The week off passed the way all good weeks off eventually do — too quickly, and mostly asleep.
Ragna spent the first two days recovering in the specific, thorough manner of someone whose body had apparently been keeping a private ledger of every ache it hadn't been allowed to properly complain about during three months of training, and had chosen this exact week to present the full invoice at once. He slept later than he had in months. He ate more than seemed strictly reasonable.
He returned, twice, to the library and the two books waiting on the study table, though he made himself stop each time before the lamp oil ran low enough to be a problem.
Sabrina spent the week reminding anyone who would listen that she was now fourth circle, a fact that had, by day three, stopped surprising anyone and had, by day five, started actively competing with the household cat for who could be more thoroughly ignored at breakfast.
Lady Sentel spent the week doing whatever it was queens did during weeks that looked, from the outside, entirely uneventful — letters, quiet meetings, the occasional long, unreadable look toward the training yard that Ragna caught twice and understood neither time.
And then, far too soon by every measure that mattered, the week ended, and Ragna found himself back at the yard's gate at dawn, freshly promoted, a new grey-threaded band tied around his upper arm to mark it, standing among nineteen familiar, considerably less exhausted faces, waiting to discover exactly what Hichus training was going to demand of all of them that Zochus hadn't already.
The answer, it turned out, arrived before the sun had fully cleared the eastern wall.
"Fifteen laps," Hale announced, with the flat, cheerful cruelty of a man who had clearly been looking forward to this exact moment all week. "Not ten. Fifteen. You're not Zochus anymore, and Zochus numbers don't apply to Hichus bodies."
The groan that rippled through the assembled trainees was, if anything, more heartfelt than the one that had greeted the original ten laps three months earlier, if only because every single person present now knew, with painful precision, exactly how much fifteen laps was actually going to cost them.
The pull-up bars fared no better. Where the old quota had sat comfortably — or uncomfortably, depending on the trainee — at a manageable number, Hale simply doubled it without comment, adding, for good measure, a second row of bars set slightly higher, forcing a longer reach that had even Ronan, arms trembling by the final set, muttering something under his breath that Hale chose, diplomatically, not to hear.
Ragna managed considerably more than his first miserable four attempts of three months ago, though his arms informed him afterward, in no uncertain terms, that "considerably more" and "comfortable" remained two entirely separate concepts.
It was only once the morning's punishing baseline had been thoroughly reestablished — sweat-soaked, breathless, twenty Hichus trainees collectively reconsidering every life decision that had led them to this yard — that Hale called them into a loose formation near the yard's shaded edge and gestured toward the gate.
"New instructor," he said, by way of introduction, in the same brief, unceremonious tone he'd used to introduce Wren months earlier. "Andell. Listen to him. I'll be back this afternoon to make sure you did."
Andell was not what Ragna had expected from a man Hale apparently respected enough to hand an entire morning's lecture over to.
He was older than Hale by a decade at least, grey threading heavily through a close-cropped beard, and moved with the unhurried, deliberate economy of a man who had long since stopped needing to prove anything to anyone through speed or spectacle.
A long scar ran from his left temple down past his jaw, old and pale and entirely unremarked upon, the kind of scar a man only stopped explaining once he'd told the story so many times it had become boring even to himself.
"I'm a knight," he said, without preamble, once the twenty of them had settled cross-legged in the shade, still catching their breath from the morning's drills. "Have been for twenty-six years. Served under three different queens across two different nations before Manachy, and I intend to tell you exactly what that word means before this morning is finished, because half of you currently think it means something considerably nicer than it actually does."
He let that sit for a moment, the way a man does when he wants a room paying proper attention before he continues.
"There are two paths a swordsman walks, once the sword itself stops being a novelty and starts being a life." He held up one finger. "The first is the knight's path. You serve. Your queen, your nation, the people standing behind you on whatever ground you're currently defending — in that order, and in that order permanently, whether it's convenient for you or not."
" A second finger joined the first. "The second is the defender's path. You serve yourself. Your own interests, your own survival, your own reasons for picking up a blade in the first place — and you answer to no crown, no oath, no chain of command above the one you've built for yourself."
"Which one's better?" Ronan asked, the question arriving with the blunt confidence of someone who fully expected a satisfying, definitive answer.
He did not get one.
"Neither," Andell said. "Both. It depends entirely on what you're willing to carry." He began pacing, slow, unhurried steps along the front of the seated group, his scarred face unreadable. "A knight is bound by honor. That's not a metaphor, and it's not a nicety — it's a chain, as real and as heavy as any manacle you've ever seen locked around a prisoner's wrist. A knight who could win a fight by breaking his word doesn't get to break it. A knight who could save more lives by abandoning the ones he's sworn to protect doesn't get to abandon them. Honor decides, in advance, what you're willing to do to win — and then it holds you to that decision even in the moment when winning would be so much easier without it."
