Dawn did the decent thing and arrived. It found Rowan Hale already in the Verenth side yard, rolling his shoulders as if making small treaties with every muscle that had kept him safe the day before. The ash sticks leaned against the fence; the dew on the grass made the ground truthful. Kaelen came out still chewing the last bite of bread he'd stolen from Maelin's affection and tried not to look like a boy terribly in love with being instructed. Nyx perched on the fencepost like a decorative sin. Sister Mirel sat on the low wall with his sleeves rolled, the posture of a man ready to turn breath into medicine. Seraine Dorl stood back in the shadow of the gate, staff balanced in both hands the way you hold a scale that refuses to lie.
Rowan tossed Kaelen the lighter stick. "Hold," he said. "Show me feet."
Kaelen set his feet where yesterday's lesson had left them: shoulder-width, knees generous, weight balanced not on heels, not on toes, somewhere politely between apology and arrogance. Rowan regarded his stance the way a carpenter eyes a beam. "Good. Now forget you have arms."
"That seems counter to the plan," Kaelen said.
"Arms lie," Rowan said. "Feet tell the truth. If your feet are right, your lies will sound like honesty."
Nyx clucked approvingly. "Poetry before breakfast. This town will become intolerable."
Rowan moved to face Kaelen. He did not raise his stick. He gestured with his chin. "Measure," he said. "What do we have."
Kaelen swallowed, trying to call the square's buskers back from his mind and install numbers where jokes lived. "Two paces," he said. "Close enough that if either of us pretends to be wise we'll be knocked down by reality anyway."
"Acceptable," Rowan said. "We will call this long measure made short by stupidity. Now rules."
Kaelen straightened without straightening, as he had been instructed: keep the spine ready but not proud. "Watch the chest, not the blade," he recited softly. "Lines, not edges. Don't cross your feet unless your ancestors are bored and would like to meet you."
"Good," Rowan said. "Add: we do not strike the head this week. We do not thrust for the belly. We do not take pride in pain. We keep count of breath. We stop when I say stop."
"Fiaht," Mirel murmured, as if an oath and a preemptive bandage.
Rowan lowered his stick until it was a natural continuation of his forearm. "First lesson," he said. "Defend what you mean to keep. If you don't know what you mean to keep, put your hands down and go inside and figure it out."
Kaelen lifted his stick. It felt better today, which is to say his hands had decided to be less stupid than yesterday. Rowan stepped in and gave the smallest strike toward Kaelen's left shoulder, lazy as a cat. Kaelen parried on instinct, stick up and across, arms tense. The blow touched wood and skated away with a satisfying clack.
"Again," Rowan said, without praise or disdain. The second strike came from the right. Kaelen met it, late. The stick glanced off his forearm with a thud that would flower to a bruise later and try to pretend it had always been there. He sucked air through his teeth. Mirel's expression did not change. Seraine's did not either, but her knuckles tightened on her staff, not with sympathy, cataloging damage.
"Where were your eyes," Rowan asked.
"Blade," Kaelen admitted.
"Why."
"It's shiny," Kaelen said, because honesty sometimes works where intelligence would get lost.
"Exactly," Rowan said. "It lies. My chest is honest. My hips are cruel. Watch them."
They resumed. Rowan's stick moved with the same ethic as his words: direct, unshowy, unwilling, as if he would rather be making tea but understood the day had different plans. He struck not at Kaelen's pride, but at his attention. He taught by making the boy fail at the smallest possible scale until the failure was too bored to continue. Kaelen learned to keep his left hand alive on the stick instead of letting it become an ornament. He learned that parrying is not a slap but a notion: 'turn, meet, let go.' He learned to keep his feet talking to one another so his hands could afford not to shout.
"Good," Rowan said at last, which from him was nearly applause. "Now I strike without warning and you do not panic. Your job is to be a wall. My job is to make you into a door if you forget how."
Nyx leaned in as if to admire the shape of potential disaster. "Do we get to bet," she asked Mirel.
"On air," Mirel said, deadpan. "The stakes are too high for coin."
Rowan flicked a struck, not hard, but quick, toward Kaelen's thigh. Kaelen's stick was there. The jolt rattled his wrists up to his teeth. He kept his feet. The second blow came toward his shoulder; he parried and felt the delicious inevitability of right angle applied at the right moment. The third came low, sneaky, and he missed entirely; the ash kissed his shin; he hopped without ceremony and then returned to stance, embarrassed but intact.
