Quistis kneeled over Falor and inspected the wound.

His breathing wheezed through the gash in his side. True sight granted by the Goddess showed two… no, three shattered ribs, and his right lung quickly deflating. He tried to smile and say something but choked on blood.

For all the power the Commander wielded, he was impulsive and poorly practised with most mundane weapons aside from his great warhammer, something Barlo was determined to beat, smash, and impale out of him.

She dug through her satchel and handed him two mixtures to drink. One to offset his blood loss, the other to strengthen him before the actual healing. It took some effort for him to down them.

With a palm on his mangled chest, she requested the Goddess’s aid, “I require this one to be mended.”

That put her at half of her daily allotment. She’d stop the training session after the next wound. By how things were going, she wouldn’t be out in the cold for much longer.

It was a credit to Barlo’s skill that he had managed to inflict such an ugly wound without outright killing the Lord Commander. Three crushed ribs and a collapsed lung just on the tail of a full body impalement, a near severance of the Commander’s right arm at the shoulder, and a crushed eye socket…

She sighed as Falor stumbled back to his feet, rolled his shoulders, and sauntered away to pick up his weapon. He spat a glob of blood, coughed, and spat another into the fresh snow.

Barlo, stripped down to the waist and barefooted, paced the outer rim of the sparring ground. Steam rose off him in thin wisps, curling around the edges of his bone-plate carapace. Vanadal carapace never stopped growing and Barlo didn’t file his smooth like tradition dictated, allowing it to grow into a spiky, jagged mess that gave him the look of a long-ago savage.

He held his swords loose at his side and waited for his willing victim to come back into range.

She caught his eyes and the question there, and replied with a nod. Yes, Falor could continue training. For as mercilessly as Barlo beat him, he would never go a single step beyond her mandates. She could stop their session with a single gesture but that would injure the Commander’s pride much worse than the Miscreant’s blades ever could, especially if Quistis could still heal him.

Some soldiers were gathered on the other side of the arena, watching in silence the lessons administered. Each of them had been in there with Barlo before and all knew intimately the edge of his blades. None cheered or commented on the exchange of blows.

Snow fell in thicker swathes now as both men took up position and raised their guard. Barlo’s weapons of choice for the day were his ugly, curved blades, one in each dominant hand, while Falor faced him with a wide-bladed halberd. Quistis washed her hands in snow and scurried back into the cover of the pavilion overlooking the sparring grounds to watch another bout of the massacre.

Falor’s warhammer, a particularly nasty piece of star ore, rested next to her chair like a squatting great hound waiting for its master’s return. It was decidedly too heavy for her to move away, so she moved her chair instead. Something about the weapon always got her teeth itching and being alone with it only made it worse. When the master got hurt, the hound growled, and she felt its resonance in the pit of her stomach.

Any moment now, Quistis thought as she looked into the still darkening sky. By her reckoning it would be past the third bell of morning but the darkness wouldn’t abate. A storm brewed above, gathering malice to unleash onto Valen.

Weapons clashed with dull rings of metal on metal. Falor came out swinging, trying to force the point of Barlo’s weapon away from him and thrust for the throat. He had the conviction for the swing but sadly not the strength. As large and well-muscled as he was, Barlo was simply much larger and much stronger. He barely flinched when attacked so brazenly, allowed the point of the halberd to pass by his face, and moved in to deliver a vicious punch rather than outright kill with his sword. He’d already demonstrated that technique earlier.

Falor had to dodge back or get his head punched off.

“You miserable bastard,” he groaned as Barlo kicked his halberd back to him. “I’ll bloody you today, or so help me…”

His threat was met with a raised chin. Barlo exposed his throat, said nothing, charged with a scissor slash of both swords. It got the Commander backtracking, desperately trying to push back the rampaging bull with a slash of his axe head. Barlo’s large sword pushed down the haft of his halberd and the other swung for his neck.

Quistis barely followed the next exchange.

