Through the window behind Edith, the birds she had startled were still scattering over the training complex, and the steady noise from the drill yards had thinned to almost nothing.
Owen stayed where he was on the cushion. He was more confused than alarmed. He had expected Edith to be surprised, but he hadn’t expected her to shout loudly enough to empty the roof.
Edith seemed to realize the same thing. She closed her mouth, took a slow breath and straightened, and when she spoke again, her voice was back to its usual level.
"Stay where you are," she said. "Run the circulation again. I want to see it properly."
Owen closed his eyes and did as he was told.
She had him complete several full cycles while she stood over him, and the questions came in the gaps between them.
"How long did you practice after I left?"
"Most of the afternoon, and into the evening."
"Did your pathways hurt at any point?"
"No."
"Did you push more mana through them than I showed you?"
"No. Same amount, same method." He began the next cycle and waited until it was finished before going on. "I reached Kindled Crest in the afternoon. I thought about stopping, but nothing hurt and nothing felt unstable, so I kept going. Eventually the pressure changed and I broke through."
"You tried nothing I didn’t teach you?"
"Nothing."
He left the Infinite Arsenal out of it entirely. Everything he had told her was true, and it was all he could say without trying to explain things he didn’t understand himself.
Edith was quiet through one more cycle. Then she said, "Open your eyes."
Owen did. Her face was composed again, but she was looking at him the way someone might look at a problem that had turned out to be far more interesting than expected.
"It’s stable," she said. "Your core, your pathways, all of it."
She folded her arms. "I had intended to spend several more sessions settling your cultivation before we touched any dedicated combat work. That isn’t necessary anymore. You’ll still cultivate every day, and I’ll keep checking your progress and teaching you what you need once you reach the point where you need it. But I’m not going to waste our training time drilling foundations you’ve already shown me."
Owen waited.
"Combat training begins today."
He couldn’t keep the interest off his face, and from the slight movement at the corner of Edith’s mouth, she noticed.
"Change into proper combat clothes," she said. "Then meet me at the second training yard."
The noise of the training complex had started up again by the time Owen stepped outside. He passed a group of soldiers on his way back to change, and it was obvious from the way their conversation dropped that they had heard Edith too.
"Did she say Tempered?" one of them muttered to the man beside him.
Another kept glancing at Owen as he walked past, until an instructor snapped his name and sent him back into formation.
Owen kept walking. He didn’t have an explanation he could give them, and he wasn’t going to make one up.
The second training yard was smaller than the main grounds and set well away from the platform where he had fought Gareth. Packed earth covered most of it, with a strip of reinforced ground for weapon work running along one side and distance markers painted along its edge.
Wooden posts and hanging targets stood near the far wall, beside weighted equipment, sand-filled bags and coiled ropes. Racks of ordinary practice weapons lined the fence. The air smelled of disturbed earth, leather and weapon oil, along with the sweat of whichever group had used the yard earlier that morning.
Edith was already there. She had taken off the formal outer layer of her uniform and tied her hair back more tightly, and she wasn’t standing around waiting for him. She was finishing her own routine, working through a set of heavy lunges with the steady pace of someone who had done them thousands of times, and she completed the set before she looked up.
"Good," she said. "Let’s see what that body of yours can actually do."
She didn’t start with swords. She started with sprints.
Owen ran the length of the yard and back, then did it again. After that came weighted carries, explosive starts from a crouch, rope climbs, footwork patterns between the distance markers, grip work with the sandbags, and bodyweight exercises with barely any rest between sets.
The difference in his body showed from the first sprint. He accelerated faster than he ever had, and sandbags that would have taken real effort a few days ago came off the ground far more easily. Between sets, his breathing settled quicker than he expected. Owen found himself enjoying it, since it felt like finding out what he could do all over again.
Edith noticed as well. She simply responded to it differently than he would have liked.
When he finished a weighted carry without much trouble, she added more weight. When his last sprint was as sharp as his first, she cut his rest. When he finished the prescribed repetitions without his form breaking down, she told him to do another set.
It took Owen about half an hour to understand that impressing Edith didn’t lighten his workload. It made it heavier.
She wasn’t trying to hurt him. She watched his form closely the whole time and stopped him twice to correct his posture before he could strain something. She just didn’t seem to believe in training below what someone could actually handle, and by the end of the conditioning, Owen had a much clearer idea of how someone with no Ferrers blood had become one of the highest-ranking officers in the house.
Edith let him drink and catch his breath before she walked over to the reinforced strip and took a blunted training sword from the rack.
"Summon your armament."
Owen called his sword, and the dark longsword settled into his hand.
"This is an assessment, not a duel," Edith said. "Attack me. I’ll mostly defend."
