"It is not unpleasant as doctor's appointments, ma'am, but it is more unpleasant than - any things not doctor's appointments."

"Oh. Well, I'm sorry to hear that."

"What didn't you like about it?"

"I did not - learn. I think - it makes sense that school is for learn, but to learn in school, has to have - all the childs knowing the same thing. If one child is not knowing any things, she will not learn. Because they will say, today we talk about how areney teniption works, and I do not know what areney teniption works, and I do not see the pictures - the pictures are not of a thing I has seen. I sayed to the teachers, none of those things I understood, and they sayed, that is okay, but I do not see why that is okay. If school is for learning, and I am not learning, I think no that is okay. 

It also goes so long. I have never sitted to learn so long before. Even when I learned Scripture, I did only an hour, two hour a day, after chores, I did not sit all day. I could sitted all day to learn Scripture, I think, because it is important. I do not see how areney teniption is important. Maybe it is! But no one sayed this, and it is not in Scripture and I think if it was important probably it would be in Scripture."

"Oh, I'm sorry, honey. I bet you'll learn more as your English gets better. Immersion's the best way to learn a language, even if it doesn't always feel like you're learning much in the moment. Did you not have PE class? The guidance counselor said you'd have PE class - I told her we were trying to get you more active -"

"We haved PE class. We sitted, and they talked about not eating bad things, and then we picked - who would play for red and who for blue - and then we played a game but it was a game where you sitted most of the game."

"...a game where you sat most of the game? What game is that?"

"One kid would go up and hit with foot a ball, and the other kids on they team would sit. Until it was they turn to hit with foot a ball, and then they would run, but if someone got the ball then they have to go back to sitting."

"Do you want to go out after dinner and play some catch, or some basketball? I bet you'll like PE more if you know the rules of all the games."

"I like knowing the rules but I think - there is not any bad things you solve by kickball, so it is not a good game. A good game, for children to get good at a thing they will need when they are grown. Like fight with swords, or ride cars, or ride small cars with legs or with two wheels. Has you ever needed to kick a ball to save your family?"

" - no. But I have also never needed to fight with swords to save my family. The point of sports is just to have some fun, make some friends, get stronger and healthier."

"All things are worthy that men doing for they own reasons, if they not Evil, but I do not think kickball have some fun, make some friends."

"Making friends in high school can be kind of tough."

"I is not trying making friends in high school."

"It might be a good idea to try making friends in high school."

"Why?"

"- look, how about we go to the park after dinner, toss a ball around, and if you don't wanna make any friends you don't have to, but if you do wanna, you'll have the advantage that you know the rules."

"- can we game fight with swords?"

"Sorry, kiddo, but you're stuck with me and I barely know which end of a sword to hold, it'll have to be baseball."

"- even babies knowing which end of a sword hold. One end cut you. No hold that one."

"It's a figure of speech. Are you in for baseball?"

"The school gived me....more school to be doing, bring back."

"- ah, fair enough. Well, if you get your homework done fast enough it won't be dark for another hour or so."

She is not optimistic about finishing the tasks on the stack of papers she's unable to read in a reasonable amount of time. She looks longingly out the window, and then pulls the stack of papers out.

"It says, what are the bases in DNA?"

"I don't know that."

"Well, if you pull out your textbook, I'm sure we can figure it out together!"

Robert doesn't actually think of it until he sees Barry pouring himself a cup of coffee at work the next morning. Barry is into some kind of hobby swordfighting thing. Civil war reenactment? Except the civil war wasn't fought with swords - doesn't matter. It'd be something to suggest Jenny take Iomedae too, and then hopefully they can bond with the kid. 

"Hey, Barry, uh, you do that swordfighting thing on weekends, right?" 

"Weekends and a few evenings a week, yeah! I'm in the SCA."

Barry does several other things in the SCA besides swordfighting but he's learned that work colleagues generally respect a man with a swordfighting hobby more than a nalbinding one, so he's not going to mention that.

"Is there a junior league for kids? You know Jenny and I foster, and we've got this girl right now - terrible situation - who said she wanted to take up swordfighting."

"...sort of. So kids are always welcome to come and do the other medieval activities, arts and crafts type stuff, and in theory we've got a version of the swordfighting that is a bit safer for the kids - with foam swords rather than wooden ones - but there's not a lot of interest and, uh, funding and support for that, in this area, right now. She can try it but she might not get a lot of opponents... Is she sixteen? We'll let her fight adults, if so."

"Oh, not quite, she's fifteen. And honestly foam swords sounds lots safer than wooden ones and I wouldn't really want her fighting against adults anyway. But maybe we'll check it out...is there an organizer we'd need to speak to in advance? What would we want to bring?"

"Oh, no need to worry about doing things in advance! She can just show up. Preferably in comfortable clothes, loose, long sleeves. I can let folks know we have a newbie coming and to bring loaner gear for her, or honestly I could just bring her some loaner kit - hmm, roughly how tall is she?"

Barry is also aware that he cannot ask questions like 'what size cuirass does she need' in the workplace. People in his office will not consistently know that a cuirass isn't a kind of technobabble that they should get a PowerPoint about. 

"Oh, she's, uh, pretty tall, five foot nine, five foot ten? But I don't know if loaner gear would work out - she's, uh, on the big side, if you get what I mean. That's why we're trying to get her more active."

That is taller than Barry was expecting for a fifteen-year-old girl! He rapidly revises his list of people he can ask for potential spare kit. 

"There's plenty of people who have a little extra weight and fight - honestly it's one of the reasons I love it, we're super diverse, there's people in their sixties and people who are really out of shape and we all get along just fine. Medieval reenactors like to eat and drink!"

(Barry is five foot three and made of pure muscle. He gives off a sense of compactness, as though you took a much larger person and squeezed them down into a tight-fitting frame. But he grins genuinely as he says this, like he thinks this is a self-deprecating joke, because he privately knows about the nearly three bottles of mead he drank last weekend even if Robert doesn't.)

"We almost certainly can find enough kit that she has the bare minimum to legally fight, and then people will go easy on her until we've scrounged up the rest - though, I actually don't know the youth armour standards off the top of my head."

"Well, then I suppose I'll see you this weekend! Thanks, Barry. She's been through a lot and it'd be good for her to make some friends."

"People who fight with swords? Yes, I want to do that. Is they a holy order?"

"They're just into history, I think. But, you know, the Crusades and stuff were part of history, so you can probably pretend to be a knight from a holy order if you want to."

"Pretend is -"

"Uh, you know, it's saying, I'm a firefighter, when I'm not a firefighter."

"I not want to do that!"

" - well, okay, honey, you don't have to, I'm sure you can also just go and practice swordfighting and not pretend anything. Barry said to wear comfortable, loose clothes, and I thought to myself, well, fantastic, that's all she wears anyway."

Iomedae is reasonably confident that her 'foster parents' are virtuous people endeavoring as far as it is in their power to do a duty that they took on because they believed it was important. She should admire them for that, and she should be grateful.

"Thank you, sir. I will try make some friends, have some fun."

"Fantastic, kiddo. I'm proud of you for trying something new." He would like her to drop the 'sir' but probably that'll happen naturally as she gets to know them better. 

Jenny arrives early and looks around anxiously for the person in charge. She wants to make sure they have some context on Iomedae and her traumatic situation, so that Iomedae doesn't just retraumatize herself with this whole swordfighting thing. There are some people around. They're mostly in costume. "You didn't say we were supposed to wear Halloween costumes!"

"Well, Barry didn't mention that."

That man is in armor. Real armor. 

Iomedae is suddenly filled with a reckless yearning. She has not been filled with a reckless yearning in a long time. It is like remembering that you can feel temperature, or smelling again for the first time at the end of a long cold. 

There are quite a few people who aren't in armour or garb, because this is a practice and not an event, but it's pretty understandable that the people in armour are significantly more eye-catching. 

The Kalomeros chapter practises on Tuesday evenings and Saturday afternoons in a church with a pretty big lawn. In winter they retreat inside one of the church's back rooms (the ones that are usually for music practice and group therapy meetings) but in summer they like to be outside on the grass. The church doesn't mind, and barely charges them anything for use of the space because they're a nonprofit.

There's a few people around the edge of the lawn who are sitting in folding chairs and on steps, mostly in mundane clothes, their laps and folding tables covered with sewing projects and musical instruments and calligraphy pens. Only one of them is wearing a thirteenth-century gown - and that's because another woman is helping show her how to pin all the veils and layers onto it.

Practice is just getting started, so people are still armouring up. Several people stand by haphazard piles of discarded metal and leather, gossiping while they lazily strap themselves in. There's no rush; there'll be plenty of daylight. Someone has brought a box of donuts and is distracting the fighters with them. 

One fighter has already been in armour for a while; it's impossible to see much of them under their ill-fitting armour but they wear a blue-and-white tabard. They have been pacing, waiting for an opponent. As Iomedae and foster family arrive, one of the other fighters finally gets his helmet on - the finishing touch to his armour - and walks out to salute the patient earlybird. 

"Looking for a dancing partner?" 

"Always."

She aims her sword forward to show Roger the thrusting tip. "I have a pointy."

On her other arm she has a shield. She hasn't registered a device yet, so she's painted it white with a blue unicornate seahorse as a way of showing allegiance to Atlantia. 

"As do I!" he says with the same motion.

They both salute each other with a half-bow, swords raised upright in front of their visors, and then - BLAM!

Roger's sword hitting Lucia's shield full-force, with all the weight of his hip and his driving back foot behind it, makes a noise loud enough to be mistaken for a gunshot. 

Sir Gabriel - he's Sir Gabriel, here, this isn't the office - trots over as soon as he spots Iomedae and her parents.

"Robert! Good to see you!"

Gabriel is in very real armour - and unlike Lucia and Roger, who both wear cobbled-together collections of steel and plastic and leather and random hockey gear hidden carefully under handsewn tabards, Gabriel has gorgeous glittering steel. He has a fluttering red-and-gold armour cloak that falls only halfway to his hip, a martlet motif engraved on his chest and his helmet tucked under one arm.

He completely ignores Roger and Lucia battering each other behind him. He's pretty used to tuning it out. 

"I take it this is your foster daughter?"

She is not the shape that Gabriel assumed she'd be when Robert mentioned that they were trying to get her more active, and he is deeply confused as to why anyone thought that was necessary. That is a lot of muscle. He mentally revises his list of loaner kit that might work again. 

"That's right, this is Iomedae! This is -" she blinks around at it. "- lovely. Are you the person to talk to about - Iomedae's situation -"

Where Iomedae is from wearing that armor would convey that you were a very important man. In America there is a lot of steel. So only maybe a very important man. But it is one thing to know this and another to know it instinctively. Iomedae is instinctively terrified and angry at Jenny, for addressing the man like that. 

(It might be mistaken as being terrified or angry about something else.)

"Her - situation?"

Gabriel is perceptive enough to pick up on Iomedae being suddenly very upset. He has no idea why, but the most recent thing that happened was that Jenny asked him a question, and so he's abruptly deeply concerned that he's about to answer that question wrong.

(He doesn't think Robert is the kind of guy to mistreat a foster child, but he doesn't really know Jenny at all, and besides how well do you ever really get to know your colleagues in a sterile office environment? It's not that he'd suspect anything, but suddenly his hackles are up a little.)

If this kid is trying to be private about something, that.... would make a lot of sense actually! She's a foster kid, she might not want her foster mother to talk to anyone about her 'situation'. It's nobody's business whether or why she's in foster care; on this field she's an aspiring Atlantian fighter and that's the only thing anyone needs to know. 

He can give a very bland and innocent answer here. "Well, Reynhard over there is currently the marshal, so you could talk to him if you have any safety concerns. You can talk to me about scrounging loaner kit - we don't have a real Iron Key at the moment so I'll just be seeing what we can find that fits." 

"Thank you! I'll talk to ...Reynhard." And she'll walk off to do that and let Robert catch up with his coworker.

She does not intend any insult, she's just ignorant - Iomedae does not know how to say that. It...looks like she doesn't need to? That's good. 

"Iomedae's been really excited for this," Robert says, watching her concernedly. "First time I've seen her really light up about something."

"Oh?"

The kid in front of him does not seem like she's lighting up. That is the opposite of what just happened. But that may well be an entirely social fuckup... Gabriel can try running the standard script and see how she responds and go from there. 

"Alright, well, wanna give it a try? This is my sword - it's rattan, but it's about the same weight as a real medieval sword would've been." He offers Iomedae a taped-up rattan stick with a roughly hammered metal basket hilt, flipping it around to give it to her hilt-first. 

- she reaches out for it immediately. Her whole posture changes. It is a silly looking practice sword, the balance isn't in fact quite the same as her real sword the police took, but he is offering it to her for training and so it is a sacred thing.