Falor pushed forward and ducked under the slash. His halberd’s hook passed behind Barlo’s calf and he tried to reverse the motion to rip out his opponent’s ankle. The Miscreant took it in stride and moved forward with the motion of the weapon, hook scraping against the armoured heel of his boot. He smashed into Falor, forehead to nose-bridge, bone-armoured torso against blood-soaked tunic.

Another loss for the Commander. Quistis got ready to go back out and heal him.

Sometime crackled in the air and Barlo jumped back.

“Oh no.”

The warhammer burst out through the chest-high ring wall in an explosion of pulverised stone fragments, straight into Falor’s hand. She turned away and shielded her face against the kicked-up dust.

“Temper, temper, Commander,” Barlo said. He still held his chin up. “We’re not training against sparkles today.”

Falor’s nose was broken and blood ran down his face but his eyes shone with crackling power.

“Let’s see how you keep your temper, Barlo, if I knock you around until the bells toll.” The words came out slurred through cracked teeth and lips. Their intent was clear enough. Lightning arced down the hammer’s long shaft and discharged into the bloodied mud.

Quistis rushed to intervene but a gesture from Barlo stopped her behind the ruin of the wall. He would ride out the storm.

The thick-skinned bastard never lowered his head.

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Lightning sheathed Falor and he swung the hammer with practised ease and infused strength. He swung at the ground and coils of electricity rushed Barlo.

“This be a bad time, ‘tain?”

Quistis almost jumped out of her skin. She hadn’t heard the man walk in, hadn’t seen him get close. The only entrance to the sparring ground was directly opposite her vantage point.

Aidan had always made Quistis’s skin crawl. The man wasn’t much to behold, and even less to remember by. He was of average height and average build and had a face that a mother’s love could think of as homely. He wore loose clothes, greys on blacks, and looked like nothing more than an overworked bureaucrat of the Fortress. Dark skin, dark eyes, raven black hair, not a smile in sight.

He was Rumi’s shadow, her assigned Claw. If Rumi hid what she really was, Aidan wore it on his sleeve with a semblance of pride.

“I wasn’t expecting a report this morning.” Quistis composed herself and turned back to the sparring. Barlo held his own but Falor’s bursts of power kept him on the backslide and off-balance. The Commander, even when angered, held himself in check and made sure his outburst didn’t spill out of the fighting arena. Nonetheless, she’d need to intervene before he’d put the warrior beyond her help and into the Sisters’ care.

“Aye, but me thinks you’d get prop’rly wobbly if I’d waited,” Aidan replied with mischievous delight. “You’re not gonna like this.”

“I’m listening. And speak properly, please. I haven’t had enough coffee for you to speak Rian at me.”

He chuckled, swallowed, and made the effort.

“I followed the two doves you was interested in. Well, they’s three now. Third’s a toy boy. Lives with ’em. I’s lookin’ at ‘im, but gonna take time.”

“Mhm.”

Barlo dodged a serpent of blue-white energy and switched to the attack. This time Falor forced back the swing of the swords with his hammer. He spun around, carried by the momentum of the heavy weapon, and smashed Barlo in the chest with bone-cracking fury. Lightning flashed on impact and sent the vanadal sprawling through the mud.

It wasn’t enough. The Miscreant rolled with the blast and was back on his feet before Falor closed the distance. His lips cracked into a full-fanged grin but he still didn’t lower his head as he met the Commander’s next swing.

“So, did we learn what other pastries they like?” she asked, eyes fixated on the duel. After the first couple of weeks of looking into the sorceress and her healer, and getting absolutely nothing of worth, she had put them out of mind. She could read only so many reports of where they took their deserts before it got rather sickening.

Rumi was less inclined to leave them be. Either as prospective recruits, or for other reasons Quistis didn’t want to think about, she had taken a curious interest that refused to abate.

“Aye. Waffles with custard, in the Agora,” Aidan said with dry amusement.

She glared at him. The spy grinned, too pleased with himself for her liking.

“They met with someone last night, someone you’d care to know about. Ludwig Angledeer, by Lady Cassandra’s Old Hope Church.”

“Why do I care about him?”

