CHAPTER 120 : TEACHING SIRA

CHAPTER 120 : TEACHING SIRA


POV: Kristine
Three hours before midnight I taught Sira how to hold a blade.
We were in the narrow garden — the strip of pale dirt with its three determined plants — in the last of the evening light before the palace locked down for the night. Sira had arranged with the harem's senior woman to give us the space.
"Grip," I said. "Not tight. Firm enough that it doesn't shift and loose enough that your wrist can follow through. Tight grips lose speed and tire the hand."
She adjusted. She was a fast learner—absorbed instruction the first time, incorporated it, and didn't need it repeated.
"Stance," I said. "Weight back. The front foot guides; it doesn't anchor. If someone pushes toward you, you use their momentum rather than resist it."
"I know something about not holding ground under pressure," she said.
"That instinct is exactly right," I said. "You've been practicing this for fifteen years. You just haven't had the physical form to match it."
She absorbed this. Adjusted her weight. Her form was good. Startlingly good.
"You watched a weapons master," I said.
"Twelve years," she said. "Before this palace. My husband employed the best one in the Velari provinces." She moved through the form again, slower, feeling the mechanics. "I was not permitted to train in the formal sense. But I watched every session. My husband knew I watched. He never said anything."
I thought about Tyron, drilling me every time we stopped on our journeys before dawn while the mist was still on the ground, and the patience he had brought to it—the way he had never once made me feel that my learning was a burden or a charity.
"He sounds like a good man," I said.
"He was the best person I have ever known," Sira said simply. "And Zedrak killed him in his own throne room." She moved through the form again. "Which is why I am going to stay in this palace after tonight and make sure that every good thing Zedrak destroyed gets the chance to be rebuilt."
We worked for two more hours. I taught her the pressure point strikes—below the ear, the base of the throat—the ones that produced unconsciousness rather than death. I taught her the leverage principle. I showed her how to move in a confined space, how to use walls and angles, and the momentum of a larger opponent.
Near the end, she paused and looked at me.
"Who taught you all of this?"
"Tyron," I said.
"He taught you well."
"He was thorough," I said. "And demanding. And occasionally he looked at me like I was simultaneously the most frustrating and the most—" I stopped.
Sira watched me stop. Something warm and knowing moved through her expression.
"The most?" she prompted.
I looked at the river below the wall.
"He was thorough," I said again.
Sira laughed—the short, genuine, startled laugh of someone who had forgotten they could. It changed her face completely, took fifteen years off it, and showed me who she had been before this palace got its hands on her.
"After tonight," she said, "when you have your son and your warrior and your life back—be less thorough about saying the things that matter."
I looked at her. "Is that advice?"
"It is instruction," she said. "From someone who spent fifteen years wishing she had said more things to the right person before it was too late." She settled the blade in her grip. "Say the things. Don't be strategic about them."
We stood in the garden in the last of the light with the river below us and the palace breathing its uneven breath around us. I looked at this woman who had survived fifteen years of the unsurvivable and was choosing to stay and survive further and felt something I could not fully name—a combination of grief and admiration and the specific love that develops between people who have been in hard places together.
I reached out and took her hand carefully. Deliberately. Choosing the contact.
The vision came soft and full—a room with a window, books on shelves, and the rebuilt Velari records. Sira's face, older, is entirely at peace.
I released her hand.
"You'll be all right," I said.
"Go get ready," she said. "You have a king to kill."

I heard about it through Sira's network two hours before midnight.

Sira came to me in my room—the door relocked by her contact after the garden—and sat beside me on the sleeping mat and told me in the low, precise way she communicated important things that Cors had reported Eli to the night commander.
"How long does the verification take?" I said.
"Six hours. Maybe five if the commander is thorough."
"We're moving in two," I said.
Sira nodded. "Then Eli is fine." She paused. "But you should know — and I am telling you because you should know, not because you need to change anything — that he handled it well. Cors confronted him directly. Eli held the interrogation without breaking cover, bought the time we needed, and then went immediately to warn the child named Brek in the children's barracks."
I was quiet for a moment.
"He warned Brek," I said.
"Told him to run when the gate opened. Told him about his brother in the adult barracks." Sira paused. "He is a remarkable child, your Eli."
Your Eli.
"Yes," I said. "He is."
Sira looked at me with the expression she wore when she was about to say something real. "He looks at you and Tyron the way children look at something they didn't believe they were allowed to want." She paused. "Make sure he knows it's real. After tonight, when there's time—make sure he knows it's permanent."
"I already told him," I said.
I held the stone.
Outside the locked door, the palace moved through its nighttime routines—footsteps, the distant sound of the river, and the occasional clang of a guard's weapon against stone. Somewhere in the adult barracks, Brek's brother didn't know yet that tonight was the night. Somewhere in the children's barracks, Eli was waiting with the patience he had built out of necessity.
"One more thing," Sira said. She reached into her dress and withdrew a second knife—smaller than the dark-handled blade. She held it out. "For your other wrist."
I took it.
"Sira," I said.
"Don't." She rose from the sleeping mat. "Don't thank me again. Just go win."
She went to the door. At the threshold she paused with her back to me.
"Kristine," she said. "When Zedrak falls — and he will fall — the women of this harem will need someone to tell them it's safe to move. Someone they can see being free first, so they know it's real." She paused. "I'll be that person. But it needs to happen quickly after. The window between his fall and the next power filling the vacuum is narrow."
"I'll be fast," I said.
She left.
I checked the vial. Checked both daggers. Checked the sword.
One hour to midnight.