OOC: For now, at least, this is a closed thread.

For the tenth time, the coin dropped to the floor, emitting a high-pitched whine as it rolled across the floor.

For the tenth time, the greyhound’s ears twitched unhappily, and she offered her owner a long-suffering stare.

And for the tenth time, her owner frowned and went to fetch the coin from wherever it had settled. In this case it had skidded under the bookshelf, so with a sigh of resignation, Daeli got down on her hands and knees. She groped blindly for a moment, and then felt a cool metal disc under her fingers. Grateful that her careful routine of cleanliness ensured a lack of dust, she pulled it out and inspected the still-gleaming surface.

She rolled onto her back, shoulder blades cushioned by the colourful carpet. Holding the mark between her thumb and first finger, she inspected the graceful Flame of Tar Valon that covered one side. Daeli noted the curving line of one side, contrasted to the smooth half-circle of the other Through her readings, she knew the Dragon’s Fang had historically fit into that sinuous curve. Two halves of an ancient symbol, shattered with Sightblinder’s counterstrike. Now there was a chance to heal, wasn’t there?

Daeli admitted to herself that men who could channel still made her uncomfortable. It was a bias, and she accepted it would take some time to dissipate. The two thousand years of blood and fire associated with saidin couldn’t just simply vanish in people’s minds the moment the Source was cleansed. The Black Tower didn’t really help matters, either. While she hadn’t exactly had much exposure to the Aes Sedai counterparts, the only Asha’man she had seen had always been swathed in severe black jackets. Those imposing stares hadn’t helped either.

And she was diverting her thoughts again. She flipped the coin up in the air and caught it, feeling the slap of metal across her callused palm. Thinking about abstruse historical trivia as it related to current events was all very well, but she had to stop allowing her mind to wander.

Levering herself off the floor, she returned to her bed and held the sheaves of parchment to the light. The diagrams were clear, the writing distinctive and easy to understand, in theory.

“Sleight of hand…All right. Place the coin-thus.” She dropped the coin onto her bed. “Now, place my hand-like so. Brush it across, gently…and…ugh.” Daeli stopped the coin from skittering away by simply stamping on it. Bending down to pick it up, she muttered in irritation.

She was a fledgling member of the Intelligence Division. As such, she needed to know how to palm things and make them disappear if needed. It was only one of the myriad skills she needed to perfect, but it seemed to be eluding her. It was so fiddly. Still, it was essential if she expected to master pick-pocketing, a related and very practical skill set.

Currently, she was learning to extricate small objects from another individual’s pocket. That was difficult but not impossible, but it was slightly embarrassing to bet continually bested by a child. Her teacher, Deven, was a scamp by anyone’s estimation, but he was extremely skilled and really quite engaging. Daeli had taken to removing all valuables from her person before visiting him.

That was enough homework for one day. She folded up the sheets with the coin and walked to her bookcase, feeling for the discreet compartment and clicking it open. Between babbling to herself about the alarming qualities of the Black Tower (and really, she was training to be a Warder. By definition, they were not very approachable either) and failing to learn simple gleeman’s tricks, she had managed to put the message out of her mind. Early this morning, an underling of the Master-at-Arms had appeared at her door and delivered a message.

“Your primary teacher, Bannerman Aeric Kislan, regrets to inform you he has been called away on urgent business, duration unknown but potentially extensive. Therefore, your training will be supervised by a wider range of teachers than you currently study under.”

She had blinked the sleep from her eyes, unsettled by the knowledge that her favourite teacher hadn’t said goodbye. The business clearly was critical, but that didn’t ease the knot in her stomach at the idea of not seeing him for an indefinite period of time. The stony Warder went on to detail several amendments to her training schedule, which Daeli had carefully noted and slipped to Corbin in passing, using one sleight of hand trick she had mastered.

So. For now, she was on her own. Her eyes shifted downwards, and she smiled at her own error. Not alone. Maia lay curled on her dog bed, at the foot of Daeli’s own bed. Catching the greyhound’s eye, she crooked her fingers inwards several times. Brown eyes stared back, puzzled and drowsy.