"Breathe," Mirel reminded.
Kaelen breathed. The yard existed in a ring around them: Nyx bouncing sunlight off her grin; Seraine's eyes like callipers; Mirel counting Kaelen's inhales the way a farmer counts clouds. The hum in Kaelen's palms did not try to correct anything. It hummed softly at itself, a backup singer behaving. He clung to that mercy.
Rowan showed him the simplest parries: outside-high, inside-high, outside-low, inside-low, the way water meets a log and preserves its name. He numbered them only after Kaelen's body had learned them without numbers.
"Names come after familiarity," he said. "We don't build shrines to what we don't understand."
They worked the line for a while: Rowan's stick tapping into Kaelen's guard, Kaelen turning, angling, learning not to swat. When Rowan finally paused, he didn't drop his stick; he let the pause count as defense.
"Now, the thing most men get wrong," he said. "A duel is not a fight. A duel is a conversation. You speak only when you have something to say. If you talk to hear your own voice, the other man will teach you silence."
"Is that why your voice is low," Nyx chirped.
"It is low," Rowan said, "because you talk enough for six men, and I am not greedy."
He stepped back. "Next lesson. Distance. There are three kinds: too far, too near, and just enough to be unwise. Know them by feel. If you sense always that you are in danger, you will discover you can still be calm. Treat danger like weather: put on a coat and mind your footing."
Kaelen nodded and committed the poetry to the same place he kept Bren's short prayers. Rowan pressed him forward, then backward, not to make him retreat but to teach him that retreat is a step like any other, honest if done on purpose, cowardly only when done by accident. Twice Kaelen felt panic nip his heels; twice Rowan's stick stopped just short of having opinions about his ribs; twice Kaelen discovered panic could be made to sit.
Mirel's count ran alongside the clack of wood like a brook under cartwheels. "Two… three… breathe." On the fourth time that Mirel said breathe, Kaelen realized he had been holding air like a miser, and let it go. The next exchange went better for no other reason than oxygen.
Rowan demonstrated the simplest riposte, a gentle tap to the arm after a parry, the argument that says, You could have been punished; I am choosing to speak instead. He made Kaelen practice it with the promise not to land a blow: "Mercy first," he said. "If mercy is refused, we own other answers. But the first offer must be true."
It took eight tries before Kaelen could make the stick say any sentence that Rowan didn't have to correct into grammar. When he finally managed a clean parry-riposte that touched Rowan's forearm with the apology of a falling leaf, Nyx applauded like a fool. Seraine didn't clap, but her chin raised half a finger's width, as if the world's balance sheet had moved a grain in their favor.
"Again," Rowan said, either enjoying himself or performing the role of someone who enjoys himself because it teaches better than grimness. "Make your defense the main act. If a strike appears out of that like a blossom in a wall crack, good. If not, you are still the wall."
They moved. Kaelen's calves barked. His wrists learned the ten different ways wood can vibrate into bone. His shoulders discovered the deep tired that comes from doing a simple thing correctly an unreasonable number of times. He liked it with a sincerity that made his face warm with the honesty of the admission.
Rowan halted him with a closed fist, 'stop,' the oldest sign, and pointed at the ground. "Now," he said, "ethic." He did not lower the stick. He pressed the words through it. "A duel is a smaller war. Our code is simple and heavy. We safeguard, we do not dominate. We leave exits. We keep count of the people behind us, and do not lose their number in our heads even when the world shouts. We protect children from ideas they cannot survive. We do not humiliate beaten men. We do not take trophies from people; we take lessons from ourselves."
Kaelen swallowed. The hum in his hands chimed once in agreement, like a plucked string in a well-made room.
Nyx slid off the fence and padded closer, the toe of her boot sketching drawings in the dust that she would deny having made if asked. "Tell him the thing about point and promise," she prompted, wicked and helpful.
Rowan grunted assent. "If you point a blade at a man, you make him a promise," he said. "You are promising to do violence if he insists. If you have no intention of keeping the promise, you are a liar and the world will eventually arrange a correction. If you make the promise too easily, you are a bully and I will arrange the correction myself."
Seraine's mouth didn't move, but Kaelen could tell she was agreeing in her own dialect, observation.
