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The air in the sparring salle is comfortably cool and clean. A variety of glyphs carved into the stone walls keep it that way. No stuffy heat, no musky smell of sweat. Just the clear ringing of metal on metal as the twins run drills. Their shoes click begrudgingly on the stone floor, stepping forward and back as they thrust their spears in each other’s general direction.
Their precision is lacking. Their practice spears often knock against knuckles not gotten safely out of the way, and their footwork is sloppy. Despite this, they both complain incessantly about running grounded drills — if we’re going to be flying all the time, why do we have to bother with learning where to put our feet, it’s useless, so on, so forth, blah, blah, blah. Never mind that even shoes with glyphs drawn straight into the soles can get scuffed. Never mind that you might not even have shoes, if you’re in a bad enough spot.
It’s this pragmaticism that has made Utowin their de facto instructor. He’s better with a spear than he is with a pen, he knows that, and everyone else knows it, too. It’s a weakness in the traditional witch career trajectory and a strength in the Knights Moralis. And, if absolutely nothing else, it means the twins take him seriously, instead of treating him like a particularly cool older cousin.
Save for when they get tired. Seemingly on cue, they disengage from the drill. Ekoh first, like always, and Etlan following suit. They turn to Utowin, who has been quite happily leaning against the wall, watching and coming up with critiques of their forms.
Ekoh says, “I’m sick of this drill.” Etlan rolls his eyes, but does not contradict him, so Utowin considers it a shared sentiment.
“You’ll do it until you do it right,” Utowin says. “That’s how drills work.”
“We’ve been doing it right.”
Utowin gives the two of them a look. Then he starts rolling through the list. “Your stances are messy. Your strikes aren’t precise. And you’re too impatient to actually learn the difference between correct and eh, good enough.” He folds his arms and shrugs. “There aren’t second chances in the real world. If you don’t build muscle memory now, you won’t be able to rely on it when it really matters.”
The twins, as per usual, groan. They find lectures and lessons boring. That’s why they’re Knights, instead of civilian witches.
“You can work on a different drill, if you want,” Utowin says. They perk right up. Then they deflate as he continues, “I think your point control could use some practice.”
“I hate that one,” Ekoh huffs.
“Well, the offer still stands.” Utowin puts up his hands. “If you can hit a target dead-on a hundred times in a row, I won’t make you do it ever again.”
It’s kind of a cruel bargain, he knows. He could probably pull it off himself, as could the other members of the squad, but they’ve all been at it longer than the twins have. All the same, the promise of not having to practice advancing and lunging and striking over and over and over again is tempting. It’s enough to get the twins’ grumbling out — maybe this time they won’t mess up. Or maybe Utowin won’t notice when they do.
He always does. It’s not that he’s waiting for them to fumble. He just knows that they will. And he likes them, of course he does, but it’s his job to instruct. To correct. To ensure that they’re worthy of the caps they wear and the spears they wield. Letting affection get in the way of their progress would be doing them a disservice.
He waits for them to get properly frustrated, then calls out, “That’s enough. Go get some water and something to eat before Silver Eve rehearsal starts.”
The twins react to the prospect of a break with relief. And they’re green enough to still be entertained by parade choreography. They leave their practice spears at the edge of the room and bustle away, shouting out a quick bye and see you later as they go.
A while later, Utowin finds them again, this time in the salle reserved for Silver Eve rehearsals. The rest has done them good. All of their frustration has disappeared. They’re chatting with the rest of their squad in earnest, in the midst of a much larger throng of people.
The Silver Eve parade is, somehow, the one moment in the year where the Knights don’t get sideeyed. It reminds civilian witches that they depend on the Knights Moralis for their way of life. But they don’t have everyone participate — as big a deal as the parade is, that would be too unwieldy. Besides, they need some Knights on-duty during the parade, making sure children don’t run into the road and would-be criminals don’t use the celebration as cover. Which is to say: doing all of the actual important things.
Despite this, Easthies likes volunteering his squad for parade duty. He says going above and beyond the call of duty sets a good example. And he’s not wrong. But, privately, Utowin thinks he only does it because Vinanna browbeats him into it.
He makes his way over to his squad. Ruffles the twins’ hair, then takes his usual place at Easthies’s side. Just in time, too — this year’s choreographer claps her hands and asks them all to kindly shut up and pay attention, they have a lot of material to get through, please and thank you.
They’ve spent the past week on footwork. Blocking out jumps and spins. Practicing backwards marches and about-faces. Refining until no one is tripping or rocketing into anyone else and ruining the whole routine. At the end of yesterday’s rehearsal, the choreographer decided they had made enough progress to be given access to pennants. Today, said pennants make their appearance and are promptly distributed.
