Chapter 8 Training
SERAPHINE
She broke Rook's nose on the second morning.
She had not planned to. She was running the hawk-speed in controlled bursts, trying to reach for it as a choice rather than a reaction, and she had it, the specific quality of that state where time seemed to thicken and her perception sharpened past its usual range. She was tracking Rook at the edge of the drill, reading the three indicators she'd learned to map before a strike: weight shift, shoulder drop, the micro-adjustment of the feet.
He didn't do any of those things. He changed direction from a standstill.
Her elbow found his face before either of them had processed that she'd moved.
The sound of it echoed off the training yard walls.
He sat down.
She was kneeling beside him in the same breath. Her hands went to his face on instinct, the healer's hands, finding the break by feel before she'd consciously located it. Clean fracture, mid-bridge, no displacement. The marks at her fingertips lit without asking.
"Hold still," she said.
"I'm being extremely still," he said. "I'm being historic levels of still. You broke my nose."
"Thirty seconds."
"You broke it in less than one."
"Rook."
He went still. She pressed, with the healer's precision that had taken years to develop, and felt the bone respond. It didn't snap back; it eased, the tissue and cartilage finding their alignment under the guidance of the marks the way water found its level. Rook made a sound that was not a word.
"Done," she said.
He touched his nose. Straight. He looked at his hand, then at her, with an expression she was learning to recognize: the one he used when something had moved him and he was deciding whether to admit it.
"That's the strangest thing I've ever felt," he said.
"Better or worse than broken?"
"Different category. Like something remembering what it was supposed to be."
She thought that was exactly right. She would tell Lyse.
"Cael's going to find out about this," Rook said.
"You didn't let me hit you. I was fast."
"I'm planning to lead with that."
The bond's ghost pulled toward the upper balcony. She had been feeling it since the start of the session: the directional awareness of him watching, the specific quality of his attention. She had been aware of it and had not looked up once.
She picked up her water and drank.
"How long has he been up there?" she said.
"Since you started," Rook said. "He came out about twenty minutes in and he hasn't moved."
"Good," she said.
"Good?"
"He should know what I can do." She got back into position. "Again."
"You just broke my nose."
"I fixed it too. Net neutral. Again."
He laughed. He got up. He got back into position.
Above her, on the balcony, the quality of that attention sharpened. She kept her eyes forward. She let the marks burn white for exactly one second, just because they had opinions and she had started letting them have them.
She threw herself into the next drill.
He came down at the end.
He always did. She had been tracking the inevitability of it since the halfway point of the session: he had stayed too long and watched too carefully to simply go back inside without speaking. The coming down was going to happen when the yard cleared and she was alone and the gap in the air had to be filled with something.
She was re-wrapping a scrape on her forearm when his shadow fell across the steps.
"You heal fast," he said.
"Faster since the gift opened properly."
"Rook said you broke his nose."
"Rook's nose is correctly aligned and fully functional."
"He said you fixed it in thirty seconds."
"Twenty-eight. I was counting."
He sat down beside her. Not across, beside. The two of them on the steps with the training yard empty in front of them.
"The healing wasn't in the initial briefing materials," he said.
"Lyse mentioned it was theoretically possible. She didn't know if I'd access it, and I didn't know until this morning." She tied off the wrap. "It feels like a word I forgot I knew. The gift is very old. It sits in the body below what I normally reach, and every time something new opens it's less like learning and more like finding."
"Is that frightening?"
She considered it. "It was, at first. Now it mostly feels like coming home to a house I've never been in that was always supposed to be mine. Which sounds strange."
"It doesn't," he said.
She looked at him.
"I owe you an apology," he said. "About the archive. Your mother's file. I had information that belonged to you and I decided when to give it to you, and that was not my decision to make."
She waited.
"I've been managing information flow since you arrived," he said. "Treating things about your own life as operational variables I had the right to time and sequence. That's wrong. I know it's wrong. I'm sorry."
"How long did it take you to figure out how to say that?" she said.
"About two hours after you found it. I spent those two hours trying to find the version that wasn't also about making myself feel better, which is harder than it sounds."
"That's the second honest thing," she said.
He looked at her.
"Keep going," she said. "We have three days before we walk into a neutral-territory meeting with a man who may have ordered my mother's death and who is claiming your house is rotten from the inside. I need you honest before we get there."
He held her gaze. "I'm afraid of the meeting. Not the tactics. I'm afraid of what he knows and what it's going to cost you to hear it and the fact that I can't stop that from costing you."
"That's three," she said.
"I've lost count of what we're counting."
"Honest things. Since I started keeping track." She stood and picked up her kit. "Come inside. Sable will have made something."
He stood. He followed her across the yard, and she was aware of him at her shoulder, steady and present and not performing anything, and she thought: this is the thing I didn't know I was building toward. Not the gift. Not the power. This specific configuration, this man who is slowly, at real cost, learning to say the true things without managing them first.
She thought: I can work with this.