"That's beautiful," Priya said. "It's also a great way to lose a gala."
"If they beat me with my own lessons, then the lessons are true." Sabine shrugged, a small Gallic movement, one shoulder, more philosophy than gesture. "And if the lessons are true, Priya, then they are true also for me. I am not standing still while they improve. I am in the circle too. Every morning I learn their feet better than they learn my teaching. Which of us is being sharpened, do you think?" She smiled then, and it was not an entirely kind smile. "Besides. A lesson given halfway is a debt. I do not like debts."
Etienne Fabre called on Sunday afternoons, from Lyon, where it was already evening, and he called on video with the camera set too close, so that Sabine saw mostly his forehead and the enormous white eyebrows that had terrified three generations of fencing students. He was seventy-four. He had been her coach from the time she was fifteen, a thin, furious girl from Clermont-Ferrand with feet too fast for her judgment, and he had built her, deliberately and against the fashion of the time, backwards: defence first, always defence first, in a sport and a country that worshipped the attack.
"You are teaching the elephants to waltz," he said, when she described the classes. "I approve. Tell me about the big one. The heavy one. Does he breathe like a bellows still?"
"He is learning to move without planting. His power breaks down when he cannot plant, Etienne. It is like watching a cathedral learn to be a tent."
"And you will face these two in your circle," Etienne said. It was not a question. His forehead shifted closer to the camera, an old man's geography. "Sabine. I have read about this gala from your Carla. A promotional event. A promoter. Two against one. You understand that in my day, we called this an ambush with catering."
"It is controlled. No strikes. Touches and takedowns only, and Vic referees, and the conditions are in writing."
"Conditions are always in writing," Etienne said. "So was your selection."
There it was, as it always arrived, without malice and without warning, the way the past arrives in any long friendship: woven into the ordinary. Once a year, perhaps twice, they touched the touch. The one touch. Sabine had been twenty-seven, at the peak of her powers and the edge of them, in the final bout of the Olympic selection, against a girl of twenty-two named Camille Aubert whom she had beaten four times in five meetings. The bout had gone to fourteen-all. One touch for Paris. One touch for everything — the apartment with the view of the river that the federation kept for its Olympians, the sponsors, the name in the record that does not fade. Camille had attacked, a wild, desperate, technically unforgivable flèche, and Sabine had done what twenty years of Etienne's teaching told her to do: she had held her distance, trusted her defence, waited for the mistake inside the attack — and the mistake had come a half-second too late, and Camille's blade had landed a half-second too early, and the light had gone red on Camille's side, and that was the whole of it. Fifteen-fourteen. The applause had the decency to be brief.
Sabine had shaken hands. She had congratulated the girl in the press room and meant perhaps seventy percent of it. And then, in the months that followed, she had discovered the true architecture of the loss: she could have chased another cycle — four more years, another selection, she was not old, fencers peak late — but she understood, with a clarity that frightened her, that she no longer wanted to win. She wanted to not have lost, which is a different sport entirely, and an unwinnable one. So she walked away, cleanly, at twenty-seven, rather than spend her thirties becoming bitter in public. Etienne had never forgiven the federation. He had forgiven her in about a week, which for Etienne Fabre constituted a collapse of standards.