The Practice Sword
A Blood & Steel Short Story
Late Summer, 2183 | The Canal Spillway | Outside the Locks
◆─◇─◇
Peri hit the tunnel floor boots-first and the sound came back to her three times bigger than it should have been.
She landed in a crouch, one hand on wet concrete, and straightened up grinning. The drain stretched ahead of her — curved walls, rusted steel, the smell of stone and standing water and something green growing where sunlight couldn’t reach.
“Come on.”
Kitt stood above her on the lip of the spillway entrance, both hands gripping the rusted railing, her knuckles white against corroded iron. Her long black hair hung loose around her face. She was wearing the blue shirt — the one with the little mechanical diagram of a piston engine on the front that their father had drawn on a napkin and their mother had somehow transferred onto cotton. Kitt wore it until the collar frayed and then kept wearing it.
“It’s far,” Kitt said.
“It’s eight feet.”
“It’s far for me.”
Nine years old and already convinced that every physical act in the world had been designed specifically to kill her.
Kitt’s jaw tightened. She stared down at the tunnel floor the way she stared at circuit boards — mapping it, measuring it, calculating angles that Peri didn’t think about because thinking about angles was the same as not jumping.
Peri held her arms out. “I’m right here.”
Kitt let go of the railing. She dropped with her eyes squeezed shut, body rigid, and Peri caught her under the arms, staggered back one step, and set her down. The impact rang off the curved walls and faded into the dark.
“See?” Peri said.
Kitt opened her eyes. Looked around the tunnel. Exhaled.
“I hate this.”
“You say that every time.”
“I mean it every time.”
Water ran down the center of the drain in a shallow stream — ankle-deep at most, cold and clear over smooth concrete. Sunlight came through the spillway entrance behind them and reached maybe thirty feet before the tunnel swallowed it. Beyond that, gray. The sound of water echoing off the curve of the walls, filling the space with a constant murmur that made the whole drain feel alive.
Peri splashed through the stream without slowing. The water hit her bare calves like ice and she gasped, then laughed. Her braid — her mother’s work from that morning, tight and precise, copper pulled back from her face — swung between her shoulder blades as she moved.
“Damn, that’s cold.”
“Language,” Kitt said from behind her, stepping carefully along the dry concrete edge, one hand trailing the wall.
“Kataero’s not here.”
“Mom would still know.”
“Only because you told her, Kitten. Come on, walk through it. It feels amazing once you stop flinching.”
“I’m not flinching. I’m watching where I walk. And my name is not Kitten.”
Peri turned around, walking backward through the water, arms spread for balance. Thirteen and already taller than their mother, her legs brown from a summer spent running the hills outside the locks. Sleeveless shirt, shorts, boots that were technically Kataero’s old pair, two sizes too big and laced tight to compensate. She’d been training with her father since dawn and her arms still hummed with it — that good ache that meant she’d worked hard enough.
“You know what your problem is?” Peri said.
“I have several. Which one?”
“You think too much before you do things.”
“You don’t think at all before you do things.”
“And yet here I am. Alive. Happy. Standing in freezing water.”
“That last one isn’t the win you think it is.”
The tunnel opened into a wider chamber about fifty yards in — a junction where three smaller drains fed into the main spillway. The ceiling rose high enough that Peri’s voice disappeared into it when she whooped. Concrete pillars held the arch. A rusted maintenance ladder climbed one wall to a grated platform above. Water seeped down the walls from the feeder tunnels, tracing dark lines through mineral deposits that looked like veins in stone.
Their training ground.
Chalk marks on the walls from last time — stance diagrams Peri had scratched out, footwork patterns, a lopsided target circle that Kitt had added and Peri pretended was useless but actually helped. The chalk was fading. They’d been coming here for three months, every time Kataero left the warehouse long enough that their absence wouldn’t be noticed.
Peri pulled her sword from the canvas wrap on her back. The blade Kataero had given her — real steel, shorter than a full sword, sized for her arm and her reach. She’d watched him test it against the workbench vise before handing it over. This isn’t a toy. You point it at something, you’d better mean it.
She meant it.
“Let’s see yours,” Peri said.
Kitt unslung her own bundle from across her chest. Unwrapped it carefully, the way she unwrapped everything — like the object might be more fragile than it was, or more important.
The practice sword.
Peri had laughed the first time she’d seen it. Scrap metal from the workshop, welded together at the guard and pommel, the blade ground flat on both edges so it couldn’t cut anything. It looked like something pulled from a junk drawer and given ambitions above its station.
