"You sound," Harold said, gripping nothing, walking, "like my first captain. Man would not let you haul fast in a swell. Said the sea does not pay for speed, it pays for not dropping the trap."
"Your captain and my teacher would have gotten along," Rowan said. "Mine says slow is not late. Slow is on time."
"Teacher still living?"
"Very much. He will be there Saturday. He is seventy and complains about chairs professionally, so if you meet him, do not offer him a folding one unless you want a lecture about furniture and decline."
Harold stopped at the end of the bars, breathing carefully, pleased with himself in the restrained manner of a man who does not want the room to make a fuss and also wants the fuss itemized. "Saturday," he said. "Margaret says the whole thing is for the fund that pays for my, what do you call it, my bars at home."
"The home rails, and the shower seat, and the ramp at the library," Rowan said. "Half the town's independence is being paid for by people grappling in a sail loft, which tells you everything about Greyhaven."
"And you are in it? Margaret said you might be in it. She heard it at the bakery."
"I might be demonstrating," Rowan said. "Drills. Technique. Nothing wild."
"Against the fast one from Portland," Harold said, with satisfaction, as if the bakery had been thorough. "Margaret showed me a video. On her telephone. Man moves like a cat in a room full of rocking chairs." He looked at her, and his gaze, for all the stroke had taken from his left side, had lost nothing in the way of directness. "You are not fast like that."
"No," Rowan said. "I am not."
"He know that?" Harold asked.
"He will find it out at the speed it happens," she said, and Harold laughed, a real laugh, sudden enough that he had to put a hand down, and she did not mind the hand, because the laugh had been worth a rail and they both knew it.
Rowan drilled with Tess again, because routine was a kind of sandbagging against nerves, and because Tess, sensing the night needed it, did not tease her. They worked closed guard, Rowan's oldest home, the position she had rebuilt her whole game around in the years after the knee, when open guard and standing passes and everything that required spring and scramble had been taken away from her one by one and she had been left, furious and grieving, with the positions a person could play lying on her back with her legs around an opponent's waist and all the time in the world. Ilya had given her the closed guard the way you give someone a house. Posture, he had said. Angles. The slow breaking of a man's structure the way the tide breaks a pier, not by hitting it harder but by never once stopping and never once hurrying. She had hated it for a year. She had wanted scrambles. Then, one winter night, a visiting purple belt twice as athletic as she was had spent four minutes inside her guard discovering, with mounting disbelief, that there was no moment in it where rushing helped him, and Rowan had come off the mat shaking, not with triumph but with recognition, the way Harold must have felt at his kitchen counter. This was the thing her body could still do. Not the old thing, slower. A different thing, entirely, that happened to be slow.
"Your guard," Tess said, standing in it, hands on Rowan's knees, doing her sincere best to posture out of it at drill speed, "is like being argued with by a librarian. There is no raised voice and yet I am losing."
"Break my posture down again," Rowan said. "You are leaving your elbow out when you turn. That is the whole invitation. A person is only as trapped as the last mistake they have not noticed yet, Ilya says."
"Ilya says a great many things for a man who claims to dislike talking."
"He dislikes wasting it. There is a difference. Again. Slower this time, and watch what your right hand does when you think about standing."