Thorn’s face was all chagrin.
“Up!” Duun struck, lizard-quick. Thorn escaped, escaped, escaped, attacked and escaped with a ringing of the blades.
Duun hit him then, averted the blade and struck his arm up with his fist. Thorn flung his own arm up to lessen the force, skipped back and covered himself again.
Duun called time again and Thorn looked down at his wrist as if he expected to see blood. “At least,” Duun said, “you didn’t stop when I hit you.”
“No.” They had hammered that one out in painful lessons, beginner habits unlearned with bruises. “I’m sorry.” Breathless, with another wipe at the sweat. Thorn meant the blade-touch.
“You’ve developed a whole new form of fence, the artful covering of your mistakes! You’re best at your escapes!”
“I’m sorry, Duun-hatani.”
“This isn’t hand-to-hand. In this, young fool, you’ve got a damn sharp claw! Rearrange your thinking and use it. Again!”
Thorn came at him. He evaded it, struck, evaded, struck.
“Hold!”
Thorn flinched back. Stood there with the breath rasping through his mouth and sweat running in his eyes. He straightened. “I’m sorry, Duun.” It had gotten to be a refrain. There were always mistakes. His look was contrite.
Duun reached a hand toward his face, slowly. Thorn stepped back. There was threat in that stance, wariness. Duun smiled.
Thorn straightened his shoulders back, panting. (Why do you shout at me? Why do you curse me? What’s wrong today? I’m trying to listen, Duun, don’t make fun of me like that.)
“Let me touch you, minnow. This once.”
The knife-hand lowered. Thorn stood still. Duun came close and put his palm in the middle of Thorn’s chest, on flesh gone pale without sunlight, on flesh slickly sweating so that hands slipped off it, if one grappled without claws. The heart jumped beneath his hand in steady, labored pulses. There was no flinching. No shivering. Duun moved the hand up to the side of Thorn’s neck and felt the same pulse. A slight flinching. Reflex. Or teaching. He looked into alien white eyes: it was curious how little the blue centers had changed from the first time he had looked into them, an infant lying on his lap; a round-bellied child clambering on his crossed ankles and trying to pull his ears; a boy’s face gazing up at him in sudden shock at finding him on the trail-
They had never seemed to change size. The bones about them did. The face became hollow-cheeked and the jaw lengthened and its skin roughened in dark hair Thorn kept shaved… (They’ll laugh at me, Duun; my body hair just doesn’t get thick enough and I’m not going to grow it on my face like that, all patched up and thick here and not there.”) Thorn shaved his body here and there too, where the patchiness was worst. Clipped and groomed and gods, tried, not to grow a coat any longer, but at least not to let the changes in his body overcome the Thorn they both had gotten used to. Thorn smelled different than he once had. The chest and shoulders were wider and muscled, the belly flat and hard, the loins narrow, the legs long-muscled and agile. Strong, Thorn could lift him nowadays, though gods knew Duun had no intention to let him try.
Strange, Thorn was not ugly. Seventeen, nearly eighteen years, and Duun looked at him eye-to-eye, even having to look up a little lately. And there was in Thorn a symmetry that made that face probable on that body and the composite of him fit together in a grace of motion that no aesthete could deny. (“When you get used to him he’s beautiful,” Sagot said. “Frightening, like some big animal you’ve gotten closer to than you wanted. But you want to watch him move. There’s a fascination to such things, isn’t there?)
The pupils dilated and contracted with thought. With anxiety. (Is this a game, Duun? Am I supposed to do something?)
Duun walked away, turning his back on that look. Perhaps Thorn picked up his anxiety. It was acute now.
(“We’ve got to go with it,” Ellud said. “Duun, you’re put me off; first it was Wait till he’s got the first tapes down. Then it was: The Betan business has him upset. Now it’s: There’s a last few things I have to teach him. Duun, we’re out of excuses.”)