“Again,” Tagg barked, and Vaenuth lifted her wooden sword with groaning muscles. They stood on a cleared area of the barge that took four steps to cross; the wooden beams were smoothed and sanded, and sealed with sap and horse collagen. It was not a large area to fight, but it was a reliable one.
Tagg started with a gentle stab. With practised ease, Vaenuth stepped back a pace, tapped aside his sword and jabbed forward at him. Tagg matched her footing, gliding back as she attacked, and dancing toward her when he did. The clatter of wooden blades echoed across the riverboat as they drifted down the Ake’ma River. Tagg’s overhead hack reverberated off her blade—simultaneously, his fist jabbed beneath their swords. Vaenuth craned her spine to one side, pulling her stomach out of reach of the fist. She slammed her blade down from its parry even though Tagg’s blade still pressed there. The sparring sword glanced off Tagg’s forearm, as his own blade clattered errantly against Vaenuth’s shoulder.
They stepped back, and Tagg shook his fingers with a grimace. Then a forward step with a poke from his sword struck Vaenuth’s thigh, and she retaliated with an angry slash. Tagg’s sword was up, blocking it, and then it was spinning round his head to catch Vaenuth’s other shoulder with a resounding clap. She cried out and dropped to one knee so he wouldn’t press his attack further.
“Up,” he said.
Vaenuth was trembling from overexertion. Tagg was too quick, and too controlled for her. “You’d have lost your hand,” she panted. Her white binding was starting to stink with sweat from their training today, and her bruised shoulder was still swelling. She could feel the insides moving where his blow had landed.
Tagg chuckled dryly and sat down on a nearby crate with a dusty thump. “And you’d be dead.”
The others in her group had tired of watching them spar, and now sat playing a dice game on the other side of the barge. There were two other passengers as well: a balding man who spent the time embroidering various linen articles he had brought in a large bag, and a woman younger than Vaenuth who spent all her time reading from a big book.
The ship’s crew was scant, for it was no more than a simple river barge; the craft was truly manned, as Vaenuth and the book-reader were the only women aboard. Its captain, a man named Ul’ma, had begun acting like Vaenuth’s servant as soon as he saw them training on board. His apparent defencelessness was likely a charade. There were dangers in the wilds. Bandits and Primals terrorized human regions, while deep jungle tribes survived the more dangerous beasts of the Numa’nakres Rainforest.
Vaenuth glanced back at Tagg, and gingerly touched the bruise on her hip. She was covered in bruises now, yellow marks on her stomach, legs, back, and she was becoming stiff. Tagg made her do stretches in the morning and evening, which helped, but his training regime was fierce. Vaenuth was already a skilled fighter, but their mission was too dangerous for confidence.
Tagg rolled his eyes at her clear discomfort and strode away.
The small silver clasp that kept Vaenuth’s wrap on was easy to undo. She wound the linen around herself again and again, until it came free of her torso, and then she walked across the barge to the water’s edge. There was only a small rail between her and the water; she dunked the linen into the river to wash out the sweat. Winding and squeezing it, she then used it to scrub the saltiness from her tanned skin. She caught the embroidering man staring at her, from his seat under the wooden sun shelter, but shrugged and dunked her linen into the warm water again.
Tagg strode back to her, his sandals scuffing the smooth planks of the floor. “Here,” he said, and tossed her first a loaf of bread and then a roasted cut of boar ham.
Setting her soaked torso-binding on the boat’s rail to dry, she looked at the food for a moment and then held it back to him. “Not hungry,” she told him.
“Blight me, you’re going to eat that, Vae,” Tagg said. “If I have to force it down your throat by the end of this venture, you’re going to eat properly. Banno puts up with your whims, but we’re here to fight people and you need more muscle. Eat.”
He didn’t even leave. He just stood there and watched as Vae pulled at the ham with her teeth. I can eat when the slaver is dead, she thought. She’d be hungry then, hungry with relief and happiness. Stressed as she was, and wanting, her appetite had never been less. She finished off the bread nonetheless and then went to join Pressip and the others for dice. She’d had enough of Tagg for the day.