“I want you to break his arm.”

Marroo’s mouth fell open at his father’s command. “But-” Darro’s glare cut off any protest and Marroo snapped his mouth shut.

“Core.” His father muttered as he turned away. “If the Burning Tree school thinks they can recruit you then they’ve failed to realize how far ahead of these children you’ve progressed.” He cast a scathing glance at the Marroo’s next opponent across the ring. “There is only one way to correct such misconceptions.”

Marroo felt his stomach churn as he looked across the ring at the other boy. The buzzer rang for a second time. Light parted for him like mist as Marroo stepped into the ring. When he met his opponent’s eyes he felt like he was going to be sick. Marroo turned back to his father before he’d taken more than a couple of steps. “The referee said he’d kick me out.” He hissed. “He said I had to be gentler.”

“Didn’t you hear?” His father asked. He gave a wry smile that didn’t touch the corners of his silver eyes. “The masters of the others schools want the honor of defeating you. No one is going to kick you out.”

“Are you ready?” The referee asked.

Marroo’s father nodded and Marroo turned back to the ring with a queasy feeling rolling through him. He bowed quickly to the boy across the ring and they both raised their swords.

“Begin!”

The other boy was cautious for the first round, perhaps because he’d seen Marroo’s other matches or perhaps because he was simply naturally inclined to the cautious approach. He was faster than many of Marroo’s previous opponents and he managed to keep up a passable defense whenever Marroo struck halfheartedly with the steps of his first or second kata.

Marroo stared at the boy’s arms as they fenced while he tried to work up the courage to fulfill his father’s demand. “I’m a weapon.” Marroo thought. “I’m a weapon, I’m a weapon.” But he didn’t feel like a weapon, especially when he turned after an indecisive first round to find his father glaring at him.

“Stop being a child.” Darro growled when Marroo stood directly before him. “It’s time to grow up.” He looked across the ring to the other boy receiving brief instruction from his own teacher. “Hurt him, or suffer the consequences of your own weakness.” Silver eyes met silver eyes, and Marroo thought of the stone gathering dust on the shelf.

The boy’s arm broke easily.

Marroo kept his eyes closed and tried to block out the sound of the boy’s screaming as medics bundled him onto a float pallet to carry him away. The screams mingled in his memory with those of a woman pinned to a wall and a man with half his tongue cut out. Darro’s hand landed on his shoulder and Marroo forced himself not to jerk away from the touch.

“Victory.” Darro grated, as though in distaste. “Never sweet, but necessary, when you follow the sword, if you want to survive.”

Marroo opened his eyes to look up at his father, then out at the other children sparring in the rings around them. Children, he saw now, as his father must. Truly, just children, incapable of doing anything to defend themselves in a real fight.

“Can we go home now?” Marroo asked

Darro grunted. “There are four more opponent’s between you and the champion badge.” He said. “After that, we can go home.”

It was not meant to be.

His next opponent was a girl. She showed none of the hostility of his other opponents as she faced him across the ring, nor did she show the cautious respect he’d received from the boy he maimed. She stared at him across her rubberized plastic sword with nothing but naked terror. She trembled as they bowed, then he met her eyes, eyes tinted a purple so bright that they were almost violet in the low light of the gymnasium, and he froze.

The girl cringed away from Marroo when the referee shouted “Begin!” but Marroo barely heard him. His sword hand shook by his side and his breath came tight and fast while the gymnasium transformed around him into a small room high up in a residential tower lit by the reflected bottom along the edge of night. His joints locked to keep him standing as his whole body began to shake, and he began, silently, to weep.

At some point the girl worked up the courage to sidle up and give his chest a poke with the sword, but he barely felt it. He heard his father’s voice grating from the sidelines as just another echo from the bloody past, and saw, again, the girl’s head roll across the sheets in a crimson tide. By the third round of the match Marroo’s eyes were closed as he fought to stem the tide of memories and the fear, and shame, and above all, guilt, that came with them.

His mother’s special book also made him weep, late at night, with the covers pulled over his head and his familiar illuminating the worn pages while it whispered the lessons he was meant to memorize in his dreams.

