Owen stayed in the yard only long enough to catch his breath. A jug of water had been left beside the training strip, and he drank most of it before setting it down and looking once more at the scuffed earth where they had been fighting.
Part of him wanted to stay and work through combinations until the light went. But his arms were heavy, his shirt was soaked through, and practicing while this exhausted would only teach him bad habits. He dismissed his sword and headed back toward the residence.
The training complex was winding down around him. Soldiers were returning practice weapons to the racks, and instructors called the last names on their lists before releasing their groups. Stable hands led horses toward the rear buildings, and servants moved along the training lanes collecting water jugs and used towels.
Evening light had begun stretching across the stone walls. It carried the smell of sweat, dust and leather, along with the first cooking smoke drifting over from the residence kitchens.
One of the maids responsible for his rooms was waiting near the side entrance the family used when they came in from training. She took his outer training coat before he could carry it upstairs himself.
"Your bath has been prepared, Young Master," she said. "Your evening clothes are already laid out."
Owen thanked her and went inside.
He was nearly at his room when he heard voices coming from the adjoining service corridor. Two maids were walking toward the corner with armfuls of folded linen and freshly cleaned clothing, talking quietly, and they clearly hadn’t realized he was there.
"...preserved food on top of the normal meals," one of them was saying. "The kitchens have been at it since dawn."
"It’s the same in the laundry. Every piece of field clothing has to be checked for damage before it goes out, and they’ve started sorting the equipment that’s leaving with the force."
There was a short pause.
"I heard tomorrow’s the young master’s assessment. Whether his name stays on the field preparations or not."
"Well, General Rooke wouldn’t have spent a whole month working him half to death if she expected him to stay home."
Owen stepped around the corner.
Both maids went silent at once. One of them nearly lost her grip on the linens and had to clutch them against her chest to keep them from sliding onto the floor.
Owen didn’t say anything. Their faces had already gone red enough, so he simply nodded to them and kept walking. He was privately amused, though. News of his assessment had apparently reached the laundry before he had even taken his bath.
In his room, steam was curling out of the adjoining bathing room. Fresh towels had been set out, and a complete set of clean evening clothes lay across the dressing bench. The maid who had met him at the entrance came in behind him and took away his sweat-soaked training clothes for laundering while he went to bathe.
The hot water worked into his shoulders and forearms, and the soreness that had built up over the day slowly began to ease. It was the first quiet moment he’d had since Edith walked away, and his thoughts turned to tomorrow almost at once.
Edith knew every sword configuration he had. She had trained him to change between them, and she had already seen him combine fire with those changes. Doing the same things faster, or changing weapons at an unexpected moment, wasn’t going to be enough anymore.
So instead of thinking about himself, Owen started thinking about her: which attacks made her close distance, when she chose to give ground, how she dealt with fire when she had room to move, and when she preferred to redirect an attack rather than stop it.
He didn’t find an answer in the bath. But by the time the water started to cool, he had reached one useful conclusion. Tomorrow wasn’t going to be won by a transformation that surprised her. It would depend on making Edith choose a response he could use.
When he came out of the bath, the maid had rearranged the clothes on the bench in the order he normally put them on: a clean shirt, trousers, his evening coat and shoes. She helped him into the coat and checked that the Ferrers crest sat straight.
"Will you be eating in your room tonight, Young Master?" she asked. "You look tired."
Owen thought about it. For most of the past month, his days had been cultivation, training, meals and sleep, one after another. Tonight, he wanted a proper dinner.
"I’ll go down," he said.
The family dining room was quiet compared to the night of his awakening celebration. Lamps had been lit against the approaching dark, serving dishes steamed along the table, and the maids moved efficiently between the dining room and the kitchens.
Eleanor was already seated. Edmund’s place was empty, and she told Owen that his father was still occupied with preparations and would join them later.
Owen sat down and began eating. He finished his first serving faster than he expected, and Eleanor signaled one of the maids to bring him more without saying anything about it.
They talked about ordinary things for a while, such as how long he had spent in the yard and whether the weather would hold. Eventually, Eleanor set down her cup.
"Has Edith finished your training?"
"Tomorrow’s the final assessment."
Eleanor didn’t need him to explain what that meant. If he passed, the possibility that had been hanging over the household for the past month would become real, and he would be leaving the estate on his first actual monster operation.
She was quiet for a moment. She didn’t ask him to withdraw, and she didn’t pretend not to understand what a subjugation was. She had lived around the Ferrers military for far too long for that. Instead, her questions were practical.
"Has anyone fitted you for field equipment yet?"
"Not yet."
"Are your boots suitable for long travel? And has Edith told you what personal items you’re expected to carry?"
"Most of that’s waiting until I actually pass tomorrow," Owen admitted.
