Two weeks passed with work in the woods; the full moon came and went. Fiona walked up the now-familiar path before the gibbous moon cleared the ridge, stomping and crunching in the noisy way Gretched had asked her to announce her arrival. About three steps after the switchback, she heard "fwip thud" past her left ear, jerked to a stop, then "fwip thud" past her right, and then again "fwip thud" past her left ear again.
Fiona stood very still. She turned to her left to see a pair of daggers stuck into a tree not two feet behind her. She should have been terrified, but her nose had already told her the source of the daggers was her companion.
She wasn't very pleased about balancing the apple for Gretched's William Tell, especially without being asked about it. Fiona swiveled her head back and peered through the dimly lit forest. Eight yards away, just off the path, Gretched was peeling a blindfold up off her forehead.
YOU DID WHAT!? Fiona yelled, inside her head. But she wasn't going to say it out loud. Gretched had so many skills, Fiona had no doubt Gretched thought this idea was safe, or at least an acceptable risk. At least it was acceptable to Gretched. And Fiona didn't want to appear scared. What she actually said was, "ah, very impressive."
"And it's a skill you're going to start on tonight," Gretched said.
"What, throwing knives at your head?" Fiona needled.
"Well, maybe we won't start with that first," Gretched replied, eyes rolling. She shouldered past Fiona and yanked the blades out of the birch bark.
At the camp, Gretched handed Fiona a knife. "Toss it like this," she said, flipping the knife in the air and catching the handle. Fiona flipped her dagger, but sprang back as it fell to avoid getting sliced. Gretched laughed. Fiona tossed again.
"Wouldn't this be easier with a stick?"
"Tossing it would be easier, but a stick is a substantially less lethal missile," Gretched responded drily.
Fiona kept at it until she could grab the handle. Once she got the hang of it, she understood that the knife was weighted to make it easy to handle. It wanted to be grabbed and tossed.
Gretched promoted Fiona to tossing hand-to-hand, and then to tossing one blade from the left to the right, and passing another from right to left in time to catch the airborne blade in her right hand. Just these skills took two nights, and thousands of repetitions, to get down.
When Fiona took a break from working on the two-handed overlapped toss, Gretched picked the daggers up, and then slipped a third from her belt. She stood up and casually juggled the three knives turning to look at Fiona. "See? You don't even need to see them. Your hands know where you put them, so they know where to find them when they land. Just practice."
"You've got a career in the circus!" Fiona joked.
"You can be my target," Gretched prodded, still flipping the daggers. She gave one a high toss with a triple flip, syncopating the beat at her other hand to make room for it to re-enter the pattern.
Fiona scowled, "seems like you had me practice that job already."
Fiona woke around noon. Slender fingers rubbed the sleep out of her eyes, then retrieved a pillow that was only balanced on the bed with the help of a curtain. This was the routine she'd fallen into: sack out in bed at something like four in the morning, sleep away the daylight, and wake up when the sun was high overhead, sunbeams coming in neither window.
Funny how it happened. Some time ago, when night brought her ogre appearance, she'd try to be asleep as much as possible; if she was awake, she sure wouldn't be gazing at her reflection in a mirror. Now, she was spending most of her waking hours an armspan away from an ogress, and sleeping away half her humanity. I suppose that's fine, she thought. When my Prince arrives, I can always shift my sleep schedule.
She yawned, stretched, scratched at her tailbone, and dragged herself out of bed.
Satisfied that Fiona had begun to sense her own proprioception, Gretched tipped a two-foot diameter log round up on edge and leaned it against a tree opposite the log bench. "Now you're gonna put 'em in the middle of that log." She guided Fiona through the much-less-delicate motions for embedding a knife in a tree stump – or, Fiona realized, in an opponent.
Fiona hadn't sunk a blade into the wood six times before Gretched interrupted. "Great! Now this," and pulled a blindfold over her head.
"You gotta be kidding me," Fiona said, wincing as Gretched's great hands tangled with her braid. "How could I possibly learn this way?"
Gretched gathered Fiona's left hand with her own right, and dumped a pile of rocks into it from her left hand. "Let's not start with my good blades. Here, hit it with rocks."
Fiona smiled, plucked a rock out of her hand, and tossed it at the center of the target. It rustled into the bushes well beyond.
She plucked out another rock, and managed to strike the tree the target was leaning on. Rock by rock, she worked out what was in front of her.
