Kaelen’s third year taught him two new words before anyone thought to teach him either on purpose: no, and again.
He learned no by watching Wren use it on everyone from the head groom to their mother, and understood almost immediately that it was less a word than a small, portable fortress a person could stand inside whenever the world tried something they hadn’t agreed to.
He used it sparingly and, according to Petra, with unsettling precision — never on the nights he was simply tired and didn’t want his bath, which is when every other child she’d raised deployed it, but on the specific occasions when someone was handling him carefully because they thought he might break.
Again he learned by himself, standing at the bottom of the training-yard steps with his father’s old practice sword — half again as tall as he was and twice as heavy as anyone would have guessed a two-year-old should lift — dragged out of the armory rack by a boy nobody had seen leave the nursery.
Duke Corwin Veyland came out to the yard that evening expecting to find one of his men had left equipment out of place, and instead found his younger son lying flat on his back in the dirt, sword-hilt still gripped in both fists, staring up at the sky with the unbothered patience of someone who intends to try again the instant he catches his breath.
“How many times,” Corwin asked, crouching, “has that thing put you on the ground?”
Kaelen considered the question with the seriousness of a much older person being asked to account for a battle.
He held up four fingers, decided that was wrong, and folded one back down to three.
Corwin had trained recruits twice this boy’s age who gave up after one humiliating pass with a blade too heavy for them.
He had never, in twenty years of soldiering, seen anyone — recruit, son, or otherwise — get back up a fourth time purely because the third attempt had gone slightly better than the second, and some small unspoken arithmetic had decided that meant a fifth attempt was worth having.
He didn’t say any of that to Kaelen.
He picked his son up out of the dirt, turned him right-side-up, and put both of his own hands over Kaelen’s on the hilt.
“Not like that,” he said.
“Like this.”
It was the first thing anyone in Ashgrave had taught Kaelen on purpose, rather than simply hoped he’d absorb by living in the house long enough.
He would remember it — not with the dragon’s memory, which was gone, but with the ordinary, stubborn memory of a small boy who wanted very badly to be good at something — that his father’s hands had smelled of leather and horse, and that the correction worked on the very next try.
Isolde Veyland found out about the sword three days later, when her son appeared at the supper table with a bruise blooming purple-yellow along one forearm and an expression that dared anyone to mention it.
“Corwin,” she said, in the tone she reserved for conversations that would happen whether he wanted them or not, “he is two.”
“Two and stubborn,” Corwin said.
“I didn’t hand him a real blade.
I stood behind him for ten minutes so he wouldn’t crack his skull open, and then I let him fall down by himself the other forty times, because that’s how he wanted it.”
“And if Aldric is right, and there’s something strange in how he’s built —”
“Then better he learns young how his own body works, before he has to learn it in front of an enemy,” Corwin said, which was, Isolde privately admitted, an infuriatingly good point, delivered in the particular tone of a man who had buried enough friends who’d learned that lesson too late.
They compromised, as they generally did, by disagreeing loudly enough that both of them felt heard, and then doing almost exactly what Corwin had proposed in the first place, with slightly better padding.
Within the month, Ashgrave’s master-at-arms — a retired sergeant named Bram Ostley, who had broken in three generations of Veyland children and considered none of them worth being impressed by — had a new and extremely small addition to his afternoon roster.
Wren, six and recently informed that her brother would now be occupied most afternoons with something called “training,” took this news with the same proprietary outrage she brought to everything involving him.
“I want to learn too,” she announced, arms crossed, in the doorway of Bram’s yard the very first afternoon.
Bram, who had exactly one rule about who trained in his yard and it wasn’t about age or sex, looked at the Duke for permission and got a shrug that meant your problem now.
And so it was that House Veyland’s heir and its second son began, from that spring onward, falling down in the dirt together on a regular schedule — Wren because she refused to be left out of anything Kaelen was allowed to have, and Kaelen because some small, wordless part of him that used to fly had decided, quietly and completely, that he did not intend to stay small and breakable forever.