She was really kind of expecting to have to diligently run errands for a long time before arguing someone around to allowing her to -

 ....quite possibly he can detect that she's a paladin, even if no other Americans can. That rather makes more sense than his offering swords to random foster children. But right now it doesn't matter. 

"WAIVER!!!!" shouts Reynhard from across the lawn. 

"I'm just letting her hold it, I'll put my helmet on before I let her hit -" 

Reynhard gives Gabriel his best stern no-nonsense sort of frown. "Waiver! No exceptions!"

(And then he'll quietly, with an apology, go back to whatever he was talking to Jenny about, because he does in fact trust Gabriel to not do anything unsafe. He's just got the seneschal breathing down his neck regarding actually making everyone sign the waiver right now.) 

"....right. Iomedae, if I can get you to sign a waiver real quick because otherwise people will get mad at me, then you can have a go at hitting me with this sword and see how that feels." 

Iomedae doesn't know the word but she can plainly interpret it all the same: a reprimand for giving the sword to a foster child. From a man that the man in gleaming steel plate feels the need to listen to. 

"Sir. You are great of men, God smile on you. I am sorry. I not know - sign."

Oh Jesus, did Robert tell her this was some kind of LARP and she needed to play a - no, address that later, that's not her fault right now and her English clearly isn't good but it is in fact his job to be gracious about this sort of thing. 

"Don't be sorry! Sign means you put your name down in a special way that legally makes it so you agreed to the writing on the paper. We have a piece of paper that says, if you get hurt learning swordfighting, you agree it's your fault for swordfighting and not our fault for letting you. Reynhard will shout at me if I let you pick up a sword without signing it, and technically he's right to."

Very technically. Gabriel can agree with needing to sign a waiver to get hit, but he thinks newbies needing a waiver to hit him is silly. 

"Oh. I no think I can do that, I no read English."

"It's just a liability waiver, kiddo. You have to sign them for everything. Jenny can probably sign it as your guardian."

Jenny is diligently filling out the liability waiver over at the marshal's table, chattering while she does. "- anyway it's so kind of you to let her try this sport of yours! I'd never heard of it!"

Reynhard sees Gabriel looking at him for approval and gives him a thumbs up. Waiver has been signed. The kiddo is allowed to fall over and break all her bones now if that's what she desires in her heart.

"Well, we all selfishly want plenty of new folk to hit, or we start running out of targets."

"....right, yeah, I forgot guardians did that for minors. Looks like we're all set!"

Gabriel pinches the helmet padding on both sides of his helmet so it doesn't slide out or fall around when he lifts it over his head and shakes the aventail out around his shoulders. Then he wrestles it onto his head, grabs the bar grille and pulls it firmly down until his chin fits into the chin strap.

"Alright, Iomedae, wanna have a go at hitting me?" 

She DOES. Also that helmet design is impressive. There's something profoundly reassuring about seeing America's impressiveness directed at something that makes sense, like good helmets. 

Swinging at his plate mail is stupid; the thing to try instead is to get the sword in between the pieces. Or to knock him over and rip his helmet off, but she was asked to show she knows what to do with a sword, not to show that she knows how to kill a man in armor. 

She straightens up into a good stance with her sword and then tries to take off his arm.

Gabriel sees the stance forming and the body mechanics going into the shot (core engaging, hip leading, wrist turning over) and realises - just in time - that this girl is either very talented or not new and he doesn't actually want to take that shot directly on his elbow. He'd flick his sword up to block but he literally just handed it to her. 

Sensible people have shields and swords in hand when they do this, or explicitly tell the newbie to aim for the head, but Gabriel often isn't sensible people and - the way that girl transformed when she had a sword in her hand, you can forgive him for getting a little impatient.

He twists a little and tucks his arm behind his back so that he takes the hit on his solid steel cuirass and the nice padded gambeson underneath, rather than on his nearly-unarmoured upper arm. It still hurts enough that he decides to go get his shield before letting her do that twenty more times. "Good!"

He glances at Robert with an exaggerated wince. "You didn't mention your foster daughter is.... what is she, a boxer? Tennis player? The designated duelist on her ice hockey team?" 

"- she, uh, says she's a holy warrior."

"Um. Like. So she's LARPed? We aren't a LARP but we get a fair number of people crossing over..."

...but a lot of the local LARPs are light-touch foam games and that does not make any sense of Iomedae clearly knowing how to generate power.

Robert lowers his voice. " I - we haven't pushed her on the 'holy warrior' thing. Iomedae was working until recently as a migrant farm laborer. She came to the attention of CPS when a man tried to rape her and she stabbed him five times."

WELL THAT WOULD EXPLAIN WHY SHE WAS VERY UPSET AT THE THOUGHT OF TELLING PEOPLE ABOUT HER SITUATION. THAT IS SO OBVIOUSLY PRIVATE INFORMATION WHY DOES HE NOW HAVE THIS INFORMATION - 

"Iomedae, that was pretty great for a first time ever. Have you trained with a weapon like this before?" 

"With a sword, yes. Not a sword of -" she gestures at the unfamiliar material. 

Okay, a steel sword, so.... fencing? No, no fencing school would've taught her to hit Atlantian calibration. Kendo maybe?

"The wood we use is called rattan. It's actually more like a grass - like bamboo. It's safe because if it breaks it doesn't shatter into sharp pieces - it separates into individual fibres and goes mushy and soft. So it's really safe, because it's not going to cut you even if you break it by accident."

"What's the word for the sword school you studied before? In whatever language you know, if you don't know the English word."

She surely cannot actually mean that she studied as a holy warrior - wait a second she doesn't mean the Knights Templar or something, does she? That would imply she knows about magic and she definitely absolutely would've... been given some letter of referral or something and not just shown up with her foster parents. She has got to mean LARP. But no, she didn't say foam sword, she said sword. 

"Sword...school, sir? There is sword schools? God is glad! Can I go to sword school. I go to America school but it does not teach fight swords."

"...uh, this is the closest thing to sword school I'm aware of around here, so congrats, you made it!" 

"But I meant the discipline you studied - uh, what sort of sword training have you had? Fencing, kendo, Dagorhir, HEMA, Amtgard, Buhurt....?"

He's pretty sure she hasn't been in the SCA before or she would know she does not have to talk like a confused medieval page. 

"When God sayed I a holy warrior, then a man who good at sword teach me sword. I am no in holy order. I want to be in holy order, but instead I was made a foster child and foster childs are not allowed to leave."

"Right, so, - has anyone explained to you how the SCA works? It kind of sounds like you think we're a LARP - with gods and magic and things. We're a historical re-enactment organisation - so we try to do things accurately the way they were in history, before the year 1600."

Gabriel's brain is busy running the standard script for the standard sort of problems that he might normally encounter, like teenagers showing up expecting more LARP elements than the SCA has, and - WAIT A SECOND -

- okay yes he's supposed to defend anyone who can't defend themselves but he should really make certain that he is not overreacting to - the incredibly loud alarm going off in his brain saying that sometimes very ordinary people turn out to be horrible monsters secretly - because that alarm is oversensitive, he knows it is - 

Very casually and curiously: "...uh, Robert, do you know what she means by foster children not being allowed to leave?"

“Yeah. After she had been in care for a week she told us that she appreciated our generosity and was going to go back to being a migrant farm worker and we had to explain to her that, no, she can’t do that.”

Okay so this is probably not a situation where Robert is secretly a terrible person. That is very reassuring. It would not be the first time Gabriel has had to cut someone out of his life for secretly being a terrible person. Instead Gabriel is very very confused and thinks Iomedae is maybe crazy. 

...can he be unconfused?

Taking care of newcomers is something Gabriel considers a little bit sacred. He remembers very fondly the people he met when he was first introduced to the SCA, and how a few of the knights had seemed like shining paragons of chivalry and honour, and he'd immediately wanted to be them someday - and now he is them, and there's nothing quite like directly being in those shoes (being the first knight in shining armour to welcome a guest) to focus his mindset on striving towards that ideal. So the question that pops up is: how can he practice grace here, and compassion, and nobility?

Is there a stance from which he can make sense of that idea, even empathise with it? Yeah, absolutely. He likes being an adult and earning his own way in the world, and he wouldn't want to go back to being a kid even if he was pretty well taken care of. Being a migrant farm worker doesn't sound fun, but he supposes he's never tried it and it at least sounds like honest work. He liked school, but for a kid who hates school.... yeah, that can make sense.

Does he need to know what's going on? His hackles are up and something seems very off but... if there's something dodgy going on, he's not the right person to intervene yet. If he says something dumb now, he might damage a perfectly good relationship with a coworker, and this random teenage girl has no particular reason to trust him to try and... what is he even going to do, fix her life for her? Probably, in most of the situations that could reasonably be happening, the best thing he can do is make sure that practice exists as a safe respite for her a couple nights a week. So yeah, let's not immediately blow that up for her.

She seems prickly about her privacy. You know what, that's fine - actually that's so very reasonable of her given the tiny bit he knows of her life. Maybe she'll open up if she realises she's among friends and maybe she won't. 

"Well, Iomedae - I want you to know that we won't treat you any differently here because of your being a foster child. If you don't want to tell anyone, you don't have to tell anyone - I won't share anything unless you tell me it's okay. If you want to be in an order, then you can work towards that and you should have the same fair chance that anyone else gets. Mmkay?"

Iomedae has been watching this interaction tensely trying to figure out if the knight will be mad at Robert for enslaving a paladin.

This is so much better. She relaxes very noticeably. She isn't sure she caught all of that, but - "I want to be in an order, sir."

Okay this is back on track, he knows how to do this part of the pitch!

"We have lots of orders! There's Baronial level awards, where our Baron and Baroness can grant membership, and there's Kingdom level, which the Crown has to invite you to. If you get involved and do service - that means volunteering to help events happen - or arts and sciences or fighting, then usually after a year or two you'll get an award of arms."

Belatedly, he directs a reassuring look at Robert: "Honestly she shouldn't worry too much about awards and orders yet - she should focus on having fun and seeing whether she likes it, we won't push her - but it's not a bad thing that she's ambitious!" 

"Why don't you try everything out, kiddo, and see what you like? The swordfighting, but sounds like there's arts and crafts and stuff too."

She doesn't know arts and crafts but there's an obvious guess. "I knowing Scripture already but I need knowing - all the holy warrior rules."

She obviously doesn't know about magic because there's no way she would be casually mentioning magic in front of Robert but she is talking way too much like someone who knows about magic and it's a little unnerving. 

"We can't really do any scripture, because officially there's no religion in the SCA. That's not to say you can't be religious or have a religious persona, but we can't have official religious ceremonies and we definitely can't teach Scripture. But you can learn about chivalry, which I guess you could call a holy warrior code - it's the rules you have to follow if you want to be a knight. Is that what you're asking about?"

If she shows up and the first thing on her mind is that she really really wants to learn chivalry then it's not going to take that long before she knows about magic one way or another. 

"I don't know religion, sir, and I don't know if chivalry is what you're asking about."

She doesn't know religion but she claims to be a holy warrior and she knows about Scripture but she wants instruction in holy warrior rules but she's got no idea what chivalry is. 

What.

He would look over to Robert for rescue but Robert lost his being-a-major-part-of-the-conversation privileges when he told Gabriel about the crime-victim history of a girl who looked like she was expecting the sky to fall at the mere mention of explaining her "situation". Gabriel is being so very polite and practicing the virtues of patience and grace and courtesy, but it is an automatic reflex for him to take any child's side against any adult's even if the child is weird and deeply confusing, so he is going to be as courteous as he can while getting as much information as possible directly from Iomedae. 

"Do you mean you... don't know the English words? Religion means -" oh wow he's never had to define that word before, "- getting together with other people to agree on what you believe about God?" 

"No religion here means, many gods obeyed here? All good and obedient gods?"

"Yes, you can portray a persona who believes any religion from anywhere, so long as you're not trying to make it an official part of an event or something. We've got a couple people in the barony who do Islamic Golden Age and a couple pre-Christian Iron Age personas. But you don't have to obey any gods at all unless you want to!" 

"...you have to obey gods if you want to go to Heaven."

Robert is so embarrassed. "Iomedae, he just said it's not a religious thing. We can't take you if you're not going to respect their rules."

Big smile in Robert's direction. "I'm sure we're just dealing with a language barrier - we have plenty of deeply religious participants!" 

To Iomedae, with much less of a carefully faked smile: "It's okay if you believe that, and it's okay if you want to have a persona who believes that, so long as you can get along alright with people who don't believe that, or don't want to talk about it, or don't believe in gods at all - okay?"

Maybe there's an additional confusion he can address. "We aren't actually affiliated with the church at all. They just let us use their space for practice." The building is pretty obviously religious, after all, so that's an easy mistake to make. 

