What a ridiculous instruction. She was absurd for trying. She tried anyway. She breathed in. She breathed out. She watched the place in her chest that had shattered the sky and saw how it flinched away the moment she looked.
“Good,” he said.
Her mouth twitched. She did not lose the thread. It stayed, brittle as glass. She drew it through the center of her without tugging. It wanted to snag on fear. She smoothed it with her breath. It tried to leap greedily into a flood.
The air around her took on a faint clarity. She thought she might have seen the tiniest film of light gathered where her fingers held the staff. She did not open them. She did not trust sight yet.
“Enough,” Thorne said, a gentle severing.
The thread dissolved without protest. It had not been asked to carry more than it could. She looked at Thorne and wanted to say something dangerous, like thank you. She said instead, “It did not break me to stop.”
“No,” he said. “Stopping is where strength hides.”
She swallowed. “I have never been allowed to stop.”
His jaw flexed. “Then learn it now.”
They moved into footwork again. He pressed her just to the edge where the thread might have come unspooled if it had not been allowed to rest, and because it had rested, it did not. It sat like a small candle inside her, not trying to be a bonfire, not starving. When he feinted high and struck low, she did not swing like a bell at panic’s pull. She stepped aside. The staff hummed in her hands and touched his with a slight, neat sound that felt like the first actual word in a language she had always wanted to speak.
He looked at their crossed staffs and then at her face. For a moment, something like pride warmed the winter blue of his eyes.
“Again,” he said.
They pushed until the sun was beginning to set. She was tired in the way a forge is exhausted after honest work.
He ended the session the way he had begun it: with a slight nod that meant you may stop, and not that you have earned affection. It was cleaner than praise. She did not know whether she would have trusted his praise. She trusted the nod.
“When I said you were the river,” he said, “I did not mean to make you feel alone in it.”
The dining hall smelled of bread. Thaelyn ate in the quiet corner where the older riders preferred to be invisible. No one had the nerve to cross the room and ask for the story of the broken dome. They had formed their own stories. She went outside to get some fresh air. A female dragon banked and did not land.
“You got a lesson in patience,”Nyxariel said.“This is good.”
Thaelyn rested her forearms on the parapet’s cool stone. “I nearly smiled at him,” she admitted, horror and wonder bound in the same thread.
“He will not hold it against you,”the dragon said dryly.“He keeps smiles like rare coins.”
A laugh escaped. It surprised them both. “He is relentless.”
“So are you.”
“Will I always be afraid of breaking what holds me?” Thaelyn asked.
“Yes,”Nyxariel said gently.“That is how you remember to be careful with the strength you carry.”A beat pulsed through the bond; the reassurance of a wing’s downstroke echoed inside a human heart.“You will also be brave.”
Sleep took her without cruelties that night. When it brought dreams, they did not flay. They showed her the quench and the quiet room where a thin thread of light lay coiled like a patient serpent, ready when invited, refusing when commanded. She woke with that image behind her eyes and the taste of iron on her tongue like a blessing.
Thorne doubled her work the next day. He did not warn her. He simply arrived with two wooden staffs and a number in his head of how far he planned to push her that he did not share. The morning felt colder against her skin than it had any right to in midsummer. She suspected the chill came from her nerves, not the air.
He had her run the parapet first. When she returned to the ring, he handed her a staff and said only, “I hope your feet are awake, Marren.”
They moved until her calves trembled, until her hands blistered beneath the gloves. When she tried to call the thread without permission, it came out rope-thick and reckless. He saw the mistake before she felt it and cut across her staff with a motion that jarred her fingers to the bone.
“No,” he said, and the word snapped the rope back into a coil that stung. “You do not earn more by taking more.”
“I am tired of being a student of less,” she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her wrist. “I am tired of being careful.”
His face was unreadable. “Careful makes the difference between a sword and shrapnel.”
