Chapter 19
"You're dropping your left shoulder every time you throw," Thane says, not looking up from the training schedule pinned to the wall. "You've been doing it for twenty minutes. It's going to get you killed."
"Good morning to you too," I say.
He turns around then, and the training room feels smaller than it did a minute ago.
The lower level practice hall is all bare stone and scuffed wooden floors, weapon racks along the south wall, no windows.
The academy's lockdown posted at six this morning means the main combat facilities are closed.
This room wasn't on the restricted list, which is apparently the only reason we're in it.
"The left shoulder," he says again, moving toward me. "Drop your arm. Let me see your stance."
I square up. Feet shoulder-width apart, hands raised, the form that Sage drilled into me over three weeks of predawn sessions in the courtyard. Thane circles me the way dragons apparently circle things, slow and appraising and not particularly subtle about it.
"Your weight's too far back," he says. "If someone rushes you from the right, you'll fall. Here." He steps in close and puts one hand flat against my lower back, pressure applied without warning, pushing my weight forward. "There. Now you're not a liability."
"That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me."
"Don't get used to it." He steps back, but not as far as he was before. "Throw the combination. Jab, cross, elbow."
I throw it. He catches my elbow on a pad he's materialized from somewhere and the impact rattles up my arm.
"Again."
I throw it again. He adjusts the angle of the pad, forcing me to correct my trajectory mid-strike, which is infuriating and probably the point.
"Again."
"Are you going to say anything other than again?"
"When you do it correctly, I'll say something different." He moves the pad to a new position. "Again."
We work like that for forty minutes. He doesn't compliment and he doesn't insult.
He just corrects, repositions, makes me repeat things until the movement stops being a decision and starts being a reflex.
It's the most focused I've been in a week.
The bond with Ryder has been running loud since Caspian left, a low persistent pressure at the base of my chest that I've been managing around rather than through, and physical work quiets it better than anything else I've found.
Thane stops me on the seventh repetition of a defensive pivot, his hand closing around my forearm to halt the movement.
"Not like that." He resets my arm himself, rotating my elbow out, and his grip is careful in a way that doesn't match his usual approach to anything.
"Like this. When you block from this angle, you keep your neck protected.
Block from the angle you were using, someone gets a clean shot at your throat. "
"Where did you learn this?" I ask. "This specific stuff. Not dragon combat training. This."
His hand drops from my arm. Pain flickers across his face before disappearing.
"My mother," he says.
I wait. He hasn't volunteered anything about her before, not directly, and I know better than to push at a door that's just opened a crack on its own.
"She wasn't trained by the dragon houses," he continues, turning away to pick up a different pad from the rack.
"She couldn't be. She had no elemental power.
So she learned this instead. Human combat forms, reaper evasion patterns, whatever she could find that didn't require fire or scale.
" He turns back. His eyes are gold in the torchlight, brighter than usual, and he's looking at me with an expression I've seen on his face exactly once before, in a corridor weeks ago, gone before I could identify it.
"She moved like you do. Quick. Scrappy. Like she was always calculating the fastest route out of the room. "
"Thane—"
"You fight with her ferocity," he says, flat, factual, like he's reading something off a page. "It's the first thing I noticed about you. I didn't know what to do with it."
The training room is very quiet. Outside, the academy sits in lockdown, and the silence it produces is a different quality than the usual morning quiet. Denser. Like the building is bracing for something.
"That's why it bothered you," I say.
"Everything about you bothers me," he says, and there's no cruelty in it this time, just exhaustion with himself. "That specific thing bothered me the most."
I pick up the sparring pad from the floor where it's fallen and hold it out to him. "Then we're even. You bother me too."
His mouth does something it rarely does, a brief shift that's almost not a smile and then deliberately isn't. He takes the pad. "Defensive sequence. I'll call the strikes. You block."
"Fine."
"Left."
I block left.
"Cross."
I turn into it, catching the pad against my forearm.
