It was time to work off the softness that had begun to settle into his bones. It was the first lesson his father had ever taught him about fighting; you had to keep at it, or all the hard earned skill and experience would dull and fade into the mists of memory, until nothing remained but a fat arse and empty pride. He would be disappointed in Finnian if he could see the son now. Many weeks had passed since he stepped into a training circle, and it had been almost as long since he practiced his forms. The lack of swords or sparring partners was not a valid excuse, but Fin comforted himself with the thought that the old man would have been glad enough just to see him alive after everything that'd happened, flabby buttocks or not.
Things were apparently different here. They called the stone citadel a capitol and a court, but to Finnian's eyes so accustomed to the splendors of the Old World, it looked run down and poor. There were no guards to line the corridors, no fencing halls in which to train, no instructors or weapons masters to ensure that no skills were dulled under their watchful eyes. Instead, what he had been directed to was this trampled field many leagues from the great halls, dusty and browned from the relentless glare of the sun and countless trampling hooves. As he looked around in dispirited silence, a hot wind picked up the dirt from the ground and sent up a dusky cloud that could blind even the most alert of fighters. Blue eyes followed the cloud until the wind died down again, then turned his attention back to the blacksmith with an expression that expressed louder than words his lack of enthusiasm.
"Really?" he said. "Ye fight here, all year around? In the sun and the rain and in snow too? I do not know if ye're hardy or just insane..."
But Finnian supposed it did make a sort of sense... As his father had often tried to impress upon him, real battles were rarely fought in palaces. Perhaps it was better to train in the kind of terrain one expected to fight in when it counted.
