“In the ring, maybe,” she shot back. “In the world beyond these gates, careful gets you killed when a man twice your size laughs at your restraint.”
He studied her, then set his staff aside and unbuckled the harness that held the blade on his back. The movement was unhurried. He did not draw the sword. He carried it to the rack at the ring’s edge and rested it there with respect. When he turned, he had nothing in his hands.
“Very well,” he said. “No staff. No blade. Come take me down.”
Her blood jumped. She crouched, weight light, intention heavy. He waited. He did not mock. He did not invite. He existed as a wall exists, all patience and unromantic truth.
She struck high to test his eyes, low to test his hips, feinted left to pull his weight where she could cut it, and sent her knee for the same soft spot he had placed his staff the day before. He pivoted, and her strike clipped air. She followed with an elbow that would have made her father swear and hit his forearm instead, a bone-to-bone jolt that sang up her humerus and into her teeth. He caught her other wrist and did not twist. He simply held.
He was warm. He did not squeeze. The pressure was exact. It told her where her body lied about leverage. It told her where panic begins. She pressed against his hold and felt every mistake she had made in breath and balance telegraph themselves into his palm.
“Breathe,” he said, barely above a whisper.
“I am,” she said through her teeth.
“You are not. You are pretending.”
Rage licked, small and fierce. She forced a slow exhale that was not a performance and found a sliver of space under his grip. She dropped her weight a finger’s breadth, turned her wrist within his, and broke free on the second breath with a neatness that startled them both.
“Better,” he said, and his eyes sparked.
He took her to the floor twice, always the small way, never a throw that would humiliate, always the precise correction of a man who understands that a student remembers the shape of a fall better than the sting of a bruise. When she landed wrong, he knelt beside her and set her knee where it should have been the breath before. When she braced wrong, he tapped the muscle that would keep her spine from paying for her pride in a decade.
She called the thread only when he said the soft word that had cut the rope the hour before. Each time it came more quickly. Each time it sat more willingly. When she tried to make it do the work for her, it went sulky and thin. When she held it like a small flame cupped against the wind, it warmed everything without trying to be seen.
“Now,” he said at midday, “mount.”
She blinked. “Mount what?”
He pointed toward the high wall that bordered the Scorchfield’s northern edge. Iron pegs ran up the stone like a ladder designed by someone who disliked the ground. A rope trailed from a pulley to a distant spike. Beyond the wall, the dragon fields stretched, green and scarred, toward the cliff’s drop where the air learned to be fierce.
“You will climb,” he said, “with the thread in place.”
She looked at the distance and then at him. “I thought we were not to use magic.”
“We are to use it with choice.” He tipped his head. “Do you trust your hands?”
“Yes.”
“Do you trust your breath?”
“Less.”
He did not smile. He waited. She wanted to balk. The rope looked like a promise of humiliation. She wanted to say she had trained enough for one day, and her palms were sure to betray her on that rough fiber. She wanted to say I am afraid.
She set her foot on the first peg. The wall took her weight with the honest indifference of stone. Her fingers curled on the rope and found a rhythm that matched the length of her reach. Hand above hand, breath below breath. The thread lay just inside her sternum, quiet as a cat in winter light. She did not ask it to hold her. She asked it to keep her company.
Halfway up, the world went still. The height spoke, low and eager. Her hands were slick. Her right foot skipped a peg and banged the wall, and she felt the panic begin, a tide at her ankles, cold and quick.
“Thaelyn,” Thorne called, voice clear but not loud. “Name three things you can hear.”
She wanted to curse him. She listened instead.
“The rope,” she managed. “The wind. My heart.”
“Two things you can feel.”
“The stone. The hemp.”