But she’d held it. And the laugh had died.
The balance was right. She didn’t know how Kitt had done it — the girl was nine, she could barely reach the grinding wheel — but the weight sat in exactly the place it should. Not blade-heavy like a chopper. Not hilt-heavy like a club. Centered. The kind of balance that Kataero talked about when he was teaching Peri to feel the steel as an extension of her arm rather than a thing she was holding.
“You’ve been working on the grip,” Peri said, testing it.
Kitt shrugged. One shoulder. The gesture she used when she didn’t want to admit she cared about something. “The cord was slipping. I re-wrapped it. Cross-pattern instead of spiral. Better friction coefficient.”
“Better what?”
“It won’t slide in your hand when it’s wet.”
“You could’ve just said that.”
“I did just say that.”
⚙
Training.
That was what Peri called it, because that’s what Kataero called what he did with her every morning in the yard behind the warehouse. Kitt didn’t get that. She’d asked once — stood in the doorway with her practice sword in both hands — and their father had looked at her the way he looked at engine parts that didn’t belong in the assembly. Gentle. But firm.
That’s not your path, little one.
So Peri taught her. Hidden. Here.
“Feet apart,” Peri said. “Wider. No — look at where your feet are.”
Kitt looked down. Her boots were close together, her weight stacked over her heels. She looked like someone waiting for a bus, not someone holding a weapon.
Peri dropped her sword. It clattered against the concrete and rang through the chamber. She crossed to Kitt and crouched, both hands on her sister’s legs, physically moving them — left foot forward, right foot back, knees bent.
“Hey—”
“Stop squirming. This leg takes your weight. Lean on it. Just a little more.”
“I’ll fall.”
“You won’t fall. Lean.”
Kitt leaned. Her face went tight with the certainty that gravity was about to betray her.
Peri shoved her. One hand flat against her shoulder, a solid push.
Kitt rocked. Her legs held. Her eyes went wide.
“See?” Peri grinned. “Your body knows what to do. You just don’t trust it yet.”
Kitt straightened slightly. Tested the stance. Weight shifting, settling. Her chin came up.
“Dad teach you this?”
Peri picked up her sword. Brushed dust off the blade. “Kataero teaches me a lot of things. This I learned on my own.”
She hadn’t, exactly. She’d learned it by getting knocked down forty times until her legs figured out where they were supposed to be. But telling Kitt that wouldn’t help. Sometimes teaching meant making it look easier than it was.
“Guard up,” Peri said.
Kitt raised the practice sword. Both hands. Elbows locked.
“Don’t lock your elbows.”
“You said guard up.”
“Up, not frozen. Keep them soft. You need to move from here.” Peri tapped Kitt’s forearms. “If you’re stiff, I’ll go right through you.”
“You go right through me anyway.”
“That’s because you close your eyes.”
“I don’t close my eyes.”
“You blink. Every single time.”
“Blinking is involuntary.”
“Not in a fight it isn’t.”
They squared off in the chamber, boots scuffing on concrete. Peri moved first — slow, obvious, a diagonal cut that a blind person could have parried. Kitt caught it on the flat of her blade with a sound that rang off the tunnel walls and came back to them amplified, metallic, huge.
They both flinched at the echo. Then grinned.
“Again,” Peri said.
They went again. And again. Peri feeding her cuts at half speed, then three-quarter speed, watching how Kitt moved. She was still stiff — scared of the contact, scared of the weight behind even a pulled strike. But her feet stayed where Peri had put them. The stance held.
Something else was happening too. Something Peri didn’t notice until the fourth or fifth exchange.
Kitt was reading her.
Every cut Peri threw, Kitt’s eyes went to the shoulder first. Not the blade. The shoulder. Tracking the motion before it arrived, predicting the angle from the rotation of Peri’s body rather than waiting to see where the steel was going. She was still too slow to do anything with the information — her body couldn’t execute what her brain was calculating — but she was seeing it.
Peri threw a faster cut. Kitt’s parry was late but her angle was perfect — she’d known exactly where the blade would be, she just couldn’t get there in time.
“Stop,” Peri said.
Kitt froze. “What?”
“How did you know that was coming high?”
“You lean. When you go high, your back foot shifts and your shoulder drops.” Kitt’s voice had that careful quality it got when she thought she might be in trouble. “Is that wrong?”
Peri stared at her.
