She holds my gaze for a moment and then she moves again.
The anger in her is its own thing. It isn't wild — it's precise, which is almost more unsettling than if it had been wild. Wild anger telegraphs. Hers is completely contained until the moment she moves, and then it's like every motion has something extra behind it, something under the mechanics. She doesn't fight like she's sparring. She fights like she's been waiting to fight, like she's had the fight building in her chest for months and each drill is the only place it's going.
I've trained warriors who fought like that. Usually after a loss — the kind that gets personal, the kind that doesn't resolve. What she's got is older than four months.
We work on the forearm redirect until it starts to feel automatic in her movements, and then I move us to holds — how to position against a wall, how to create drop weight, how to use the limited mass she has by letting it fall instead of trying to push. She picks it up cleanly. Argues with me once, about the drop angle, and turns out to be right, which I tell her.
She blinks. Then keeps going.
"You're surprised I said so," I say.
"Most people don't," she says, and that's all she says about it.
"If you're right, you're right." I reset the hold. "Do it again and this time trust the drop."
She does. The drop works. I actually have to shift my weight to compensate, and the shift opens up a gap she doesn't use because she hasn't been told to use it yet, but sheseesit — I watch her eyes track it — and she turns back to me with the first thing she's shown all morning that isn't suspicion or controlled anger.
It's satisfaction. Narrow and private. Gone in a second. But there.
"The gap," I say.
"I saw it."
"That's where you go." I step back and give her the full shape of it. "You make that happen, I shift, you've got two steps before I can redirect. That's your window."
"Two steps isn't much."
"Two steps is everything." I roll my shoulder out. "Two steps and you're already thinking about step three. That's what separates someone who knows how to move from someone who panics." I look at her. "You don't panic."
She doesn't answer. Doesn't confirm, doesn't deny. Just watches me with those sharp green eyes doing the same arithmetic they've been running all morning, and I find myself aware, with an uncomfortable specificity, that I don't want to be on the wrong side of that calculation.
She glares at me plenty. The glaring is almost conversational at this point — it's how she keeps the space managed, I think. Holds the distance with her eyes so her feet can stay in the work. When she's drilling, when the mechanics have her attention, the glaring drops off and she's just — there. Completely there. More present than anyone I've trained in a long time.
I'm not going to say any of this to her.
She shakes out her left wrist and I see the motion catch — the small tightening around the joint that means she's been nursing something. Not fresh. The kind of ache that's been there so long it's just part of the landscape.
"Wrist?" I ask.
Her eyes come up sharp. "Fine."
"I'm not asking you to stop. I'm asking about the wrist."
A pause. "The Stonevein hung us by the wrists." Flat. No performance. She is telling me a fact the same way she told me the weather. "It didn't set right."
I hold still. Not because I don't have a response but because anything I put into the air right now is going to be wrong. I think of Falla's voice, telling me what he'd found when they brought the women in. I think of the time I'd spent in the Stonevein compound looking for Saela, and the things I'd seen in those corridors that I haven't told anyone except Falla, who I knew wouldn't sleep well on it but who needed to know. I think about something very large and very hot sitting in my chest and I breathe out through my nose, slow.
"We'll work around it today," I say. "Falla can look at it if you want."
"I don't."
"All right." I shift us to a different drill. New position, takes the wrist load off, doesn't require explanation.
She notices. I see her notice. She doesn't say anything, but she notices, and she doesn't argue about moving on.
We work for another half hour after the wrist conversation, and I can feel the shift in it — not a big one, nothing I'd point to if she asked, but the quality of the space between us has changed. She's still all sharp edges and controlled motion, still watching me like I might do something worth cataloguing, but the watching has loosened slightly around the edges. Less inventory. More practice.
When I finally call it — the light changing through the trees, the air heating up — she's breathing harder than she was but standing cleaner. Feet better placed. Shoulders down a fraction from where they'd been at the start of the morning.