"Again," Rowan said. He tapped Kaelen's stick, raised his own, and the small conversation resumed. The rhythm now had tiny pleasures in it; occasionally Kaelen found that his stick was in the right place before he consciously moved it. Once he caught Rowan's forearm with the promised tap and saw the man's eyebrow lift a millimeter: acceptance. No praise; Rowan conserved praise with the same fierce thrift he applied to risk.
Acceptance was fuel enough.
They added footwork. "Advance small when you must impose your will," Rowan said. "Retreat smaller when you must deny someone else's. Never cross your feet in panic. If you must cross, do it on purpose. The difference is the size of a grave." He demonstrated, a minuscule cross-step that made his weight whisper from one hip to the other without consequence. Kaelen's first attempt tangled him. Rowan was there with a shoulder to prevent the ground from asserting its opinion.
"Again," he said, smiling this time with the corners of his eyes. "Do not apologize to earth yet; you haven't earned the right."
By mid-morning, Kaelen's shirt clung to him and his stick had acquired a small nick from an early mistake he meant to leave as a private reminder. Rowan let their measure open and closed with shepherd's care: not letting the boy get too far into comfort, not letting strain steal his form. Nyx interrupted only when a joke would prevent Kaelen from beginning to hate himself for falling short; her timing, infuriatingly, was right. Mirel handed over a cup of water at exactly the moment before pride would have refused it.
Seraine changed nothing; she saw everything.
Once, in the middle of a quick exchange that asked his wrists to know seven little truths in a row, Kaelen felt the hum in his palms flare toward the stick, the same itch that had nearly called the wrong-fire to sit between his hands. The ash shivered, not visible to anyone else, but to him the wood went thinner for a stuttering heartbeat, as if a line of the world had forgotten to draw itself. He gritted his teeth and thought no, not here, not this, and the sensation subsided, leaving the aftertaste of copper and clove behind his tongue. Seraine's head snapped the smallest degree, as if someone had brushed her sleeve with a moth. Her gaze cut to Kaelen's hands. Then to his feet. Then back to his hands, her irises dark as ink. She said nothing.
Rowan ended their bout with a tidy circle of his stick and the open palm that means cease. Kaelen stopped, chest rioting. Rowan breathed like someone in control of a storm.
"Enough," the knight said softly, the word that tastes like bread in his mouth. "You are fit to begin. Tomorrow, we add the bind and the disengage. We will teach your wrists to be less clever and more honest. Seraine, your turn to glare."
Seraine stepped forward into the yard with a motion that did not disturb the air. She set the butt of her staff on the earth and regarded Kaelen as if he were a glyph that had been written wrong but could still pass inspection if corrected with love. "I have watched your shoulders," she said without ceremony. "They lie less than yesterday. Good. Your hands, however, are untrustworthy."
"That seems unfair," Nyx said brightly. "They have done nothing but hit a heroic number of decent parries."
"They hum," Seraine said. She did not soften it. "And when they do, the world around them stops respecting alignment. That is not how spells work."
Kaelen opened his mouth to protest he was not doing spells. He closed it. He looked down at his betrayers. "What does alignment mean," he asked, because he had learned that asking in Seraine's presence was the quickest route to her becoming the teacher she can't resist being.
Seraine's staff made a tiny circle in the dirt, almost absentminded. "Magic we study, the magic you can teach, test, swear by, honors structure," she said. "Glyphs are simply agreements made visible. The way lines meet tells power how to behave. You want fire, you seal a sigil against wind so that flame does not need to make arguments. You want force, you draw the marriage of pressure to direction and you repeat the marriage until power is family. Even wild spells submit to geometry the long way around. They pay tithes to shape."
"And mine," Kaelen said, throat dry. "Doesn't."
"It refuses tithes," Seraine said, eyes narrowing with interest that could be either fondness or cruelty. "It edits. It touches the weft where the Loom expects warp. It leaves no ash. It leaves memory. I do not like this. I do not hate it. I mean to understand it before it understands us."
Mirel shifted his weight, kind even when he asked permission to interfere. "He is tired," he suggested. "Study after bread is a more gracious thief."
"Study after bread," Seraine agreed at once, not annoyed, grateful to be reminded to be kind. "But before bread, one simple test and no harm. Kaelen, stand there." She pointed to a spot where the grass had decided to be shorter. "Hold out your hands, palms down. Do nothing. Think nothing you would be ashamed to have written on your forehead."
