Chapter 70: Borrowed Instinct, Human Body
Chapter 70: Borrowed Instinct, Human Body
It took her about ninety seconds to work out that I’d been doing it wrong the entire time.
"Stop," she said. "Stop. Do that again."
"Do what again?"
"The thing you just did with your feet. Step off your left and come round."
I did. I stepped off, and the instinct arrived the way it always does — a clear, immediate, wordless sense of how — and I followed it: down low, weight forward, both hands coming toward the floor, hips loose, the whole motion flowing through my spine.
My knee went somewhere it didn’t want to go and I nearly put my chin on the boards.
Liora caught my elbow. "There. That."
"That’s what the skill says to do."
"That is what the skill says I would do." She was looking at me with an expression I recognised from the first time she’d watched me hold a knife. "Adrian. My spine has more in it than yours. My hips rotate further. My centre sits lower than yours and I’ve got a tail doing a third of the work." She turned me sideways and put her palm flat between my shoulder blades. "You are trying to be a Night-Tail with two human legs and a broken rib. Of course it hurts."
"Then what’s the point of it?"
"The point is that it’s telling you the right thing. It’s just telling you in my accent."
That was the whole lesson and it took us two hours.
We started slow because we had to. My leg would take weight and not much else, and every fourth or fifth repetition my ribs would send up something sharp enough that I’d have to stand still and breathe for a moment, and she never once told me to push through it. She’d just wait, and then say "again," and we’d go.
The corrections came one at a time.
"Lower," she said. "But not my lower. You don’t need to get your hands near the ground; you need your weight under your hips instead of over your toes. Bend the knees, not the back."
Then: "Shorter steps. Look at your feet — you’re reaching. Every time you reach you’ve given away the ability to change your mind. Keep them underneath you and take three where you’d have taken one."
Then, about forty minutes in and considerably more sharply: "Stop lunging. You are throwing your weight, and once it’s thrown it belongs to the floor. Move it. Carry it across. There’s a difference and you’ll feel it the first time you get it right."
I got it right about twenty minutes after that and she was correct: I did feel it. It was the difference between falling in a direction and going there.
The knees were the worst habit.
"You’re turning through your knees."
"I’m turning."
"You’re turning through the joints that break." She crouched — properly, her way, with an ease that made the whole preceding two hours look like satire — and put two fingers on my kneecap and two on my hip. "Here. Everything comes from here. Your knee is a hinge, it is not a pivot, and if you keep steering with it then some evening it will simply stop and you’ll be a man sitting down in front of something."
"Feline Grace disagrees."
"Feline Grace is describing a body with the hips of a woman who climbs walls." She stood up. "You’re not going to get one. So take the instruction and translate it. When it tells you to spin, you pivot — one foot planted, the other going out diagonally, so you finish facing somewhere useful." She stepped it out for me. "Two feet on the ground. Diagonal. Not a spin, a corner."
I fell over twice doing that and swore both times, once at length.
"You’re frustrated," she observed.
"I’ve had this skill for fifteen days and I’m apparently going about it like a man wearing someone else’s shoes."
"You are wearing someone else’s shoes. That’s not an insult, it’s the actual situation." She rolled her shoulders. "And you’ve clearly been using it well enough to still be alive, so stop sulking. Again."
The last correction was the one that stung, because it was about vanity.
I got a sequence clean — off the left, weight across, short step, hip pivot, finish square — and I was so pleased with myself that I stood there for a full second admiring it, and she flicked me on the forehead.
"That," she said. "Never that."
"I did it right."
"You did, and then you stopped, and if I’d been a Ridgeback you’d be dead and your last thought would have been what excellent footwork." She stepped back into position. "You don’t finish an evasion. You finish in a place, and the place has to be one you can move from or hit from. Otherwise you’ve simply travelled while dying."
We did it eleven more times.
On the twelfth, I came off the left, carried my weight instead of throwing it, took three short steps under my hips, cornered through the pivot rather than the knee, and finished with my feet set and my shoulders square and the doorway behind me at an angle I could use — and none of it was copied off her, and none of it was fighting the instinct either.
The skill had said go there. I’d worked out how to go there with the equipment I actually own.
"Good," Liora said. It was the first time she’d said it all evening. "Now put your knife in your hand."
That went considerably worse for a while.
She came at me slowly and without her own knives, using her forearm as the threat, and she found every hole in it. Twice I evaded well and forgot the blade existed entirely. Once I got the blade up and forgot the footwork, and she pushed me over with two fingers.
"You’ve got two jobs," she said. "You keep wanting to do one."
The fourth time, I overcommitted and she put her palm flat on my sternum, and I sat down.
"Ribs," I said, from the floor.
"Ribs," she agreed, and gave me a minute.
It was the seventh attempt.
She came in high on my left. I stepped off, carried the weight, cornered through the hip, and finished a half-pace outside her arm with my feet set — and because my feet were set and my shoulders were square, the knife was already where it needed to be, and I brought it up flat and stopped it against her forearm.
Not a strike. A block that would have been a cut, laid on with control, from a stable position.
We both stopped.
"There," she said.
"That was—"
"That was one clean counter out of about fifty, and it took two hours, and you’re going to lose it in your sleep and have to find it again tomorrow." Liora pushed my knife hand gently down and away with two fingers. "And it was yours. Not a copy of me. That’s the difference between having my instincts and having something you can actually use."
I sat down on the crate because my leg had stopped negotiating.
"How long," I said, "until that’s automatic?"
"Months." She sat down beside me, close enough that our shoulders touched. "Do it every day. Slowly, and badly, and while it hurts. That’s the entire method. There isn’t another one."