The journey earlier in the season had stripped the knight of his summer weight. Malcolm appeared tall and lean with broad shoulders. He wore dark winter clothing under a leather tabard to fend off the chill in the air, shoulders dressed with a heavy cloak of wolf pelts. A simple longsword hung sheathed off his left hip and his hair was slicked back from his face in dark, loose waves.

A man that equaled him in height, extended his arm, presenting a letter to the raven haired man, his own hair the stark opposite in colour. Malcolm smiled, making it clear to any onlookers that the pair knew each other. The fairer of the two released the letter and reached up to take the reins of both their horses.

“Will you be long in the city, Malcolm?”

“Not long at all,” the knight replied, “an hour or two tops.”

“I’ll meet you at the southern gate with the horses.”

“Thank you, Jared.” Malcolm smiled again.

The pair parted ways in Lowtown outside the barracks. Malcolm walked into the training grounds and spoke with a few of his peers gathered there, captains like himself, recognisable by the number of silver pins worn on the left side of their chests. Malcolm removed a black leather glove to shake hands with some of the men and women before feeding his fingers back into the glove.

Following the meeting, Malcolm removed his cloak and hung it up and stood his sword against the wall below it before proceeding to the training ground where some of his fellow knights were training. He took up one of the blunt training swords and watched from the sidelines as a pair of skilled fighters tested their expertise against one another.

A sharp sound saw the man flinch, the muscles in his shoulders tightening as a weight landed on his shoulder, causing him to start. He squinted and twisted to find a large crow the colour of the midnight sky had taken up resident on his right shoulder. He looked for a message that might be tied to the bird’s foot, only to find there was no such note.

“Hello?” He said to the bird, “where did you come from?”

The bird made a low clicking sound before freeing another sharp caw. He stretched out his wings and took flight, swooping across the training ground to the waiting arm of his handler. Malcolm looked across at the woman with a raised brow, his feathers dark, softened only by the green of his eyes.

Adorned in little more than a uniform, Ryshaeri had returned to the barracks after a summons from her superior to join the knights for combat training after her long night on patrol. Though it was not normal protocol for skyriders to train with the knights, Ryshaeri’s fighting style was too wild for the stonewallers and they thought it might help her discipline herself rather than always go for the kill. Poor sleep weighed on her, but excitement was her motivator. Elated to be able to learn the ways of the riders of her new tribe in the city of stone was a great honour in Ryshaeri’s heart, one that she wasn’t willing to let slip through her fingers. She would thrive here and prove herself to be better than the tamers of the spirit clan.

“Craw”

The gutteral sound of Karkaroth’s call rang through the air as she turned the corner and he lifted off of Ryshaeri to find another human to scrounge attention from. Warmth lit up Ryshaeri’s face, welcoming the stranger that Karkaroth chose to land upon. He was a well built man, taller for a man in the city of stone with serious features and a sword in hand.

“Sorry, Sir” the thick, apologetic tones of her accent sounded across the grounds as she raised her arm to signal Karkaroth to return “Karakaroth tries find love in every places.” She had hoped that this intrusion would not intimidate or discomfort the man, being foreign had been tough enough as it was without needing to insult anyone who was potentially in a higher chain of command.

Tattoos and any type of jewelry were not supposed to be allowed in the military due to a number of reasons regarding appearance, only those of significance to religion or heritage were allowed and unfortunately for Ryshaeri the black tattoo that covered her eyeline made her what people here had called “the odd one out.” It wasn’t a term that she had been familiar with, but it was one that she would point to herself and use with a smile.

Karkaroth returned to her arm as she wandered closer to the stranger, halting in front him. “I am Handler Cook-e. I was order to come down to learn with new Kneyt, is this fight place?” she explained the best she could with the way she knew how to weave a sentence in their language.

Malcolm was quick to surmise, given the woman’s accent, that the bird’s handler was foreign, though he couldn’t place where she might be from. He offered up a polite smile and practiced quiet patience while she spoke, taking his time to decipher her meaning.

“This is the training grounds,” he finally said, after a brief pause. The stranger’s uniform told him that she was training as a Skyrider. The bird seemed altogether fitting then, he thought.

“I’m Malcolm,” he said, “Malcolm Krome. You have an accent,” he decided to add, “where are you from?”

Malcolm had come across very few individuals in his time that sported facial tattoos, even fewer of them women. He studied the Skyrider for a moment before gesturing to the practice weapons stacked in an iron cage against the far wall.

“Would you care to dance?” He teased, pointing to a space on the snow covered flagstone. “For all swordplay is like dance, is it not?”

Introductions were as quick as they were painless, something that Ryshaeri was grateful for. The long lines of foreign titles had been difficult for her to initially pick up, though she was grasping them slowly.