Eleanor turned to the maid standing nearest the door. "If he passes, I want his travel clothing and underlayers prepared immediately, not left until the last moment. And have someone go through his field wardrobe tomorrow. Anything that no longer fits him properly should be replaced."
"Yes, my lady."
Owen looked at his mother. She had given those instructions too readily for them to have just occurred to her. His own month had been taken up with cultivation and training, but for her, the same month had been a countdown to watching her younger son leave the safety of the estate for the first time.
"I’ve watched your father leave for operations more times than I can count," Eleanor said after the maid had gone. "That’s part of being a Ferrers, and I know the risks aren’t just stories." She paused. "It’s different when it’s you."
Owen waited.
"I’m not asking you to prove anything, or to make the family proud," she said. "I just want you to come back."
He couldn’t promise her that nothing would happen, and she would have known better than to believe him if he had.
"I’ll listen to the soldiers who’ve done this before," he said instead. "I’m not going to treat it like one of Edith’s exercises."
Eleanor looked at him a moment longer, then nodded and picked her cup back up.
Edmund arrived later than the others. Mercer walked with him as far as the door before continuing on elsewhere, and Edmund sat down and filled his plate. His mind was clearly still partly on the preparations outside, but he ate rather than turning dinner into a briefing.
"Owen’s final assessment is tomorrow," Eleanor told him before Owen could.
Edmund looked across the table. "Do you feel ready?"
Owen considered giving a confident answer, then decided there was no point. "I don’t have a perfect plan for making her use her armament."
Edmund didn’t seem surprised. "She’s deliberately kept that ability from you. Spending the night trying to plan around something you’ve never seen would be a waste." He reached for the bread. "What you can prepare for is Edith herself. You’ve been fighting her for weeks."
That was close enough to what Owen had worked out in the bath that he only nodded.
After that, the conversation moved away from him. Edmund and Eleanor talked about the household matters that came with the coming departure while Owen ate. A maid replaced an empty serving dish, another cleared the plates and brought out fruit, and Owen listened more than he spoke.
When dinner ended, he went back upstairs.
His room had been reset while he was gone. The bathwater had been emptied, the used towels removed and his bed turned down. Beside the dressing bench, his maid had laid out fresh combat clothing for the morning: dark training trousers, a clean undershirt, his fitted Ferrers training coat and a pair of polished boots.
"What time would you like to be woken, Young Master?"
"A little earlier than usual," Owen said. He didn’t want to rush breakfast or arrive at the yard still half asleep.
She nodded and left him for the night.
Once he was alone, Owen considered opening his dashboard, then decided against it. Nothing on it would answer tomorrow’s problem. He already knew his cultivation, his numbers and the swords available to him. The part he didn’t know was Edith.
He lay down and went back over moments from their recent spars.
One sequence he came up with relied too much on Edith retreating, and she rarely retreated when she didn’t have to, so he set it aside. Another depended on changing to the greatsword before she had committed to her response, and she would almost certainly read that the moment it started.
A third idea seemed more promising, until he realized he was still thinking about each sword on its own instead of the reaction each one could create.
That thought stayed with him. He didn’t need one sword Edith couldn’t handle. He needed one choice that made her answer, and then another that made that answer inconvenient.
Eventually, he stopped trying to finish a fight that hadn’t started yet and let himself fall asleep.
A knock came at the time he had asked for.
The maid waited until he answered before coming in, then opened the curtains and told him breakfast was being served. Owen was already half awake, which was more than he could have said on the morning of his first cultivation lesson.
He washed while she checked over the clothes she had laid out the night before. By the time he was ready to dress, there was nothing left to find, clean or fix. She helped settle the training coat across his shoulders, brushed a small piece of lint from the sleeve and stepped back.
Breakfast was shorter than dinner had been. Eleanor was there, but neither of them brought up the previous night’s conversation. She simply made sure he ate enough while the maids moved around them with bread, eggs, fruit and hot drinks, and the sounds of activity elsewhere in the residence grew steadily louder.
On his way out, Owen passed the same service corridor as the evening before. One of the maids he had overheard was there again, carrying folded clothes toward another part of the house. She recognized him, went faintly pink, and became very interested in the clothes in her arms. Owen walked past without making it any worse for her.
Outside, the estate was fully awake. Soldiers crossed the courtyards with field packs, servants carried bundles toward the storage buildings, stable hands were preparing mounts, and officers stood near the training complex calling names from their lists. Owen made his way through all of it toward the yard where Edith would be waiting.
As he got closer, he stopped paying attention to the preparations around him.
Yesterday, he had left the yard wondering which sword could force Edith to show him what she had kept hidden all month. This morning, he understood that the sword itself wasn’t the answer. What mattered was making Edith choose.
He reached the entrance to the second training yard and saw that someone was already waiting inside.
Owen adjusted the cuff of the clean training coat his maid had laid out, rolled his shoulders once, and walked in.