Without Supervision

  "In the absence of correction, the body returns to what it already knows. This is either excellent news or a significant problem, depending entirely on what the body already knows."

  · · · ? · · ·

  Bj?rn left on a Mánadagr (Monday) before dawn with a pack, his good cloak, and the particular quality of absence he carried on trips that weren’t fully explained.

  He did this, on average, twice a year. The explanation was always some version of work—a garrison consultation in the next settlement, a supply run to a larger post, something that required him specifically and would take a few days. Sometimes it did. Sometimes it quietly became weeks. The explanation was always technically sufficient. It also always had the texture of a thing said rather than a thing explained, which was different. Eirik had been noticing the difference for two years without commenting on it, because pushing at closed doors produced nothing except a slightly cooler temperature in the room.

  His mother’s face, when she said goodbye, did the thing.

  It was subtle—so subtle most people would have missed it entirely. The fraction of a second where her hand on Bj?rn’s arm wasn’t casual. The reserved way her posture held itself together around something larger than the present moment. Then it resolved back into her usual composure, and she turned to the herb bundles like the world hadn’t shifted.

  Rí watched all of this from behind the door with the focused attention of a child gathering data.

  “Is Papa coming back?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Sigrid said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because he always does.” She picked up the yarrow she’d been sorting. “Come help me with this.”

  Rí came with the particular grace of a five-year-old who had decided her assistance was a gift rather than a request. Eirik watched his mother’s hands move through the herbs with the steadiness of someone whose hands had stopped telling on her a long time ago.

  He picked up the practice sword and went out to the yard.

  Without his father present, the training yard felt different. Not worse—just quieter. Less weight in the air. Less of that steady pressure of being observed by someone who knew exactly what you were doing wrong before you finished doing it.

  Eirik ran his warmup footwork, settled his stance, and moved into the sword forms.

  First pass: fine.

  Second: fine.

  Third: still fine.

  Fourth pass—his grip went wrong.

  Not a little wrong. Not the usual “seven-year-old hands are small and the weapon is stubborn” wrong.

  His fingers shifted into an interlocking grip—left hand folded over right, weight forward, the exact shape of—

  He stopped mid-sequence.

  Corrected it.

  Kept going.

  Fifth pass: wrong again. This time his right hand slid dominant and his wrists angled barrel-high, like he was waiting on an outside pitch.

  Baseball.

  He had not thought the word baseball in… a while. But apparently his hands had.

  He stopped. Looked at his hands. They looked back at him with the calm innocence of hands that believed they had done an excellent job.

  “No,” he told them. “Absolutely not.”

  Sixth pass: interlocking again.

  He set the sword down and stood there in the early light, having a quiet argument with his own motor memory.

  So the memories are fading, he thought, but the body is a hoarder.

  The football playbook was gone. The names were going. Whole parts of his prior life were turning into gaps that didn’t hurt anymore.

  But apparently how to hold sporting equipment was lodged somewhere deep and durable, right next to breathing and blinking and the mysterious urge to run directly into puddles.

  He took the sword again and started from the beginning with one goal: catch the grip the moment it tried to shift.

  It worked for two full passes.

  On the third pass he caught himself thinking about foot placement instead of his hands, and arrived at the end in what was, frankly, some kind of… racket grip.

  He didn’t even know what sport it belonged to. His hands were apparently freelancing now.

  “Your right hand is wrong,” said a voice behind him.

  Eirik turned.

  His mother stood at the edge of the yard holding a cup of something warm, watching with the expression she wore when she’d been there longer than you wanted her to be.

  “I know,” Eirik said.

  “You’ve corrected it six times in the last two passes and arrived at six different wrong configurations.” She sipped. “What does it default to?”

  He considered the least complicated way to explain this. “Old habits,” he said. “Things my hands remember from before. They keep trying to be helpful.”

  Sigrid looked at his hands with the focused interest she brought to things that were medically unusual. “From before,” she said—not a question, not a door closing. Just acknowledgment placed carefully on the shelf.

  “They want to hold something else,” Eirik said. “Not a sword.”

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “What kind of something else?”

