Airs & Graces: The Angel's Grace Trilogy Book I

by A. J. Downey

  “This is the same thing as community college?” I asked, a bit amused.

  “Yes, it’s… it’s not just existing. It’s not finding the job where I don’t have to really push myself. I don’t know what’s going to happen or where I’ll end up. I just know, back there in the fight, things finally felt right. It sounds weird, but you’d told me before exactly what to do. I didn’t fight it, didn’t panic. We’d gotten through it before. As soon as I did that, things just slowed down. And I want more of that. I want you to teach me how to be useful to you. I don’t want to be the helpless baggage anymore. And if that means I’m occasionally bait, or whatever is needed, then so be it. It all starts with learning how to handle myself better, though.”

  It wasn’t a very detailed plan, but it was a plan, and it was Adelaide’s, which was a step in the right direction. It also wasn’t what I’d have predicted, in terms of a moment of enlightenment, so I somewhat hoped it might take others off-guard as well. “All right, then we’ll find a quiet place to stay, and start looking into a private place to train. We’ll need to find you some suitable weapons, too.”

  ***

  Elko, Nevada turned out to have what we were looking for. While it wasn’t initially gymnasium space, we were able to find a suitable building for rent near a motel, in a town with enough gyms that we could pick up what we needed to create a sparring area with some privacy. I carved wooden practice swords for the two of us, and laid some practice mats down. We wouldn’t be able to stay forever, sooner or later, someone would track us down. But there was nothing in Elko that screamed that it would be Adelaide’s first choice in destinations, and it certainly wasn’t anywhere I’d visited before.

  We didn’t waste any time. As soon as she had a weapon, space, and a night’s sleep since the attack, Adelaide was ready to begin her training, almost too eager to get started.

  “Your footwork is critical. You need to keep your weight forward, on the balls of your feet.” Adelaide looked a little disappointed. Ever since she’d gotten it, any time she thought she could, she’d been swinging the practice sword around. I suspected she may have suspected more sparring, somewhat sooner.

  “All right, like this?” She shifted her balance.

  “Kind of, but this isn’t ballet. Just keep your weight forward, so you can shift forward, back, or to either side easily.” I demonstrated my own stance, how readily I was able to maneuver. She made a couple of attempts to copy it. I finally stepped up behind her, helping to physically guide her into the stance, lightly kicking her feet apart slightly more and nudging the backs of her knees with my own. “Bend your knees just a little, not so stiff. Everything relies on your ability to move.”

  “Tab…” she started, when I’d gotten her mostly into stance. “Never mind. Okay, so, moving is key. Got it. Now what do I do with the sword?”

  I stepped back into position, shifting into my own stance. “Don’t worry about the sword yet. If you know what to do with your body in a fight, the sword will follow. Practice your footwork.” I demonstrated again. She sighed, but gave up on ideas of swinging the sword around for the time being and practiced mimicking my movements. There were objections and more sighing when I gave her some exercises, particularly focused on increasing her core strength and building up her legs, but she did them anyway.

  The second day went much more easily. She objected, for a while, to the exercises, then to learning to fall, and then to get back to her feet quickly, followed by more footwork training, and then more falling practice, but, eventually, as she tired, the objections slowed, and when they did, she took to it much more naturally. She also slept well that night, with the exhaustion.

  The third day finally yielded a breakthrough. Adelaide was still meeting my movements with the proper defensive responses, shifting backward and side to side. Some of the movements had gone through enough repetition that she not only did them by rote, but at one point amid the routine, she followed up the practiced movement with a deft side-step, anticipating my next move before I made it, ending up on my more vulnerable side when I took a rapid step forward.

  “Good,” I said. “Very good.”

  She paused, far more surprised than I. “I don’t know how that happened. I just – ”

  “You just felt comfortable with the movements and went with the proper impulse. Just like back in Boulder.”

  “Just like back in Boulder. But you didn’t just go easy on me or anything, right?”

  I shook my head. “We’re moving slowly – and without blades – but the principles remain the same. The first part of learning to fight is learning to move. Outmaneuver your opponent, and you leave them vulnerable. Do you remember what the difference was in the fight with the Demons?”

  She nodded. “They didn’t surround us, didn’t overwhelm us. I just sort of saw that it was what they were hoping to do. Pin us down.”

  “And you tricked them out of it, yes. It was all about positioning. If they’d surrounded us, in enough numbers, it would have been far harder to protect you. But they weren’t smart enough to wait. You outmaneuvered them and put them where you wanted them,” I remained in place, so she could see where she stood in relation to me, opposite my sword-arm. “And it made all the difference.”

  She took to learning to move, and then to fall, and then to kick back up to a standing position much more readily after that. She didn’t have any more flashes of insight, but that didn’t dim any of her enthusiasm for learning the basics for the day.

  She was considerably less enthusiastic the next morning when all of the crunches and kip-ups caught up with her stomach muscles, but eventually, she pulled herself out of bed and took to the routine again. “I thought I was in pretty good shape before. By the time we leave town, I’m going to be ready to… I don’t know, go run a marathon, or take up kick boxing, or something.”