There’s hardly time for anyone to start messing around before the choreographer starts demonstrating what she wants: tosses, spins, spirals. It’s all standard stuff for the Silver Eve performance, which means Utowin is bored out of his mind. But he’s not a child who can sneak out of classrooms anymore. He’s a grown-up with responsibilities. And sometimes being a grown-up means that the responsibilities are ramrod straight postures and delicate flicks of the wrist.
The blocking for the first half of the pennant choreography is imparted onto them, move by move. Whether or not it’s interesting, Utowin picks it up quickly. The spear is a familiar weight in his hands, even if it is a lighter, flimsier version, designed for performance rather than practical use. He knows he’ll remember when to toss and catch and twirl — it’ll be the others in the squad coming to him, requesting that he go over measures thirty through thirty-six, or asking him if that one arc is clockwise or counterclockwise. And that always makes him puff up a bit. Even if the choreography is kind of pointless.
The next day, the choreographer has them review what they’ve already learned. Utowin is missing some of the refinement, some of the clean lines and sharp motions. He starts some tosses half a second late or early. But he remembers it all. And he doesn’t smack anyone else with his spear.
The same cannot be said for a significant portion of the people present. “Don’t worry about it,” he wheezes at the guy next to him, who’s just whacked him in the stomach and is apologizing for it rather profusely. “You’ll get it eventually.”
“I know,” the guy says, bashful. Utowin’s seen him around, even outside of rehearsals, but he’s never heard his name. “I just wish I could pick it up as quickly as you have.”
Utowin smiles before he has a chance to think about it. It’s an odd, embarrassing spot to be in — being good at something that doesn’t matter. If he was going to excel at something dainty and useless, he’d rather it be magic. At least that one opens up career opportunities. Being a decent dancer just gets him volunteered for stuff like this.
As the Silver Eve rehearsals progress, his training sessions with the twins become a welcome respite. Instructing is leagues more entertaining than being instructed. So he runs drills upon drills. Stances, forms, guards. Distance control. Parries and thrusts. He spars with them, has them spar against each other, ropes in any other people who may be present in the salle that day.
They’re improving. Not as quickly as they think they are, but improving all the same. He’s proud of them and their progress.
All the same, he doesn’t want to stunt their growth with too much praise. So he tells Ekoh his ability to set and disrupt the tempo of a bout will be useful if his precision improves. Suggests to Etlan that he should work on being more proactive and less reactive. Finds weak points and presses on them until the twins give up and accept that they actually do have a thing or two left to learn.
He’s just wrapped up a sparring match with Ekoh — pushed him backwards, hooked the top quarter of his spear behind his ankle, swept his leg out from under him. Ekoh lands on the mat with a huff, then flops flat.
“You have to watch both ends of the spear,” Utowin says, nudging Ekoh’s side with his foot.
“I’m trying, okay?” Ekoh grumbles, swatting at his ankle. “We can’t all be you.”
It’s not right to be pleased about besting one’s student. Proper teachers don’t do that. Proper teachers want their students to surpass them. It’s a good thing Ekoh can’t see the grin tugging at his mouth.
“It just takes practice,” he says. "You'll get there." He focuses and removes the smile from his face. Then he leans over and gives Ekoh a hand up.
The days smear together a bit. The squad is pulled out of the Great Hall every so often, inspecting some little upset in the outside world, restoring order and wiping memories as needed. In between, Silver Eve rehearsals continue, as does the twins’ actual training.
The better they get, the harsher Utowin’s criticism becomes. Once, in a fit of frustration, Etlan claims that Utowin was supposed to be the fun one. But for the most part, the two of them grit their teeth and bear it. And, of course, when they can’t get a spin in the Silver Eve choreography down, when they keep stumbling into each other and tripping over their feet and their pennants both, he’s the one they go to.
He helps the others, too, when they’re having trouble. He’d rather be doing something practical. But his personal opinions aren’t going to change the importance placed by the powers that be on Silver Eve.
Luckily, there’s not much help to provide. Galga and Luluci are on top of things, as they always are. And the twins’ issues are easily resolved. Most of his outside-of-rehearsals efforts are spent on Easthies. Not because he’s struggling — he isn’t. He’s just a perfectionist who lies awake at night thinking about how this toss or that spin wasn’t quite right.
Utowin is beginning to feel like he lives in the training salles. Easthies has conscripted him in his effort to practice spin-tosses — smoothing out the catches, keeping the lines his pennant cuts crisp and clear. And Utowin follows along, only half paying attention to Easthies’s time-keeping. There’ll be live music for the performance, a whole marching band, but they aren’t bothering with the recording. One-two-toss-pivot. Five-catch-seven-eight. On and on, forever and ever, world without end.