"That leaves me with about four thoughts," Kaelen muttered, obeying.
Seraine lifted her staff and traced in the air three slow lines that met in a shape Kaelen could nearly name. Not a square, not a triangle. A triangle with its corners softened into arcs.
"This glyph," she said, "is the smallest sign for steadiness. It asks the air to hold still the way a mother asks a child to hold a bowl, gently and with the promise of soup. I am going to place it in front of your hands. If your hum is well-behaved, nothing will happen because nothing needs to. If your hum is rude, it will make my careful lines forget the manners they spent a decade learning."
Nyx propped her chin on her fist and watched with the delighted malice of a cat presented with a box. Rowan said nothing; he moved a fraction closer to Kaelen, not crowding, simply standing where a blow would pass through a better man first. Mirel's eyes half-closed, the better to hear what might go wrong.
Seraine's glyph drifted, light as dust motes, and halted in the air a handspan from Kaelen's palms. He felt its presence the way you feel a father in the doorway, not seen; sensed. It pressed no weight; it stated intention. The hum in his hands, traitor and friend, stirred at once as if someone had called its name from down a long hall. He did nothing. He tried to do less than nothing. He tried to be wood.
The glyph held. For a breath. Two. On three, the line at the bottom, that steady arc like a smile drawn by a stern child, shivered. Not much. The smallest wobble of a pen at the end of a long graceful curve. Seraine did not move. Kaelen felt his hum lean. He didn't lean with it. The wobble steadied.
Then, without warning and with the casual offense of a bird deciding to land where it is not welcome, his hum offered a correction. It did not push. It simply existed with more insistence. The bottom arc of Seraine's glyph quivered, then jumped a hair too far to the left, then returned to its rightful place with the prim indignation of a line that has been caught napping. The upper arc did not move. The side arc tried to and remembered its obligations.
The glyph held, barely.
"Again," Seraine whispered, and Kaelen didn't know if she meant his hum or her glyph. He did not command anything. He attempted to think of bread, which seemed an honorable distraction. The hum behaved better. The glyph sat. The air learned to be quiet like a child behaving in formal clothes.
Seraine lowered her staff. The glyph's lines blurred, not quite undone, and then faded as gently as dew deciding to be air again. She took a breath, long as a measured line, and let it out like acceptance and annoyance the same size.
"Your power doesn't follow glyph structure," she said, half to herself, half to the yard. "It doesn't ignore it either. It notices and then corrects. It refuses to be instructed by shape. It prefers… revision."
"Like a scribe?" Nyx offered, eyes alight. "Or a very picky editor with no friends."
"Like a force that believes itself prior to language," Seraine said, and there was awe in it despite her disapproval. "I need to see it under pain. Not harm," she amended before Mirel could bristle. "Stress. Surprise. The body tells the truth when it forgets it is being listened to."
Rowan lowered his stick, quiet as a door agreeing to close. "He will not be surprised by you," he said. "He will pretend to be. His hands will decide on their own, but his spirit will try to keep you from seeing. He is a good boy and good boys are very bad specimens. We will arrange honest stress."
Seraine glanced at Kaelen. "After bread," she repeated. "After rest. But I will have a turn with you, Kaelen Verenth. We will begin with water. Then light. Then language. I would like to know whether your wrong-fire corrects words."
"Corrects?" Kaelen echoed, startled into grinning. "You mean like a schoolmaster with a red stick."
"Exactly," Seraine said. She almost smiled.
"Bread," Mirel insisted. "And a chair. And perhaps a mother's kitchen." He tilted his head toward the door. Maelin had been watching from within the hinge of the doorway, face unreadable. At 'bread,' she raised a thumb as if to say the world had finally turned in a sensible direction.
Rowan tapped Kaelen's stick, not a blow, an affection. "Douse your wrists in the basin," he suggested. "Cold convinces joints to forgive instruction. Then we eat. Then we invent rules we will break. Then we let Seraine change the air."
Nyx hopped backward toward the door, already stealing the second-best seat. "And I," she announced, "will make unhelpful remarks at every juncture to ensure we remain humble."
Kaelen let out a breath he had not realized he had been renting from the morning. He dipped his wrists in the basin; the cold gasped up his forearms and made the hum sit straighter and then gentler, as if taught manners by water. He glanced at Seraine, expecting her gaze to be a blade. It was a ledger. Inside it, a column had been started with his name at the top. He did not hate that.