  “Thinking of leaving town already? We’ve barely begun, and we have the place through the end of the month.”

  “Nope. I mean, I’m kind of homesick for Seattle, but this isn’t so bad. When we’re all done with this, I’m definitely joining a gym, though. They say all of this starts to feel good after a while, right?”

  I don’t think she was still thinking about how good it would feel after another hour of break-falls and rolls, but she did it without complaining, sighing, or asking when she was going to learn how to use a sword.

  That much demonstrated that, by the next day, she was ready to start learning some blade work. It took every bit as long as the footwork had to get the basics down. She was continually forgetting to coordinate everything she’d learned with what she was learning with the practice sword in hand, throwing herself off balance when she swung too hard, or lunged with too much enthusiasm. Getting down a proper, relaxed grip and a suitable stance at the same time seemed an impossibility on that first day.

  By the third day with the sword in hand, the coordination was there, and she was managing to go through footwork routines and even her falls without letting her guard down. She was distinctly not a natural with a sword, but it was getting easier, and while she didn’t always agree with the order of operations, she never lost her conviction that this was the right path for her to be taking. She became more convinced of it on the ninth day into our training, when she had another flash of insight.

  We still hadn’t gotten into any sparring, with most of the focus being on defense. Her coordination was improving in general, and she was reacting properly to most of my movements. When I lunged forward, my practice blade found, instead of hers as part of the lesson, only empty air, and Adelaide was behind me, after a quick half-turn and rapid bit of footwork. Had she been an enemy, or even expecting it, she’d have had a brief moment with my back exposed to her.

  Once again, instead of following through, she ended up wide-eyed, this time staring at her sword. “Good, very good,” I responded, turning.

  Instead of the smile from before, she kept staring at the sword. “Tab, I… I saw you ki
ll her. That wasn’t just… wasn’t just me moving. It was what I think she wished she’d been fast enough to do. I saw her… then saw myself, stabbing you in the back.”

  I reached out, putting a hand on her shoulder. At first, she flinched away from it, then forced herself to relax.

  “It’s not real,” I uttered.

  “But it was real. Like the visions. Like she was going to make it come true. Like she was just showing me the future.”

  “Let me tell you the truth about Iaoel and the future,” I responded, keeping my hand on her, the other reaching out to slowly push the blade down, leaving her looking into my eyes instead of at the sword. She looked more scared than I’d seen her since before the Temple. “Iaoel doesn’t know the future.”

  “But she’s the Angel of Visions, right?”

  “She could see possible futures, yes. Things which might happen. She could sometimes see the events leading to them, making them more likely. But neither she, nor anyone else, can reliably see the future that will definitely occur.”

  “I thought that’s what this was about. That she saw something that was going to happen, and it started everything. Sending you to Hell, getting herself killed, just everything…”

  “If she could have seen that, don’t you think she might have avoided her own expulsion? That’s part of the entire point of the gift of free will, and why it’s so powerful. She could see what might happen, possible outcomes. But people can change the future. You can change the future, so what you just saw never happens.”

  I’m uncertain how convinced she was, but she at least nodded her assent. “Can we… can we be done for today? I need to think about this. And maybe get something to eat.”

  Despite ending up going for Italian, instead of the quick diner food we’d been favoring, dinner that night was quiet, with a lot more introspection. Similarly, she went to bed, without any further efforts at conversation.

  I spent the early hours of the morning wondering if she was going to be ready to move on after the vision spooked her. As it turned out, I need not have worried. By the time she had finished showering and dressing for the day, she had the look of determination back.

  “Come on, Tab, get ready. We need to get to the gym. Like hell I’m going to let her push me around.” It almost sounded like she was referring to the arguments with her mother, which might have been a good thing, with what started us down this road.

  Despite that determination, the effects were obvious. Half the day had to be spent going back over things she’d grasped readily the day before – almost as if she was scared that too much ease would lead to a repeat performance. Still, she picked it back up and, by the end of the day, seemed reasonably pleased with herself. She’d had no more moments of tremendous accomplishment with the sword, but also no more traumatic visions. Her actual skill level was improving, at the least.

  After two more days of constant effort, her sword work was consistently improving again, so I’d begun to teach her a few basic attacks, to go with the defenses. She didn’t take to them very readily, but worked on them to a point of reasonable expertise, at least. When she got comfortable enough with a couple of the maneuvers, she finally voiced an objection, though this time, more thoughtfully than usual.

  “Tab, I know I was all gung-ho about swinging a sword around before, but this doesn’t feel right. I’m not going to be able to really hurt most of the things we’re fighting, right?”

  “Not currently. Why?”

  “Then let’s go back to the defenses. I think I was a bit too fixated, before I knew how some of this worked, on cutting off people’s heads. Mainly the people trying to kill me. But I’d rather focus on the things that will help me to survive, if that’s okay?”

