"You performed a severance ritual on yourself in a public corridor," he says. "You are many things. Careful is not consistently one of them."
I leave before he can see me almost smile.
The corridor outside is empty. The academy presses in around me, cold stone and old magic and the particular silence of a building holding its breath. Somewhere overhead, the clouds finish their decision and the sky goes fully dark at four in the afternoon, and the torches along the corridor walls flare brighter in response, throwing long shadows that move like they're thinking about it.
I walk. I keep to the main passages, away from the east wing, the tracking seal's shape sitting folded against my ribs. The bond runs steady behind my sternum, Ryder's watchfulness moving through it like a current that doesn't know how to stop.
Three students gone. Caspian leaving. Thane's father threatening war. Someone with Veil knowledge setting traps in the breach points.
The game is changing, all right. I just haven't figured out yet who's playing it, or what they think winning looks like.
But I'm going to find out. That's not bravery. That's just the only option I've ever really had.
Chapter 19
"You're dropping your left shoulder every time you throw," Thane says, not looking up from the training schedule pinned to the wall. "You've been doing it for twenty minutes. It's going to get you killed."
"Good morning to you too," I say.
He turns around then, and the training room feels smaller than it did a minute ago. The lower level practice hall is all bare stone and scuffed wooden floors, weapon racks along the south wall, no windows. The academy's lockdown posted at six this morning means the main combat facilities are closed. This room wasn't on the restricted list, which is apparently the only reason we're in it.
"The left shoulder," he says again, moving toward me. "Drop your arm. Let me see your stance."
I square up. Feet shoulder-width apart, hands raised, the form that Sage drilled into me over three weeks of predawn sessions in the courtyard. Thane circles me the way dragons apparently circle things, slow and appraising and not particularly subtle about it.
"Your weight's too far back," he says. "If someone rushes you from the right, you'll fall. Here." He steps in close and puts one hand flat against my lower back, pressure applied without warning, pushing my weight forward. "There. Now you're not a liability."
"That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me."
"Don't get used to it." He steps back, but not as far as he was before. "Throw the combination. Jab, cross, elbow."
I throw it. He catches my elbow on a pad he's materialized from somewhere and the impact rattles up my arm.
"Again."
I throw it again. He adjusts the angle of the pad, forcing me to correct my trajectory mid-strike, which is infuriating and probably the point.
"Again."
"Are you going to say anything other than again?"
"When you do it correctly, I'll say something different." He moves the pad to a new position. "Again."
We work like that for forty minutes. He doesn't compliment and he doesn't insult. He just corrects, repositions, makes me repeat things until the movement stops being a decision and starts being a reflex. It's the most focused I've been in a week. The bond with Ryder has been running loud since Caspian left, a low persistent pressure at the base of my chest that I've been managing around rather than through, and physical work quiets it better than anything else I've found.
Thane stops me on the seventh repetition of a defensive pivot, his hand closing around my forearm to halt the movement.
"Not like that." He resets my arm himself, rotating my elbow out, and his grip is careful in a way that doesn't match his usual approach to anything. "Like this. When you block from this angle, you keep your neck protected. Block from the angle you were using, someone gets a clean shot at your throat."
"Where did you learn this?" I ask. "This specific stuff. Not dragon combat training. This."
His hand drops from my arm. Pain flickers across his face before disappearing.
"My mother," he says.
I wait. He hasn't volunteered anything about her before, not directly, and I know better than to push at a door that's just opened a crack on its own.
"She wasn't trained by the dragon houses," he continues, turning away to pick up a different pad from the rack. "She couldn't be. She had no elemental power. So she learned this instead. Human combat forms, reaper evasion patterns, whatever she could find that didn't require fire or scale." He turns back. His eyes are gold in the torchlight, brighter than usual, and he's looking at me with an expression I've seen on his face exactly once before, in a corridor weeks ago, gone before I could identify it. "She moved like you do. Quick. Scrappy. Like she was always calculating the fastest route out of the room."
