Rebel Reborn

Chapter Nine: Straw Dummies

Rebel

The training grounds sat past the kitchen gardens, at the back of the estate where the lawn gave out to packed dirt. I'd asked Tamara twice for the way and once for clothes I could move in. She'd brought them folded, and handed them over the way you'd hand a knife to a child.

I rolled my shoulders and tested my neck. It was still tender, the bruise gone towards the wrong end of a colorful sunset. I walked around the training ring once. I passed a rack of staves and a row of straw dummies gone soft with age. The dirt was raked flat and clean.

I started to move.

The knowledge was all there, like muscle memory from my last life. I knew footwork, weight, the half-second read on a strike before it landed. It had come through the dark with me, whole and intact.

I threw a combination I somehow knew I'd thrown a thousand times and watched Lily's arms answer late and soft. There was no fist in them. No strength, no anger they had ever once been asked to carry. By the third pass my lungs were burning. By the fifth my legs went wobbly and I had to plant the stave in the dirt to keep from going down with them.

Pathetic, said the wolf, from her corner. It was the first thing I'd heard from her.

You're awake, I said.

She didn't answer that. But when I set my feet and went again, something thin and grudging moved into the borrowed muscle — a loan, not a gift, gone almost before I could spend it.

She wanted to see what I'd do with it first.

That was fine. We had the same grievance, the wolf and I. We'd both been left behind by the same careless girl. She just hadn't decided yet whether that made us allies or only two things shut in the same cage.

I ran the combination until it stopped being an embarrassment. It took longer than I'd have liked.

"That's a strange way to mourn a broken engagement."

I finished the strike before I turned. I wasn't going to rush to turn around for anyone.

The young man stood at the fence with his arms folded, leaning against a post like he'd been there a while and wanted me to know it. He was big through the shoulders, with reddish blond hair, and eyes the color of deep water. The host's body recognized him immediately. Lily's memory handed him over whole.

Timothy.

The memory came with everything attached. Her eighteenth birthday. A boy making a grand romantic gesture in a room full of people. Lily taking it apart in front of the same room because she could — because an audience made cruelty feel like power.

He'd changed a great deal since that memory. He had matured, in more ways than one. The eyes that stared at me now did not look at me with puppy love, but with sharp, unforgiving malice.

I wondered if I was actually in physical danger. I was alone at the back of the estate. I was wearing a body that didn't have the muscle to throw a punch. Timothy was a man with twice my strength. And he had every reason to want this version of me face-down in the dirt.

If he decided to make something of it, there was very little I could do but be interesting about it.

"You're here early," I said as a distraction. "Camp's still a week out."

"I wanted the grounds to myself." He didn't come off the fence. "The Luna said you'd be down here." He let that sit. "She didn't say why."

"I'm conditioning."

His eyes went over me once, flat, unemotional, taking inventory. His gaze was nothing like Tristan's. There was no desire in it at all.

"The Lily I knew didn't sweat," he said casually.

"That one's gone."

I meant it more plainly than he could possibly comprehend. He took it for a turn of phrase, and his mouth twisted into something that was too cruel to be a smile.

"I heard about the rope." He said, just to watch my face take it. "I'll be straight with you. I wasn't sorry."

"No reason you should be. Not your monkey, not your circus."

That went in somewhere he wasn't quite prepared for. He'd come up the hill braced for the old Lily's weapons of choice — the tears, the venom, the brittle act she put on when she was cornered. Agreement wasn't anywhere on the list.

He came off the fence then, slowly. I could see the slightest shadow of self doubt in his blue eyes.

He pulled a stave from the rack and turned it once over the back of his hand. "Spar."

It was not a friendly invitation. It was a test with an insult folded into it. He wanted to show me how weak and helpless I really was. He fully expected me to make some excuse and refuse.

I took a stave of my own. It was heavy for Lily's arms. I took it anyway.

"I don't have a sparring partner. I was going to use the straw men," I said, and nodded at the row of them. "Why do you ask, Timmy? Are you volunteering?"

Something crossed his face that wasn't anger. It was nearer to interest — the dangerous kind, a man learning that the thing he came to break is built differently than he expected.

He stepped into the ring.

"Volunteering," he said. "Sure."

I set my feet. The wolf raised her head. Lily's arms were soft and shaking and would not last a minute, and I knew how this ended before it started.

Still, I had no intention of making it cheap for him.