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"Oh, goodness!" Mrs. Pemberton snapped, which was the closest the governess ever got to swearing.
"Are you alright?" Roland asked, letting her sword fall to her side, and stepping forward. There was a splash of red on the ground. "Oh, I am sorry, I hadn't meant to actually--"
"It's quite alright, Emily, I was well aware it would always be a risk." Nonetheless, her face was somewhat green, and she looked far more at a loss about what to do with her own sword.
Roland took it, and hung both weapons on the training wrack. By then, Pemberton had already stopped the bleeding with a handkerchief. "Best get it clean right away," she said, and so Roland sent one of the runners to fetch some hot water. That was the nice things about these Chinese camps, being so organized; they almost always had things like that readily available.
The cut was not deep. Roland truly had not been aiming to maim, and they'd both been using dull, practice blades. Pemberton did not flinch as it was dressed. "You should see the size of cuts in the kitchen," she laughed. "I've seen people lose whole digits."
When Pemberton had first been hired on as her governess, Roland frankly had seen her as nothing more than a soggy piece of tissue paper paper likely to dissolve at the first sign of trouble, but she had to admit that under all those gloves and petticoats, she was made of far firmer stuff than that.
Not that anyone could fairly blame Roland for that initial assumption, she felt. Pemberton had been utterly miserable those first months. Always telling Roland to keep her legs crossed or to use more ladylike language. Flinching every time Temeraire moved as if the dragon might gobble them all down. Meanwhile, in private, every other sentence insinuated that Captain Laurence might be taking her to bed.
Ha! The captain, taking advantage. The very thought was laughable. Even if Laurence wasn't made of something like eighty-percent honour by weight, he was not so stupid to have hired a governess if he had been.
But while the thought of such a thing had surely never so much as crossed Laurence's mind, that did not mean it had not crossed others'. Roland had had to fend off a number of advances over the years, with prejudice. They'd mostly died down by now, but she still had to give some fellow a black eye occasionally. None of that meant she needed to leave the corps.
And that was what she'd been afraid might happen, even as she had refused to voice the thought. That Mrs. Pemberton would somehow devise a way to make her leave.
She couldn't have, of course. Even Captain Laurence could not have, if that had been her intent. Excidium certainly would not have stood for it.
No. The truth of the matter, it was not anything Mrs. Pemberton had said or did which had irritated Emily so, nor anything she could have done. It was everyone else.
You must not let them think of you as a woman, Mother had said, when she had been dressing her in the green of her very first runner uniform. You're an aviator, first and foremost. One day you'll be a captain. But as soon as they start thinking of you as a 'girl' or a 'lady', then they'll find all sorts of ways to make your job harder.
Roland had witnessed that firsthand, with how everyone had been treating Captain Harcourt, these last few years. That had been a necessary evil, for the sake of a child, for the sake of Lily's captain. Emily did not intend to make it for anything less, herself. And now, here she was, running around with a governess trailing after her, going on about combing her hair!
"Well." Pemberton slapped her knees in an imitation of a soldier, and hefted herself back to her feet. "Let us give it another shot."
"Are you certain?" asked Roland, dubious.
"Yes," was her only reply.
So they picked up the swords and went again. Roland was more careful this time, slower. It was difficult to hold oneself back. Upper strike, middle strike, lower strike; the basic forms.
Pemberton had learned from the painful lesson. She did not leave herself wide and open, as she had before, and was quicker meeting Roland's strikes. After another five sets she said, "No need to be quite that light, Emily."
The governess was brave, Roland considered, as she increased he force by a faction. (Upper strike.) It took guts to pick up a weapon one had never learned before. (Middle strike.) But it was more than that. (Lower strike.) To take a sea voyage, half-way across the world. (Upper strike.) Away from all her relations and friends. (Middle strike.) And Mrs. Pemberton had done it, to lend a hand to a girl she thought might be in need. (Lower strike.)
Clang, clang, clang. Pemberton met every one of Roland's blows. She was panting heavily and sweating by the end of the set, but she still kept her sword raised. "Another round?"
"No," Roland said. "That'll do for tonight. We're on the wing tomorrow; you'll not want your muscles too unhappy with you."
"That is probably wise," Pemberton conceded, with a tilt of her head.
The pair of them made their ways to the nearby pond stream which had been requisitioned by the army as a makeshift bath. They were not the only ones with the similar idea; there was a group of nine or so soldiers ahead of them, scrubbing the day's grit away. Roland was not shy of bathing in front of her fellow soldiers, but these were the Chinese aviators, which meant they were women, and so this time neither was Pemberton, either. The two groups waved at each other, and smiled.
And it was nice, Roland had to acknowledge, as she gritted her teeth against the cold water. To not have to be on the look out for any funny business. To not have her body be the odd one out.
It was nice, sometimes, to have someone besides her fellow crew to talk to.
"Brisk," Pemberton said, her skin covered in goose pimples. "But oddly refreshing, after all of that thrashing about."
"Mmmmn," Roland agreed, preoccupied as she tried to reach some piece of grit she could feel somehow lodged between her shoulder blades.
Pemberton stepped forward and worked the dirt out for her. "I know I have said so before," the governess said, voice soft. "But it bears repeating; I do appreciate the time you are taking on my behalf."
"Not at all. I am happy to," Roland said, and to her mild surprise, meant it.
"I am sure everyone back at home would think me quite out of my mind, if they were to see me making a fool of myself, swinging around a sword," Pemberton admitted. "I suppose you only think me daft for having left it so long."
"Never." Roland placed a hand on Pemberton's shoulder. "I would never look down on someone who wishes to defend herself, or begrudge someone who never had the opportunity or need before to learn."
When Roland had first met Pemberton, she had read disgust in her every wrinkled nose, distaste in each curl of her lip. But when Alice smiled, as she did now, it did make Emily wonder how she had ever read such malice in her gentle, open face.
Society could be very unkind to women. That was why Alice had come; to look after her. It was merely time that Emily return the favour.