“I don’t see why I have to practice so much,” I said, wiping sweat from my forehead with the back of my hand. It was a chilly day, but the sun still beat down on me, and I’d been getting quite a workout. The sword was heavy in my hand, and my muscles ached. Still, the dummy I’d been slicing looked a heck of a lot worse.

“Practice makes perfect, Miss Price,” Saylor trilled.

“I know that. Heck, I practically invented that. In fact, if I decided to do something so low-class as get a tattoo, it would probably be that. What I mean is”— I took another swing at the dummy—“is that I don’t have to practice this. You said that when Mr. Hall passed his powers on to me, he also passed on his knowledge. And the knowledge of every Paladin before him.”

I swung the sword in an arc over my head, going in to slice the dummy up under the ribs. “I don’t have to practice. I can . . . I don’t know, do this.”

Saylor gave a long suffering sigh and took another sip of sweet tea. “And all of that is true. But practice never hurt anyone. And while your brain knows all of these things, your body is still unused to them.” She nodded at the dummy. “Hence the practice. Now again.”

“Why swords anyway?” I asked even as I did what she said. Spinning, I hit the dummy in the neck, then pulled the sword out and dropped into a low spin, whacking the flat of the blade against its legs. “They’re not exactly the most convenient weapons. Shouldn’t I have”— I grunted as I brought the sword down with both hands—“a gun?”

Saylor poked at the ice in her glass with a bright pink straw. “Modernized weapons won’t work for Paladins.”

I swung around, the sword making a slight zing in the air. “Like, we’re not supposed to use them or—”

“The original magic that created Paladins didn’t take things like guns, or grenades, or—or rocket launchers into account. Therefore, you can’t work with those nearly as well as you can with a sword.”

I took that in, turning the hilt of the sword over in my hands. “Okay. But a rocket launcher sounds a lot more useful than a sword.”

It took another fifteen minutes, and my thighs and calves had joined my shoulders in screaming, before Saylor said I could quit. I wanted to fling the sword to the ground and sink into a lawn chair next to her, but instead, I put the sword back in the house and wheeled the dummy back onto the patio.

When I did sit down, Saylor rewarded me with one of her rare grins. “Good girl.”