She’d heard the name, somewhere, but it wasn’t on her list of troublemakers and potential problems. Maybe some sort of scholar? She remembered a book by one Angledeer but what it was about wouldn’t spring to mind.

“Cinder’s teacher. Last one alive.”

That pried her interest away from the exchange of blows. He went on in the usual dry monotone he used every time he reported something to her.

“Hard to get close to ’em. Very hard. They’s got eyes in the backs of they heads. I couldn’t hear the talk, couldn’t be that close, but kept up with ‘em and followed through the Alchemist’s soup. I know who he’s about because Lady Belli drew up a list of the sorceress’s old acquaintances. Just in case.”

He glanced over her shoulder and moved two steps aside.

“Another thing, ‘tain. That flame-breath and her crony? They be acting peculiar-like when away from eyes. Very careful in public, very prop’rly posh. But not so much when they thinks it’s private. Other body talk, not lady and servant. Me nose don’t likes it.”

That was too much coincidence to ignore. She’d accepted the explanation for young Tianna’s interest in the troublemakers of Hoarfrost. There was never a shortage of young, misguided people interested to know more about the most powerful students the Academy had ever trained up to Falor. Some even sought to imitate them.

But meeting with someone that was an actual, living connection? There’s interest, and then there’s troublesome obsession that always seemed to land in her lap if left unchecked.

“I want them marked and—”

Barlo crashed into the pavilion, flew through the space Aidan had occupied, and hit the back wall with a stone-cracking thump. He landed in a heap, lay still for a few moments, and then hauled himself to his feet with some difficulty. His chest carapace was shattered and he had to lean against the wall to steady himself, but still made the effort of raising his chin.

“Bloody bastard—” Quistis turned to Falor as he leaned on the ruin of the separating wall. “You got me again,” he said through gritted teeth.

The Commander had dropped his hammer and held his stomach with both hands. Soft, pink entrails poked through the net of his fingers.

“Need a touch of help, Quis.” His knees gave out and he fell into the mud, groaning in agony.

Quistis spared a glare for Barlo before vaulting over with her medical supplies.

“If I could heal you so that it kept hurting for a fortnight or more, I would.” Another ugly wound that would scar, and it wasn’t even necessary. She dug her fingers into his opened abdomen, feeling for the damage. He clung to consciousness and tried to smile at her anger, stoically failing to not wince as she checked him over.

Without a healer on hand, in actual battle, that wound would be a festering nightmare. She knew it. He knew it.

She let her silence scream invective at him.

“I didn’t cut him deep,” Barlo rumbled above, looking down over the shattered rim of the wall. He peeled off shattered bits of carapace, purple with viscera, and tried to round off the edges with a bloodied dagger. In a few day’s time his armour would be regrown even stronger than before, and the edges would be grey scars on white bone. “If someone goes fer yer belly, Commander, don’t step into the swing when that someone’s got a second blade ready. Killing them won’t be worth much if ye ain’t fit t’ fight the next bastard.”

“Shut up. I bloodied you.” Words gurgled up bloody from the Commander’s throat.

“And I killed ye. Hope it was worth the Captain’s ire.”

Quistis groaned her displeasure, packed Falor’s guts back in, and healed him. She would treat him later with salves to reduce the scarring, and purgers to clear up any rot that may have gotten into the cuts. As far as she was concerned this morning's sparring was finished and she dared one of them to contradict her.

“Aidan,” she called out, “please fetch Rumi and Vial. Barlo, get cleaned up and join us.” She handed him an accelerant to hasten his natural recovery. “You too, Commander.”

“What’d I miss?” Falor wheezed out when she helped him up. There wasn’t much left of his clothes but tattered, bloody rags.

“News on our Cinder situation.”

“She’s surfaced?”

“No. But a cold trail started stinking.” She washed the blood off her hands with snow as she walked away from the sparring ring, giving a wide berth to the discarded hammer. “May be nothing, still, but I don’t want to chance it.”

Storm winds picked up and the shingles above rattled like dead men’s fingers, welcoming the coming tempest.