Ryshaeri’s eyes studied the man more closely now, as he in turn did the same to her. Surprisingly muscular for his size, her gaze fell down his arm the way he grasped his sword in hand and she watched him. His structure, albeit not familiar to that she was used to in the tribe, was well built. Malcolm wasn’t horrible to look at.

Warmth filled her smile as her gaze shifted to follow the line of his fingers that pointed to the array of swords lined up against the wall, then back to the training ground. “I from Emanys,” the handler offered, dismissed Karkaroth and wandered over to the wall to pick out one of the blades at random and tried to mimic Malcolm’s grip. A better bowman than she was a swordsman, the instructors had called her reckless and untrained in the way of the blade.

As swiftly as her hand reached for a weapon the raven flew off and perched itself on a nearby seat in hope somebody would come to sit beside it.

“This?” the skyrider quizzed, looking between her hand and Malcolm's to try to understand where she was at fault.

A small bout of laughter pursed between her lips as the playful tones and promises of ‘dancing’ were mentioned, “Renmere people dance with sword?” she asked, her eyes bright with further excitement as she found new power in her wrist. Dancing had been a fun past-time which she enjoyed and Malcolm seemed up for giving her a challenge.

“You show me, Please?” it was a plea for help.

Ryshaeri grasped the sword and attempted a stabbing motion which turned into an awkward showmanship of not knowing what hand was better to hold it in. There was no grace in what she was doing. The handler gave up and shrugged “Me bad dancer, I uhh…” she paused, chuckling “hope get good fast?”

A brief, hopeful look of uncertainty flickered across the skyrider’s face as she looked over to Malcolm and bit her lip. Ryshaeri would be damned if she would allow her pride to fall at the hand of a stranger who asked to spar. She walked to the open space on the snow covered stone, gripped her weapon the best she could, lifted it and pointed at him “We dance.”

Emanys, the man repeated in his mind, mouth ajar as the stranger retreated to fetch herself a sparring sword. The swords were shaped like any other feder or training sword. It possessed a rebated blade and square cross section, with a flattened tip and wide forte at the bottom of the blade known as the schilt.

Malcolm attempted to correct the woman’s gripe by openly adjusting his own. Though with most of his recruits, his training was somewhat more aggressive, forcing one to dodge, often revealing their lead hand without the defender giving it a second thought. For now, Malcolm did as he had suggested and treated this session like a dance.

“There are four parts to a long blade,” he explained. “The bind,” Malcolm pointed out, “is made up of the pommel and crossguard. The strong forms the next quarter of the blade, which leads into the middle and finally the tip, which we call the weak.” He ran his free hand over the parts he spoke about in turn.

Malcolm extended his sword arm then and pointed out the difference between the true edge and the false edge of the blade, concerning which was further or closer to the wrist. “The true edge faces away while the false edge faces towards,” he said, “this is important for training for better understanding what your instructor means when they ask you to cut with the weak of the sword using the false edge or parry with the strong.”

“This morning we will just focus on how to cut, slice and thrust,” he explained, sure neither of them had more time than that to spare. “These are the three ways to use your longsword, master these and you will go far.”

Malcolm spoke quickly, in a context that she didn’t fully know how to comprehend but she tried her best to pick up what she could. “Bind” was where the cross bit was, he said something along the lines of “Pommel” and “Crossguard,” Ryshaeri pointedly looked at the sword perplexed with confusion. Why did it have so many names?

“Strong” was the big middle iron chunk and the pointy end was “Weak.” Ryshaeri lifted her gaze to steadily meet Malcolm’s as she touched the three parts of the sword he pointed out. The skyrider was put into a moment of deep thought. “Why dance weak?” she asked, pointing at the tip with a quizzical expression.

He kept talking. She grinned at him. This was almost getting to a point where Ryshaeri felt she would have spent more time looking at the beautiful foreigner than actually understanding what in the world she was supposed to do with a sword.

Ryshaeri knew the word to cut, but she had to put two and two together to figure out what he meant by slice and thrust. Uncertain on which one was which she attempted an upward slashing motion followed by the question of “Thrust?” and a forward piercing motion with “Slice?”

“Master this and you will go far” he said.

Her eyes widened for a moment as she battled for context. Was he telling her that he enslaved people for this and that she will go far or was he telling her to have slaves to do this? Ryshaeri’s head cocked, she didn’t take him to be the type.

“You Master of sword people?” she frowned and looked around the other training recruits clacking swords together in the backdrop of their conversations and then back to Malcolm, “I know Ryshaeri go far.”

Ryshaeri felt like she was doing well for what she was presented with and boldly swung for Malcolm with a measly amount of force “Thrust!” she exclaimed with a wide smile.