  I nodded, dropping the emphasis on attack, for the moment, to help her better her defenses. We worked on it for another two hours, before she apparently found the right comfort level again. Her eyes got a bit of a far-away look to them, and she side-stepped one of my lunges. Since she didn’t come right out of it this time, I slashed at her. She parried neatly, and stepped back out of reach once she’d guided my blade out of the way. I sped up, and she once again met me with the proper defense. I switched from the single attacks to a combination, and she evaded each one, parrying the last thrust. We hadn’t worked on combinations yet, and throughout the more difficult sequence, her eyes never turned downward to watch the blade, instead staying fixed forward.

  Three more combinations, each one more rapid than the last, and she defended herself perfectly, each time, moving to an advantageous position, or finishing the sequence out of reach of follow-ups. Slowly, as we fought, dancing and moving about the mat, her expression changed from one of slight surprise with the distant gaze to a very Adelaide-like smile of excitement. It only faded when, eventually, my skill at blade work exceeded her reflexes and insight, and I ended up sweeping her feet out from under her after knocking her blade to the side. She hit the mat, and was about to kick back to her feet, when she found the tip of my practice sword at her throat. Despite the loss, she looked elated. “I did it. I saw the counterattacks, and just ignored them, and kept trying to direct it further and further, to the next attack and the next. I can do it, Tab!” As soon as my blade was out of the way, she rolled up to her feet, and threw her arms in the air, pumping her fists in excitement. “I can do it.”

  “Did you want to try another round, and see if you can bring it back?”

  “I think I’ve pushed that about as hard as I can for now. I’m starving. But there is something else I feel like I’m finally ready to try, after dinner.”

  “And that is?”

  “Piorre’s journal. I kind of looked through it before, but it’s been a while. I don’t think I really understood what he was doing. I have some more insight now, and I want to see if there’s maybe something in there that can help me, that I maybe missed before.”

  “That sounds reasonable.” It was just as well. For all that I was encouraging her through the process and didn’t want to detract from her excitement, now that the sparring was over for the day, I couldn’t help but reflect on how much her inspired techniques reminded me of my own sparring matches with Iaoel. At the very least, given a blade that posed some kind of threat to the supernatural, she might now, indeed, give some of her enemies pause. Any hesitation might not last for very long, but buying even a second could prove critical in the future.

  She went through two full dinners that night at the diner, a further sign that the experience had taken a lot out of her. She remained quite happy throughout, though, and, once she’d gotten some real food into her, she picked up her usual talkativeness. For the most part, she wanted to know about my thoughts on her progress and how I thought her technique could improve. Over the days we’d been in town, she’d picked up enough knowledge of swordsmanship, at least, to start to recognize how many things she didn’t know – the first step toward understanding in many disciplines.

  As soon as we got back to the motel, she started poring over Piorre’s journal, and this time, she started making notes of her own in the margins. I didn’t bother to ask what she was seeing in the entries, so as not to break her focus. I spent much of the time in meditation instead, pondering the day’s events and trying to quiet my own concerns.

  Despite the realizations regarding Piorre’s journals, by the next day, she couldn’t wait to get back to her sword practice. This time, we weren’t very far into the lessons when she managed to bring about the insights again that let her parry or side-step long strings of incoming attacks. This time, when it was over, and she was on the ground with my sword at her throat, she couldn’t wait to get back up and try it again. The visions didn’t come so readily the second time, somewhat frustrating her. After she’d had a chance to have lunch, stretch and reflect on the morning, though, she was able to consciously bring it about again – suitably, right about the time she was voicing giving up, and trying to just work on improving her non-supernatural techniques.
This time, the sequence didn’t last as long, but she remained enthused by it, even so.

  When that was done, instead of retreating from lessons for an early dinner, she went back to trying to find the right state of mind again. Late into the evening, well past when we’d usually quit for the day, she finally found it again when on the verge of exhaustion, and, once again, focusing on the routine and on the mental discipline involved with that intense focus, instead of actively trying to bring on the visions. It only lasted a couple of passes with the swords this time, before it left her in a bad position, and I hit her somewhat harder than intended when she failed to get her guard up at all, instead trying to shake off something the vision was giving her, judging by the look of her in the moment.

  “What did you see?” I asked.

  “I saw myself talking to Michael, offering him Iaoel’s knowledge if he’d go and rescue you from Hell,” she said, rubbing her shoulder where I’d struck her. “And I knew she was just trying to get to me, while I was tired.”

  “You knew?”

  She nodded emphatically, kicking back to her feet with proper technique, even though the process jarred her shoulder a bit. “I knew it was just her, because it’ll be a cold day in hell before I give that bastard anything.”

  I couldn’t help but smile. The vision may have been Iaoel’s, but the sentiment was pure Adelaide.

  She once again ate two full meals at dinner, drawing a comment from the waitress. Adelaide just quipped back pleasantly, and went back to eating. By dessert, she was right back in Piorre’s journals, making more notes. This time, noting her resilience and bouncing back from what she’d seen during the day, I decided to inquire as to what had her attention. “Any thoughts?”

  “Just him, kinda sorting through his stuff and talking about writing his will sometime. I guess he was trying to come to terms with his own mortality or whatever…” She fell silent. One might perhaps have assumed she was reflecting sadly on Piorre’s death, but I saw the look in her eyes and had seen it before.