Owen attacked with what he knew. His cuts came faster and heavier than they had even a few days ago, and he could feel how much quicker he recovered from each one. None of it troubled Edith. She controlled the distance and timing so comfortably that his extra speed never seemed to reach her.
She wasn’t only defending, either. She left an opening, and when he went for it, she closed it and slipped off the line. She changed the distance without warning and watched how he adjusted. She let him press forward and then shut another opening before he could reach it.
After a few exchanges, Owen realized she was studying him while she fought. From then on, he stopped treating obvious openings as gifts and started asking himself what she wanted him to reveal by taking them.
In the next exchange, he cut toward her shoulder, and Edith caught his blade in a firm bind. Her training sword held the line between them while she stepped in close enough that he couldn’t comfortably reset.
Owen tried shifting the pressure, and she had adjusted before he finished.
He couldn’t overpower her from there, and trying would only hand her the next move. But the bind depended on his blade being exactly where she was controlling it.
He focused on the Sword Type function.
The longsword changed while their weapons were still engaged. The blade shortened and the balance shifted toward his hand as it became an arming sword, and the point of contact Edith had been controlling simply disappeared.
Owen stepped inside at once.
Edith reacted before he got there. She pivoted off the line and drove a kick into his torso, controlled but solid, and it knocked him back several steps. Owen caught himself with the shorter sword still in his hand.
"Stop," Edith said.
She lowered her training sword. For several seconds, she didn’t look at him at all. She was looking at the weapon in his hand.
"What did you just do?"
Owen had been expecting that question from the moment he made the change. "My armament can change what kind of sword it manifests as," he said. "I don’t fully understand why. It just can."
It was true, and it was as much as he could safely tell her.
"Is that the only other shape?"
"No."
"Show me."
Owen changed the arming sword back into the longsword, and when Edith nodded at him to keep going, into a greatsword. The extra weight settled into his arms, and he adjusted his hands along the longer grip.
"Swing it," Edith said. "A basic cut. Don’t try anything clever."
He did, then changed to a saber at her instruction, and after that a rapier and a falchion. Edith made him move with each one before she let him switch again, and she watched every change closely. Whatever shape the blade took, the copper markings were still there beneath its surface. It was still the same weapon.
Her questions became more specific as they went.
"Does the fire change between shapes?"
Owen ignited the rapier briefly. The flame ran along the narrow blade the same way it did along the longsword. "It doesn’t feel any different."
"Does changing cost you energy?"
"Not that I’ve noticed."
"Can you change while you’re moving?"
"I don’t know. I haven’t tried."
"Try."
He stepped forward and changed the rapier into a saber mid-stride. It worked, but the sudden shift in balance made his next step clumsy, and Edith’s eyes went straight to his feet.
"Does it always appear in the same hand?"
"I’ve only ever summoned it in this one."
Owen answered only from what he had actually seen. There was a lot he still didn’t know, and pretending otherwise would only get him caught out later.
By the time he had gone through all six, Edith’s expression had changed. The surprise had faded, and what had replaced it looked a great deal more intense.
"Do you understand what that means?" she asked, and went on before he could answer. "When someone fights you, they judge your reach, your leverage and your lines from the sword in your hand. They decide what you can and can’t do before you do it. If that sword changes in the middle of an exchange, everything they decided is wrong."
She pointed her training sword at the arming sword he had used against her. "What you did earlier was crude. The idea behind it is dangerous."
Then she looked at his feet, and her tone didn’t change at all. "It’s also useless if you can’t fight with what you’re holding. Your armament gives you different swords. It doesn’t give you the experience to use them properly. You changed to a saber while moving, and your footwork fell apart."
Owen couldn’t argue with that.
He had expected her to sound disappointed. Instead, she sounded like someone who had just been handed a problem she very much wanted to solve.
"Forget what I planned for today," she said. "We’re doing something else."
She started testing him at once. She had him attack with the longsword and called for a change before he could finish the next exchange.
"Arming sword."
He changed.
"Reset. Greatsword."
He changed again.
"Reset. Rapier."
She watched his feet, his grip, his distance and how he recovered after each attack, and it quickly became clear which parts of his training carried over and which didn’t. His longsword footwork mostly held up with the arming sword. It did not hold up with the greatsword, and his rapier point wandered badly whenever he tried to cut with it out of habit.
When Owen did something well, she didn’t praise him. She sped up.
When he made a mistake, she named the exact problem and made him repeat it until he fixed it, and when he fixed it, she moved on to something harder.
By the time their session should have been ending, Owen was drenched in sweat, and his arms had started to feel the strain of six different weights and balances. Edith glanced at the time and looked briefly unhappy that it had gone so quickly.
"One more," she said. "Longsword to rapier to arming sword, ten times, clean. Then you can go."