"Stop casting," Wolha said, on the sixteenth day. "You're done casting for the week."
Yeju's hand was already up with the glyph half-drawn. She let it go. "It's the sixteenth day. That's a hundred and seventy-six casts. The schedule says eleven a day."
"The schedule says eleven a day to build a floor. You've built four inches of floor. Now you're going to spend a week learning what to stand on it with." Wolha was not on her stool, the first sign the afternoon would be different. She stood at the far end of the hall by the rack with two practice blades in her hands, and she threw one.
Yeju did not catch it. It hit the boards and skidded past, and she picked it up off the floor with the dignity of a woman who has been thrown things before.
"I can't fight."
"I know you can't fight. I'm not teaching you to fight. That would take four years and you'd still lose." Wolha walked up the hall with the other blade held loose. "I'm going to attack you. You're going to throw your candle at the moment I commit. Not before. Not after. At the moment." She stopped six feet away. "You did it once by accident in a duel ring. Now you'll do it on purpose, forty times, and you'll be wrong for the first thirty-eight."
Forty. I can cast eleven.
"I don't have forty casts in me."
"You're not going to cast." Her eye went flat with something that might have been humour. "You're going to say the word. When you think I've committed, you say 'now.' That's the whole drill. It costs you nothing, and it's the only thing in this school worth teaching you."
She came in.
Yeju said "now" and Wolha stopped a foot short, blade at rest, having committed to nothing.
"Too early. I'd shifted my weight. Shifting isn't committing." She stepped back. "Again."
She came in again. Yeju waited, then waited longer, and the blade was very close when she said "now", a half-beat after the tip had already reached her throat. She knew because Wolha stopped it there.
"Too late. You're dead. Again."
The third one Yeju got wrong in a new way. The fourth she got wrong in the same way as the second. By the twelfth she had begun to see it: the commitment was not in the blade at all. It was in the back foot, in the moment the weight went past the point where a person could still change their mind. By the nineteenth she said "now" with Wolha's blade a hand's width from her collarbone, the woman's back foot off the boards. Wolha stopped and straightened up.
"There," she said.
"That was luck."
"Yes. Again."
By the twenty-fourth attempt Yeju had begun to hate the drill in a way she had not hated anything since arriving. A strange, useful, clarifying hate.
Not the failing. She was accustomed to failing; she had failed at eleven casts a day for sixteen days and taken it as weather. It was that the drill was free. No core in it, no mana, no rating, no F stamped on a board, and she was still bad at it. So the thing standing between her and living through the spring was not her decorative core at all. It was her.
"Twenty-five," Wolha said, and came in again.
Yeju said "now" too early. Wolha stopped, one foot still planted, made no comment, went back to the mark.
She's not shifting her weight this time. Watch the hip. The blade lies, the shoulders lie, the face lies. The hip has to move, because a body can't go forward without it.
"Twenty-six."
Yeju watched the hip. She said "now" the moment the hip went, and Wolha's back foot came off the boards a quarter-second later. Early again, but early by a quarter-second instead of a second and a half.
Wolha straightened. She looked at Yeju for a moment.
"What did you change?"
"I stopped watching the sword."
"Mm." She went back to the mark. "Twenty-seven."
They went to thirty-eight. Yeju got four right. Her arms had done nothing all afternoon, yet she was more spent than after any grind. Watching a person try to kill you thirty-eight times uses something a body does not carry much of.
Wolha racked the blades and sat down on her stool at last. She took out the pipe and did not light it.
"Here's the arithmetic. A first-circle candle does no damage. Everyone in this school knows it, which is why nobody teaches what I just taught you. A candle isn't worth a drill." She turned the pipe over. "But a mage on a Rift line has one useful second in any fight, and it's the second where the thing in front of her has committed and can't change its mind. Everything before that second, you're guessing. Everything after, you're dead. In that one second, a candle in the eyes is the same as a hammer."
One second. If I'm in it, I live. Early or late, I don't.
"How do the others do it," Yeju said.
"They don't need to. Jang throws forty forms and one of them lands. A fine strategy, if you've got forty forms." Wolha's eye came up. "You've got one. So you don't get to be wrong. That's your whole life now: everyone else in that hall is allowed to be wrong thirty-nine times a fight, and you're allowed zero. The good news is that being right once is enough. The bad news is it has to be the right once."
"There's a second half," Wolha said. "You won't like it."
"I didn't like the first half."
"You loved the first half. You've been grinning like an idiot since the twenty-sixth." She said it without any warmth at all, which was as close as Gang Wolha came to affection. "Here's the second half. The drill works because I telegraph. On purpose. I've dropped my weight a half-beat early forty-two times so a girl with no core could learn to see it."
Oh.
"Things in a Rift don't telegraph." She turned the pipe over. "A gloamstag commits with its shoulders, because it has shoulders, a spine, a way it has to move. Some of what's in Permit-Zone Nine doesn't have shoulders. Some of it doesn't have a front. I watched a Ring-five try to read a commitment off a thing with no face, and it opened him hip to collarbone in the time it took him to work out where its weight was."
The good hall was quiet. Out in the yard somebody was still shouting about feet.
"So the drill's useless," Yeju said.
"The drill is one of two things you'll have out there. The other one is me, and I'll be busy." Wolha stood and stretched; the shoulder made its sound. "You've got eleven weeks to learn to read commitment off a thing that's built wrong. That's not a training problem. Nobody knows how to teach it. The ones who can do it, do it. The ones who can't are a list of names in the vanguard hall. I have read that list. There are nine hundred and six of them."
She went toward the door.
"Same time tomorrow. Bring your ears, not your hands."
Yeju was at the door when Wolha spoke again, not looking at her, packing the pipe she was not going to smoke.
"You've been writing."
Yeju's hand stopped on the frame.
"Ink on the cheek. Third time this week." Wolha thumbed the bowl. "Not coursework. Coursework ink is on the fingers. Cheek ink is a person who fell asleep on something at two in the morning."
Say something. Say a normal thing.
"It's a hobby," Yeju said.
"Mm." Wolha did not look up. "I had one of those. I was going to be a cartographer. There's a case of survey maps in my rooms I haven't opened in nineteen years." She struck a match, finally, and lit the pipe indoors, in the good hall, against four regulations. "Keep the hobby, Han Yeju. It's the only part of a person the Rift line can't take, and everyone I served with who lost theirs first is dead."