She didn’t lean. She’d been working with Kataero for months and she did not lean.
“Show me,” she said.
Kitt set the practice sword down. Stood in front of Peri. Then, with the absolute seriousness of a nine-year-old demonstrating a physics principle, she mimicked Peri’s high cut — and Peri watched her own habit played back to her, the subtle weight shift she’d never felt from the inside.
She leaned.
“Dad hasn’t told you?” Kitt asked.
“No.”
“Maybe he’s waiting for you to notice.”
“Or maybe you notice things nobody else does.”
Kitt’s mouth opened. Closed. She picked up the practice sword and became very interested in examining the cord grip.
⚙
The water was louder.
Peri noticed it first — not the sound so much as the feeling. The stream in the center of the drain had been ankle-deep when they’d arrived. Now it covered the concrete between them and lapped at the base of the support pillars.
She looked toward the feeder tunnels. The seepage that had been tracing dark lines down the walls was running now, steady rivulets joining the main flow.
“Kitt.”
Kitt was already looking. Not at the water — at the walls. At the feeder tunnels. At whatever invisible math she was doing in her head.
“We need to go,” Kitt said. Her voice had changed. Not scared. Alert. The tone she used when a circuit wasn’t behaving and she was trying to figure out why before it burned.
They moved back toward the entrance. The water was knee-deep on Peri now, thigh-deep on Kitt, and running fast enough that each step required bracing. Cold shocked through Peri’s legs. She grabbed Kitt’s arm and pulled her along, both of them wading against the current.
The spillway entrance. The concrete ledge they’d dropped from.
Water poured over it in a sheet.
Not the trickle they’d navigated on the way in. A curtain of flow, slicking the concrete face, turning the eight-foot climb into something that would put them both on their backs the moment they tried it. Peri lunged for the ledge anyway — fingers found wet stone, boots scraped, and the water knocked her hand loose before she’d made it two feet.
She dropped back down. The impact splashed to her waist.
“I can’t grip it.”
“I know,” Kitt said. She was breathing hard but her eyes were moving. Scanning the feeder tunnels, tracing the flow. “There’s a valve. The pressure’s coming from the main feeder. If we reduce the flow, the ledge drains enough to climb.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Kitt.”
“Give me a minute!”
Kitt waded into the largest feeder tunnel. The water was faster here, pulling at her legs, and her hair was immediately soaked and hanging in her face. She shoved it aside. It fell back. She shoved it again, lost her footing, caught herself against the wall with one hand while the other fought a losing battle with wet hair plastered across her eyes.
“I can’t see.”
Peri didn’t think about it. Her hands went to her own braid — her mother’s work, tight and precise, the one that survived everything — and she pulled the tie free. Copper hair spilled loose around her face, instantly wild, but she was already gathering Kitt’s hair back, twisting it, wrapping the tie around it the way she’d watched their mother do a thousand times.
It wasn’t neat. It wasn’t even good. But it held.
“There,” Peri said. “Go.”
Kitt blinked. Reached back and touched the knot. Then she turned and kept moving.
She had one hand on the tunnel wall now, fingers trailing the surface, reading it. Peri pointed toward an alcove on the right wall where a rusted access panel sat half-open. “There — there’s a housing.”
Kitt shook her head without looking. “That’s drainage. Output, not input.” Her fingers kept moving along the left wall. “The source is further down.”
Deeper. Where the light from the main chamber barely reached and the tunnel walls went dark and close. Kitt slowed. Her steps got shorter. Peri could hear her breathing — fast and thin, the way it got when Kitt was scared and trying to pretend she wasn’t.
“I’m right behind you,” Peri said.
“Ok.” Kitt’s voice was small. But she kept going.
Her fingers found it. A maintenance housing set into the left wall, half-hidden by mineral buildup. A hand-wheel valve, corroded green, connected to a gate that controlled the water channeling into the main drain. The wheel was seized — rust and mineral deposits had welded it into position, and the water pressure behind the gate was pushing against every attempt to move it.
Peri grabbed the wheel with both hands. Her arms were strong for thirteen — Kataero had made sure of that. She braced her boots against the wall and pulled.
Nothing.
She readjusted. Pulled harder. Her shoulders burned. The wheel didn’t shift.
“It won’t move. The pressure’s holding it.”
“I have an idea.” Kitt had her practice sword out. She was studying the wheel’s spokes, the housing, the gap between metal and stone. Water ran down her arms. She was shaking — cold or fear, probably both — but her hands were steady.
