For the last few days, life had been pain. Helena accepted it readily. The pain was nothing, an irritation, a prick, a bother. It was no fact at all measured against the knowledge that she’d not live as a cripple.

  She made her way around the house, feeling her body slowly mend, silently wishing it would do so faster. Her memories moved back to childhood, when she’d been training as an adolescent. Vitonnia was not so disorganized a place as Vorhazh, and nothing like Eregar. The soldiers in her land were trained to it early enough that each of them fought with a second nature. She’d felt bruises and lashes in the training yard before even entering her teens, and it was a grim reminder, nursing similar wounds now, how rapidly her young flesh had repaired them.

  Then again, she hadn’t been granted magical aid back then. Such things were too expensive by far for the mere grunts, however gifted. And Helena was under no delusions that youthful vigour would have let her body mend the sorts of ruin that had been inflicted upon it. When she’d been told how her new employers had left her healed, she’d immediately asked of the price. She’d panicked upon hearing a hundred gold had been spent, horrified at living under such a debt.

  Solitaire, though, had just laughed. He’d said something she didn’t understand, about one people called the “British” and another called “the yanks” and how the former didn’t pay for their healing while the latter were stupid. And that had been that.

  It was stunning, but not as stunning as remembering him being by her side when she’d still thought her life was over. Holding her hand, whispering to her. Helena had gotten angry, somehow, after his explanation of her healing, demanded an explanation.

  “Every life that’s ever been lived is precious, you should be asking other people why they wouldn’t save one for free.”

  He’d left her with that to consider it by herself, and Helena had decided that she would truly never understand the man, no matter how long she spent trying to gain his measure. She had gone about her business elsewhere in the mansion, motivated to find some form of distraction through sheer weight of confusion. The alternative was accepting the very real possibility that Solitaire was a good man after all, and such a fact as that might leave the skies themselves raining down upon the world in rebellion.

  Fortunately, the Velaharo manor was a place of distraction, if nothing else.

  There was a lot happening, and perhaps the least exciting among it all was the new arrival. Magnus, his name was. Helena had not seen his fight with Shango, but she’d heard it was one-sided enough that she could at least rely on the man not to embarrass her and Argar. If push came to shove. He was a typical Turskan, tough and hard, but not all together bright beneath his beady gaze.

  Any other time she’d have relished teaching him his limits in a good spar, but such things were beyond Helena as she was now. She’d be weeks in the healing, still, and not much good until it was finished. More distractions, then, were needed. Many more.

  Argar was no more enthusiastic about the man than Helena herself, but to her surprise he was rather less apathetic about everything else around him. The giant seemed to have gotten into the habit of training, somehow. It almost felt surreal to see. He had that way of making anything he did seem ridiculous, as if it were some performance starring a ludicrously overscaled puppet.

  “You won your match pretty easily.” Helena observed, finding yet another surprise in Argar’s answering look. The man seemed actually offended by her observation.

  “‘Course I did.” He growled. “I’m just doing this to burn off some belly fat, that’s all.”

  Helena looked at that belly, and saw how it wobbled with every motion. She could certainly understand that of all sentiments. It had been strange, meeting with the Belahonts, largely because they’d been the first group Helena remembered who actually out-did the environment of her youth in bodily trim. All lean musculature and jagged abdominal ridges. Clearly there was some anatomical quirk left prominent in their family’s blood, alongside the height.

  Argar had none of that, but he was moving with a surprising speed as always. Enthusiasm, perhaps, giving a boost to his already unusual haste. Helena watched him for a good few minutes more until he finally tired of swinging the great weighted blades around, dropping them with so loud a clatter that she jumped. He made his way for the corner, and Helena thought he’d sit. Instead he just squatted there, eyes bulging and jaw tight.

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  “What are you doing?” She frowned.

  “Exercise.” He grunted. “Beam taught. It. Shut.”

  It was a few words less than would have been ideal, but Helena got his message all the same. Rolling her eyes, she left him to his exertions and turned her focus to his discarded training tools.

  They really were rather big, she had to admit. Bending down, wincing as a few hastily-healed muscles jumped in her back, she closed a shaky fist around one and tried to raise it up.

