Chapter Ten (Part 1)

The next two weeks went on to be the hardest days Ven had ever experienced, and by day two part of her started wondering if she might have made a terrible mistake.

Each night, including the first, they would stay up well past dark, practicing what Eujin called Killer’s Cant. It was a combination of signals, sign language, and different types of clicks, chirps, and whistles meant to mimic the sounds of various birds and insects. It was apparently a shared code that those who knew could send and receive information to each other without anyone unfamiliar with the code to know what was being said, or that anything was even being said at all. The meanings, despite their subtlety, were varied and complex, and Ven constantly found herself mixing up which signal meant which. A mistake that was, of course, always punished by a stiff slap across the face.

By night ten, she could finally manage to hold a basic conversation. This was met by Eujin spending the entire next day refusing to communicate in anything but it. This ordinarily would not have been a huge problem, save for one tiny little problem. Killer’s Cant didn’t have a signal for “I need to use the bathroom”.

By mid-morning, Ven finally had to just dash into the underbrush to relieve herself without permission, after nearly an hour of trying unsuccessfully to convey that her bladder was about to burst. She emerged from the woods to find a very amused Eujin, who then promptly made a small gesture with his hand to indicate an apology. On Ven’s less-than-happy verbal insistence, Eujin finally agreed to make a new sign between them for that purpose moving forward.

Learning the Cant, however, was the easy part.

In order to keep a high pace and to help train her body, Eujin insisted they sprint sections of the road, typically one after the other, until Ven was too light-headed, sore, and nauseous to do anything more than stumble off to the side of the road and puke into the ditch. No sooner had she wiped her mouth than he was making her run again.

This continued all day, day after day until about day 8 or 9, at which point Ven’s feet had developed massive torn blisters from running in her too-tight boots. Only then did Eujin allow a break for her feet to heal. Unable to keep wearing her boots due to the pain, Ven reverted to wearing her leather slippers. This kept down most of the chafing, but had the unfortunate side-effect of causing every single stone and root in the trail to drill straight through their thin soles and jab into the bottom of her foot. After a couple hours of dealing with that, she was firmly convinced that it was probably even worse than the blisters.

When they would stop a few points throughout the day for meals, Eujin would make her do press-ups and sit-ups until she couldn’t get off the ground. After the first few days, he also started teaching her open-hand fighting. This generally consisted of her getting knocked flying through the air or folded in half by a strike, only to be derided until she finally got back on her feet to try again. After a few days of this, Ven could count on one hand the areas of her body that didn’t have bruises or cuts. Eating hardtack was challenging enough without her arms and hands feeling like gelatin. Feeling like she’d just gotten trampled by a horse only served to make things harder.

Nighttime, in addition to Cant practice, was also when she would practice moving quietly, based on techniques he showed her on night two. She would then have to try and take something from his hand while he had his eyes closed. If he ever heard her, he would strike her with the scabbard of his sword and make her start over. The closest she ever managed to get was within five paces. Eujin, much like with all of his other lessons, said nothing in the way of praise. But she knew getting that close was probably a pretty big feat.

By the time they stopped every night and she finished all of her evening training, Ven could hardly keep her head up. She was oftentimes asleep within moments of her head touching down on her pack. Mornings started before sunrise, in the frigid pre-dawn hours where the grass was still frozen into shimmering whitish spikes. Surprisingly, this was the only part of their exhausting routine that didn’t bother her. She’d been getting up before the sun for long enough that doing otherwise just felt lazy.

It really was a shame she couldn’t get a chance to really enjoy the scenery because of the endless work and exhaustion. Here she was, the furthest she had ever been from home in her entire life, and the entirety of her time thus far had been spent sore, bruised, exhausted, occasionally nauseous, and frequently in a terrible mood. There was no chance to admire the mountains growing ever so slowly closer on the horizon, or the streams they crossed, or the flowers she’d never seen before. The one time she’d stopped to just look around and take in her surroundings, Eujin had made her do twice as many sprints to make up for “lost time”.