Alberich surveyed his latest pupil, and reflected that Trainee Myste was at least providing one thing for him: a distraction from grief. Although she was providing a little grief of her own, of a different sort.

The middle-aged woman looked right back at him, her hazel eyes unnaturally large behind the thick glass lenses she wore, held to her face by a frame of wood, with leather straps that buckled behind her head, flattening already straight brown hair. She had a set that she normally wore that had lighter frames with sidepieces of wire that hooked over her ears, but those kept flying off during any sort of exertion; this had been the best they could do for weapons’ practice, and it wasn’t very good. Her peripheral vision was poor enough, and the frames of the lenses made it worse. And they were a handicap in another way; the first thing that an attacker would do would be to try to smash them. But she was virtually blind without them, so what could he do? Her shortsightedness was just the first in a string of handicaps that made her woefully unsuited to be a Herald.

He thought she looked particularly aggrieved this afternoon, but it was difficult to tell what her expression was on the other side of that wood-and-glass mask.

Physically, she was utterly unprepossessing, and looked like what she had been before she’d been Chosen; a sedentary scribe and clerk. He had no idea why she of all people had been Chosen, at a time when fighting Heralds were what was needed, not clerks, and how he was going to turn her into a fighter he had no clue. He despaired; she—well, he didn’t know for certain how she felt. Frustrated, surely, at the least.

She was the single clumsiest Trainee he had ever attempted to teach, bar none. He didn’t think this was on purpose, though, for even though she clearly didn’t want to be here, she did try until she was black and blue. Even if she’d come here as a child, she’d have been clumsy, he suspected, but this business of learning weaponcraft late in life, a task to which she was utterly unsuited, must seem utter madness to her. He didn’t blame her for being irritated and unhappy.

What was the point of putting her in this position anyway? She couldn’t see without those lenses; she would lose them in a fight, and then she would be blind, and how was he supposed to train her to overcome that? Though there were tales of blind warriors with preternatural abilities in both Karse and Valdemar, those had all been about men and women who had been trained since early childhood in their craft, who brought skilled bodies and the finely honed senses of hearing and smell and touch to bear on the problem of being unable to see.