“Lower your right hand,” he said. “Your grip is built for an anvil, not for a fight.”
“I was built for both,” she snapped and lunged.
He let her overextend. He let her believe for a heartbeat that she would strike his temple. Then his staff bit just below her wrist and twisted, clean and straightforward, and the staff leapt from her fingers. It clattered across the ground.
“Retrieve it,” he said.
She did, jaw tight, the drag of breath scraping against old pride. When she straightened, he had shifted his stance by a finger’s breadth, as if to say: I will be here when your temper is done speaking.
They moved again. Her shoulders remembered the hammer and the bellows and the feel of steel. Her body knew how to endure heat. It did not yet know how to bend it. He attacked in short, disciplined patterns, never the same sequence twice. A strike to test her lower guard. A feint to pull her into a high block. A check to see if she could read a pivot before it happened. He drew her out of shape as a smith draws a billet long and thin, tapping at the same place until it lengthens or snaps.
“Your weight is forward,” he said, as her staff skimmed his ribs with air and nothing more. “You think offense is the only language.”
“It is the only language that keeps a blade from your throat.”
He stepped inside her guard with small, brutal grace and set the end of his staff against the hollow just below her sternum. Not a strike, just a warning. Her breath stalled in outrage.
“It is not the blade that kills,” he said softly. “It is the breath you spend unwisely before it arrives.”
He shoved. She went down hard, dust puffing around her like the ghost of a storm. The sky above the sheared dome was clean and blue, indifferent to rage. She lay there a heartbeat, chest bright with ache, palms stinging. Her fingers curled as if to find a hammer that was not there.
“Up,”Nyxariel murmured, the voice a warm pressure along her bones.“There is no lesson in the ground.”
Thaelyn rolled to her feet. “Again,” she said.
He obliged. Minutes braided into an hour. The hour untwined into something longer. Thorne never raised his voice. He did not praise or scold. He observed, adjusted, and punished laziness. When she flagged, he sent her running the ring, quiet and relentless, counting only in the way his eyes flicked to the sun’s angle and back to her stride. When she finished, he put the staff in her hands again and set her feet with two quick touches, clinical as a surgeon’s, never lingering.
She wanted him to be cruel. Cruelty would have given her a clean edge to hate. He gave her something harder. He gave her expectations.
“Your stance is honest now,” he said at last.
“I am glad my honesty pleases you,” she said, breathless.
“It is not for me.” He nodded at the staff. “Again.”
She struck. He met her. The wooden rods met, bit, and parted. The rhythm found her. The staff stopped being a stick and became the length of her arm extended beyond what her bone could carry. She felt the counterweight in her hips, the pull of core and breath. Heat sluiced through muscle, not rage-heat, but the sound of heat at work.
She feinted. He did not take it. She grinned and changed levels, swept for his ankle. He jumped and tapped her shoulder with the bored courtesy of a teacher marking a page.
“Do not smile or change expression when you are open,” he said.
She scowled and drove forward. He let her press until her lungsbegged, then stepped aside and watched her spend the last of a small reservoir. When she hung on the edge of exhaustion, he spoke as if reading the ledger of her breaths.
“Stop.”
Her body obeyed before her mind did. She stared at him, swaying. “Why?”
“Because you will break form in exactly three movements and then convince yourself you lost because of strength, not because of discipline.”
“Maybe I lost because you are hammering me with your mouth.”
The barest curve tugged his mouth again. “Hydrate.”
There was a jar waiting at the ring’s edge. She drank and felt the world tilt back into place. When she returned, he stood at the far side of the ring, examining a seam in the warded stone.
“This fracture,” he said without turning, “was sealed the night Nyxariel came. It remembers you.”
“I remember it too,” she said quietly.