"All right," he said to the yard, the stick, the staff, the priest, the thief, and the new shape of his day. "Bread. Then we break theories."
Maelin made the house behave like a host and like a mother at once. She set a board across two stools and called it a table because there were too many elbows for the kitchen's, and the board obeyed. She slid bowls along it with the accuracy of a merchant counting coins while dancing. Bread arrived with a crackle that announced its crust had become a person in the last hour. Cheese had agreed to be friendly. There were apples that promised not to lie and a pot of stew that had done as much learning as stew can do without asking for a library card.
"Sit," she said, and even Nyx sat. "Eat before you start teaching my yard new vocabulary."
Rowan settled with the unselfconscious grace of a man who treats chairs as colleagues. Seraine placed her staff against the wall as if instructing it not to eavesdrop. Sister Mirel took the seat that let him see everyone's throat and hands out of reflex, then pretended it was for the light. Daran leaned in the doorway at first, and then Maelin's eye cornered him into a chair.
Kaelen slid in beside Rowan and opposite Seraine, forearms tingling from the drills, wrists damp from the basin. Nyx pinched a hot roll and juggled it between palms with exaggerated tragedy.
"Ow, salvation hurts," she announced, tearing it open with her teeth and moaning theatrically. "If I die of bread, tell the river I was brave."
"How are the rules," she asked Kaelen, as if rules were vegetables that could be judged for crispness. "Did he make you recite them facing east."
"I made him recite them facing me," Rowan said, tearing bread with the same restraint he applied to breaking men's noses. "East is not in charge of his breath. I am."
Kaelen smiled into his bowl. "There are three distances," he began dutifully.
"Too far, too near, and the one where fools live," Nyx supplied.
"Just enough to be unwise," Kaelen corrected. "And breath when Mirel says, and watch the chest, and don't cross your feet unless you meant to leave a beautiful corpse and also a very confused crowd."
Maelin's eyes flicked to his forearms the way mothers' eyes count new maps of their children. "Bruises?" she asked, like a baker checking heat on the bottom of a loaf.
"Minor comments," Mirel said before Kaelen could make a joke. "The kind you write in the margins when a boy forgets to breathe. We shall annotate with cold later."
Seraine pushed her bread through the stew with a precise angle of wrist that made it look like geometry. "He did not hum at the stick," she said, which, coming from her, was nearly a fondness. "He tried once; he remembered to be polite."
"Polite is my favorite of his vices," Daran said, accepting a slab of cheese as if it were terms of surrender.
"And you," Maelin said, turning to Rowan with the familiarity of a woman who had decided the knight was furniture now. "Will you teach him not to die for fools."
"I will teach him to be useful to fools without accepting their schedules," Rowan said mildly. "Dying is a bad habit."
"He'll be miserable at first," Nyx confided. "Not dying is all about boredom."
"Then we will feed him boredom with good bread so he learns to love it," Maelin replied, and set another roll where Kaelen could pretend not to take it and then take it. "Sister Mirel, is he allowed to run and fall and be a nuisance later."
"He is allowed to do everything he intends," Mirel said, "so long as after each intention he admits he is hydrated."
Seraine touched a fingertip to the rim of her bowl, as if checking a ward. "After bread," she said, glancing at Maelin with the smallest bow, "I will borrow your boy by the Lark. We will study his uncooperative runtime where curious eyes cannot invent narratives."
Maelin pretended to misunderstand the jargon and understood perfectly. "You'll go with an escort," she said, as if Seraine were the one who might fall into the river. "Nyx, be boredom. Rowan, be weather. Sister Mirel, be in the way of harm. Kaelen, you will be home when I point at the sun and say the obvious thing. If you are not, I will go fetch you and the river will be embarrassed."
"Yes," Kaelen said, humbled and warmed by the way parental threats promise rescue.
Daran lifted his cup and rotated it once in his fingers, a little ritual he had never explained.
They ate. Conversation grew and shrank the way proper talk does when the table is crowded with hands. Rowan described, in three phrases and an elegant shrug, the mule he would deal with at dusk and its disdain for surfaces. Nyx labeled the mule 'Minister of Elevation' and appointed herself ambassador. Mirel told a brief, clean story about a boy who swallowed a bead and then a larger bead to 'push it down' and how the universe had applauded his strategy by making him pass both bead and wisdom. Seraine shared nothing that resembled gossip and everything that resembled weather reports for minds.