"Overhead."
I raise my guard, but he's faster than I account for, and the overhead is a feint. The real strike comes low, and I catch it wrong, and the impact sends me back two steps.
"That's going to keep happening," he says, "until you stop trusting the called strike and start reading my body."
"You just told me to block when you called it."
"I lied." He raises the pad again. "Now you know. Read my body. Don't listen to what I say."
"The most honest relationship advice I've ever received," I say, and he actually lets the almost-smile land this time before it's gone.
We run the sequence again. And again. He feints three more times, and I catch two of them, which feels like progress until he catches me wrong-footed on the third and I end up sitting on the floor with no clear memory of how I got there.
"That," he says, standing over me, "would have been a kill shot from anything with actual claws."
"Thank you," I say, from the floor. "That's very helpful."
"Get up."
I get up. We go again.
It's another twenty minutes before I catch the feint cleanly enough that he has to step back to avoid my counter. He stops, and his posture shifts, subtle, a settling, like a concession he wasn't planning to make.
"There," he says.
"Was that a compliment? I can't tell."
"Don't push it, Fairmont."
I'm about to push it anyway, because I apparently have no self-preservation instincts where Thane Valorix is concerned, when the alarm sounds.
It's not the standard lockdown tone that's been cycling through the corridors since dawn.
This one is lower, running at a frequency that resonates in the stone walls and in the floor under my feet, a subsonic warning that I've never heard before but understand immediately in the way that certain sounds bypass thinking and land directly in the body.
Major breach. Lower levels.
Thane is already moving, the sparring pad dropped, tension radiating from him that wasn't there thirty seconds ago. "Stay here," he says.
"No."
"Angelic." He stops, turns. The gold in his eyes is brighter and the air around him has gone several degrees warmer. "This isn't a training exercise. Stay in this room."
"There are people in the lower levels," I say.
"Students. Faculty. And whoever is down there has been using those passages to set traps.
" I pick up the short practice blade from the rack because it's better than nothing, and I know that because Ryder told me to always have something in my hand.
"I'm not staying in a room while something hunts through the floors below me. "
He stares at me for two seconds. Then he crosses the room, takes the practice blade out of my hand, and replaces it with an actual weapon from the locked case on the south wall that he opens with a touch of heat from his palm.
"Stay behind me," he says. "Two steps. Don't close that gap for any reason."
"Understood."
We move.
The stairwell to the lower levels is at the end of the corridor, and the alarm is louder here, cycling in waves that make my back teeth ache.
The bond with Ryder fires hot the moment we hit the stairs, a sharp spike that tells me he's already down there or moving toward it, and I push the awareness aside because splitting my focus on the stairs is how I die.
The lower passages are older than the rest of the academy, stone that predates the current construction by several centuries, corridors that are narrow and low-ceilinged and smell of cold water and metal.
The torches down here run on a different system, oil rather than magical feed, and several of them have gone out.
Thane slows at the first junction. He's reading through the air with senses that aren't mine to access. Then he turns left, and I stay two steps behind him exactly like he said, because this is not the moment to be contrary.
We find the source of the alarm in what the academy's layout calls the lower archive corridor, a passage running beneath the east wing where old administrative records are stored in warded cases.
There are four other people already in the corridor when we arrive: two students I recognize from the reaper house, a maintenance worker pressed flat against the far wall, and Professor Aldric.
I've had Professor Aldric for ward theory on Thursdays.
He's methodical, dry-humored, the kind of man who teaches through repetition until the material becomes structural.
He's standing in the center of the corridor with his back to us, and he's standing wrong.
Too still. The specific stillness of a body being operated rather than inhabited.
"Professor Aldric," Thane says. His voice is level but the warmth in the air around us has intensified. "Step away from the archive access panel."
The professor doesn't turn around. His hand is pressed flat against a panel in the wall, and the wards on it are active, pulsing with a sickly green light that isn't the original color of the academy's warding system.