21st of Deepwinter, 413 AH
Aldric had the shirt laid out before I was fully awake.
I sat up and swung my legs off the bed. The room was dark, the light-stone on the desk turned low, the windows frosted over and barely grey with early dawn.
The desk was worse than I'd left it, which was impressive since I was the only one making it worse. Specimens in repurposed kitchen jars along the back edge. The beetle I'd found behind the stables was still the most interesting, mostly because it had six legs and something that might have been a seventh. I'd been trying to map the parallel system in the insects, see if mana behaved the same way in a beetle's tissue as in mine.
So far the answer was: maybe, and also I had no way to tell with the tools I had. I couldn't observe at the resolution that mattered. The jars weren't helping either, one of them didn't seal properly and the specimen inside had dried out overnight. Third one I'd lost that way.
The notebook filled most of the top drawer now, thick with two months of data, its spine giving up. The pages were dense with my actual writing, quick, abbreviated, messier wherever the results got interesting. Nothing I would let Pemberton see.
Aldric stood by the wardrobe with a shirt I hadn't seen before. Wider through the shoulders, like the last two replacements. Growing up was doing most of that work, though two months of conditioning had not made the tailor's job easier.
I dressed. He buttoned the collar, same as every morning since I've arrived here. I'd undo it the moment I left the room. He pretended not to know.
On the way past the desk, I stopped and opened the drawer.
The data from three nights ago lay on top, graphs in ink on paper that deserved better tools. The right forearm, my primary test site since those first sessions in this room, was responding differently now than it had in week one. The mana reached that tissue cleanly, without the fraying at the edges that used to eat my concentration.
The cells had changed their response, or at least enough to make that a useful model after two months of daily work. The mana entered without the old resistance, and the tissue seemed to be waiting for a next signal. I'd started thinking of it as a conversation. The mana said something. The cells listened, but weren't quite ready to answer yet.
I'm close. I couldn't prove it, but I could feel it.
What I needed was better observation, because feeling what the cells did wasn't the same as seeing it. I missed the equipment from my past life. A proper microscope, sealed containers, preservation materials that didn't break down within a week. I had a desk full of kitchen jars and a borrowed lens that couldn't resolve past a grain of salt. The estate didn't stock anything better. I'd looked.
I left the desk.
The corridor was cold. Winter had settled into the estate with the stubbornness of an organism that had found its niche and intended to stay. Frost on the windows, heating arrays at full capacity. I could feel the ward coverage in the floor, warm stone where the arrays reached and cold stone where they didn't.
The training hall was quiet, light-stones dimmed, the wooden practice floor carrying the chill. Sera was on the far side, going through sword combinations with the focused intensity she brought every morning. She was always here first. Five weeks of arriving early and I'd never once beaten her to the floor. Either she woke before dawn or she didn't sleep. Both seemed plausible.
We still didn't talk. That was the arrangement. Unspoken, reliable, and efficient. She trained on her side, I trained on mine, and the hall was big enough that pretending worked. I liked it.
I hung the jacket on the hook by the door, pushed my sleeves up past my forearms, and started the stretches.
The left calf was tight from yesterday's run. I worked it loose, ran through my conditioning routine, and moved into the casting stance. Back foot planted, weight centered, hands positioned. Hold. Two months of Vael drilling this same position into me until my body knew it without thinking.
I'd picked the mana-path resistance tests back up a few weeks into the routine. Progress had slowed enough that marginal gains mattered. I tested small adjustments to the stance, kept the angles that eased the mana's path, and discarded the ones that didn't. Vael hadn't flagged any of it.
Across the hall, Sera finished a sequence and reset. I caught her gaze shifting away as I looked up, quick and deliberate, as it did sometimes when I turned from a drill. She'd been doing that for weeks now, brief looks when I was busy focusing on a hold or in the middle of exercise, always redirected before I made eye contact.
I assumed she was watching for something. Everyone in the family had adjusted to me differently since the fall. Sera's way was distance, though it might have been distance before the fall too. Hard to say, when you couldn't remember. We were siblings only in the technical sense.
Her footwork was clean, though. It always was. She trained with her whole body committed, every movement serving the next one. Efficient in a way that looked nothing like Vael's efficiency but got results I could respect.
I went back to the stance.
The hip angle I'd adjusted yesterday was holding, so I focused on the weight distribution Vael had been grinding into me for three weeks. Rear leg grounded, front foot light, everything centered through the hips. Hold. The shirt was sticking to my back from the run and the exercises before it. Without the jacket, the cold air should have helped. I was still hot.
My balance wobbled on the third hold, something in the back foot. I adjusted the angle and tried again.
"Put it on."
I turned to the left. Sera was standing two steps from me with my jacket held out at arm's length, the hook behind her bare. She'd crossed the hall while I was in the hold.
So we're talking now.
She was giving me the look. The old classifications didn't fit this time though, and if she'd meant to stab me, she probably wouldn't have brought the jacket.
"I'm sweating," I said.
"Then close your collar and roll your sleeves down."
That makes absolutely no sense.
She was still holding the jacket out. Her grip on the fabric had tightened. She was putting creases into my jacket.
"Why?"
"Because you..." She stopped. Her eyes did a circuit: collar, forearms, the damp fabric where it sat against my chest. "You shouldn't be walking around like that."
"I'm not walking around. I'm training. In the training hall." I gestured at the empty room. "There's no one here."
"I'm here!" she shouted. "Tsk. Just put it on!"
"Sera, I'm in the middle of a routine. The shirt is wet because I've been working out. If I put the jacket on, I overheat. If I button the collar, I restrict airflow. The sleeves are up because I need to see what my forearms are doing during the holds."
"You don't need to be doing this," The heat had gone out of her voice, what replaced it was flatter. "The stance work, the drills, all of it. You don't need any of it."
"I need it."
"You don't." Her grip on the jacket had whitened her knuckles. "Mother will sort you out. Tutors, tools, whatever you want. You're the son. You could sit in your room with your jars and nothing would change." A pause. "Some of us have to earn it."
That pissed me off.
She could call me spoiled. Fine. But my work was the one part of this life I had built for myself. The failed tests and ruined specimens hadn't been handed to me. Neither had the progress. I had chosen all of it and she did not get to take that choice from me.
I snatched the jacket from her hands and hung it back on the hook. When I turned around, she was still standing in the same place.
I walked straight at her, until our boots nearly touched and less than a handspan separated our faces. Our eyes were level.
"You can think I should cover up?" My voice stayed low. "Too bad. Neither you nor anyone else decides what I do. How I dress, how I train, and what I do with my work are all mine to decide."
Her mouth opened, then closed again. She blinked, and for the first time, Sera simply looked surprised. She turned and stomped to her side of the hall, picked up the sword, and swung.
The cut came down with too much force, the execution off. A sloppy swing, even I could see that. She caught it, reset, and went again.
I went back to the stance.
By the time her swings had settled into something that sounded like the morning's rhythm, footsteps came from the corridor.
Vael came through the door as she always did. A nod to Sera, then me.