"That sounds like a disadvantage," Iris said.
"It is," Andell agreed, without hesitation. "It's also the entire reason people trust knights with their children, their borders, their queens. Honor is a chain, but it's a chain other people can see. They know exactly what you won't do to them, because you've already told them, publicly, permanently, and paid the cost of proving it every single time the temptation to break it presented itself."
He stopped pacing.
"A defender wears no such chain. A defender wins, by whatever means the situation actually requires, and answers only to the results. No oath above self-preservation. No honor code dictating what methods are beneath you. A defender who needs to lie, lies. A defender who needs to retreat when a knight's code would have demanded a doomed last stand, retreats, and lives to fight another day, and doesn't lose a moment's sleep over which choice a knight would have judged more honorable."
His scarred face carried no particular judgment as he said it — simply fact, laid out flat, the way Hale laid out facts about laps and pull-up quotas.
"Neither path is beneath the other. I've fought beside defenders I trusted with my life, and I've fought beside knights I wouldn't have trusted to hold my horse. The path doesn't make the person. It only tells you, in advance, what kind of chains that person's decided to wear — or refuse to wear — before the moment comes that actually tests it."
He looked over the twenty of them, slow and deliberate, the same way Wren had looked over the yard before her demonstration months ago.
"You're free to choose either. Nobody in this yard is going to force a chain onto you that you didn't pick up yourself. But choose knowing what you're choosing, because the day it actually matters — and it will — is not the day to discover which one you actually are."
The conversation that followed lasted well past the lecture's official end, trainees breaking into loose clusters across the yard while Andell packed away a training dummy he'd apparently brought and never gotten around to using, the whole demonstration having turned out to be entirely a conversation and nothing more.
"Knight, obviously," Ronan said, with the easy certainty of someone who had clearly already decided this months before Andell had ever opened his mouth. "My whole family's served the crown for three generations. Doesn't make sense to be anything else."
"Defender," Iris said, just as quickly, without a hint of apology in it. "I didn't spend two years clawing my way through trials so someone else's honor code could decide, for me, what I'm allowed to do to survive."
"I don't know yet," Devren admitted, turning the question over with the same careful thoroughness he applied to everything. "Feels like the kind of thing you shouldn't answer too fast. Andell basically just told us that."
Several more opinions circulated — Lacia leaning knight, Garrick undecided, Kelly, characteristically, saying almost nothing at all and clearly already having quietly made up his mind days before anyone had thought to ask him.
Ronan turned, eventually, toward Ragna, who'd been sitting through most of the discussion listening more than contributing, an old habit that hadn't fully left him even three months into a training that had otherwise changed nearly everything about him.
"What about you? Queen's household, adopted or not — feels like knight's the obvious pick."
Ragna considered the question longer than he considered most things, turning it over the way he'd turned over the two books in the library all week, and found, somewhat to his own surprise, that the answer arrived cleanly, without much of the deliberation he'd expected from himself.
"Defender," he said.
"Why?"
He didn't have a tidy reason ready, the kind Ronan's three generations of crown service had handed him without effort, or the kind Iris's two years of clawing through trials had earned her outright. He simply had the plain, unembellished truth of it, and offered that instead.
"I don't know exactly," he admitted. "It's not that I don't respect the knight's path — Andell clearly does, and I trust that. It just doesn't fit right when I try it on. Something in me doesn't want to promise, in advance, what I will and won't do to protect the people I care about. I think I'd rather decide that in the moment, when it actually matters, and live with whatever that decision costs me afterward — instead of deciding it years ahead of time and hoping the world's cruel enough moments happen to line up neatly with a code I wrote before I ever met them."
He shrugged, a little self-conscious at how much longer that answer had come out than he'd intended. "It just suits me. That's the honest answer. I don't have a better one yet."
Ronan studied him for a moment, the way he had that very first miserable day months ago, though the expression behind it had changed considerably since then.
"That's a strange way to pick a whole philosophy."
"Probably," Ragna agreed. "Ask me again in ten years. I might have a tidier answer by then."
"And if you don't?"
Ragna thought of Sentel's quiet warning, months ago, about fairness being a luxury for children not watched by two kingdoms.
He thought of the book still waiting on the library table, and a title that had refused to let him stop thinking about it all week.
"Then I suppose I'll have found out the hard way," he said, "same as everything else so far."