They story told of an ancient wilderness outpost, somewhere on the edge of an uninhabitable zone, a desert mountain range full of dust and dry winds and the few deer and mice that could survive there and the cats that hunted them. “Now everyone knows,” the story said, “that such uninhabitable regions are the home of strange and mysterious creatures, creatures you and I will never have to fear, surrounded, as we are, by thousands of other men like ourselves. Creatures from beyond the sky, who drop down to do battle with those of us who make our living inbetween the shadows of the Midnight Plains. This is a story of just such a creature, a dragon, who came to the little outpost without a name to carry of its people, and the coward who brought about his end.”

The coward lived a life of constant fear. He spent his days gathering the tools and protections he thought he would need in the case of any life-threatening emergency, even going so far as to ensure that he possessed an inflatable boat despite his home in the desert “just in case”. He gathered so many, and so extensively, that when the dragon came he was able to hide amidst his treasures and survive, that is, until the rest of the town called on him to help.

“You’ve got this whole armory.” One of his friends told him when he refused to go out and face the dragon. “For what? To hide behind while your friends are eaten one by one? While your neighbors, and your neighbor’s children die?” He told him there would be an expedition, with or without his help, but that if he brought his wealth of treasures with him, they would have a far far better chance of defeating the monster than if he remained behind. “It will keep coming back, and some day, your treasures won’t save you.”

He joined the expedition in the end, and held his friend’s hand as he lay dying beside the body of the dragon he’d sacrificed himself to give the coward a chance of slaying. Marroo wept as the Coward said goodbye, and later, in his dreams, it was he who told the violet eyed little girl that they would meet again in a happier place.

“Was he a coward?” His mother asked him when she quizzed him about the book as he returned it. She lay in bed, near noon, bathed in reflected core light while she held a hand to her head looking gray as death.

Marroo shrugged, back to her as he tried to leave. “Everyone said so.”

Marroo’s mother raised her eyebrows and set the book on the bedside table. “And that made him one?” She asked.

Marroo scowled.

His mother pushed herself into a sitting position with some effort and gave him a grimacing smile. “Was what he did a cowardly thing?”

“No.” Marroo said after a moment’s hesitation.

“So, what was he?”

“He was afraid.”

His mother squeezed her temples and glared at the window, then turned back to him. “But what he did was brave. Being afriad just made his actions braver, don’t you think?”

Marroo just shrugged.

His mother sighed and pushed herself out of bed and carried the book back to the shelf just outside her door. She stared at it for a moment. “You can’t be what other people call you.” She said finally. She looked at him. “This is the lesson for you. You’re not defined by what others say about you, or by what you feel, or think. Do you understand? You’re defined by what you choose to do about it.”

Marroo nodded silently.

She grimaced, then compressed her lips into a thin line as she slid the book back onto the shelf. “Now.” She said as she turned back to him. “You can choose.” She pulled out the next book in the series he’d been reading and showed it to him. I can give you a book you’ll enjoy.”, she said, then pulled down another book from the top shelf. “Or I can give you another one that you can learn from.” The book she showed him this time was as battered as the story about the dragon, though it only had a title and no painted picture. “The choice is yours.” She raised both eyebrows.

He took the book without the picture but stopped before retreating to his room.

“Yes?” His mother asked.

---

Marroo didn’t finish the tournament after the girl defeated him. He didn’t even remember climbing into the aircab or following his father into the training room until the stone dropped into his hands and he felt the pain blossom through his palms.

“A sword cuts.” His father growled at him. “How can you cut if you are afraid to harm your enemies?”

Marroo closed his eyes. The pain from the stone, so huge in his memories, seemed almost negligible now. Still present, but less. Marroo pressed his palms to it as though warming them at a fire, waiting for the pain he remembered as a child.

“I don’t want to be like you.” He whispered.

“What’s that?”

Marroo opened his eyes and met his father’s silver gaze.

Neither said a word.

His father snorted after a minute of silence and he turned to stalk towards the cabinet that held their sparring swords. “You won’t be.” He growled as he yanked out a blunted steel blade. He tossed it towards Marroo who caught it while keeping the stone in one hand. “Fight like that when you’re on the streets, and you’ll be dead.” He pulled out a sword of his own and Marroo felt a bruise swell from the blow delivered to his shoulder before he’d even had time to pull his own practice sword from it’s scabbard.