  “A stick you swing at a ball,” he said. Then, after a beat: “Two different kinds, actually. That’s the problem. They can’t agree.”

  Something moved through her face—almost a smile, almost that complicated look she sometimes got when he said something that brushed against things she wasn’t going to talk about.

  “Come here,” she said, and set down the cup.

  Her approach to the grip was different from Bj?rn’s. Where Bj?rn built from mechanics and leverage, Sigrid built from sensation.

  She took his hands and adjusted them with quiet precision, not explaining the geometry so much as placing it where it belonged.

  “There,” she said. “Now keep your ?nd-current moving through your palms while you hold it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because your body learns through feeling, not through thinking.” She tapped his knuckles lightly. “You already know the correct position. You don’t need more thinking. You need your hands to recognize it when they drift.”

  He ran his ?nd-current through the palms—just enough to heighten contact, not enough to do anything dramatic.

  The grip immediately felt different. Not stronger. Not weaker.

  More present.

  “Now move,” she said. “Slowly. The form doesn’t matter. Just keep moving and feel where it tries to go wrong.”

  He moved through the pattern. Slow. Controlled.

  And there—clear as a tide turning—he felt the moment his hands wanted to slide into the old grip.

  He caught it before it happened.

  “Oh,” he said.

  “Yes,” Sigrid said, with quiet satisfaction.

  He ran it again at normal speed. The third movement tried to shift—caught. The sixth tried—caught. By the end, the grip stayed correct and his hands felt… informed, like they’d been given a better option rather than being punished into compliance.

  “That’s what your father is doing when he corrects you,” Sigrid said. “He does it from outside. This is from inside.” She looked at him for a moment, the way she did when deciding whether to say something and choosing the shape of it carefully. “The channeling work is never just about herbs, Eirik. It’s about learning your body well enough to work with it rather than at it.”

  He hesitated. “Did you teach Papa that?”

  The expression again—the one he didn’t have a name for.

  “Your father and I taught each other a great many things,” she said. “A long time ago.” She picked up her cup. “Keep working. Same approach. I’ll be inside if your hands invent a seventh sport.”

  She went inside.

  Rí, who had apparently been sitting on the fence for the last ten minutes waiting for her moment, immediately climbed down and grabbed a stick from the ground.

  “I’m training now,” Rí announced.

  The stick was slightly longer than Rí was tall. She held it in both hands with a grip that was, honestly, at least as reasonable as any of the wrong grips Eirik had produced earlier, which he chose not to mention because he wanted to survive the afternoon.

  “What are you training?” he asked.

  “Sword,” she said.

  “With a stick.”

  “It’s a practice sword,” she said patiently, as if explaining something to someone slow. “Like yours. Only mine is better.”

  His practice sword was shaped and weighted. Hers was a birch branch. He could already see the argument forming if he pressed the point, so he didn’t.

  “Okay,” he said. “Show me your grip.”

  She did. It wasn’t bad. Which said something about either natural aptitude or the fact that she’d been watching him and Bj?rn train for two years and absorbed far more than anyone had credited.

  He adjusted her thumbs. She let him, because she had already decided the big question.

  “Now what?” she asked.

  “Now you hold it and feel how heavy it is.”

  “It’s not heavy.”

  “For you it is. You’re five.”

  “I’m almost six.”

  “Almost six, then.”

  Rí held the stick with an expression of someone taking a task seriously that she had not previously considered worth taking seriously.

  After a moment she admitted, grudgingly: “It’s a little heavy.”

  “Yes. That’s why we do carry work before swing work.”

  “Papa doesn’t make you carry your sword around.”

  “Papa made me do carry work for a year and a half before I ever held a sword.”

  Rí absorbed this like it was a personal insult to the universe. “That seems like a long time.”

  “It was,” Eirik agreed. “But now I can hold the sword without my arms giving out, which means I have the thing I was actually practicing.”

  Rí stared at the training post like she was considering fighting it on principle.

  “Can I hit it?” she asked.

  “Not yet.”

  “When?”

  “When you can hold guard for two minutes without your arms dropping.”