Kaelen did not talk much. He listened to the rhythm of people who believed they were allowed to be here, and by osmosis, learned it. He had expected his appetite to shrink after drills; it expanded. Bread vanished into him. Stew followed. An apple was persuaded to be half his and half Nyx's when she stole it and then insisted sharing had occurred. He thought about telling Maelin he'd gone to the Lark alone that previous morning, and didn't, because confession is better done when the person you're confessing to has already forgiven you and she had not decided to, and he did not wish to tilt the day.
When bowls were complicated only by smears, Maelin flicked her towel at Rowan as if knighting him with linen. "You may borrow my boy," she said. "Return him less stupid than you took him, and with all the parts I am accustomed to counting."
They did not parade through Stonebridge with their purpose. They left by the side lane, carrying their intentions like eggs. Nyx walked beside Kaelen making the exact amount of nonsense that keeps fear from climbing up the back of a neck. Mirel carried nothing and thus was prepared for everything. Seraine did not so much walk as argue with the ground toward a conclusion; the ground usually won and was flattered by her respect. Rowan stayed slightly behind, which is where watchful men stand when they are not formally guarding but refuse to be one foot farther from duty than they must.
The Lark accepted them with its same old sentence, amended by small commas of breeze. The willow at the bend did not nod; it is rude to nod to every person who thinks they are significant. No one else was visible on the path or the far bank. Kaelen felt the square's voice drop out of his bones and let the hum in his palms rise without shame. It rose; it behaved. He thanked it and did not say so out loud.
"Here," Seraine said, indicating a flat patch of shaded ground where pebbles had decided on a shared aesthetic. "Rowan, keep the perimeter. Nyx, keep the rules honest by breaking none loudly. Sister Mirel, as ever, count his mistakes for later forgiveness. Kaelen, you're with me."
He swallowed and stepped into the little theater she had defined. She faced him and tapped her staff once on the earth, which is how gentle mages tell the world they are about to write on it. "Defense first," she said. "It is my profession to remove options from men who have mistaken violence for agency. I do not kill unless the world proves unable to do arithmetic without subtraction. We will start with a hold."
She drew in the air with the tip of her staff, not elaborate, three strokes that made a sigil that felt like a knot. The lines glowed a chalk-soft white as she drew and then went almost invisible, hanging in the air before Kaelen, neither smoke nor light.
"This is a simple tarsal bind," she said. "It's a request to the world: slow the ankle, respect the ground, embarrass haste. It's often enough to end arguments and make men reconsider their gods. I am going to place it on your feet. Do your hum a favor: think nothing heroic."
Kaelen fixed his eyes on the glyph and the space just behind it. He kept his hands open and down at his sides like a man at the edge of a roof pretending he does not like height. Seraine flicked the smallest energy from the staff's tip and the glyph drifted down like a paper tossed into the air and deciding to be meaningful. As it approached his boots, the bottom arc quivered, not as badly as before, not enough to fail. The lines touched the ground around his ankles and hardened into an invisible syrup, pressure, not weight. His ankles obeyed the suggestion and balked when he tried to step. He could move, he would not fall, but haste had been removed from the menu.
"Good," Seraine said softly, the word clipped, approving. "Now I will release."
She willed the glyph to unwind and it did, mostly. As it lifted, the bottom arc jerked left a hair and then corrected. Kaelen felt the pressure vanish and the relief leave behind a phantom cuff.
"You saw it," Seraine said. Not a question.
"I felt it," Kaelen said. "Like a line deciding it prefers a different sentence."
Nyx, who had stationed herself on the willow root with the air of a cat paid to have opinions, oohed quietly. "He is fun," she told no one in particular.
"Again," Seraine said.
They repeated it. This time Kaelen tried to make his hum intentionally dull. It is difficult to be stupid on purpose. He managed for two breaths and the glyph settled cleaner. On three, his hum blinked at the thing like a magpie at a coin and the tiniest tremble rippled the bottom stroke again. Seraine didn't hide her irritation, not at him, at the universe. "It is correcting," she murmured, half to the river. "It prefers a different alignment. Like someone changing a letter to make a word live in their mouth."