Daeli frowned. She was trying to teach Maia to obey more unspoken commands. As a canine member of the Intelligence Division, there could be situations where spoken commands could get both of them killed. Daeli flapped her hand more emphatically, and with a doggy grumble, Maia stretched her long silver limbs and trotted over. Daeli patted the bed beside her, and soon she had a long muzzle lying in her lap.

Reaching across to her bedside table, she fished a morsel of dried meat from the bag and offered it to her pet. It disappeared behind white teeth and a pink tongue, and Daeli half-smiled.

“Good girl. I have to go, unfortunately. The first of my new lessons will be starting shortly, and being late would be rather unprofessional, wouldn’t it Maia? My teacher’s name is Dayne Cordilyn Gaidin. I don’t know his opinion of dogs, so I’m leaving you here. I don’t know much about him, really. Just some gossip about his Aes Sedai.” Being quiet and bookish was good for finding out pieces of information sometimes. Nose in a book far enough, and people assumed you couldn’t hear them talking. “He complimented my archery once when he was walking past the court. That’s good, I suppose.”

She took stock of her clothing. Since the thaw two weeks ago, temperatures had risen, but it could still be chilly. Her breeches were modestly draped wool, cut just close enough not to impair movement on the courts. Though the quality of the wool was excellent, the breeches were a plain earth-brown, lacking even the tiny snowdrops that adorned the cuffs of her deep blue blouse. The idea of her daughter without any embroidery would probably send her mother into fits. Daeli mused for a moment on the semi-absurdity of a twenty-year old still being dressed by a mother who lived halfway across the known world. Still, given that her mother was the head of a small textile empire, and Daeli had little interest in fashion, it was probably a good arrangement.

Shrugging into a darker blue coat, she locked her dog into the room and made her way down the stairs and out of the Vron barracks. She quickly found the appropriate practice court and entered, looking around.

Well aware that she was early, she sat on a bench and waited.

“By the Light you are a bloody fool!” Dayne knocked the practice sword out of the hands of the young man opposite him, making his sparring opponent’s eyes goes wide, then stepped into him so they were nearly touching chests. “How many times man? How many times are you going to let me in under your last strike? I can see your next form coming before you’ve even finished the first!”

“I’m – I’m…” the young man’s words trailed off.

“You’re what? An idiot? How did you even get into the practice yards? Did you bribe someone? Perhaps someone took pity on your pathetic carcass and thought training with the warders might harden you up a bit. Is that it? Speak up man!”

“Gaidin.” A voice, as calm as Dayne’s was agitated, cut through the tirade and drew Dayne’s attention. “A word please.”

Dayne turned, his eyes reluctantly leaving his sparring partner, and faced the owner of the voice. He knew who it was before he saw the man – a towering hulk with a shaggy mane of brown hair surrounding a face lined with years of trials and battles. The head of the practice yards stood before Dayne, face impassive, hands clasped behind his back. Tolvan Damanes, a borderlander twice Dayne’s age and three times his experience, nodded toward a clear spot of the yard where they could speak alone. Dayne fell in alongside his superior as the two men strode to the clearing, his anger and frustration beginning to ebb.

“The lad is not coming along as you had hoped?” Damanes asked after they had put sufficient distance between themselves and Dayne’s young sparring partner.

“The boy progresses slowly if at all,” Dayne replied. “He knows the forms well enough, he just will not, or cannot, think.”

“And berating him in front of his peers?”

“I am out of ideas Damanes. The first Trolloc the boy sees will split him in two. I would pity the Aes Sedai that might consider bonding him, or any man willing to spend coin on the boy to make him his sword arm.”

“Hopeless?”

Dayne stopped and gave Damanes a look, considering the lad, the progress that he’d made since first coming under Dayne’s tutelage. “I’d have called him hopeless when you first gave him to me, now I’d call him nearly so. He’ll hold his own in a tavern brawl but…”

“But? “ Damanes turned and looked out over the practice yards, hands still behind his back, his eyes sweeping the trainers and the young, and not so young, hopefuls all aspiring to the Cloak. “Would you stand next to him on the Blightborder?”

Dayne hesitated. “Only to try and keep him alive.”

Damanes nodded. “His father will be most disappointed. He shows little aptitude for his father’s court, or so I’m told.”

“Better flailing about in his father’s court than the battlefield. He’s less likely to get someone, or himself, killed there.”

