“You smile at the heat of metal and not at me,” Thorne teased her.
“You are not at eight hundred degrees,” she said, and drew the blade to the waiting oil.
The plunge was music and violence. The oil kissed, spat, and smoked. The blade stiffened in the quench like a wild thing finding a name. When the rush settled, she lifted it and set the length to the anvil, listening with palm and ear for the tiny cries that say whether a spine has cracked or kept faith. No shriek. She breathed.
She forgot Thorne while she worked. She forgot the ring, the dome, even the dragon high beyond the mountain lip. She moved through the steps that had taught her to keep company with fire. Normalize. Temper. Polish a window in the steel to see the temper line wink like a secret river.
Somewhere between the second tempering and the soft regrind, she felt Thorne come to stand a pace from her left shoulder. He did not speak. He did not reach for the blade. He watchedher hands.
When she set the length to rest, he spoke as if they were already in conversation. “That is how you will train your magic.”
She did not look away from the faint ghost of him shimmering in the blade. “I cannot plunge my chest into oil.”
“The oil is breath,” he said. “The heat is thought. The hammer is a choice. You will not force your Aether into shape. You will take its temperature and wait for the right color. Then you will ask it to remember who it is.”
“And if it refuses?”
“Then you ask again. With better timing.”
She set the blade down gently and finally faced him. “You speak as if you have been trained to know limits and ends.”
“I unfortunately and fortunately have. I know flame,” he said. “I know shadows. I know what it is like to break and be broken. I know what happens when you let either turn feral in your mind. They do not make you better. They make you ruin.”
His gaze held hers. Something unguarded briefed the edges of his pupils, gone before she could name it.
“I will try,” she said.
“No,” he answered. “You will practice.”
He took her back to the Scorchfield in late afternoon.
“Stand,” Thorne said. “Feet as if you were about to draw steel from the quench.”
She obeyed.
“No magic,” he said. “Only the breath that keeps you from reaching for it.”
“That sounds like magic,” she muttered, eyes half-lidded.
“It is discipline.”
He walked in circles and spoke without looking at her face. “Call your awareness to your hands. Not to the scars. To the temperature of the skin. To the tiny drafts sliding between your fingers and the wood. Your hands tell you more truth than your anger does.”
She did. Heat gathered where her palm cupped the staff. A very cool tickle moved along the backs of her fingers where the wind threaded the space between them and the rod. The wood wasfaintly sticky with oil and sweat. It squeaked when she adjusted a fraction.
“Good,” he said. “Now to your feet. Let them speak.”
“It is saying the ground is not level.”
“It is never level. Learn anyway.”
He did not come near her for a while. He let his voice touch what his hands did not. He drew her attention to small anchors she had never thought to use, the shift of ankle bones as she prepared to move. The slack in her jaw allowed a breath to be deeper than the last. The way her shoulders wanted to lift when she was afraid, and how lowering them on purpose cut the panic in half.
“Now look for a thread. Not a rope. Not a flood. A thread, no thicker than the line you file into a blade to find where the curve truly lives.”
“I do not know how to find that thread, ” she said
“You do,” he said. “You do it without hearing yourself name it. Breathe. When you exhale, look for the place in your ribs that wants to glow. Do not make it glow. Watch it want.”