Rowan paced the perimeter, eyes a field's width out, but Kaelen felt the man's attention swing closer at 'correcting,' as if that word smelled like work.
"Now a different neutralize," Seraine said. "Sight." She drew four small intersecting lines and then a dot in the center. "A lattice to dazzle, not blindness, only the kind of light that offends pride and makes hands forget knives for two heartbeats. This is enough to break rhythm; rhythm wins duels more often than edges. Close your eyes at my count and tell me if you can taste its edges."
He closed. She counted. The air flashed not bright, but structured; light that had been instructed to strobe. His hum lifted toward it, not to aid, to… align. The strobe staggered once, one beat late, as if a drummer had tripped, and then it completed its sequence. He opened his eyes to find Seraine's mouth a line as she watched the last flare fade. "You phase it," she said. "Your hum, it moves my pulses one off. Only a breath. But an enemy who counts could make a feast of that."
"Try to count mine," Rowan said from the shadow of the alder, and Seraine sniffed: 'later.'
"Variation," she continued, merciless and gentle. "Muffle. This is not silence, never remove a sense entirely when you can make it polite." She painted a curved symbol that looked like a cupped hand and set it at chest height. Sound thinned. Not gone, it slipped off the edges of things like water beading on oil. The river's murmur lowered a key and stood farther away. Even the hawk's refusal to learn anything grew modest.
Kaelen's hum loomed, reflex, and the muffle flickered, it over-dampened and then under, as though a novice were working the bellows too eagerly. Seraine's eyes gleamed with that complicated feeling people have when their prediction turns out right and they wish it hadn't.
"I can try to sit on it," Kaelen offered, holding his hands rigid at his sides like a child at an inspection.
"You may try breathing like a person," Mirel suggested. "Sitting on a thing rarely convinces it to be good."
They rested. Seraine softened her face a hair. "You're doing well," she said, which was more praise than many men had received trying to impress her with correct glyphs. "The failures are mine; I chose visible glyphs that assumes compliance. I will need to try to move closer to your language, or teach you to hold still while I write. Both are obnoxious."
Nyx put her chin in her palm and wiggled her fingers at Kaelen. "You're an obnoxious language," she crooned. "Congratulations."
"Set your hands," Seraine said, ignoring the commentary. "This time you speak first. Do not throw wrong-fire at me. Ask the river to do something tiny, and I will try to put my lattice on top of your ask. We'll see if we can share a sentence."
Kaelen wanted to ask for nothing and go home. He asked for something anyway because boys trained by Rowan are infected with obedience where it is least convenient. He chose a small swirl near the stone, his earlier friend, and asked it to travel half a thumb to the left. The hum rose; the swirl obeyed, not sharply, with the insolent leisure of a cat deciding to humor a child. The instant he felt his request accepted, Seraine's staff wrote the very faintest sigil over the water, a grid that asked surface tension to pretend, briefly, to be cloth.
The grid landed. His swirl objected. The grid's bottom line wavered, here it came again, that small infuriating leftward tick, and then corrected. For a heartbeat the two magics coexisted like polite strangers on a bench who have only one story between them. Then Kaelen's hum reflexively edited the grid's cell boundaries into a pattern he did not know he preferred, and Seraine's grid responded by either refusing to break or breaking invisibly. The water shivered in place, which is a thing water detests. The grid faded; Kaelen released his swirl because it had earned the right to be left alone.
Seraine's eyebrows had climbed and not yet come down. "Did you see," she said softly. "It tried to keep cell walls and your hum moved them a breath. It didn't tear my threads. It re-wove the hem."
"Friendly vandalism," Nyx declared. "A cure for boring blankets."
"A night terror for stable magic," Seraine countered. She caught Kaelen's face, which had gone pale, and his hands, which had begun their tremble. "Nothing exploded," she said, crisp and almost kind. "That is known as progress."
They tried another technique, immobilization through pressure rather than binding, a downward vector into the knee that asked the body to remember weight with respect. Seraine lowered her staff and drew a neat chevron that sat like a wedge above Kaelen's right knee. "This simply convinces your quadriceps to be shy," she said. "It removes sprinting from this conversation for a heartbeat."
The wedge descended. Kaelen felt the muscle acknowledge the request and answer with a yelp, then comply less. His hum pushed a little, not against Seraine but on behalf of the knee; he found himself whispering, inside, polite, let go, it's my leg. The wedge released early, as if reminded that consent had been revoked. Seraine's lips thinned and then, unexpectedly, she laughed once. Not derision. Delight that the experiment had given her a new equation.
