He wasn’t kidding. Over the next ten minutes, he swung, thrust, parried, feinted, and jabbed with dazzling agility and coordination, Doctor X barely finishing one breathtaking stroke before Victor Power blurred by with the speed of the next. The lessons were furious: attack formations, defense positions; footwork for advance and retreat; techniques for battling those taller than you, as well as those far smaller; jarring changes in tempo to bewilder your foe; the combination of both blades to redirect an onslaught; fighting one-on-one as well as taking on an entire group; the calculations of speed versus brute strength that determined a one-handed versus two-handed grip.

Each technique, drawn from renaissance and medieval schools of combat, had a name and he barked them out: Boar’s Tooth, botta secreta, double rownde, durchführen, false edge, imbrocata, kissing-the-button, on-the-pass, scandiaglio, volté. Then he added a few techniques from the Jack Sturges school—showier moves with names more befitting a thirteen-year-old boy: the Drunken Chicken, Blah-de-blah-de-blah, the Blue Jean Surprise, Idiot Gets a Face Full, and his magnum opus, Fling the Poop.

Right away it was clear that I was expected to memorize this menu of mayhem.

The reason I can repeat them to you in alphabetical order is because I did.

I didn’t mean to. If I couldn’t memorize the banal bits of information hurled at me by Ms. Pinkton, and if I couldn’t muster the minimal athletic ability demanded by Coach Lawrence, how was I expected to combine the two, and do so under the duress of a swashbuckling, back-from-the-dead uncle, two hideous trolls, and the promise of hunting down something called a Nullhuller? Yet I felt the information file into never-before-used compartments of my brain, as if the cerebral space had been waiting all this time, absorbent and hungry, for the right kind of facts to fill it.

ARRRGH!!! sniffed the air. Her orange eyes blazed and she drove the points of her horns into the underside of the bridge. Crumbles of cement colored a patch of her hair gray. Jack understood and reached for the astrolabe. But ARRRGH!!! was already loping away from the bridge, nose lifted, drool hanging down in eight-foot strands. Jack made a hand motion to Blinky. Instantly, tentacles curled around my and Tub’s shoulders.

“Courage can ebb when the moment of confrontation is nigh. But worry not, diminutive pixies. Fate would not allow a troll of my character to be struck down upon such an undistinguished field of battle. Not before my greatest wish is fulfilled. I speak, of course, of my unfinished historical dissertation.”

That wasn’t enough to put me at ease. I pointed at ARRRGH!!!.

“What’s her greatest wish?” I asked.

“Better dental hygiene,” Blinky answered without hesitation.