There’s a few parts where they’re supposed to toss their spears, trade positions, and catch the other’s spear before it hits the ground. It probably looks neat, all the long pennants rippling as they arc through the air. And the effect’ll be amplified by their long capes and coats, when they start doing dress rehearsals. All the same, they’ve been giving everyone grief.
Well — almost everyone. Utowin is ticked at how simple it feels. He knows, on instinct alone, how high Easthies is going to toss his spear, how much force he’s going to put behind the throw, where it will be when Utowin is supposed to catch it. He knows where to walk, where to fly: far enough apart that they don’t slam into each other, but close enough that it’s impressive. And Easthies seems to be doing the same mental calculus.
The choreographer told them, yesterday, that they were naturals. Made some tongue-in-cheek crack about them being wasted on the Knights — they should have gone into competitive dance and won medals.
But Knight Moralis is the only thing Utowin wants to be. The only thing he knows how to be. He was miserable as a civilian — perpetually waist-deep in snow, rubbing his red-knuckled hands together in a futile attempt to warm them up, drawing faulty glyphs and crumpling the papers up and creating an elaborate point system for throwing them into the recycling bin. He knows the spear and he knows how to be a precise half-step behind Easthies and that’s it.
It’s not that he wants to be bad at this. He certainly doesn’t want to struggle through the rehearsals until he gives up and sneaks out through the back door. He just — and this is childish, he knows it is — likes the way his life is. He likes his spear, likes his pennant, likes his prescribed spot at Easthies’s shoulder. Dance rehearsals are an unwelcome disruption to that status quo.
They run the toss-trade-catch sequences, then run them again, then run them again. And after each repetition, Easthies hums, We can do better. He starts the count over, and Utowin follows, and there they go again.
They don’t need the practice: that much is obvious. It’s an excuse. But Utowin puts aside the skin-crawling and the chest-tightening and keeps doing his job. If his job right now is rehearsing dance steps he could do in his sleep, then so be it. Better to practice it now than to flub it at the parade.
At least he has training with the twins after this. He starts dreaming up criticisms to dole out. Neaten up your footwork. Stop telegraphing your moves. Stay on the offensive, don’t let yourself be pushed onto the back foot. That block should be muscle memory for you, why isn’t it, go and drill it until you can do it without thinking. He’ll spar with them and drop them both on the mats and it’ll make him feel a little bit better.
There was a time, once, when he would have felt ashamed of taking things out on other people. Especially people like the twins — only nominally adults, still more children than anything. But that was long, long ago. Before he came to the Great Hall. Before he became a Knight. Before he had to worry about stupid parade choreography.
The stupid parade choreography, however, can only be blamed for so much. It can’t be blamed for his penchant for power trips, or for Easthies’s perfectionist streak, or for whatever might fit in between those two things — in between their forearms and wrists, brushing against each other. Not forcefully enough to disrupt the overall motion. Just enough to be noticed. A little thing, part of a long series of little things. Quick looks, quiet words, small gestures. Dried-up rings at the bottoms of teacups.
He likes his job. He wants to keep his job. He wants the system that gave him the job in the first place strong. And if he has to dance, then he’d rather the steps be laid out far in advance. None of this plausible deniability, this not-quite-anything. Easthies goes on and on, whenever he gets the opportunity, about how the Knights Moralis are the first, last, and only line of defense — how, if they slip up, if they get sloppy, if they get complacent, the bulwarks between witches and oblivion will begin to crumble. The rules exist for a reason, and there can be no deviation.
They move on to other parts of the choreography, ones that don’t come so close to the edge of anything. Utowin remembers that he has to meet up with the twins soon. So he continues through the routine, idly looking for a good moment to excuse himself.
It comes at a moment where the tempo slows. He loses momentum. Stops concentrating. Lets the crisp arc of his pennant crumple and fall to the floor.
Easthies, not missing a beat, gives him a flat stare and asks him what’s gotten into him.
“I’ve got to dip,” he says, shrugging. “I’m running drills with the twins in a few.”
Easthies nods in vague approval, but something flashes across his face.
There is no world where the look in his eyes means anything. There is no world where it means something and that something is acted upon. That world is incompatible with the very foundation of their lives as witches. As Knights.
And if it does mean something, then there’s one of two causes. Either Easthies has carved out an exception for himself — which he does not do — or he has made a mistake.
Utowin promptly pushes aside whatever emotion that prospect conjures up and leaves. Not his problem, not his responsibility, not anything at all.
If, later, he’s especially hard on the twins, if he seems at all vindictive, then it’s because they need a strong hand. It’s because the Knights Moralis need competent instructors. They have standards to maintain. Best to spend his efforts where they’ll actually matter.