Damanes gave Dayne a sidelong glance. “I’ve seen many a poor noble cost many a man his life Gaidin.”

Dayne hid a wince. “Aye, you’ll garner no argument from me there Damanes.”

“Pity,” Damanes sighed. “I had thought assigning him to you and you alone might salvage something of him but the Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills.” He looked at Dayne and smirked. “Or so I am constantly told.”

“I like to think I have a bit more control than that over things,” Dayne said. “He’s a good lad, and he wants to do well, I’m just not sure he’s capable of getting much better.”

“Experience can teach many a man what a teacher cannot.”

Dayne gave Damanes a glance. When had he gotten so philosophical? “True, but you have to live to learn from your experience. And that is the heart of the problem.”

Damanes remained silent. Dayne kept his focus on Toress, watched as the man practiced the forms on his own, moving awkwardly from one to the next, never stringing them together into a coherent whole. For some the sword was like an art, it came to them in a way that they could neither explain nor teach. For others, like Dayne, it had become a learned skill, one honed to a level few others, save his warder brethren, achieved. For people like Toress, it was simply a concept they could not fathom. They moved the blade precisely; they could work the forms as well, sometimes even better, than others. But they could not think the fight. They could not see what Dayne and Damanes and Easar and any number of other accomplished swordsmen saw when they wielded their blades. Dayne could read a man’s body, the position of his shoulders, how he held his arms, where his feet were, all tells and signs to him of what would be coming next, where the man’s blade would be, the position it would be in, how it all would look even before his opponent did it. Dayne anticipated, predicted, planned – all in the mere seconds that spanned between strikes of the blade. Toress reacted. He did not predict, he did not anticipate – and he would die. As sure as rain turned dirt to mud, Toress was a man waiting to take a blade to the belly no matter how hard Dayne worked him.

“He shall be dismissed then. No point in wasting valuable training time on the lad. I’m sure I can put your skills to better use elsewhere. The Light knows there is no shortage of those in need of training, with the blade and otherwise.” Damanes gave Dayne a curt nod. “I’ll give you an afternoon of reprieve Gaidin. By tomorrow, or perhaps the day next, I’ll put you back to work.” He glanced skyward, taking in the cobalt blue of the sky. “Dismissed.”

Dayne inclined his head and spun on his heel, striding toward the sheds of weapons where a group of warders and trainees were milling about. An afternoon with no pressing matters seemed a rarity of late, yet the freedom brought with it the usual pang, highlighting the hole that dogged his days. He did as best he could to shove the thoughts aside. It had been over a year since he’d last laid eyes on Alura, last felt the bond and her presence. Now it was a void, a silent, black hole where once she had been inside his head. He cursed. Not even a minute gone in his afternoon of freedom and he’d already turned to thinking of his missing Aes Sedai.

Enough, he thought as he weaved through the warders and their trainees. He stepped into the shed, hanging his practice sword by its hilt from a set of pegs in the wall. He exchanged pleasantries with a few of the warders before stepping back to the practice yards. An afternoon of freedom, with a glance skyward to check the position of the sun, he decided he would do his best to enjoy it.

* * *

“A siswai?”

“Yes. Sarine is her name. Daeli Sarine. Young, likely not past her twentieth naming day if I’m not mistaken. Dark hair, middling height. Do you know her?”

Dayne thought for a moment. “Good with a bow?”

“That’s understating it slightly,” Damanes replied as he leaned back in his chair, propping his booted feet on the top of his desk. “She excellent by all accounts, if a bit unrefined.”

“I don’t know her, at least not formally, though I recall seeing her train with the bow a few times.”

“Yes, well, however good with the bow she is supposed be, that does not necessarily translate into good with the blade. Hence this meeting.”

“I’m to teach her the blade?”

“Well, the dagger specifically, moving her up to larger weapons as you deem fit. It’s clearly not her first love but she wants to be a gaidar, she won’t have much choice.”

Dayne nodded. “She has a far sight more promise than Toress I suspect?”

“Again, your ability to understate things shines through Cordilyn.”

“Good,” Dayne replied, the tension easing from his shoulders. Dealing with the futility of another Toress would have made for a long, painful spring. “When do we start?”

“Tomorrow, after the mid-day meal. She’ll be in the third practice yard.”

