“Oh, wow. Y’all are . . . hard-core.”

“Yes, yes,” Saylor said, bustling over to the sword and picking it up. “This is for . . . inspiration. We obviously don’t want to involve weapons. At least not yet.”

“Yet?” Bee asked, but Saylor was already heading back into the house with the sword. “Now,” she said when she came back. “One of the things Harper has been learning is how to stay on her guard so attackers can’t surprise her.”

“Right,” Bee said, nodding like that was a totally normal thing for Saylor to be teaching me.

And I have to hand it to my best friend. For the next hour, she watched Saylor Stark throw various things—knives, pots, and more ceramic lambs than any one woman should own—at me from various directions while I was blindfolded, and at no point did she run away screaming, calling us all crazy people. She sat in the grass, legs folded, serenely watching the president of the Pine Grove Betterment Society lob a knife at the Homecoming Queen.

“Good job, Harper!” Bee called out when I batted the knife away, striking the hilt with the side of my hand. “Way to hustle!”

It was the exact same thing she shouted at Brandon when he practiced basketball, and for some reason, it made me smile. Same when, after I spun away from a particularly heavy china cat tossed at my midsection, Bee launched into one of our cheers, complete with shaking her fists like there were pom-poms in them.

After I’d deflected enough things, Saylor finally called it quits. We were both sweating and breathing hard, Saylor from throwing, me from the tension of spending an hour trying not to get whacked.

“Good job, Harper,” Saylor told me, untying the blindfold. “And you, Miss Franklin. You were very . . . supportive.”

Bee stood up, dusting off the back of her pants. “Thank you, Miss Saylor.” Then she nodded her head at the sun porch. “I thought you were training David, too. Why didn’t he get stuff thrown at his head?”

David, who was leaning on the French doors, arms folded over his chest, said, “I’ve already passed this stage. Have my dodging-stuff badge. Belt. Whatever.”

I shot him a look, and his chin trembled with the effort of not laughing.

But Bee accepted that. “Okay. Well, that was . . . interesting. Thanks so much for letting me watch, Miss Saylor.”

“Any time, honey,” Saylor cooed, even as she gave me a glare that plainly said, Never again.

“Are y’all done now?” Bee said.

“I have a few more things to go over with Harper, but it’s more theory than training.” Right. Saylor had wanted to show me the spell Blythe was planning on doing.

“In that case, I’ll go ahead and skedaddle,” Bee said.

“I’ll walk you out,” I told her as I wiped the sweat from my face with an embroidered towel that smelled like lavender.