"Okay, I get that I can probe with a rock and listen to what it hits, but surely I wouldn't have enough time – or daggers – to use that in a real fight."
Gretched laughed, "Good thinking! Imagine if I had used that technique to figure out where your face wasn't a few nights ago!"
Fiona smiled. Okay, Gretched really was extremely confident that she wouldn't have skewered my face, she thought. I just kinda wish she'd have asked first. "So what am I supposed to be doing? Smelling the target!? Or just remembering where everything was before you blindfolded me?"
"A little remembering isn't cheating. But, no, you were right on with listening. Thing is, objects reflect sounds even before you hit them with a rock." Gretched put her hands on Fiona's hips and rotated her a quarter turn. "Okay, that'll scramble you up enough. Now clap your hands while turning your head back and forth, and when you know where the target is, point at it."
More meditation? Fiona did as she was told. At first, all she heard were her own hands. But as she turned her head, she realized that the clapping made the shape of the forest appear in her mind. The fire was easy to pick out; it was crackling on its own. But big hard objects – the log bench, the bigger maple on the uphill side of the clearing – they had an acoustic presence. She couldn't exactly hear the objects, but she could tell where they weren't. Fiona pointed at them and announced what they were.
And, with more practice, Fiona could also tell where soft things were. The branches of the lean-to absorbed sound, and felt like a hole in front of the background of tree trunks. Gretched was a bigger, softer acoustic hole – although she was easy to pick out just from her breathing.
Gretched spun Fiona around and walked her around the camp and repeated the exercise. Fiona was surprised how much she could "see". This time, Gretched stood five yards away, almost between trees at the far side of the clearing, and faced away to attenuate her breathing. Fiona could still locate Gretched's echo-damping silhouette easily. She squatted down, picked a rock off the forest floor by touch, and tossed it playfully at Gretched's backside. Gretched laughed. "You're getting it! You're not peeking, are you?"
"No, I swear! I saw you there with my ears," Fiona said, realizing how stupid it sounded.
"Well, good job." Gretched said. "Now try it again without clapping." She repositioned Fiona, then Fiona heard her moving around the camp, rearranging the log round and a few other items. "Spin around," Gretched said, and while Fiona spun, Gretched moved quietly across the camp and stood still.
Fiona stood in silence. She could hear the fire crackle, back over her left shoulder; nothing else in the immediate vicinity. She turned in place to orient herself to the fire, which she knew marked the middle of the clearing. As she turned, she noticed the deafening rustle her dress made as it followed her spin and then settled back down.
She tried shaking her hips to make it rustle more, and caught on that the rustle of her own clothes worked like clapping. Whenever she rustled, she could feel the hard and soft, near and deep contrasts in her environment. She pointed out the target round. Then she pointed at Gretched and whispered "and there you are."
They played the game again. This time, Fiona tried standing perfectly still. If she waited long enough, she realized that even the softly popping fire was a crispy enough source to paint a picture of the woods around her.
The following evening, Gretched said "let's put the pieces together." She tied a blindfold over Fiona's red hair, spun her around, and placed three daggers into her left hand. Gretched held her own hand over Fiona's left to hold her fire while she walked around behind Fiona. "I'll just stay back here until you get the hang of it," she said with a chortle.
Fiona transferred a knife into her right hand. She stood very still. She could smell Gretched standing just behind her shoulder, and hear her breath near her ear. That was distracting. Fiona shook her hips gently to make a bit more rustle, and started to feel the shape of the clearing again. Behind the blindfold, she pointed her eyes where she "saw" the target round, lifted up her arm, and delivered the missile. It clattered into the bushes above and left of the target.
Left of the target – Fiona understood that, even as that throw failed, she had acquired more details in her mental image. She chambered another knife, listened to the fire and the hard and soft textures around it, and sunk the knife deep into the wood … of the tree trunk above the target. Fiona heard the pop of Gretched's lips part into a smile, nine inches behind her. Her ears swiveled back towards the clearing.
She gripped the last knife. She waited and listened and felt the scene in front of her. It was like waiting for eyes to adjust to the dark – the longer she listened, the more organic static brought shape and texture to her mind. The tree behind the target sparkled, the dirt below felt soft and warm. She heaved the knife, and heard it thump into the endgrain. Fiona peeled up her blindfold. The knife was wedged between sapwood and the heavy bark at the very edge of the round, but it was there.
"Unmitigated victory!" Gretched proclaimed. "We'll keep practicing."