If there are people who think that disobeying gods is a good way to go to Heaven, then they're ....badly mistaken and not going to go to Heaven as a result. She is not sure what it means to get along with them. Obviously she is not qualified to prosecute heresy when she isn't even in a holy order yet. But he says 'people who don't believe that' like it's an active disagreement and that - really seems like quite a big and important problem. 

...which people might take a knight seriously about and will not take a foster child seriously about. "I want follow the rules. There lots of things I do not know. It is not a holy order, but - it is okay I am a holy warrior?"

If he was going to be pedantic at a literal child who clearly doesn't speak English well, he could explain again about not being a LARP and how they don't have anything like a paladin class.

(He went to a LARP once, and the paladins and clerics got yellow beanbags they could throw at people to restore hit points. He deeply objected to the idea of becoming more powerful through attending more events in order to "level up" with "character points" and ended up sticking to the SCA, where his skill level is his skill level and he never feels like he has to pay a tithe before he's allowed to excel. But throwing yellow beanbags at people was kind of fun because they couldn't even complain when you hit them square in the nose and yelled I'M HELPING! I'M HELPING!) 

He's not going to be pedantic at a literal child who clearly doesn't speak English well.

"Yes! Totally okay to be a holy warrior. Lots of people are Crusaders, but you could also be a holy warrior from a different time period and culture if you're willing to research it. But first you might want to learn some swordfighting or some arts, find something you enjoy, and see if it's for you before you invest a lot in a persona?" 

She didn't really follow most of that but she got the most important bit. "I want to learn swordfighting!!"

Yes! This is a need he can meet! He trained many years to be able to be the sort of person who can help with this!

"You are in the right place for that! - one second."

He will go and get his shield first because seriously - he thinks he's going to have an actual bruise on his ribs from her first attempt to kill him. He's used to newbies hitting him lightly and needing to be gently coaxed into hitting him harder with lots of reassurance that he is fine and not hurt, and also used to newbies having zero understanding of body mechanics, and regrets his life choices a tiny bit. Not very much. 

His shield has a gorgeous red and gold design with martlets. "Alright, show me that attack again, but this time I'm going to block with my shield because I like my ribs intact. Try to hit me in the helmet, I'll probably block with the shield, I'm just looking at your form."

She'll go for his visor. The sword is too thick to actually slip through the bars but it's what you'd want to do with a real sword, rather than ineffectually slashing at the side of his head.

She moves a sword like someone who has really had quite a lot of practice for a fifteen year old and who has good habits, or in particular the habit of picking blows that would be lethal if they landed and putting her considerable strength into them.

"Good!" he yelps, more out of the habit of acknowledging the blow than out of any active intent to praise. 

Gabriel shakes his head for a second, making sure his neck still works. 

Oof that was also unexpected and in a way that is entirely his own fault. Usually he tells a newbie to hit him, and they do a tennis-racket swing and then he demonstrates a flat snap and then they work on that for a bit. It was probably a matter of time before one of them decided to thrust him in the visor. It is, in fact, his own fault for not explaining the rules to Iomedae - she's not a native English speaker, she probably did not understand that he wanted the same attack again. And his own fault for not blocking it - he ought to be perfectly capable of blocking a thrust from a newbie if he's going to go around in a white belt, but he'd been holding his shield away from his bar grills so he could look at her form with his eyes. No excuses though. 

"Alright, so! We do combat on the honour system. If you hit someone hard enough that you would've killed them if it was a real attack, then they say good, and you win the fight. If you hit with a glancing blow or poor technique, so the blow wouldn't have penetrated their armour, they say light and you keep fighting. If you hit someone in the arm or leg, they lose use of that limb. Generally if you thrust to the face, you only have to do it very lightly and people should still say good, because you don't really need to use any force to put a sword in an open-face helmet and we don't want to break necks while sparring. So you only need to use directed positive pressure - just a bit of a push - for face thrusts. The power on your first blow was very good. Do you need me to say any of that slower or differently?" 

She caught maybe a quarter of that. She's usually only catching about a quarter of things, but if you smile and repeat back the exact words you can get by that way for many things.

Not for this, this is too important.

"I think, sir, that was rules, and important, and God help me obey, you say it again slower and also differently."

He can do that! He loves the honour system so much and is proud of the culture it represents.

"So, when we fight, we are pretending we are fighting in historical armour with historical swords. Chainmail or leather armour, open faced helmets, and real sharp steel swords. We don't want to actually kill each other, so we are using rattan swords and we have extra protection for our faces and as much armour as we like. But if you are hit by an attack that would have hurt you badly through some chainmail, if it was a real sharp sword, then you should say 'good', and that means you lose the fight. It's an honour system - no judges or electronic scoring. If you have lost the fight fairly, you must say so to your opponent. With me on that?" 

Oh, that is a good custom. It is the custom a holy order would have, if they needed to establish who had won fights for some reason. It is a custom that says, everybody here is honorable, so we can do things a way that -

- no, actually, her delight is building as she contemplates it, because - in a sense that is the entire and whole core of being a paladin, isn't it, that if you are honorable, and everybody can trust you to be honorable, then you can dispense with all the costly parts of everything which are just there as guards against evildoers. In Heaven probably the Emperor wanders the streets without bodyguards, and need not wonder which of his advisors are being truthful, because things are better when people are Good. The core of Goodness is not giving your food to the hungry, though you should give your food to the hungry. The core of Goodness is that honorable things are stronger than dishonorable things, that honor is a kind of wealth - 

- a kind she'd feared America didn't have -

"As in Heaven," she says. "I am with you."

Honestly 'as in heaven' is a very sweet thing to say and he can get on board with this whole.... Crusader persona or whatever is going on. 

"Great! And if someone hits you a lot harder than you're comfortable with, you can tell them it's excessive and they'll hit you lighter so you don't get hurt. If someone hits you and you think it would not stop you even with a sharp sword, you can say light to tell people that you are not dead and you can keep fighting. Does that make sense too?"

"I have not been - hurt enough to die but for God in a real fight. I would be - not sure, some things."

"That's okay! If you aren't certain in practice you can just say you aren't certain and we can help you learn calibration. Once you have enough armour to be safe, we can hit you good and hit you light so you can tell the difference."

Gabriel shoots an apologetic look at Robert. "Going to have to check exactly what she's allowed to do right now - how long until she's sixteen?" 

“She, uh, doesn’t know her birthday. I think they just put January 1st on the forms.”

He so so so badly doesn't want this girl to be told that she has to use nothing but foam swords and fight whichever twelve-year-old shows up for youth combat. Not with the way she lights up upon being given a sword - he can imagine it's probably a break from how powerless it must feel to be a foster kid. He also doesn't even know much about youth combat off the top of his head, because Kalomeros has never had a strong youth combat program and he thinks it's dormant right now.

"Would you give her permission to do armoured combat? She won't be able to authorise and fight in any actual tournaments until she's sixteen, but she can get some armour on and give it a go at practice."

He is PRETTY sure the marshals will not yell at him for this but he's also just not going to go and ask Reynhard what the rule is for people who don't know their birthday because he knows Reynhard is not going to know the answer and then Iomedae is not going to be allowed to fight until someone finds out. 

"Well, how dangerous would you say it is compared to, say, hockey, or football, or something?"

Roger and Lucia are very enthusiastically murdering each other in the background as this conversation happens. Roger just hit Lucia hard enough in the head that she staggered back two paces with a cry of, "Good!"

Then she's right back up in his face making a noise like a thunderstorm as she beats her sword on every edge of his shield, looking for openings that he isn't giving her.

A couple other fighters are moving out onto the field now, and one of the knights is lazily putting a newer fighter through some warmup exercises. Those produce significantly less noise. 

This would probably be easier if Roger and Lucia were not doing that! He can't begrudge them, though, they have that special rivalry that comes from starting at the same time and improving at similar rates so that they're always alternating which one is pulling ahead of the other today, and that kind of rivalry makes people want to take harder and dish out harder. He knows from experience. 

Bright smile. 

"We actually probably have similar or lower rates of injuries to football and hockey!" he says cheerfully. It helps that he's saying true things even if he's worried it's not going to convince his normal coworker from his extremely normal job. "I know it looks dangerous, but we have a strong community that looks out for each other, and we're very conscious of armour standards and safety.... you know, people shouldn't be hitting each other in football, but that often means they're not really wearing enough protective gear or preparing for when something does happen. We're always thinking about how we can make sure we're still able to fi-" don't call it fighting, "-do this sport when we're seventy."

"Kiddo, promise me you'll be safe?"

"It is good to die fighting as holy warrior. It is how I will die. My life give first to God, and no can obey you if you ask me not to give life to God.

But live longer if good at swording."

If Iomedae said that at home he'd probably just laugh and tell her not to die on him any time soon but she's being like this in front of his coworkers. 

Why are they upset about this trivial and obvious statement. "...I do not plan be foolish. I will no go to Hell, fight Satan, until very strong."

Yeah he's also got nothing. 

Three rounds back Roger noticed she was really tired and asked if she was done, and she gasped out, "Three more!" because that's what she says every time she's asked if she's done. Her dad says you're not learning unless you're tired and you're not growing unless you want to quit.

She taps the top corner of Roger's shield just enough to make him put it over his eyes and then steps sharply to the right and throws the wrap juuust far enough that it'll hit the unarmoured section on the back of his thigh, right underneath the bottom edge of his shield. As soon as he yelps acknowledgement, she's already going in for the hug. "Great fight!!"

Then she takes her helmet off immediately so she can wipe all the sweat out of her eyes, and looks around for somewhere to collapse exhaustedly, and - NEWBIE!! THERE IS A NEWBIE!!

Lucy considers it her SACRED DUTY to make sure she, with her long ponytail and her slight stature and her voice that she can't get to drop below a bright soprano tone no matter how hard she tries, is VISIBLE to new fighters just in case anyone ever thinks that they won't be able to fight because of their body or their identity. (She cries whenever she sings One Of Us.) 

"Hello!!" she says as she bounds over. "Welcome!!!" 

Most women don't fight because they are weaker than men and less possessed of the martial virtues. Iomedae has spent her life petitioning to be an exception but she has never entertained the claim that this would work out for most people. She heard the high voice and assumed Lucia was a younger boy. But no!

"Hello! God glad we meet!" Aaand she doesn't know the knight's name at all - "This great man say me the rules."

Okay, not what she expected to hear but the important thing continues to be that she has a SACRED DUTY to be nice to the newbies even if she has absolutely no idea how she is supposed to feel about claims that God himself has taken notice of who she meets.

"I'm glad to meet you too! I'm Lucy - uh, or Lucia. Are you new?"

Belatedly, Lucy looks sideways at Sir Gabriel for confirmation she isn't interrupting anything important. 

He is still kind of stuck on the whole thing where Iomedae is a holy warrior who thinks she will die for God by fighting against Hell. That's.... not how anything works. Magic is real but he's pretty sure Hell is not real. (Or he really, really hopes Hell is not real!) 

"Um, Lucy, do you actually want to show Iomedae the free donuts? I should catch up with Robert, we work together."

Iomedae will delightedly be handed off to the girl her age who fights! "Thank you sir, God greet you in Heaven!" and to the girl, "I am Robert foster child. And Jenny foster child - that is Jenny there. I want to join an order, I am a holy warrior."

Lucy is nineteen but honestly looks like she could be fifteen. She will excitedly take Iomedae to the folding table where somebody has left a tray of free donuts. 

...she did not just openly say that openly what the heck - okay Gabriel isn't freaking out so clearly this is fine somehow - is she just really into her persona? 

"Say your name again slowly? Aye - oh - med - aye? Is that... Greek?" 

"Iomedae. Aye- oh - meh - day. I do not know Greek."

"Iomedae! Pretty name. I also do not know Greek! I totally wish I did though, such a gorgeous language. Don't even worry about it, you don't need to - I mean, I picked an Italian name and I've got no connection to Italy at all besides liking the food." 

Lucy needs a donut inside her face right now. She selects one with yellow icing and inhales a quarter of it. 

"So you're here to fight, or do you have interest in other things too? I do some medieval cooking!" 

"I don't know what - other things - there is. I know there is no religion. God smile on lots things but I only like ones make me stronger."

"Oh! Well, in the SCA we do re-creation of any activity that people did before the year 1600. There's rattan fighting which is what we're practicing now - there's rapier too but the rapier fighters meet at a school - and people do sewing, weaving, dancing, brewing, bardic - that means poetry and music and storytelling - and equestrian and calligraphy - people make scrolls to give out as awards - and archery and smithing and heraldry. You can do whatever you're passionate about. There's people in our area that whittle period flutes, and make Arabic coffee, and paint maps, and all sorts!"

She caught very few of those words but it seems unlikely to be productive to repeat them all in a quizzical tone. "1600 since God came to Earth as man to save us?"

