The salle, a long, low building with smooth, worn wooden floors, was lit from above by clerestory windows. This was because the walls were taken up with storage cabinets and a few full-length mirrors. For the rest, there wasn’t much, just a few benches, some training equipment, and the door to Alberich’s office. For all Skif knew, Alberich might even have quarters here, since he hardly ever saw the Weaponsmaster anywhere else.

“So, you come in good time,” Alberich said, as the last of his sharpened stakes slammed into the target. He turned toward Skif, picking up something from the bench where his weapons had been. “Come here, then. Let us see how these suit you.”

“These” proved to be little daggers in sheaths that Alberich strapped to Skif’s arms, with the daggers lying along the inside of his arms. Once on, they were hidden by Skif’s sleeves, and he flexed his arms experimentally. They weren’t at all uncomfortable, and he suspected that with a little practice wearing them, he wouldn’t even notice they were there.

“Of my students, only two are, I think, fit to use these,” Alberich said. “Jeri is one. It is you that is the other. Look you—” He showed Skif the catch that kept each dagger firmly in its sheath—and the near-invisible shake of the wrist that dropped it down into the hand, ready to throw, when the catch was undone.

Skif was thrilled with the new acquisition—what boy wouldn’t be?—but unlike most, if not all, of the other Trainees, he had seen men knifed and bleeding and dead. Men—and a woman or two. Even before he left his uncle’s tavern, he’d seen death at its most violent. And he knew, bone-deep and blood-deep, that death was what these knives were for. Not target practice, not showing off for one’s friends. Death, hidden in a sleeve, small and silent, waiting to be used.

Death was a cold, still face, and blood pooling and clotting on the pavement. Death was floating bloated in the river. Death was ashes and bones in the burned-out hulk of a building.

Death was someone you knew found still and cold, and never coming back. And these little “toy” daggers were death. Not to be treated lightly, or to be played with.

But death was also being able to stop someone from making you dead.

“Can you kill a man?” Alberich asked suddenly, as Skif contemplated the dagger in his hand.