"You can refuse," she said. "That is excellent. But I need you to be able to refuse and still walk. Again. This time: don't argue; be boring."
He tried to be boring and succeeded at being mostly cooperative. The pressure kissed his knee and he understood, bodily, what it would be to be neutralized without harm. "Good," Seraine said, and her voice lowered a fraction, warmth discovering itself. "Again. Then on the other leg. Then we will let Nyx throw pebbles while you count."
"Why am I a pebble," Nyx demanded.
"You are pebbles in spirit," Seraine said, not looking.
They iterated. Most attempts failed by Seraine's tidy standards. When her light lattice strobed, Kaelen's hum made the third flash lazy. When her muffle settled efficiently, the hum insisted on giving him a single thread of sound to hang on to and she could not fully erase it. When she asked the river to hold still around a reed, Kaelen's hum, offended on behalf of the reed, untied one knot of the request and everything sulked briefly. Sometimes they made a thing together, once, gloriously, his hum held an eddy steady while her grid persuaded glare to soften, and the patch of water went matte like silk; Seraine's mouth did the tiniest thing that was not a smile and absolutely was.
"Again," she said, of her own volition, quick.
He could not repeat it. That was the nature of miracles and beginners.
Mirel called breath-halts at intervals cunningly chosen to feel like kindness disguised as order. Rowan shadowed with the patience of a man who had learned that Europe collapses when people are hurried through kindness. Nyx sacrificed two pebbles and a sarcastic bow to the river; one hit his shoulder because he had miscounted; she apologized by dubbing him Sir Almost.
Once, when Seraine placed the ankle bind without saying the word and he felt it before it fully formed, Kaelen kept his hum still through the first heartbeat and the glyph held perfect, elegant, polite. Seraine's head snapped up and the full wattage of her approval hit him like sunlight without heat.
"Yes," she said, low. "Again." The again failed, but he would live off the first yes for two days.
"Observation," she said at last, as the shadows collected like thoughts. "When you are frightened, your hum corrects. When you are proud, it corrects harder and worse. When you are calm and counting, it sometimes rests. When I speak the architecture of a spell out loud, you interfere more. When I put the lines down quietly, you can pretend not to see them. We will use silence. We will train your stillness. You will learn to idle."
"I am famously terrible at idling," Kaelen said, rubbing at his wrists where the invisible grammar of her magic had asked briefly to be honored.
"Excellent," Seraine said. "We shall solve that with boredom and repetition. Rowan's code is the right half. Mine is the left. Between us, you may learn to be a sentence and not a scribble."
"That's… nearly inspiring," Nyx said. "You should take up preaching. I will write your hymns."
"Please don't," Mirel murmured, because he has heard Nyx's hymns and they are all about rope.
They turned homeward when the light lowered its eyebrows. Seraine's staff rode her shoulder; Rowan's hand brushed Kaelen's back twice, the light contact that says remember your feet. The river let them go without making a point and the willow kept its gossip.
On the path, Seraine walked beside Kaelen for ten steps and did the oddest thing: she offered advice without setting it on a plate of disdain.
"You will fail, often," she said. "Be grateful. Failure is information. Collect it. Your magic is earlier than mine. It edits where mine parses. It will win arguments you should not allow it to have. You need to learn to be boring on command. Rowan will teach your body; I will teach your attention. Sister Mirel will teach you to stop before your soul files a complaint."
Kaelen wanted to say thank you and instead said, "I can try."
"Better than can," Seraine said. "Try is a verb with a spine."
At the lane, Nyx took his elbow and bounced once. "You were very impressive while mostly failing," she said earnestly. "A rare skill. Keep it up. One day you'll be adequately terrifying."
He laughed, grateful for the joke that took the scold off the day. Mirel peeled away toward the temple with a promise of boiled herbs and an offer to sit if night decided to invent itself noisily again. Rowan touched the doorframe of the Verenth's house as if greeting an old friend, and Maelin opened to them not because she had been listening, though she had, but because she could sense the shape of four people who had used their breath on her boy and returned him.
"How is theory," she asked, drying her hands on a towel.
"Broken and fixable," Seraine said, and Maelin surprised herself by liking the answer.