"Um, I think it's supposed to be sixteen hundred since Jesus'.... either birth or death I don't remember? I usually just call it the Common Era."

The Empire counts time from the Starstone but it makes sense to Iomedae that this place would count from when God as a human came to them. "I think understand. ...you fight. You in fighting order?"

Lucy is a recent addition to a fighting order and incredibly proud of it. "Yes! I recently got my Order of the Silver Osprey!"

She digs underneath her gorget and pulls out a small medallion that she was wearing, hidden, underneath her plastic breastplate and her tabard. It is white enamel and shows two birds, both holding a golden sword between them. There's a massive grin on her face as she angles it towards Iomedae to show her. 

Iomedae can't think of an English word for what she wants to say, not at first, but her delighted intake of breath is expressive. 

"Every bad thing in every land or sea fear you, all angels sing! Good! So good!"

This is a level of effusive praise that makes Lucy turn bright red and duck her head for a second, but she comes up with an even bigger grin. Gosh, if every angel sings about her Silver Osprey, then she can't wait to hear what will happen if she ever gets knighted or something. Maybe it will be like a Disney movie and adorable small animals will start dancing around her. 

"Well, I'm not sure every bad thing fears me," she says, suddenly shy. Now she's anxious in case people think she's getting big-headed, and wants to deflect a little, though she's still grinning like an idiot. "I think they'd fear Sir Gabriel a lot more - he's a knight. Do you want a donut? They're for everyone."

"Sir Gabriel?" she asks, pointing at the knight in very good steel. "Bad things sure fear Sir Gabriel. ...Jenny worries I eat donut." Indeed Jenny is watching somewhat tensely, though she hasn't actually said anything. 

They try not to keep junk food in the house! Probably it's okay if she's being active...

She will confirm that that is Sir Gabriel with a nod. 

????????

"Oh I'm so sorry, are you Coeliac or something? I think Nicole said she was bringing some fruit or something but she isn't here yet." Nicole's mundane job sometimes keeps her really busy.

"I do not understand Jenny, but she is a good woman trying obey God. I not need food, I eated."

At some point Lucy's fervent atheism is going to make her be very annoyed by the way Iomedae talks, but currently she is doing her SACRED DUTY to be nice to newbies so she isn't paying too much attention.

"Ah, makes sense! Yeah I wouldn't want donuts if I'd already had dinner either. Well, not until I fought and then I'd want twelve."

Lucy thinks the sensible next step is to ask people for loaner armour so they can try loaner gear on Iomedae but Gabriel, the person she wants to ask about this, seemed to be strongly hinting that she should take Iomedae away so that he could talk to Robert about something.

"...do you want to try holding a shield as well?" She can offer to lend out her shield, at least until she's recovered. Once she's ready for her next fight she will need the shield to go FIGHT EVERYONE. 

"Yes please!!" 

Iomedae has wielded a shield before. She is not quite as delighted about it as she is about a sword but she is not zero delighted.

Lucy will happily give Iomedae a shield!

She has a side strap shield which is too small for Iomedae, but the loose leather elbow strap will slide nicely over her arm. Lucy doesn't think Iomedae wants to touch her sweaty shield glove (she got used to touching other people's sweat really fast but she knows most newbies aren't hardened to it yet) so she wiggles it out of the basket and lets Iomedae hold the bare handle.

It's a fairly standard heater shield, and Lucy wants to show Iomedae how to stand with one corner tilted up over one eye so that she can block her head while still seeing the opponent. But first she will wait and see if Iomedae is comfortable holding the shield and the sword at the same time. Her shield is a heavy steel loaner, not a lightweight aluminium one, and honestly it took her a long time before she was comfortable with it. 

It also took Iomedae a while to get comfortable with a heavy steel shield, but she put that time in a while ago. She holds it up quite cheerfully. "You try to sword me?"

"...you aren't wearing a helmet! I can hit the shield carefully if you just want to feel what that's like, but Sir Reynhard will kill me if I hit you."

Roger has no such fears. He taps Lucia on the top of the head with a sword. "You're blocking the donuts, dumbass."

"Light!" but she still moves to let Roger get past and get donuts. 

"Helmet is -" she gestures at her head questioningly. "I do not have, still want to fight. That sword not steel."

"But - you'll get a concussion. You can't fight without a helmet. We can lend you one! We just need Gabriel to be done with whatever he's talking about with your dad." 

"Yes, ma'am." She will look impatiently over at Robert.

"Probably I should talk to the social worker. I think some sports would be good for her but swordfighting grown men is, uh, not where I'd have started -"

Gabriel is going to switch on absolutely all of his charm for this. He is the sort of person who fits the armour; he looks like a knight, not a LARPer wearing a costume. He is also, during weekdays, capable of roleplaying as an incredibly normal professional middle-manager who wears a suit and tie and says things about delivering sustainable value for stakeholders using innovative blue sky solutions. The correct character to play here is going to be something like... 'super-responsible sports coach', and he can play that.

"She definitely doesn't have to fight anyone she's not comfortable with! Lucy over there's been fighting since her sixteenth birthday, and she's an absolute gem, a really hardworking kid - she's won awards for service."

He's trying to make it sound like Lucy will be a good influence, which is easy because he really believes Lucy would be a good influence on just about anyone. 

Lay on the paperwork, people in his office love paperwork, especially official-sounding paperwork. Even better if he can do it in a way that isn't directly pressuring him to let her play with swords. "If you need some information for the social worker I can send you over a document for parents that lays out all the information and talks about the benefits of getting kids involved in historical education. The SCA really does teach kids good values - we're a 501c nonprofit, we tend to see teenagers doing a lot of volunteering and growing into amazing young adults." 

Lucy doesn't look alarming at all! "If you could send some things over that'd be useful, just so the social worker knows what's going on. I - we're pretty concerned about her. I think - I mean, she's been through a lot, and she'll say things like -" vague gesture at what they both just heard. "I think it could be good for her, I just worry she'll hurt herself...or someone else. ...she was really upset she couldn't carry a knife to school..."

"Yeah I'm.... getting the impression she's been through a lot."

Gabriel thinks about Roger for a second because he's the person at the practice who might be about to be demoted into the position of second most concerning young person. Roger has been through a lot and getting to fight is how Roger gets through the week - but that's not his information to give out to everyone who might think Roger is comforting or inspiring or whatever.

"Do you think maybe she just needs an outlet? I've seen kids with some real anger issues just transform into sweethearts once they realised they could take all those big feelings out on the battlefield. Maybe if she gets a chance to play as a Crusader for a bit, she'll realise she doesn't have to be one all the time?" 

"Maybe. She'll be supervised, and you'll stop her if she's doing anything dangerous?"

"On my honour I promise I will not let her do anything I would not let my own daughter do."

This is a very easy promise for him to make because he's pretty sure any child of his would be happiest roaming feral over the hills like a Spartan out of myth and only sometimes returning home for dinner, but Robert doesn't need to know that. 

"Then...I think it's all right if she wants to fight with the other girl - I mean, I'd be more worried for the other girl! - and I'll talk with Jenny and the social worker about whether she can safely do the adult version." He is assuming Lucy is Iomedae's age because she's just so much smaller when they're standing next to each other.

"Oh, Lucy is the last person you need to be scared for. Don't worry about her." Lucy is very obviously trying to live up to her superduke dad, and also somewhat obviously trying to get herself squired to a different superduke, and also last week he saw her go into a labyrinth under Danville and kill a minotaur and come out with a giant grin on her face. "She's tougher than she looks."

"Let's get her some loaner armour first before we let her try anything. I've got two loaner helmets in my trunk and if neither of those fit, Reynhard has a spare and Nicole's going to bring a spare as well, whenever she shows up." 

"Yes, that sounds like a good idea."

Iomedae had a suit of armor. It was made to her measurements - to the armorer's best guess of her adult measurements, actually, with an extra gambeson in the meantime - when Aroden chose her, at great expense, because that is what is owed to Aroden, when he selects one's daughter (or more usually one's son) as a paladin. Armor, and a shield and a sword and a holy symbol though she'll have to be a stronger paladin before she needs it.

She had to sell it, when she arrived in America, because there was no space in the van to take it with her. A man showed her how to list it on the internet, and she exchanged it - the wealth of a noble family of the Empire, ten times what her dowry would have been - for a hundred American dollars, which she could earn in a few weeks. 

She wishes that she had it back, very badly. Since she doesn't of course she should wear whatever they have spare but she feels very strange about it.

Lots of the loaner armour Iomedae is going to get later is going to be leather, or thermoflex plastic, or rusted old banged-up fifth-hand gear, or otherwise not as impressive as Gabriel's kit - unless she gets lucky and finds herself a household that wants to adopt her. There's a common attitude that loaner gear ought to be a bit shit, since it encourages people to spend the time or money to upgrade to their own gear and actually hand the loaner gear back - though Gabriel, himself, is profoundly irritated by that attitude. (It sounds to him like people making excuses instead of doing better, and there's plenty of people out there who aren't going to be able to upgrade to their own kit right now no matter how much they're incentivised to - like, say, talented foster kids.)

Helmets, though, are something absolutely nobody is willing to skimp on.

In the trunk of his car Gabriel has two fourteen-gauge stainless steel helmets, both solidly built and shiny, and a plastic bag full of handsewn helmet pads. One has cheek plates, while the other has just bars welded over the face. He casts a careful assessing eye over Iomedae and then stuffs an arrangement of velcro pads into the one with the more open face, trying to get as much padding as he can into the helmet for what he guesses will fit her head. The chin strap needs retying, which he does deftly, guessing at the length Iomedae needs.

"Try this. Don't worry if it doesn't fit, we have others you can try." 

It's a beautiful helmet, nicer than the one she had because America is good at metalworking. "Thank you, Sir Gabriel." She'll try it. It fits if she is a bit aggressive about squishing it down onto her head. It's...shockingly comfortable, actually. 

Wearing a helmet is so much better than not wearing a helmet. Iomedae loves being armored. Without armor she feels like a naked helpless worm.

In front of Robert and Jenny, Gabriel is going to be very visibly careful about checking the fit. He will look into both the corners of the bar grills to make certain there's no metal touching Iomedae's face, circle around behind her to check how the pads sit around the back of her neck, and then stand in front of her and... usually he'd just go ahead and do this but he's being ultra careful so he'll ask, "Iomedae, is it OK if I put my hand on your face?"

She is in fact visibly slightly uncomfortable with a man being close to her, though she is reminding herself that he is a knight. (And only a very tiny part of her is noting that, because he is a knight, it probably wouldn't work if she stabbed him.) He's not Evil, anyway. 

"This is - to try helmet?"

"Yeah. Uh, Lucy can I get you to model the lean test for me?" 

Lucy really wants to get back to fighting but she is dutifully trailing after Iomedae because fighting the newbie is her SACRED DUTY so she is going to do that before fighting everyone else.

She pulls her helmet back on and obediently mashes her face into Gabriel's outstretched palm, leaning most of her weight into his hand. "See, even when he does this, the metal still doesn't touch my face."

Gabriel has his palm flat against the welded bars that make up Lucia's visor, and even with her leaning all her weight into that hand, he still isn't actually touching her face. The helmet is snug enough on her head that her skin doesn't get anywhere near the metal, and only touches the foam pads inside.

"Yeah. For safety we don't want anyone to be able to hit you in the face and actually transfer force to your nose. This way we know your face is safe."

"I understand. You can do this."

Gabriel has quietly noted Iomedae's visible discomfort and decided to be way more careful than he would be with the average fighter. He usually tries to treat girls the same way he treats anyone else, which means he doesn't think anything of casually punching Lucy in the shoulder or helping to get a measuring tape around her thigh or including her in group hugs or pulling chainmail out of where it's gotten caught in her armpit. But this is a foster kid who has been through a lot so it's probably best if everyone gets in the habit of not hugging her early on.

He will do the lean test and note that the helmet is letting the tip of Iomedae's nose just barely graze the metal bars.

"Okay, this will be perfectly safe for right now, but we'll get you something better before you go fighting in any tournaments for real. Lucy, nothing above a five to the face, okay?" 

"I wasn't going to hit her with anything above a five anyway."

"A five?"

"Like I'm not going to hit you super hard the first time - because you're new!" 

Gabriel thinks that sitting back and allowing Lucy to make this mistake will be both reassuring to Robert and Jenny and very funny for him personally, so he's going to just let that happen. 

"I am new to this order but I wanted be holy warrior since I was -" She holds up eight fingers. "I good at fighting for a girl and not bad even for boy."

"...Girls are just as good at fighting as boys. Don't let anyone ever tell you that you're worse because you're a girl."

