The morning after Fatima he found Edda at the training ground.
She was alone. The flat stretch of dirt behind the hut that she had cleared herself — pulling the stumps with her bare hands, leveling the earth with a flat stone, drawing the boundary lines in the dirt with a sharpened stick.
She was wearing a skirt. It was the first time he had seen her in one.
Brown linen, mid-calf, paired with a simple undershirt that did not fully contain her muscular frame.
She stood at the center of the clearing with a wooden sword and her back straight and her white hair tied up and she looked like what she was — a fifty-year-old dragon slayer who had been thoroughly broken and had gotten up and resumed her function.
She heard him coming.
She turned.
She bowed. "Sir Lord."
"Your grandson," he said, stopping at the edge of the clearing. "Is alive. He is on the mountain range east of the dead zone. He has a mission for me to complete. He will not return for some time."
Edda was still for a moment.
She looked at the ground. Something moved across her face — relief, grief, the complicated architecture of a grandmother who had watched her grandson witness everything at the waterfall. She pressed it down. She lifted her face.
"Understood," she said.
"Train them," he said. "All of them. Hard."
"How hard?"
"Hard enough that they need to be healed after." He paused. "I will provide the healing."
Edda looked at him for a long moment. Then she looked at the wooden sword in her hand. Then she nodded once, with the decisive finality of a warrior accepting an order she understood completely.
"Formation practice begins at dawn," she said. "Sword forms, endurance circuits, mana circulation for those who have it."
"Good."
He turned and walked back toward the hut.
Edda watched him go. She looked at the training ground. She looked at the skirt she was wearing, which she had chosen this morning for reasons she had not examined closely. She pressed her lips together. She went back to her sword form.
The first morning of training was chaos.
Nara had never held a sword. She held the wooden training blade with both hands wrapped around the wrong part of the grip and her elbows pointing outward. Edda corrected her three times before giving up and making her hold a rock instead to understand weight distribution.
Celia was better. She had muscle and a natural understanding of leverage from years of physical work. She picked up the first form in under an hour. She was also competitive enough that watching Edda demonstrate once was sufficient motivation to practice the same motion four hundred times until she had it.
Gia had the best instincts but the injured knee, which she refused to rest, which meant Edda had to order her to rest it, which Gia ignored, which meant Edda had to physically stop her twice before midday.
Marla and Fatima trained together. Their bodies were not built for sword work — too soft, too heavy, the wrong center of gravity for quick movement. Edda modified the forms for them. She focused their training on stability, on groundwork, on learning how to use weight as a weapon. By midday Marla had knocked Gia down twice and felt very good about it.
Rika had been trained before. She moved well. She was fast. She was also furious about something that she refused to name, and the fury made her sloppy, and Edda kept pointing this out, and Rika kept looking toward the hut door, and Edda kept pointing that out too.
It was in the second hour of morning training that Raven walked out.
He had Edda’s wooden sword in his hand.
He walked to the center of the clearing. He looked at the women arranged in a loose formation. He looked at Edda, who was standing at the side with her arms crossed.
Then he walked to Edda.
He stopped behind her.
Edda went very still.
"Continue calling the count," he said. His voice was close. Against her ear.
"Sir Lord," she said carefully. "I am in the middle of—"
His hands found the waistband of her skirt.
"Continue," he said. "Calling. The count."
Edda closed her eyes for one single second. Then she opened them. She looked at her women. Every one of them was staring at her with wide eyes and slack jaws.
"SECOND FORM," Edda said. Her voice was drill-sergeant steady. "Begin."
Raven lifted her skirt.
She was not wearing smallclothes. She had stopped wearing them after the first night at the waterfall because they had been destroyed and she had not thought to replace them.
His cock was already out. Already hard. The thick, twelve-inch shaft pressed against the back of her thigh. The head found her anal — the ring that had been broken and rebuilt and broken again, the hole that remembered him with the muscle memory of a body that had been colonized.
He pushed.
SKHLRK—
"Hah—!" Edda’s body went rigid. Her hands flew to her sides. Her chin went up.
"COUNT," she said. Her voice barely cracked. "LEFT FOOT FORWARD."
The women stared.
"LEFT FOOT FORWARD!" she repeated.
They moved. Reluctantly. Watching her with the fascinated horror of people watching someone try to conduct an orchestra while drowning.
He pushed deeper.
Six inches. Seven. Her anal stretched. The walls gripped. The familiar, burning, complete sensation of being filled past capacity flooded through her muscular body. Her toes pressed into the dirt through her sandals. Her thighs trembled.
"RAISE THE SWORD," she said.
PAH—
"THIRD FORM—" Her voice pitched upward on the last word. She caught it. She breathed. "THIRD FORM. OVERHEAD POSITION."
PAH PAH—
"Hah— hah— HOLD THAT POSITION—"
Rika had stopped moving entirely. She was staring with her mouth open. Celia had raised her sword to overhead position and was holding it with her eyes locked on Edda’s face. Nara had dropped her rock.
"What," Rika said, "is he doing?"
"Training," Raven said pleasantly, his hips rolling, his cock pressing deeper into the old dragon slayer’s bowels. "Her body. All bodies need training in different ways."
"You need all of your bodies trained," he continued, his voice carrying across the clearing. He gripped Edda’s hip with one hand. His other hand found her muscular tit through the undershirt. "Training the mind for discipline. Training the muscles for endurance. Training the holes for capacity." He drove his hips forward. "This is her training. Yours will come. Continue the forms."
Edda’s mouth was open. Drool was forming at the corner of her lip. Her eyes were rolled but functional — she could still see the clearing, still see her women, still count the form.
"FOURTH FORM!" she said. "STEP AND STRIKE!"
PAH PAH PAH—
"AAAAAANGHH~!! Hah— STEP— HAH— AND— HAH— STRIKE—"
The women moved. Haltingly. With the distracted, fascinated rhythm of people performing physical tasks while watching something they could not look away from.
He fucked her.
He fucked the old dragon slayer in the training ground in the morning light while she called the sword forms. Her skirt was bunched around her waist. Her ass was exposed to the clearing. Her muscular cheeks spread around his shaft.
The ring of her anal was dark and stretched and leaking the seed from the night before.
His cock drove through her like a sword through a scabbard — precisely, repeatedly, with controlled force.
PAH PAH PAH PAH—
"AAAAAANGHH~!! HNGHH~!! KYAAANGH~!! FIFTH FORM— AAAAAANGHH~!! BEGIN—"