I throw the punch. Her hand absorbs it and she nods once, the way she nods when something is acceptable but not yet good. We've been out here forty minutes. My knuckles ache and my shoulders are starting to burn in a way that has nothing to do with magic, which is almost a relief. It's honest pain, at least. The kind that means something was done.
"Malik taught you this?" I ask.
"He taught me the foundation. The rest I practiced on a very patient wall." She circles me slowly, watching my posture. "Punch again. Left this time."
I throw the left. She corrects my wrist angle with two fingers, adjusting without breaking stride.
"You're telegraphing with your shoulder," she says. "People who fight with magic do that because they're used to leading with intention. Physical fighting doesn't care about intention. It only cares about what actually moves."
"I've spent twenty-one years with people treating me like I don't have anything worth using," I say. "The intention is the only thing I've ever had."
Sage looks at me for a moment. "Then use it to throw faster."
I throw faster.
We work for another half hour. By the time the sky shifts from gray to pale yellow, I can hold my stance against a solid push, throw a serviceable left jab, and get out of a wrist grab without wrenching my own arm. It's not much. But it's more than I had yesterday, and yesterday I had nothing, so the math is in my favor.
I'm pulling my jacket back on when I notice Thane.
He's standing at the far edge of the training grounds, near the archway that leads back into the east wing. Arms crossed. Not walking anywhere. Just watching. His expression is unreadable from this distance, but he hasn't moved since I first caught himin my peripheral vision, which means he's been there for at least ten minutes and hasn't announced himself or left.
I hold his gaze for two seconds. He doesn't look away. I do, because I have somewhere to be and I refuse to perform for an audience I didn't invite.
"Don't," Sage says quietly, falling into step beside me as we head toward the main entrance.
"I wasn't going to do anything."
"You were thinking about it."
"Thinking isn't doing."
"At Nocturne," she says, "sometimes the difference is smaller than you'd like."
My uniform is ruined before second period.
I find it when I come back to the dormitory room after breakfast to grab my notes. The jacket is laid out on my bed with perfect precision, which is how I know it wasn't an accident. The fabric has been soaked in something that smells faintly sweet, and when I pick it up the dye has bled through in spreading dark patches that won't pass for anything except deliberate. The spare, hanging behind the door, has been cut along the collar seam. Not torn. Cut, with something sharp and careful, so it will hold its shape until I put it on and move, and then it will gap open at exactly the wrong moment.
I put on the soaked jacket. The smell is already fading and the patches could, if necessary, be explained as water damage. I button it to the throat and go to class.
In the corridor outside the Practical Wards lecture, Seraphina Vale is standing with Lilith and Astrid, and when I walk past she looks at my jacket with fake concern.
"Fairmont," she says. "What happened to your uniform?"
"I spilled something."
"You really should be more careful." She tilts her head, and her voice has fake sympathy in it. "The academy has standards."
"Noted," I say, and keep walking.
Lilith says something behind me, low and amused, and Astrid laughs. I don't stop. I go to class and sit down and copy out the ward notation from the board and I do not give them the satisfaction of a reaction they can see.
But I file it. Date, method, estimated time.
The basement happens after lunch.
I'm following a map Sage drew me on a scrap of parchment, trying to find the records office to report the missing textbook Thane burned yesterday, and somewhere between the third and second subfloors I go through a door that should lead to the administrative corridor and instead leads to a stairwell that ends in a heavy oak door that swings shut behind me with a sound like something being decided.
I try the handle. Locked.