Girls are not as good at fighting as boys. Girls are weaker than boys, and less possessed of the martial virtues. Girls can usually best contribute to the great project of civilization by bearing it sons. Iomedae does not like it and she spent most of her life desperately praying it was not true of her but she does not see the point in pretending that it is not so in general. Scripture says that in Azlant strength was not relevant to most works of men and instead civilization required things in which men and women were equals, and that is great and good, but fighting isn't one such thing.

But Lucy is a fighter and a girl and it would be cruel and foolish to try with broken English to explain to her, if somehow she doesn't already know, that girls like her are rare. She doesn't even know the word for rare. 

"...God choosed me, so I am good at fighting as God needs. And you maybe as good as any boy, have to fight and see."

Maybe there aren't as many female fighters as there are male fighters, but that doesn't mean anything. Lucy firmly believes that girls have the same inherent inborn ability that boys do, and it is society and culture that beats them down until the only regular female fighters at her practice are herself and Nicole (and occasionally there's some nonbinary people who show up who wouldn't mind being counted as female fighters, but they aren't regulars). Perhaps men have an advantage in strength and speed, but women have the advantage in cooperative teamwork and wits and endurance and pain tolerance and stealth, and Lucy is pretty certain it should all even out. Smaller fighters don't have as much reach, but they're smaller targets too. She's spent her whole fighting career learning to press the advantages she has as a smaller fighter, and learning that she has to work twice as hard to keep up but she's not lazy enough for that to be an issue. 

They will have to fight and see. Lucy is no longer intending to be particularly gentle.

Also the God stuff is getting uncomfortable but... maybe she's trying to be Joan of Arc, and Lucy won't complain about that because Joan of Arc is feminist icon to plenty of SCAdians. Still. 

"....I think Cináed wants to go a few rounds. Can I come back and fight Iomedae once you've got her in minimum armour?" 

"Yeah, go wear yourself out," Gabriel says, smiling brightly.

He produces thermoflex plastic elbows, attached via narrow leather thongs to a set of splinted leather-and-steel vambraces. Vambraces aren't technically required for legal minimum armour, but he did just promise not to let Iomedae do anything unsafe, and he feels quite strongly that not wearing vambraces is the sort of choice you should only make after being hit in the forearm with a Dane axe several times. He'll show these to Iomedae and try to catch Reynhard's eye so he can beckon him over and ask about a demi. 

Lucy needs her shield back to fight! She takes hold of the shield corner and waits for Iomedae to slide her arm out. 

Iomedae will perfectly happily give back the shield and come check out the armor made of unfamiliar material. She pokes it. "God is good. This is - less money steel?"

"Yes! Much cheaper than steel and lighter, too. This is Kydex plastic. If you get it very hot in an oven it becomes flexible, so you can shape it to someone's body in only a few minutes. I fit these to myself before I upgraded to steel, so they might be too small for you, but I think they'll be okay." He is shorter than Iomedae but his arms are pretty muscular. 

She'll try them on, then. "Thank you, sir. ...Lucy say, girls fight as good as boys. Other people think that?"

Oh man. He tries to avoid saying things about gender out loud because he historically has shattered his stealth several times by opening his damn mouth. 

"Well, in the SCA we only recreate the parts of history we think are good and we leave behind the parts that weren't. We call it the Middle Ages as they should have been, sometimes. We do swordfighting and weaving and chivalry but we don't do sexism or serfs or the plague. If anyone gives you trouble because of being a girl, you can tell me about it - or Reynhard over there - and we will talk to them and make them stop." 

That was confusing and didn't seem like an answer to the question! She turns it over in her head and then gives up and decides to just check her own best guess. "Most girls not fight. If a girl fight she is as good as she is, if you think you are better sword her, do not say she is a girl. And no one angry if a girl fight them and win?"

Gabriel is, on his own part, struggling to interpret that turn of phrase and realising he may need to use slightly easier English. He's been brushing off some of Iomedae's mangled sentences as someone trying to imitate a medieval peasant speaking Ye Olde Englishe but maybe she's just actually struggling that badly. 

"You're right that lots of girls don't fight, but it's only because they are more interested in something else, like music or calligraphy. If they want to fight, they can. If someone is angry to lose to a girl, then they're showing you their own small-mindedness and lack of honour, nothing more."

"...would Spanish be easier?" 

"I speak better Spanish, yes."

She relaxes slightly. She really understands Spanish a lot better, even if she's still limited in speaking it. She still doesn't understand him but that's more fixable if she speaks the language.

"Gracias, señor. ...En el lugar donde crecí, no era común que las niñas pelearan. Solo si Dios las elegía. Pero los Estados Unidos es muy próspera, muy civilizada, y scriptura dice que donde los lugares son próspera, entonces más de las virtudes de la civilización son poseídas por hombres y mujeres por igual. No sé si eso es lo que quiere decir cuando dice que los hombres y las mujeres son iguales."*

???????

So she's from somewhere poor because she didn't learn English and there's a lot of sexism and she's maybe genuinely just this religious, but somewhere rich enough that teenagers with swordfighting hobbies can afford to have actual training with a steel sword, and Scripture says what now?

"Soy de Ujue, en Menador, en Taldor. Me sé todas las escrituras de memoria, aunque no en este idioma. Una vez pasé un año hablando solo con versículos de las escrituras. Estoy segura de que esto es lo que dice. También me enseñaron que las mujeres no tienen las virtudes marciales que tienen los hombres, y que las mujeres son más débiles que los hombres, y que las mujeres no están hechas para liderar a los hombres, y creo que estas cosas son verdad, y ninguna verdad es enemiga del Cielo; pero está permitido que las mujeres peleen, o Dios no me habría elegido, y la civilización exige muchas virtudes y algunas de ellas las poseen las mujeres. Decir que las mujeres son iguales a los hombres suena tan absurdo como decir que las mujeres son tan altas como los hombres, pero si lo que dice es que las virtudes estadounidense los hombres y las mujeres poseen las mismas, entonces me alegra y no me sorprende oírlo, porque las Escrituras dijeron que así sería."

"Hey, uh, were you fitting Iomedae for protective gear?" Because that is what she was told he was doing, and then instead he switched to Spanish to have some kind of emotionally intense conversation with her and someone who runs youth sports should really be aware that's not exactly appropriate!

"Yep! Just making sure she understands all the safety rules. We wouldn't want to risk her doing something dangerous because she didn't understand!" he lies because that is something that everyone will agree is important and appropriate.

He has never heard of Ujue, or Menador, or Taldor. He is also beginning to suspect that while this kid has definitely not actually been told about the entire system of magic and the various good reasons to keep it secret, she quite possibly has been exposed to magic and - maybe she got lost in a fey realm? That can happen very occasionally but he can't imagine the fey then giving the child back up to the American foster care system. He so badly wants to ask more questions in Spanish but Jenny is giving him a look and he definitely cannot ask those questions in a language that Robert or Jenny understand.

"So Iomedae, do those vambraces fit you okay?" 

Did he just lie. Iomedae cannot be complicit in that no matter how angry with her he is -

"Yes, sir. - we talked Spanish Scripture and women no safety rules."

Jenny's smile is slightly frozen.

WHY ON EARTH IS SHE - oh Jesus she probably was raised by the fey, can she not lie? 

"Right - and I told her we consider women equal here - apparently there's Scripture that says she isn't where she comes from? And I don't want her to worry about that!"

Switching the charm back on. Playing the sports coach role, right, yes. He slipped up but he knows how to play this part when he's not distracted by a mystery. "It's really important that girls learn they can hit as hard as boys - so, Iomedae, you and Lucy aren't exempt from the rules and you need to wear helmets if you want to hit each other, because you could do real damage otherwise, just like boys could."

Iomedae nods seriously. 

"That's great! And if Iomedae has classmates who want to speak Spanish with her, other kids in the kids' fighting class, of course that's fine too, it makes perfect sense that a kid might want to talk to her friends without her parents overhearing." Pointedly. 

Iomedae has absolutely no idea what's going on but she is pretty confident Jenny just insulted the knight in steel armor. "Please, sir, I and Jenny and Robert so glad all of us of this order, its holy work."

"I think Lucy studied it in high school, so if anything comes up we can definitely see if she can translate for Iomedae!" he says cheerfully, like someone who is absolutely certain that he's never done anything wrong in his life and has no idea why anyone would ever suspect him of even thinking about lying and is just gracefully accepting a correction on safety-conscious behaviour.

He's good at maintaining the masquerade, and at this point he's fairly convinced that some sort of magic is involved and he needs to talk to other people and figure out what to do before making any further progress on that particular mystery. If she's been exposed to magic and the fey is going around telling people about it insistently, they'll either have to bring her in on the secret of magic or they'll have to use memory magic. Jenny and Robert are definitely not the kind of people who should know about his secret double life involving slaying dragons and throwing fireballs. 

"So, Iomedae - the elbows fit?"

He doesn't want to put hands on her to show her how to put the elbow on - even with her permission he bets that will make her uncomfortable. So instead he'll slip his own elbow armour off - it's the same fundamental design, just in much shinier materials - and put it back on again with exaggeratedly careful movements, to show her how it works. There's two straps that buckle around the forearm and one that goes straight across the inside of the elbow. 

The elbows fit! She will show him her range of motion in case he has any concerns about it but she thinks it's reasonably unrestrictive as being armored goes.

"Reynhard! You have the spare demi, right? And those loaner chest pieces?" 

Reynhard has a gigantic and very messy gym bag of spare bits and pieces tucked behind his folding chair. He will throw pieces haphazardly onto the grass (his stance is that you don't have to be careful with armour because if you can break it then it wasn't doing you any good anyway) until he locates a demi and a plausible looking chest piece.

The demigauntlet is a ring of black plastic, sloped slightly into a cone-like shape, attached by a small piece of paracord to a semicircle of plastic that covers the back of the hand, kept in place by another piece of paracord that goes around the palm. The wrist protector ought to slip over a vambrace to keep force from being transferred into the delicate bones of the wrist. 

He also has a larger piece for the chest and back - two large curved plastic sheets connected by two straps that go over the shoulders and two that buckle around the sides.

"We don't actually require armour on the whole torso - it's required specifically for the kidneys - but since Iomedae is new and young I'd like to make sure she always has protection on her chest and stomach," he explains for Jenny and Robert's sake as he brings the pieces over.

"Iomedae, are you right or left handed? You'll only need a demi on your sword hand. The shield hand doesn't need one."

Are there people who hold swords in the other hand when dueling? What a concept. If you got good enough at it it'd probably be an advantage because people weren't used to countering it. Now that she's thought of it she wants to try it - no. She needs to show them that she is worth training further, not try silly things. "Sword hand is this one." It's her right. 

Reynhard will hold out the demigauntlet and try to help Iomedae get her hand into it, but it doesn't quite want to go over the vambrace that Gabriel's picked out. He sighs with frustration and goes back to the bin to pull out two more - one with a similar black plastic design, the other a single piece of wax-hardened leather that flares out onto both the back of the hand and the back of the wrist.

The third one will fit. 

The cuirass needs to be lifted over her head first and then buckled at the sides; if she expresses noticeable discomfort at being helped with the demigauntlets then he will stand back and let her try this herself. 

Gabriel is on edge about Iomedae's personal space but mostly thinks it will be helpful to radiate calm untroubledness. 

Iomedae does not want to be flinchy about being fitted for armor. Aroden wouldn't be. She is still very slightly flinchy about being fitted for armor. It doesn't help that Jenny is absolutely watching with the affect that Iomedae's chastity is in fact in question.

(This is not how Jenny would've phrased the concern!)

If Iomedae is noticeably flinchy about being helped with a demigauntlet he will stand back and get her to put the cuirass on herself!

"You will probably have to take the helmet off both for this and for a gorget. It'll go over your head easier if you're not wearing the helmet." 

In the background, a superhumanly elegant woman is pulling up to the church in a really, really nice car.

She gets out, hefts a gym bag over one shoulder, puts a folding chair on her other hip, slides a grocery bag over the end of the folding chair, and strides up the slope from the car park to the lawn with a bright smile on her face. Once she sets up her chair and organises her things, she waves to Reynhard and Gabriel and goes over to find out what is going on with the anxious-looking new people hovering around. 

"Reynhard, where can I put some extra snacks?" 

The way these people address each other is VERY CONFUSING. 

Iomedae is buckling the cuirass. It'll bite at her in a few places but it's honestly very good for armor not fitted to her.

"Does that fit okay, Iomedae? Feels comfortable to move in?" 

"....I'm pretty sure I have something better in my car."

Nicole is casting a very critical eye over the places where the cuirass might fit a boy who had a narrower straighter torso but doesn't look like it fits Iomedae; she bets it is uncomfortable around the chest and the sides pinch into her hips.