  Rí set herself in what she interpreted as guard—creative, enthusiastic, technically incorrect—and held it through sheer determination. Her arms started drifting at forty seconds. At a minute she was holding it through force of personality alone, which was… honestly a good foundation for a Bj?rnsson.

  Eirik let her go to ninety seconds before calling it.

  “Good,” he said.

  Rí lowered the stick like she had just proved something and then sat down immediately because her arms had a different opinion.

  “Tomorrow you’ll hold it longer,” he said.

  “I know,” she said from the ground with absolute certainty. “I always do.”

  Astrid arrived after midday with her practice axe over one shoulder and the expression she wore when she’d heard something was happening and wanted to see it.

  She surveyed the yard—Eirik running sword forms with notably better grip consistency, Rí resting between her sets like a tiny veteran—and said, “Is she training?”

  “Yes,” Rí said before Eirik could answer.

  “With a stick,” Astrid observed.

  “It’s a practice sword.”

  Astrid looked at the branch, then at Rí, and made the mature decision to decline the argument. “Right,” she said, and set her axe against the post. Then she nodded at Eirik’s hands. “Grip’s been giving you trouble.”

  “How do you know?”

  “You’re moving careful,” Astrid said. “You do that when you’re thinking too much. When it’s working you look annoying and confident.”

  “That is… not a compliment.”

  “It is. Probably.”

  She grabbed a spare practice sword and turned it in her hand. “Want to do slow work? I won’t use the axe. You can focus on the grip. I get practice too.”

  This was why Astrid was useful: she proposed solutions that were actually solutions.

  They ran slow exchanges for an hour—controlled, half speed, feeling for mechanics and gaps rather than doing anything that resembled fighting.

  “Your footwork is better than your sword work,” Astrid said during a pause.

  “Everyone says that.”

  “Because it’s true.” She shrugged. “But it’s not a problem. It’s just order. You built one thing first, now you’re building the other.”

  “They’ll match up,” Eirik said.

  Astrid made a face like obviously. “Yeah. You’re barely seven. You’ve got time.”

  That evening, doing the palm-current grip work his mother had shown him, he found himself thinking about weight.

  The grip problem had been muscle memory, yes. But it was also—he could feel it now—partly that the practice sword didn’t weigh enough to punish bad movement in the way a real one would. He was learning geometry on something light enough that the mistake sometimes slid by instead of biting.

  He needed something heavier. Not a real sword—he wasn’t ready, and it would be absurdly expensive anyway—but a training weight. A sword-shaped inconvenience. Something that made the body honest.

  The nearest proper smithing market was several days’ travel. He’d need Bj?rn back. He’d need timing. He’d need to convince an adult that this was a reasonable thing to sell to a seven-year-old, which would be the hardest part.

  He set the practice sword against the wall and stretched his palms, letting the channeling warmth fade.

  “Did the grip work?” Rí asked from across the room.

  He’d thought she was asleep.

  “Yes,” Eirik said.

  “Mama taught you something.”

  “Yes.”

  A pause. The faint rustle of a child deciding whether she was actually going to sleep or had more to say.

  “She knows lots of things,” Rí said finally. “Lots and lots. More than she says.”

  “I know,” Eirik said.

  “Papa too.”

  “I know.”

  “More than everyone here,” Rí said with the certainty of someone reporting a fact she’d confirmed. “I can tell. I don’t know why they don’t say.”

  Eirik lay in the dark and thought about Sigrid’s hand on Bj?rn’s arm this morning. About Bj?rn’s cloak and the trips that weren’t explained. About doors that stayed closed because pushing at them didn’t open them.

  “I don’t know either,” he said. “But I think they have reasons.”

  “Good reasons?”

  He remembered the stillness in his mother’s face when she said goodbye. “I think so,” he said. “Yeah.”

  “Okay,” Rí said, satisfied—like she’d filed it properly—and fell asleep.

  Eirik listened to the house settle. His hands still tingled faintly from the palm-current work. The grip had held.

  Without supervision, the body returned to what it already knew.

  Today, at least, he had taught it something new.