In the following days, Aridel and Mei started to settle for a strict schedule of training that focused on three main aspects, physical training in the mornings, starting well before the break of dawn with a pause for breakfast. Then lunch and cultivation for the whole afternoon. Right after dinner, both went over the many manuals, booklets and tomes needed to get Mei up to par with the knowledge of the world she desperately needed if they wanted to fool people into not noticing that she was not the previous Mei from before the wedding.
Aridel had never spent so much time with a woman before and he had been guarded about the new situation at first. As Mei had noticed on the second day, he was a man of his own world, wise, cultured and highly educated, but still a man with preconcieved notions of how women and men differed. Sure, there were women warriors and in his own army, there were women soldiers but they were simply nowhere near the number of men he had under his direct command nor had he been in close contact with them. It could be said that women had an army and ranks of their own.
-A lady with a family so powerful in the empire´s capital like yours would train and cultivate, but unless desperate times called for it, she would not step into the battlefield-he mentioned
-But I will be-she asserted- You said so yourself, that I will be by your side always-she laughed- I will totally blow my cover if I have to make merry with highborn ladies and speak about tea and embroidery-she shuddered.
Mei was right and he knew it. He saw just how dedicated she was to the training, how inmersed in becoming stronger she was and he admired her for it. She was studious, even with cultivation, the aspect that was most foreing for her and thus the one where she advanced the slowest, still she pushed and tried relentlessly until she comprehended what she needed to do.
But by the third day, he recognized she was a loner, same as he was. She was able to deal with the servants and the guards, she was kind to everyone and even gentle with the few servant kids that lived in the Marshall manor but she maintained a certain distance from everyone, even from Nanny Coco. If she only had to live a life within the social circles of the capital, she would be miserable.
Still, she started to learn about those things too, Aridel noticed how Mei always made it a point to listen deeply to the servants and to Nanny Coco as they brought news from outside the manor. She even started to draw a document herself, filled with family trees and names so as to not become lost in the maze of social relationships.
-I think you will be able to learn about tea and poetry when you set your mind to it- he said as he saw her frowning while reading an old treatise about herbs and plants that also had a few poems in it.
She gazed at him and smiled lightly, happy at his compliment. It was already their tenth night together and it was nearing the time to go to sleep as the night was very advanced.
The first days had been hard, even for him. He lost much sleep first as he dealt with the aftermath of the attack, their wedding rites and also with getting used to having a woman in his personal space. She slept like a log instead, if only for a short few hours. Completely unconcerned with the fact that a man was also in the bed, however spacious it was, completely oblivious to the fact that she slept only in a thin robe and always with her long gray tresses fixed on a loose braid. So completely unaware that her simple way of dressing, talking and just her bearing was attracting him even more than the charms of the most gorgeous courtesan.
She was not restrained with him on the physical sense either. She woke up very early and started to get ready with her training clothes while on his view. He had to admit he had escaped with the excuse of his morning ablutions the first times he had seen how she took off her sleeping robes. The image of her stretching her body, how the profile of face lifted, her neck, her back and waist, lined by her hair and the robe just covering her hips had been burned into his memory as the most alluring thing he had ever seen.
He had no one to blame for that particular issue. He had been the one to announce that Mei would reside with him and not in some courtyard out of his sight. As the days passed, he realized it was a sweet torture, an intimacy not many people could endure nor like. It was even harder to acept that he rather liked it.
His training grounds also became possesed by her. She had been absolutely impressed when he showed the pavilion where he trained privately and begged for a trip to the weapons vault where she tried all the weapons her strenght allowed her. He had been exceptical at first when he saw how she trained by stretching and bending in repeated sequences every day until she explained that her body was weak and had to be made carefully fit before she tried more intensive methods. By the fifth day, she had started to add weight to her arms and legs and just yesterday she had increased the weight as well as to practice hit moves.
He had used the time to practice with the sword and the axe while she did all that bending she called tai chi. However, people would call him a saint with a peerless concentration as he did not go out of form even while she was right there beside him. clad with a light upper garment that left her collarbone and arms completely bare and training pants that allowed her to do flexible moves without exposing her. She had shocked him into blushing furiously too when she said she would have wanted a pool to swim and then went on to say that in her world, that was considered one of the best training methods as it excersised the whole body. He had said that clothes, especially women clothes would make it too troublesome and she drew a woman in swiming garments in a spare piece of paper. He had imagined her on those and said he would find a way to build one for her, on the condition that she would only train there with him, under the security of complete secrecy and plenty of concealling enchantments. She just gazed at him with naked lust in her eyes.
-Dont worry, you are the only one I want to see me like that...
He had started to help her today with her hit moves. She knew most by memory, as she had had over 30 years of previous training and knew many styles of hand to hand combat that he had never seen before. They had agreed to train moves only for the next couple of days while her body strenght increased and they could go at it on a more intense way. He knew they would reach a point, perhaps 2 months from now when they would even train with live weapons and that in less than half a year, she would be able to use what she learned while on cultivation in real combat too.
-It will be just in time for us to go back to Radiant City-