She wouldn't normally just interrupt but Sir Reynhard knows how annoyed she is about female fighters getting put in the same gear as male fighters and nobody telling them that armour isn't inherently supposed to be uncomfortable and ill-fitting. 

"I can fight in it, sir." And she nods her head to the approaching woman, who moves like she is important. "Ma'am."

Gabriel glances sideways at Nicole, who is being terribly rude by interrupting but who he also trusts to have good opinions about armour for girls. He's better at reading Nicole than most, and he's pretty sure that beneath the ultra-polished smile she is looking irritated. 

"I bet you can fight in it! But is it comfortable?" he tries, glancing at Nicole and getting a rewarding nod for his efforts. "We want you to be having a good time while you're fighting, and you will be safer if it fits better so it can spread force over you more evenly." 

"I can feel it here and here, but it is a good fit for armor not mine."

Nicole is just going to go and get the lamellar hauberk from out of her car, and grab a spare gorget while she's there. It'll be a lot easier to just show everyone a better idea than to find a polite way to list all of her criticisms of their ideas. 

"You've worn armour before?"

Oh that was a stupid question, he's already probably risking the masquerade but he's just so curious about what is going on. Oh well. May as well keep going now.

"It's very easy to fit armour to the person. Usually with this plastic we can just heat it up and reshape it. Right now this is loaner gear so it won't fit perfectly, but you shouldn't have to make do with anything that is actually hurting you or pinching you."

Gabriel has already made up his mind that if Iomedae sticks around he will make sure that she gets some armour made for her. There's no way a foster kid can afford to buy her own stuff, and he does actually trust his coworker enough that he reckons he'll get the kit back from Robert if Iomedae decides not to pursue fighting any more. 

"When God made me a holy warrior my family payed make me armor. But when I came to America I had no way to carry it, fix it, so I selled it."

Yeah she's from a fey realm and they're going to need to figure out who she sold that armour to so that they can recover what is probably a bunch of OBVIOUS MAGICAL ARTEFACTS - 

Nicole is back from the car.

"Here! I bet this will work a lot better."

Nicole holds out a lamellar hauberk to Iomedae. She's just adjusted the strings and straps to what she thinks roughly the right size will be - it'll be a little small on her, so she's loosened various pieces. There will be an unprotected gap down each side and probably an unprotected sliver of stomach beneath the hem, but it will be easy and light and comfortable to move in, and nobody ought to be hitting the newbie in places she's visibly not armoured. 

If Iomedae knew Nicole was thinking that she'd be very confused because of course you should try to hit people in places where they are not armored. That's how to kill them.

The new armor fits better. "You are right, ma'am, a lot better."

Reynhard is back at his gear bag, tossing things around looking for knees - because if Iomedae has a helmet, gorget, knee and elbow pads, kidney protection, and protection for the top part of her spine then she has the legal minimum armour to fight!

Obviously it would be nice to have shoulders but it doesn't seem like anyone has loaner shoulders just lying around right now, and they're technically not required, and nobody should be whacking the newbie super hard in the obviously unarmoured shoulder. 

Of course she's right. "I'm glad! You can use that for today and see if you like it and we can talk about you borrowing it longer-term if so. I'm Nicole, by the way, it's a pleasure to meet you." 

"I am Iomedae! I am a foster child of Robert and Jenny, and a holy warrior of God, and I want to join this order."

Oh, she wants to be formal and fancy and in-persona? Nicole raises one eyebrow very slightly. 

"In that case, I'm Duchess Nicole du Vivier and I welcome you to Atlantia, my lady. Let me get my own armour on and you are more than welcome to have a try attacking me if you so desire."

She gives Iomedae a very dignified little 'bye for now' wave as she walks back to her folding chair and opens up her kit bag. 

What a reassuringly normal interaction! Except now Iomedae has an extremely important question and she can't even easily straighten it up with Sir Gabriel because she doesn't know the Spanish either. She will look pleadingly at him. "Sir, Duchess is -"

"It means she's served as queen twice! We have a Crown Tournament every six months to pick our new heirs, and she's been consort to the winner twice."

That just introduced a bunch more words that Iomedae doesn't know! She's served in...some role...that is selected by winner ....and she's been something to the winner ... "What I say her."

"I call her your grace when she's being intimidating, but you don't really have to use anyone's titles at practice. We can both just call her Nicole."

"At practice?"

"This is practice, where we are now. We come here just to hang out and improve our skills. There's more formality at official events, but here, Nicole's just here to get better at fighting, same as you." 

"...and this is why you not angry Robert and Jenny disobedient?"

"Robert and Jenny aren't.... disobedient, they don't have to obey me. Robert's my coworker, I'm not his boss-" 

"- and neither of them are in the SCA so they don't have to play our game -" 

"- yeah, the only person you have to obey here is Sir Reynhard and that's only because he's the marshal and he's in charge of safety, so you have to listen if he gives you a safety instruction."

This is important to them, they said it as if it is important, but it does not make sense, and she doesn't know 'coworker' or 'boss' and she doesn't understand why someone would say 'play our game' about ...obeying your superiors, which is not a game, which is in fact the thing in the whole world which is least like a game. All of civilization rests on it and paradise is denied to anyone who fails at it and - that's not how she'd make the rules, but it's what they are, even Aroden doesn't say you don't have to follow the rules, just that someday civilization itself will make the rules, and make better ones -

"I have obey Robert and Jenny," she points out, because being pedantic is easier than getting into any of that. "I was made they foster child. ...ready now fight?"

But you don't have to obey them because our parents' generation was just wrong, about so much, and you did not choose them and it's always morally justified to rebel against unjust and unearned authority, and I want people like you to grow up to be better and kinder and smarter than the people who raised you and you can't do that if you don't learn to discard the idea that you owe them deference for being born earlier, and

Nope nope nope he needs to walk away from this conversation immediately -

- no, he doesn't get to walk away from this conversation, he's got duties.

Gabriel wrestles a smile onto his face with a Herculean effort. 

"Yep, I'm sure you do a great job listening to your parents! You still need knees if you want to fight."

Reynhard has found spare knees! 

These are actually very shiny steel. There's a flaring piece of boiled leather that covers the thigh, with a couple holes in the top that allow a string to pass through so the weight can be hung from a belt, and riveted onto the leather is a fully articulated steel knee with three small steel segments on either side of the larger central kneecap piece. It clinks at it moves and makes soft shrrrr noises as the pieces scrape against each other.

"Again, thigh protection isn't mandatory but I'd prefer Iomedae wears it because she's young and we don't want to hurt her." 

She is confused and frustrated and ill at ease and - armor, and then she gets to fight, and it will all be all right, because she's really quite promising at fighting, because Aroden chose her and she is worthy and she will prove it once she gets a sword in her hands.

...how are they getting metal to move past other metal like that???? She's going to be too distracted by the knee mechanism to even put it on for a few moments. Open and closed, open and closed. "God is good," she proclaims, and then tries it on.

If Gabriel ever meets God he's going to fight him with a sword. For many reasons but one of them will be making a world where children ever have to obey anyone against their will. 

(God doesn't fight with a sword, God is a wizard. Though even if Iomedae could read Sir Gabriel's forced smile she would not have the vocabulary to correct him on this point.)

Those leg pieces are a little bit too big for Iomedae. He'll pass her a belt for her to attach the thighs to, so they stay up, but the knees still hang a little below where her actual knees are. They don't have anything better and she seems eager to fight, so he supposes it'll do for today. Nobody has a perfect kit on their first day, and Iomedae's getting better day-one gear than average for Kalomeros (because Gabriel had put on Facebook that he needed people to bring loaner kit for a newbie who was in foster care, and people came through because of course they did).

"Alright, that kit looks legal to me. I'm happy for you to practise in it so long as you tell everyone you fight that it's your first day, you're not authorised and they should be gentle. I can lend you my shield."

Reynhard's shield is decorated with a huge winding snake whose curves fill the space inside a thick black border. The edge is bound with a thick curved piece of leather to make sure the shield-corner can't get inside anyone's visor. 

Lucy has just finished a fight and is gulping down the water she forgot to drink while she was busy doing her SACRED DUTY regarding welcoming newbies. Cináed is a little older than her and stronger and faster and probably more talented, but she was raised in the SCA and grew up on boffers, so it's a fairly even match that leaves both fighters exhausted. 

She will nevertheless give Iomedae an enthusiastic wave with her sword.

Iomedae takes the sword and bounds delightedly on over to Lucy. She moves less awkwardly in armor, somehow. It's that she's not curled up defensively into herself. 

"Sir Reynhard says I have to say that it's your first day you're not authorized and they should be gentle."

"....I think he means it's your first day? I'm authorised! But okay!"

Lucy scrambles to put her water away and get her helmet back on, so she can take up a position facing Iomedae on the field. She angles her sword carefully towards Iomedae to show her the pointy end. It has two inches of foam taped to the end of the rattan. "I have a thrusting tip - uh, don't worry about what that means, I just have to tell you because it's the rules. Now you tell me you have one too - I'm pretty sure you have one too." 

"I do not have a tip, this sword is..." what was the word "rattan."

"Uh... can I see that?" 

She disentangles her sword hand from her basket and lanyard, and reaches out to Iomedae's sword. The end of the sword has two foam discs taped securely to the tip, padding it to take some of the force out of thrusts. "No, you do have a tip - look." She presses her thumb an inch into the end of the stick. "It's padded." 

"Ohhh, that is a tip? I thought it was -" she gestures out a pointy tip like a real sword would have. "Then yes I have a thrusting tip."

"They're to stop us from killing each other, not to help us kill each other more."

Lucy manages to get her hand back into her sword basket without tangling her lanyard after a few seconds of struggle.

"Uh, if nobody told you yet also, legal target areas are anywhere except the hands and the shins.... and if someone says hold then you need to stay still and put your weapon down... I think that's everything? Okay. Before we fight we salute!"

She brings her sword up vertical in front of her face with the tip pointed to the sky, gives Iomedae a forty-five-degree bow, and then raises the sword slightly towards her in a saluting motion before swishing it down into a fighting stance position.

That is beautiful and good and correct and Iomedae's heart is soaring and - if she does not stay disciplined and win her fights then no one will let her in their order. They will see that she is incompetent and think that God meant for her to be a preacher. (Iomedae's mother briefly tried to float this theory but when that happened Iomedae's father was on her side. She does not think Robert will be on her side.)

 By the time she swishes her sword down to match Lucy's she no longer looks full of boundless joy and assurance. She looks like she is assessing how to kill Lucy. 

Lucy is caught between her desire to BE NICE TO NEWBIES and her desire to HIT SEXIST PEOPLE UNTIL THEY STOP BEING SEXIST. These are both very important and sacred duties! 

She takes a stance with her sword arm cocked behind her so that her hand sits by her shoulder, ready to smash forwards with explosive power. Her right foot is back, her forward left leg hidden carefully behind her shield, and she watches Iomedae carefully through her right eye - her left is covered by the shield corner. 

She'll start circling Iomedae just barely out of range of what she thinks Iomedae's reach is, just to see how the other fighter moves. 

Iomedae's reach is longer than Lucy's guessing and she's tempted to try to get her right off the bat but if she doesn't take her down on the spot she'll be in trouble and if you fight like that you don't live very long. You have to fight in such a way as to survive a hundred fights, her swordfighting teacher liked to say, and she doesn't actually even think a hundred fights would be enough.

Iomedae does not, realistically, expect to live very long but she wants to. She wants to be immortal, like Aroden was, because there are too many evils to defeat in one life. 

So - cautiously circling, until she gets a better opening than that. When she does move she's very fast and also there is a lot of her.

Lucy circles around people to keep her muscles warm and flexible, or to get newbies out of the mindset that they have to stand rooted and hammer each other like rock-em-sock-em robots, or to get the sun out of her eyes, or to settle into her fighting mindset and get an opportunity to breathe deep. It's not, to her, a way of looking for openings; openings will be made once she starts feinting or engaging, but for now she's just keeping her guard exactly where it is. She knows where she's open: her head is vulnerable to a particularly well-placed flat snap if she doesn't lift her shield and tilt left a little for it, and definitely vulnerable to an offside if she doesn't tilt her shield right in time; her left leg is vulnerable to a wrap if she doesn't kick her shield out to prevent it; her whole right side is protected until she throws a shot but her arm is immediately vulnerable once she does; there might be a slot-shot open at just the wrong part of her footwork but she moves her feet carefully to mostly prevent it. She's aware of all of those places, likes her guard just the way it is, and maintains it in just that same place while she circles. 

Until she realises that Iomedae doesn't actually seem to want to attack her, and she doesn't want to take all day about this. Is she.... scared of being hit? She didn't seem like the kind of person who would be scared to be hit, but it's not unusual at all for newbies to be hesitant! 