She slid the blade between two spokes of the wheel. Angled it against the housing.
“Push with me,” she said. “Not the wheel. The sword. It’s a lever — the spoke is the fulcrum. We’re not fighting the pressure, we’re redirecting it.”
“I don’t know what a fulcrum is.”
“Just push.”
Peri wrapped both hands around the hilt of Kitt’s practice sword, above Kitt’s smaller grip. The blade flexed. The weld at the guard creaked. Kitt’s eyes went to the joint — her jaw tight, her knuckles white around the hilt.
“It’ll hold,” Peri said. She didn’t know if that was true.
They pushed together.
The weld held.
The wheel groaned. Shifted. Then broke free with a shriek of corroded metal that filled the tunnel and rang off every surface until it was everywhere at once. Water pressure dropped. The flow cut to half, then less, the stream around their legs losing its urgency, the roar in the feeder tunnel dropping to the murmur they’d walked in on.
Peri pulled the practice sword free. Held it up. Looked at the weld.
It had held.
She looked at Kitt. Soaked, shaking, hair pulled back in a messy knot that was already slipping, standing in a draining tunnel with her arms wrapped around herself. Nine years old.
“See?” Peri wiped her free hand on her soaked shorts and grinned. “Everything works out.”
Kitt stared at the retreating water. Her jaw was tight.
“Easy for you to say. Everything works out for you.”
Somewhere deeper in the tunnel, the valve ticked as pressure equalized.
“Only because of you.”
⚙
The climb out was ugly but manageable. The water had dropped enough that Peri could brace against the ledge and haul herself up, then reach down for Kitt. She grabbed her sister under the arms the same way she’d caught her on the drop — and this time she didn’t stagger.
Late afternoon hit them like a warm hand.
The canal road ran parallel to the water, packed dirt and gravel between the spillway and the tree line. The canal itself was flat and calm, moving slow toward the locks. Sunlight on the surface turning everything amber. The warehouse a couple of miles ahead, just visible past the bend where the towpath curved.
Peri walked in the center of the road. Her copper hair — loose now, wild, freed from the braid her mother had built that morning — was drying in tangled waves around her face and shoulders. She had her sword in one hand and was already replaying the fight that hadn’t happened, her free arm cutting through the air, narrating an imaginary battle against an imaginary army that grew larger and more dangerous with every telling.
“— and then I’d come in from the left, right? Because they’d expect the right, everyone goes right, but I’d fake the shoulder drop and —”
She spun, slashing at nothing, boots kicking up dust.
“— and they’d never see it coming because they don’t watch the shoulder like you said, they watch the blade, and by then it’s —”
She jabbed her sword at the sky, victorious over an enemy that had never existed and never stood a chance.
⚙
Kitt walked a few steps behind.
The practice sword rested across her shoulder, balanced at the point she’d ground specifically for carrying. Her hair was still pulled back in Peri’s tie — messy, already loosening, but holding. Her shirt was soaked through and her boots squelched with every step.
She watched Peri move. The wild hair, the easy stride, the sword swinging through imaginary enemies like the world was a game she was winning. The way her sister’s body just did what her brain asked, no lag, no negotiation, no fear.
The warehouse appeared around the bend. Smoke from the stove. The sound of the lock gates cycling through their evening routine.
“Mom’s going to kill us,” Kitt said.
Peri stopped mid-swing. Turned around. Took in the full picture — both of them soaked, filthy, carrying weapons they weren’t supposed to have, two hours past when they should have been home.
“She’ll be mad. But then she won’t.” Peri shrugged. “Probably force us to shower before dinner.”
“Yeah.”
They walked for a moment. The canal beside them, the road ahead, the warehouse getting closer.
“Peri?”
“Yeah.”
“Think I’ll ever be as good as you?”
Peri stopped. She turned and looked at her sister. At the way Kitt held the practice sword — balanced, easy, the weight sitting exactly where it should. The way she’d always held it. Like the blade made sense to her in a way that went past words.
“You’re already better,” Peri said. “C’mon. Before mom sends Connor after us.”
She turned back toward the warehouse. Started running.
Kitt stood there for a second. Just a second.
Then she shifted the practice sword on her shoulder, found the balance point by feel, and chased her sister home.
Wilted Crowns — Book 1 of the Ironforged Series is coming 03/31/2026. Thank you for taking a moment to enjoy this short story. Find more here. — JT