* * *

Dayne waited in the shadows of the practice yard, leaning back against a wall with his arms crossed, and watched. The sun had passed its zenith, warders and trainees were beginning to filter into the practice yard after the mid-day meal. He’d seen his new ward enter the yard, glancing around for him before checking the position of the sun. Apparently satisfied that she was early and did not see him in the yard, Dayne watched her settle herself on a bench along the opposite wall, her legs crossed, her body motionless. She had moved with a certain poise, almost graceful, and he could see her potential. Just from the way she carried herself, took in her surroundings, observed what was going on around her, he could tell she would achieve the cloak. Yes, it was a snap judgment, but he’d seen enough failures in his time as a trainer to know when someone had it and someone did not. Daeli Sarine looked to have it.

He gave her some time to sit before he made his way around the outside of the practice yard, approaching on her side. She was still motionless, eyes lidded, almost in a trancelike state as near as he could tell. He stood near her for a moment, waiting for her to notice him but she did not. He cleared his throat, clasping his hands behind his back.

“Siswai,” he said.

Her head snapped around, her bright blue eyes focusing on his as she jumped to her feet in one fluid motion.

“Gaidin Cordilyn?” she asked. She stood nearly to his chin, her head tilted up slightly so that her eyes could meet his. Her hair was raven black, framing a pretty face with eyes that were a striking blue. Though not pure like the sky, they seemed flecked with another color though he was at a loss to tell what it was in the harsh mid-day light. A deep blue blouse with plain brown trousers, cut for movement instead of style, and a modest coat finished her attire.

“Yes,” he said with a nod. “I am to continue your training in the blades. Is this your understanding?”

She nodded, her eyes bright and wide. She seemed only mildly nervous as she stood before him.

“Very well. We are to start with daggers, a weapon you have experience with, is that correct?”

“Yes, I do,” she said. Her voice pleasant, fitting her appearance, yet he could tell she held herself with caution and a guardedness that recalled Dayne's own feelings when he had first begun to train one-on-one with the warders of his early years. He studied her, not saying a word, sizing up the way she stood, how she shifted her weight, waiting to see if she would become uncomfortable under his gaze. It did not take long before she did, her earlier guardedness shifting noticeably into wariness. He waited a moment more, watching her face become shadowed, her shoulders stiffening, before he spoke.

“Let’s get started.” He reached down and retrieved a dagger from each of his boots, flipped one so that he held it by the blade, and tossed it to Daeli. She snatched it by the black-wrapped handle in mid-air and then looked at him. Her mouth moved as if about to say something but Dayne lunged at her, cutting off any chance to speak. Her eyes went wide and she slid off to one side, trying to get out of his way. He slashed, weakly, making sure to miss by a wide margin, watching for her reaction. She brought the blade up as if to parry his blow but then thought better of it and continued her retreat out of his path. Dayne pressed the issue, lunging here, attempting a slashing strike there, watching her move and react.

Still he came and still she moved, fluidly at first, though a bit more haggard and less sure of herself as he continued to press. And still she reacted, playing defense as best she could against his attacks. Dayne thrust directly towards her mid-section and she slipped, losing her footing and going down hard on her backside, the dagger slipping from her hand and skittering across the cobblestones. He stood above her, the dagger pointing at her as she looked up at him. There was a mixture of surprise, fear, and anger swirling behind her blue eyes.

Yes, he thought. Exactly what I wanted to see. In one motion he slipped the dagger back into his boot and offered her his hand. She hesitated for a moment, a look of apprehension on her face, before taking it and allowing him to help her back to her feet.

“I understand you’re good with a bow. Is that true?” he asked.

“I’ve been told that, yes,” she replied.

“The dagger is nothing like the bow. Unless you enjoy throwing them I suppose.” He bent over and picked up the dagger that she had lost during their fight. He flipped it in his hand to hold the blade again and presented it to her. She took it. “It’s a close-in weapon meant for a quick kill. It’s not something you want to be dancing around with, running through your forms and waiting for your chance to strike. If you’re using that,” he pointed at the dagger in her hand. “You’d best have it in your mind how you’re going to end things or how you’re going to disengage yourself from the fight.”

Daeli nodded.

“Are you prepared to learn?”

“Yes I am gaidin.”

“I hope so. Let’s continue.”