Lucy puts her foot down a little differently on the next step so that she's a little squarer to Iomedae, and tilts her sword out to the side as though she's thinking about hitting Iomedae but being very slow and telegraphing about it, and - yep, there it is, she takes the bait - woah, Iomedae takes the bait much faster than she expected. One second Lucy's gently hinting at an opening, and the next she's frantically ducking into her shield to avoid a staggering blow that she just barely caught on her shield corner, and she's dimly aware of suddenly being towered over by an opponent twice her weight.

With Lucy's face behind her shield she has to counterattack blind; she throws an angled blow at the place she's guessing Iomedae's elbow has to be, judging from the impact of her sword. At the same time, she's stepping out to disengage and reassess; she's been drilled in never disengaging without giving the enemy something to worry about while she does it, but it won't be a particularly hard blow even if it lands because she hasn't yet figured out power generation on blows where her hips are going in the wrong direction. 

Iomedae has stepped over to the side, which doesn't work quite as well in this armor as it does in better fitted armor but does work well enough that Lucy's sword barely glances off the edge of her elbow, and now she's to the side of Lucy and can try to swing around her shield.

Lucy was disengaging as the blow came in, but Iomedae is significantly taller than her and Lucy is blindly retreating in the wrong direction, so the paladin outpaces her fairly easily. Now Iomedae's on her shield side and Lucy's shield is up protecting her head - high enough that the wrap comes in and tags her below the shield edge, right in the sweet spot between the leather skirt that protects her butt and the plastic that covers her thighs. Lucy was turning to try and chase Iomedae with a flat snap, but she's too slow; her brain has time to comment that's going to be such a nice bruise in the morning before her mouth produces the word, "Good!" 

That was exactly as satisfying to watch as Gabriel thought it would be. 

This is the best thing that has happened since Iomedae was made a paladin. She beams at Lucy and drops her sword to offer her a hand. "We fight we both stronger!"

It's impossible for Lucy to be annoyed - at herself for underestimating the newbie, or at Iomedae for assuming that Lucy didn't deliberately give that opening (or at Iomedae for hitting like a truck) - when Iomedae is so damn charming. Frankly she appreciates her opponent a very great deal for it; she can't say anything snarky about how she regrets going easy when Iomedae's just said something so nice, and so Iomedae has saved her from saying something that would've definitely fallen below the standard of courtesy she sets for herself. She takes a breath and finds herself wearing a very genuine smile. 

"Yes! We will both get stronger!" she agrees enthusiastically. "You have amazing power, wow." 

"When I the smaller one I fight like you," says Iomedae, though she isn't sure the exact shade of meaning she wants will come through. "Again?"

This time Lucy is not giving Iomedae the benefit of the doubt! "Again!"

She nods, steps back, and waits for Iomedae to pick her sword up. As soon as she seems ready, Lucy springs forwards and feints a thrust to the face. Her feet are still moving, and in the beat after she thinks Iomedae will tell her hands to react to the thrust, Lucy flicks the tip of her sword up and crunches her hips down to lend power as she aims a flat snap at the very bottom edge of Iomedae's shield, hoping she'll move it up when she sees the feint. 

And she's very surprised when she hears, "Light!" because she really did just crunch her weight downwards into the sword, but maybe Iomedae was moving or maybe that leg armour is really padded beneath the leather? 

She steps left to give herself room for a low return, her knees bent low and her shield raised above her head to keep her safe from her taller opponent's reprisal, and bounces up into an offside. She learned this from a smaller fighters' class that Nicole taught once; if she has to strike upwards anyway, she may as well use the upwards force of her spring to power her blow rather than worrying about rotation of the hips. 

The offside is blocked and she's already bouncing the sword off the block and looking for the onside. Lucy knows she struggles to get her sword over the top of taller fighters' shields and still have power in her arm, so she's become very precise in how she twists her wrist and aims her sword down into the central line between shield and body.

It's unfortunate that Iomedae is smart enough to realise that this is Lucy's happy range and step away, so that Lucy's sword doesn't connect with quite as much power as it ought to. She smacks the tip of her sword into Iomedae's collarbone and she hears, "Light!" again.

She thought that one had enough power on it, but Iomedae really was stepping away, and it wasn't her finest technique ever. Iomedae isn't wearing shoulder armour, though. Lucy raises her estimation of Iomedae's pain tolerance a notch. 

You can sometimes really take quite severe injuries in a combat situation without being immediately incapacitated! It's why she had to stab Martin five times, and she's been stabbed five times plenty of times herself.

Now they're at range again and Lucy has to figure out how to cross the donut of death between Iomedae's reach and her own.

She went to a class down south on feinting that talked about just using tension and stance, not wasting energy. So she'll "ha!" and do something she thinks of as throwing her spirit out to the left - as though she really has the intention of going left, but only really tensing and aiming and not moving - and then she'll dodge right and smack Iomedae with a flat snap.

She hears, "Light!" from Iomedae and then she is rocked backwards by a smack to her visor that on the one hand she really deserved for leaving her head open (she was far too confident that her own strike would be true) and on the other hand is an amount of power that no newbie has any right to be capable of.

"Good," she says, somewhat weakly, and almost drops her sword.

Lucy casts a sideways glance at Gabriel and Reynhard, watching. 

She would never question Iomedae's honour - questioning anyone's honour is unfathomably rude - but she's kind of questioning Iomedae's calibration and she is wondering if either of them is likely to rescue her from the most awkward conversation. 

Iomedae reaches out to steady her. "First time you being as with baby with me! Can you show me again -" and she imitates the feint, badly.

"....I thought you were new," Lucy says, sort of stunned.

Slowly, she shows Iomedae the motion she'd use for a face thrust. She learned it from rapier initially - she had a few rapier lessons before deciding armoured combat was her true passion - but she's started adding a little wrist twist into the motion to make it stick on a visor and not slide off to either side. "This is the thrust. I was running with it so I didn't have good body mechanics, because I knew I was turning it into-" she shows how she can untwist her wrist and send the sword tip in a wide arc over their heads and to one side. 

"Oh! - when I practiced we did not try hit in face, might die that way even if priest. This, you can try, because -" she pats the foam nub. "God is good. ....sorry you think I was new. I said what Sir Reynault sayed to say but maybe I should say, Sir Reynault says this, Lucia says this? If I fight yourgrace Nicole. So I not - lying, saying I new."

Lucy vaguely remembers reading something about how medieval people in tournaments wouldn't thrust to the face, even with blunted swords, because shoving your sword into someone's brain via their eye socket is pretty lethal regardless of whether you've dulled the edge a bit, and they hadn't invented fencing masks yet, though she's not sure why they never used the SCA solution of having wooden swords that are wider than the gaps in helmets are allowed to be. She has no idea if she's remembering that correctly, but that's really the only thing her brain has to grasp onto and she has no idea what Iomedae is talking about regarding priests.

".... I think Her Grace can handle herself. She's - one of the best fighters that isn't a knight," she says. Nicole has just won several squires' tourneys and Rose tourneys back-to-back and while Lucy can't pretend to know what goes on in the secret knights' meetings, the writing's been on the wall for a while. Also she literally cannot imagine what it would take to ruffle Nicole's feathers; she somehow always seems poised and dignified and unbothered even when someone like Migliorotto is beating the shit out of her while also criticising everything about her technique.

"Sir Reynhard was right, you should tell people it's your first day. You deserve to get the grace period of everyone being all welcoming at the newbie just like everyone else gets, it's not your fault you're good. If Roger underestimates you, then please beat his ass for me."

Lucy still wants rescue from someone else, though, because 'those looked like good hits' sounds so much better if it doesn't carry undertones of 'I think I should have won'. It doesn't seem immediately forthcoming. 

"....again?"

Again! Iomedae doesn't know Lucy wants rescue and isn't planning to offer it!

Lucy wants to try counterpunching. Iomedae is clearly not fazed by aggression and speed, and maybe Lucy can catch her out with tactics. She can wait patiently, feinting a little but not really going anywhere, and see what Iomedae does. 

Iomedae was slow to learn to feint. Paladins don't lie, she told her sword tutor, and he laughed at her and then insisted they practice almost nothing else for several weeks. She knows what her body is saying and she likes it to be what she's doing. But she did learn. She takes a high swing at Lucy which is just a distraction to close with her and shove them both backwards - but Iomedae with sturdier footing -

"...hold!" 

"HOLD!!" 

...eek! "HOLD!!!" 

- she will absolutely and completely freeze when instructed to. ...she's confused though. 

"Alright that one's on me." 

"....yeah. Iomedae, it's fine, nobody told you because we normally don't have to tell newbies because they're normally not as confident as you. We can't do grappling here - no bashing with the shield, no grabbing people and shoving them over, okay?" 

These guys are such dumbasses sometimes but Nicole loves them all so she can't be mad. She's just decided she needs to go adopt this newcomer later. She is in armour by now and was warming up with Erik; when she sees the called hold isn't relevant to her fight she'll go straight back to fighting. 

"Yes, sir," says Iomedae, clearly just as confused but just as clearly intending to follow the rule.

"Alright, great, don't worry about it, that's on us."

Reynhard thinks it's on him but Gabriel already said it was on him so he's alright to share. 

"....so hold over? We fight?" 

"Lay on."

Reynhard has, in fact, been watching Iomedae's calibration. He is pretty sure she's calling 'light' to shots that she ought to be saying 'good' to. But he's going to give them a couple more rounds to be very sure before he intervenes, because Lucy's a tough kid and honourable and won't throw a fit about Iomedae not taking her shots, and he wants to see if he can figure out what's going on and phrase the intervention gently without putting off a newcomer. 

Lucy is filled with DETERMINATION and also MURDEROUS INTENT.

She goes to a high guard that she's comfortable counterpunching from and waits in it, sinking down deep into her focus. It is so embarrassing if she gets her Osprey and then mere weeks later she's being beaten up by someone on their first day! 

Lucy fends off Iomedae's first few attacks by blocking and stepping out to the right, keeping herself on the taller fighter's shield side, looking for the wrap shot that will get around Iomedae's shield and connect with the back of her leg and never quite moving fast enough to find it. She's in a rhythm, stepping to the tempo of the song that plays in her head (lately her brain radio's been Megalovania). 

When she thinks she's established a pattern she suddenly moves the other direction on the off-beat, a fraction of a second after she might be moving if she was holding her tempo - slow is fast - and tries to chop her sword into Iomedae's sword elbow. 

Lucy isn't quite sure how she misses - Iomedae doesn't look nimble but apparently she's fast. Lucy's sword goes into exactly the place that elbow was a second ago, and then she feels Iomedae's blade thudding down hard onto her helmet. It's only after she says, "Good!" that she understands that elbow went up to the sky for Iomedae to get over her shield and smack her in the back of the head. 

(Damn, she always forgets tall people can hit scorpion shots. It's not like they'll ever be in her repertoire.)

Lucy doesn't feel the need to verbally ask for another. She'll reset to the starting position a few paces apart and keep restarting fights until someone says they want to quit. 

Sometimes Lucy watches Migliorotto stalk people down on the field. He rarely chases, he's not trying to catch up to anyone who's running away, he's just relentlessly casually walking at people and threatening the whole time. It's something she's struggled to figure out - she's either backing off and looking to block and retreat, or she's rushing in full of aggro - but it's what she was supposed to be working on this practice.

Deep breaths for this; she's trying to mimic the sort of calm focus certain knights have when they're neither panickedly retreating nor angrily advancing but rather just - moving and watching. Her world narrows down to Iomedae's basket hilt, she becomes one with the blade, and she advances with a sweeping offside slash. It's intended to make Iomedae move rather than to kill - it'll be easy to block as she slowly crosses into range - but she's read her Musashi and knows better than to throw an entirely fake attack; the tip of her sword is aimed for the very corner of Iomedae's face. 

Lucy walks directly into Iomedae's thrusting tip.

Okay, I guess you know how to do that now... 

"Good," she says, tiredly, shaking her head to make her chin strap loose again after getting jabbed in the face. And reset. And again. 

Lucy's able to put her shield between her and Iomedae's next several attacks, though her shield arm is getting tired as well. Small, energy-conserving movements - tilting the shield one way so that just the very corner blocks the onside, tilting it the other way so that just the very corner blocks the offside, bending her knees to block the low shot rather than trying to extend her elbow down. And there's the opportunity, with Lucy short enough that she can step around to the side, get under the sword and land a hit on Iomedae's leg while her sword is busy tracing the long graceful arc of the return.

By now she's sort of expecting to hear "light", and when she does she's already doing a high return and prepared to block the crushing overhead from Iomedae. She keeps moving, staying under the sword, trying to push up into Iomedae's space with a high guard - sword nearly parallel above her shield - so that as soon as Iomedae attacks she can punish the sword movement by flicking straight into side of Iomedae's helmet that the sword currently protects.

