Page 29 of Outfoxed

“I hurt her dignity above all else. She loves her tail more than is wise, but we all have our faults. I startled her because she expected a beating with the sword rather than a yank of her tail. Of course, it did sting. It is a punishment for allowing me to get a hold of her tail. She will remember her prized tail is a liability next time, won’t she?”

“Don’t you even think about cutting off my tail,” I grumbled, smoothing the abused fur.

“What else have we learned?”

One of the boys, seven going on sixty with a temper prone to flaring, raised his hand.

“Freddy, what did you learn?”

“She made you work to catch her. She’s fast, and she knows how to use her sword. But isn’t she learning, too? We’ve never seen her use a sword before.”

Right. I’d used a sword to limited degree with the older students, although I considered my skills to be weak at best. Still, it wasn’t like Batbayar to dodge the truth like he did with the children.

Interesting.

“Jade has spent many months watching me teach others how to wield a sword. It is natural for her to have learned some things. The rest I must teach her body, but her mind is sharp and she is an attentive student. In time, you will be able to flee from me with just as much success.”

“Failure hurts,” I said in my most rueful tone, and I stroked my poor tail again to play along with his lesson.

“Pain is an excellent teacher, and you will do your best to prevent me from pulling on your precious tail again, won’t you?”

I nodded.

“Learn from your mistakes. You will make mistakes, just as Jade mistakenly assumed I would not use every weapon at my disposal. Her tail is a liability in battle, but it’s a beautiful liability, and society has taught us to avoid destroying beautiful things that cannot be easily replaced. As red foxes are rare, they will avoid her prized tail and ears and subdue her in other ways. That is the nature of the greedy.”

It was. I used that reality to my benefit to escape the bounty hunters. I wouldn’t trust all bounty hunters, but the ones like Sandro, who still possessed their base integrity, would keep their word.

“Prepare yourself, Jade. We will repeat the exercise again, but I will punish your mistakes harshly.”

Running like I meant it wouldn’t save me. Parrying his blows would delay the inevitable. As long as he kept the advantage of attack, the best I could do was defend. Every spar I’d ever watched involved the combatants vying for the moment of attack, the one that ultimately determined the victor.

For a while, I could avoid him, but unless I found a chance to attack, I had no hope of victory. Rather than allow him to take full control of our spar from the very first blow, I slashed my wooden blade at his shins, forcing him to hop back or join me in being bruised.

I earned a smile from the instructor, but he’d taught me early on blessings were often curses while curses often proved to be blessings in disguise. The curse of his best effort might one day become a blessing of survival, but even when he pulled the blows, wooden practice swords hurt.

Pain taught me well, and it took a single blow to remind me why I needed to run like I meant it and do my best to counter his every strike.

I won some, I lost most, but I cracked my wooden katana into his ribs once before he disarmed me.

Victory wasn’t mine, but I left the spar proud of the little I had achieved.

“Stretch and catch your breath, Jade.” Batbayar waited until I obeyed. “What did you learn that time?”

Maria held up her hand, and after a moment, the rest of the students followed her example. Batbayar considered the students, then said, “Freddy, tell us what you learned.”

“She’s beautiful.”

Puzzled, I continued stretching and regarded the child with interest, as he usually displayed his temper long before he complimented somebody.

“She is. What about that spar made you recognize this?”

“You know how when it rains really hard during a storm and the water runs down a hill while the lightning lights up the sky?”

“I do.”

“She moves like the water during the storm, and she’s quiet like the moment before it thunders. That’s what she’s like. You taught her to move like the rain.”

Sometimes Batbayar taught the children, and sometimes the children taught me, but I doubted I’d be able to see Mother Nature’s fury quite the same.