levi's eyes, entirely serious now. "You deserve a real teacher for the weapon that actually suits you. I'd rather admit what I don't know than mislead you into something that gets you hurt because I was too proud to say so."
Levi studied him for a long moment, something like genuine respect settling into his expression. "That's a strange kind of honesty to offer a man who just spent the last hour trying to learn something for free."
"It's the only kind I've got much use for," Ragna said, and meant it. "When we reach the temple, ask about axes specifically. I'll back you on it, whatever weight that carries. But I won't pretend to teach you something I'd be teaching wrong."
Levi clapped him on the shoulder, the gesture warm and entirely without resentment. "Fair enough. Come on, then — Matan's mule is leaving us behind again."
***
They reached Herinhon by noon, the city rising ahead of them in a way that made Ragna's earlier assumptions about Manachy's grandeur feel suddenly, distinctly provincial — high walls of pale grey stone, towers crowned with banners bearing a crest Ragna didn't recognize, the whole sprawling city humming with the particular dense, restless energy of a place considerably larger than anywhere he'd lived his entire life.
They'd barely crossed into the city square, Matan's cart rattling along beside them through a crowd thick with merchants and soldiers and criers shouting news Ragna couldn't fully follow, when a young man on horseback — richly dressed, flanked by four armored knights whose bearing marked them as considerably more than ceremonial guards — pulled up sharply at the sight of him, his expression shifting from bored indifference to something sharp and mocking in the space of a single breath.
"Well, well," the young man called out, loud enough that half the square turned to look. "Young Master Colvo. Slumming it with peasants and farmers now, are we? I'd heard the academy trials left you humbled, but I confess I didn't expect quite this level of theater."
Ragna froze, entirely uncertain who was being addressed until he realized, with a slow, creeping unease, that every eye in the immediate vicinity — including Levi's and Matan's — had turned toward him.
"I think you have me mistaken for someone else," Ragna said carefully, once it became clear the silence wasn't going to resolve itself.
"Mistaken." The young man — Sterling, one of the knights murmured, low enough that Ragna barely caught it — laughed, sharp and unpleasant. "That's a fine trick, Colvo, but I'm not falling for it twice. Pretending you don't know your own name because you lost the swordsmen's trial and can't bear the shame of it — that's beneath even you, and you've set a fairly low bar over the years."
"I don't know anyone named Colvo," Ragna said, more firmly now, aware of Levi shifting uneasily beside him, aware too of the growing weight of curious stares pressing in from every direction. "I've never attended any academy. I don't know what trial you're referring to."
Sterling's confident sneer faltered, just slightly, something uncertain flickering behind his eyes for the first time since he'd ridden up.
He leaned forward in his saddle, studying Ragna's face with a considerably closer, more genuine scrutiny than the mockery had carried a moment ago.
"You're not—" he started, then stopped, frowning hard, clearly recalculating something he'd been entirely certain of only moments before. "You genuinely don't know him."
"I've told you three times now."
The knights around Sterling exchanged glances, and Ragna caught, in the brief silence that followed, the unmistakable shape of a question none of them seemed eager to actually voice aloud — then who is this, wearing Colvo's exact face, riding with a farmer and a mine-worker as though it meant nothing at all?
Sterling, however, was apparently not a man inclined toward deep reflection. He straightened in his saddle, waved the confusion off with an irritated flick of his wrist, and offered Ragna one final, withering glare before wheeling his horse around.
"Whoever you are," he said, "stay out of my sight." The knights fell in behind him, each one sparing Ragna a final, cold glance that carried considerably more weight than the words leaving with them, before the whole procession pushed back through the crowd and vanished toward the city's upper district.
"That was strange," Levi said, once they were finally out of earshot, his voice carrying the particular flat understatement of someone still processing what had just happened.
"I have no idea who Colvo is," Ragna said, staring after the departed knights, something uneasy settling into his chest that had nothing to do with the mockery and everything to do with the raw, unmistakable certainty in Sterling's voice that he'd been looking at someone he genuinely knew.
Matan pulled the cart to a stop nearby, the square's remaining crowd flowing loosely around them, and it was there, waiting for his own composure to catch up with the encounter, that Ragna's eyes drifted toward the wooden board bolted to a nearby wall — a wanted board, dense with faces and names and sums of gold large enough to make even a farmer's eyes widen.
One face held his attention considerably longer than the rest.
LADY RUI TERBRUDA — WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE — 250,000 GOLD
The largest bounty on the entire board, by a wide margin. Ragna recognized the family name instantly, Sentel's old lessons surfacing without effort — the Terbruda line, royal blood of Migard, scattered and hunted since the kingdom's fall generations ago. This, then, was the missing princess, the one who'd escaped whatever chaos had claimed the rest of her line.
Her eyes, rendered in careful ink on the weathered poster, were grey — a soft, storm-colored grey that struck something oddly familiar in Ragna's chest, though he couldn't have said why if pressed. He stood in front of the board a moment longer than he meant to, something quiet and unexplainable tugging at him, before Matan's voice pulled him back.
"This is where I leave you both," the farmer said, already climbing down to properly say his goodbyes. "My route cuts south from here, out to the countryside. You two head through the western gate — straight road from there to the Temple, if the maps I've seen are honest." He pressed a small pouch into each of their hands before either could protest, the weight of silver coin unmistakable through the cloth.
"Fifty silver each. Call it a token, for good company on a long road. You've both earned considerably more than that from an old farmer's perspective."
"Matan, we can't—"
"You can, and you will, and I won't hear another word about it." He clasped Ragna's hand, then Levi's, firm and warm. "Safe roads, the both of you. I mean that."
He climbed back onto his cart, flicked the reins, and rolled away through the thinning crowd without looking back, leaving Ragna and Levi standing together in Herinhon's busy square — one bounty poster, one stranger's mistaken face, and a western gate still waiting ahead of them.