Come on, take the bait, please? Lucy knows Iomedae can kill her with a wrap to the side of the head, here, but her straightforward flick shot can come in faster than an outside swing can reply. 

In this specific context it might be worth it to have them both get hit because Iomedae hits harder but in nearly all fights that you get into as a brand new paladin and a fifteen year old girl this is not true; you cannot trade; you have to do better than trading. Iomedae does not go for it, 

Eventually Lucy gets impatient with this and tries to feint the flick, pull her sword down in front of her shield, and jam it sideways into Iomedae's armpit. It's the sort of thing that always gets her tangled up, stopped as much by her own cuirass getting in the way of her elbow as by Iomedae's shield edge, and she has to raise her shield against the replying onslaught and back out - no, don't back out, she's the one who likes range - she'll sidestep around to the Iomedae's shield side so she can get a little respite without having to cross that damned donut again.

This is not actually a fight she can win with the virtues she normally beats newbies with - aggression, confidence, poise - nor a fight she is going to win by being stronger or faster, because she's not. Goddamnit she's going to have to actually use that 'technique' stuff that people keep trying to teach her, isn't she. 

Lucia has a pell, at home, with lines marked on it in sharpie and coloured tape - so she can say to herself that she wants to hit A, or B, or green, or pink, and ask her hands to do what her voice called. In a way it feels wrong for it to be hard, because she ought to be in control of herself, but when she swings a sword at full speed at a target two feet away sometimes it wants to hit B and not C. She's still working, slowly, on transferring that pinpoint accuracy to a live opponent; it disappears when she's under stress.

If she asks her arm for a strike, her arm will do the same slightly diagonal motion which Iomedae has been reliably catching on her shield. She has to go through the whole list of things that she noticed made it easier, the last time she was on the pell; letting her hand turn over earlier than she intuitively feels like it needs to, glancing past Iomedae's shoulder so her head will help her body rotate enough, getting the sword horizontal before she pushes off with her toes to pump it to the correct height, leaving her grip loose and relaxed until suddenly she tightens her fingers to give the blade a crack as it sails horizontally over the enemy shield at just the perfect angle to get past it, and her wrist keeps rotating to - 

"Good," her mouth says again, because Iomedae has hit her in the chest while she was busy doing all that thinking.

Lucy sucks in air greedily once her ribs unfreeze. Damn, that girl hits like she's trying to do a murder! 

Yes, that is the objective of swordfighting. You should try not to resort to it but when you do resort to it it is because you are sure that the other person needs to be dead or at least incapacitated. Practicing not killing people would be practicing entirely the wrong skill.

Technique was the right idea, though. If she's fast and accurate enough she can put her sword into those gaps in Iomedae's guard, which are there, Lucia sees them... they just get covered so quickly because she's fast - and are dangerous to go for, because she's got reach and she dishes out bruises. Lucia isn't going to outdo her on aggression. It has to be all precision. 

Reset. Again. 

They both want to hit each other. Their swords clatter as each attack blocks the other, both looking for the same line and finding only a sharp shock to the sword wrist. Now they're toe-to-toe and it gets messy and frantic. Lucia bounces her sword off Iomedae's shield and Iomedae batters Lucia's shield and their swords collide again and then again, both trying to be faster than the other. If she could hit Iomedae in the brief moment between Iomedae's attack and her recovery - but she can't, she can't be twice as fast as her.

She can be slower though! On her next shot she breaks the pattern - attacks, and instead of attacking again she waits just a second for Iomedae's block to move while Iomedae looks for her own attack, and now she can get through the guard with a lazy-looking slow shot that she tries to make snappy with a sudden twist of her shoulders and last-second clamp of her fingers on the handle. 

This works to get through the guard! Lucy isn't even bothered by hearing light again, because she did the thing she practised doing and it actually worked because practice works!

She can bounce the sword off Iomedae's helmet and turn her wrist over to crack her helmet again from the other angle (light again) before she has to focus on blocking, backing out, surviving.

Now Lucy's feeling enthusiastic about this. She dives in again, ducking her head into her shield to avoid Iomedae's welcome-into-my-reach hospitality, and goes for a wrap to the back of the head that is blocked by Iomedae shrugging her shield back over her shoulder. 

Lucy blocks and attacks and blocks and attacks and - they are back to the messy speed contest and she doubts the same trick will work twice in a row, but if she gets her guard set up a little differently she can block and punch Iomedae's sword down into her own shield, and that gives her a fraction of a moment of window to smack Iomedae in the shoulder.

"- hold-" Iomedae pauses to consider. She does not think any of those blows were individually incapacitating but she...thinks she would be down by now, from blood loss if nothing else. 

"Good!"

Lucy stopped the second a hold was called, and stepped back and let her sword tip fall to her shoe (not on the ground - she's been yelled at about getting dirt in people's visors - always balanced on her own toes). 

That was good? But it wasn't any harder than anything else she hit, and it was probably gentler than several of her previous attacks - she was really cheating for speed a little bit - 

"I heard a hold called?"

Gabriel is fairly immediately hovering anxiously next to Lucy and Iomedae. 

"What's wrong, Iomedae? - it's awesome that you called hold, anyone is allowed to do that any time they are concerned about safety, no matter how new you are. I just have to check so I know whether we can lay on again." 

"Sorry just needed think to know if that hit kill me. But it did, and I sayed so! Lucy won!"

This seems like an excellent opportunity to address calibration.

"That's great! You don't need to call a hold for that - you can always change your mind, too, if you need to, and say a hit was actually good even if you initially said light. Or make the call after a disengage, and that's fine too."

Gabriel read once, in a book of advice for marshals, that the polite way to point out bad calibration is often to ask a question - rather than saying 'you just called light to a hit that left a visible dent in your helm' one can always ask 'was that lovely dent in your helm there before?' 

"Do you want some help figuring out what should count as good? You know best as the person being hit, but from a spectator point of view the first two attacks looked better. I can understand it's very tricky because you have a good helmet on your head, and nothing on your shoulder!" 

"The first two was better. But if Lucy swording steel, not kill me, I think, not - not only that. But all three, I think that kill me if Lucy swording steel. ...I stab Martin five times. When a real fight, takes a lot."

Robert is so so glad that he already explained the situation there to Barry.

Maybe Iomedae should have an outlet for her aggressive impulses that involves less, uh, thinking about death. Like.....rock climbing?

"Sorry, you stabbed a guy five times?" 

This is not alarming because Gabriel is not reacting like it is terribly alarming but - no actually she's still kind of alarmed. Sometimes people terribly underestimate how bad things are, like when the boys in her high school were flicking bogeys into girls' hair and the teachers didn't act like this was at all something that proved civilization had fundamentally failed to create situations in which people did better things than torment each other because they found it funny, and in fact after the fifth time they acted like it was a minor inconvenience that they were tired of hearing about, and Lucy had maybe slightly had to punch one of those guys in the parking lot after school. Maybe Gabriel thinks that it's fine for minors to stab people so long as they say sorry afterwards, or that it's okay to stab a guy with a small knife so long as he was being really obnoxious - she feels like she heard worse moral takes than that in high school politics class.

She is not supposed to ever be quiet about what she believes is right. That's one of the rules of magic she's committed to. Lucy isn't sure how to do that in this situation so she goes with the first thing to come into her head. 

"I - it's very morally wrong to stab people in a real fight!" 

Iomedae looks deeply puzzled at her. "I don't know - morally. It ...better to stop him some other way, if you have one, because no priests. But better to stop him than not, even if you kill him."

Gabriel would absolutely not violate kids' privacy if he could help it but Iomedae just brought that up on her own and this situation is going to go south very very fast if he doesn't say anything.

"Luce, it was self defence. Let's not quiz her about a possibly traumatic experience, okay?" 

"Self defence five times?" - Sir Gabriel is giving her a look that means she can ask about this LATER. "Okay yes sorry."

Lucy kind of feels like stabbing somebody once can be self-defence but doing it five times is definitely murder! But she also feels like she is imminently about to be murdered by someone she does actually respect deeply if she doesn't shut her mouth, and she has said the minimum thing that her magic needed her to say, she has avoided being complicit in pretending that stabbing people five times is a NORMAL THING that you can just bring up in conversation and not expect people to CHECK - 

“That is what I saying, that in a real fight many people still able fight after hit. …I no mind Lucy asking. If a holy warrior should do some thing different I need to know that.”

...she can't help it, she really likes Iomedae. Lucy often has moral objections to things that other people thought were fine or excusable, and usually when she brings them up, those other people do mind - and mind quite a lot.

She had not been aware it was self defence, when Iomedae first mentioned it, and she supposes she really doesn't know the circumstances or the situation. But the pressure to object right now feels so much less urgent with a strong signal that Iomedae is the kind of person who might even theoretically be open to ever discussing it again.... which they will probably need to happen because Lucy isn't certain she can be friends with someone who killed someone unless it was for a really good reason, but she does want to be friends with Iomedae.

"Better to stop an attacker than not," she agrees quietly. This is a truth she can say without getting into the calibration questions. 

"So, yes, sometimes people can still fight after they've taken a lethal hit, but - they'd still be dying eventually, right? And for the purpose of tournaments, once you take a hit that is good, you lose immediately. We want to train to not be dead at all - it might be easiest if someone just hits you with a good and a light so you can see what the line is."

"Oh, it is good if but for god it would kill you later? - yes please hit me both."

Gabriel would normally just hit people but with Robert and Jenny both hovering he is pretty hesitant to whack their foster child over the head with a stick.

This is something Nicole can rescue him from, probably, he's pretty sure a woman hitting Iomedae is going to come off as less alarming to his extremely normal coworker. He will look over to where she's sitting - she's chatting with the sewing group politely and sipping water, which is not how he'd recover between fights - and see if he can wave at her. 

Nicole is more than happy to stroll over! After Gabriel explains to her with a few quiet words, she can tap Iomedae in the helmet. "This is light."

Tap again, slightly harder - "This is still light."

Tap again, right on the borderline - "This is just about light, but if you don't want to get hit very hard you can call it good when you're new, and people won't hit you so hard."

Tap again, hard enough to make Iomedae move - "This is good."

"...I think that would not kill me even with steel! The helmet is American."

"You'd definitely be dead with no helmet, though, right? And with a medieval - not American - helmet, it might break it." 

"Break a not American helmet, yes. So good is, if not wear American armor, and no God, then would be dead?"

"....I'm not sure what you mean by no God. If you mean - it would be a miracle and you'd have to get lucky but you could be alive - yes, absolutely."

"I mean, - people who work for God, who no warriors, what they called."

"...hmm, monks? Nuns, maybe? Clergy? There's - a lot of ways to work for the church and I don't think any of them would be relevant?" 

"God not save the dying?"

"Not to the best of my knowledge."

Nicole is aware of some things like - incredibly magical healing fountains deep beneath the Earth or possibly in the fae realm which might save the dying - but they seem to work perfectly well for atheists and Hindus and Buddhists and pagan witches and other people who don't believe in the Abrahamic God. 

"I will tell him he should do that! I think I know now what good is and Lucy won all the fight, or all but one maybe."

"No! You won the first one, I was stupid and gave you the opening but you still won it, and then when I hit you in the leg you only would've lost the leg - we go down to our knees, to simulate a leg injury, but you can keep fighting - and then after the hold you won two fights, with that scorpion shot and that face thrust - I didn't think you knew how to do that!" 

Out of context that would sound like a relatively normal sort of thing for a religious person to say - Iomedae will pray to God to spare the wounded, that's lovely, plenty of Crusaders probably did that - but for her to be calibrating blows off the assumption that God would save her, it kind of sounds like she actually thinks God might. Gabriel was tentatively hypothesising raised by the fey, but there's no fey that would tell their human changeling child that they had a direct red telephone to God to ask for their blood to stay inside their body please.

Unfortunately there is absolutely no way he is getting this kid alone to ask questions like do you know about magic and are you aware that magic is supposed to be secret and where the hell is Taldor anyway.

"I think a couple of Lucy's were light, yes, when you were moving away from her so she didn't catch you as close as she wanted to. It's always hard to tell as a spectator, but you're pretty fast on your feet. And Lucy, you still forget your hip sometimes."

She does NOT forget her hip, she's done HOURS of pell this week, it's just sometimes she's feinting and sometimes she's tangled up and sometimes she's doing the smaller-fighter thing of trying to use the spring of her knees for power rather than rotation. She's going to smile and nod though because smiling and nodding is the polite thing you do when the knights are wasting time talking instead of letting her get hit with a stick, which is how she actually learns. 

" - I think if you lose a leg you die always. Other person then has more -" she doesn't know the word for it but she demonstrates. Someone without a leg has no reach and can't move very fast and it should be easy for the uninjured fighter to kill them.