  Obviously, she was able to lift it. And amazingly, she actually felt its weight resist her effort. Helena was wounded for sure, but she knew her own strength even diminished as it was, and the mass resisting her now was…Insanity.

  When she finally glanced over to Argar, he was properly seated. Apparently he’d finally earned himself an actual break.

  “How much do these weigh?” She’d asked.

  He’d grinned at that. Which was fair enough.

  “Twenty pounds, for now.” Argar had shrugged, with about as much modesty as Helena had learned to expect from Solitaire. “It’s a start.”

  That had more or less been the end of their conversation, Helena was in no mood to continue watching him grin away while she couldn’t at least give him a jab in response. She continued her study of the mansion, and found no shortage of additional points of interest. Shango, of course, was at the centre of her next bout.

  “Ah, Helena.” He grinned, sympathy burning in his eyes. She looked away from it, feeling sick just to catch a single glimpse.

  “Sir.”

  “Sir.” He echoed, smile slipping. “Right, well, anyway, keep an eye on this would you?”

  He handed her something, and Helena realised it was a bundle of…Yes, of cloth. Cheap, of course, and set out into a long, long strip. He moved away. “We’re doing experiments. Alright Elizabeth, go!”

  The other new join, Elizabeth, started her sprint just as he gave the order. Something was tethered to her back, Helena realised, and that something was tugged and detached just as she took off. It was perhaps the finest sprint she’d ever seen.

  It was fortunate they were in the largest hall of the entire mansion, because anywhere else and it would surely have been dangerous to unleash such speeds. The woman seemed almost to disappear as she shot along the ground, crossing it in great loping strides and almost reaching the far wall before Shango’s voice rang out.

  “NOW!”

  Instantly, the woman threw something down, and she was decelerating after that. As Helena looked more carefully, she saw the something had been a bag, burst open and its contents spilled out on the floor. Shango was quickly moving to retrieve the object he’d handed her, gesturing her over to the spot Elizabeth had started her sprint from.

  “Hold this down here.” He ordered, handing Helena one end of the ribbon, while he moved away with the other. There were lines on it, she saw, as the ribbon unfurled. Equidistant black etches. Shango seemed to count them as he continued unrolling it.

  Finally, he stopped at the site of the dropped bag.

  “As I thought.” Shango noted, hurrying back. “Well, as Solitaire thought, but still it’s good to have confirmation. You’re just over two point seven times the average speed of an average man, as far as we can tell. About fifty percent faster than Beam, sixty percent faster than Solitaire, and seventy five percent faster than me.”

  Elizabeth frowned.

  “But I already knew you were all slow.”

  Shango glared at her, his good mood, apparently, barely broken.

  “You can go now.” He sighed, and she did, disappearing with barely less speed than before. When she was, Helena spoke.

  “What was that?” She asked. Shango smiled, turning and gesturing to something. The object which had been linked to the rope originally tethered to Elizabeth. A tall thing, more wood than metal, and as alien as everything else the Belahonts ever made.

  “This is a fairly basic measuring device. Rope hooks up to it, once that’s pulled a latch is released, water falls a measured distance and one second passes before it hits the ground. Good for timing precisely. Solitaire designed it, and Beam built it during a break from work with Ardin. We’ve been using it to compare speed.”

  Helena watched it, thought, and tried to conjure up a question. She couldn’t, and so her silence just remained for a few more moments.

  “What is it?” Shango asked softly, seeing through her as always.

  “None of you are acting any differently.” She breathed. “I…I failed.”

  She failed. And a failed soldier was a dead one, Helena had learned that well enough. To try, to fight, was to resign yourself to the outcome. She hadn’t, and yet her failure had yet to punish her.

  Shango didn’t put a hand on her arm, he merely sighed.

  “Because you’re our fucking friend, Helena.” The man shook his head, as if bewildered at the very question. “Does that really need explaining? Now go and lie down, Corvan says you need some rest, boss’s orders.”

  He smiled, thin, weak, testing. Helena had planned to feign a smile of her own, but she never got the chance to do so. A real one erupted across her features entirely on its own, unprompted, irresistible and incomparably warm. It was the most wonderful thing she’d felt all day.

  Almost enough to distract from that nagging still left in her gut, and that deep ache still plaguing every battered inch of her.