Chapter 35. #3
"Sorry," he said eventually, the way people said it when they'd been somewhere else and came back to the room. "I don't usually—"
"Don't," she said.
He looked at her.
"Don't apologise for it."
He held her gaze for a moment. Then looked back at the field.
The stars moved through their slow arc above them. Eventually Liam dropped off the wall, landing quietly, and held out a hand.
She took it and jumped down.
They stood in the courtyard for a moment, both looking at the field.
"You should sleep," he said.
"So should you."
"Yeah." He picked up a jacket from the base of the wall and shook it out. Then he looked at her — the particular look that said I see you without saying it. "Goodnight, Aeliana."
"Goodnight."
She walked back through the dark, the cold in her face and the stars still very clear above the mountains.
She slept.
~
The morning run was shorter than she'd planned.
Not by decision — she'd set out at the usual time with the usual route in mind, but her legs were heavier than they should have been for the fourth lap and she made the cut before the hill extension without letting herself argue about it.
Back in her room with ten minutes to spare, changed, boots laced.
She was on the training field before anyone else. She set out the mats.
Squad training was footwork and contact, run in the frost-pale dark before the sun had cleared the mountain line.
Varrin called corrections the way he always did — clipped, exact, no more words than necessary.
She moved through the sequences and didn't let the heaviness show, because showing it was the wrong answer, and also because it wasn't that bad.
Just the particular weight of too little sleep spread across too many hours.
By the end of the session her shirt clung to her back and the bruises from contact had already started to bloom.
Varrin dismissed them at the end and looked at the first years. "Carr's class. Don't be late."
They gathered their things. She stayed where she was.
Varrin glanced at her once on his way out.
Not a question. Just acknowledgement that they both knew she wouldn't be going.
Her dragons hadn't channeled yet — hadn't started the process that would make the signet work beginning to make sense.
Professor Carr's lectures on wielding weren't for her. Not yet.
The door closed.
She went to get the bucket.
~
The training room floor took longer this morning than it usually did.
Not because she was slower — she wasn't, not meaningfully — but because her attention kept sliding, the particular slippage of a mind that hadn't had enough hours to reset properly.
She caught it each time and pulled it back.
Boot scrape by the east door. Frost under the threshold.
The corner Bran always kicked equipment into.
She was on the last section when the door opened.
-
Garrick had not intended to be early.
He'd had a debrief with Xaden that should have run until half nine, but Xaden had a particular gift for ending things precisely when he'd said what he needed to say and not a sentence later,
and he'd been walking toward the east training room with twenty minutes to spare before he'd fully registered the change in his schedule.
He pushed the door open.
She was on her knees at the far corner of the room with a brush in one hand and her weight braced on the other, working the last section of stone floor with the focused, methodical efficiency of someone who had learned not to waste movement.
Her braid had come partially loose — the kind of thing that happened over the course of a morning, not the kind she'd stop to fix in the middle of a task. She didn't look up when he came in.
He set his bag down by the bench.
She finished the corner, sat back on her heels, and looked at the floor the way she looked at most completed things — briefly, checking the result against some internal standard, then moving on. She gathered the brush and pushed to her feet and turned to take the bucket back to the supply room.
She registered him in the doorway and stopped.
"You're early," she said.
"Xaden ran short." He looked at her.
He'd been looking at her with some version of professional attention since she'd crossed the Parapet, and he'd learned to read the difference between tired and depleted, between pushed and spent.
She was somewhere in the middle of that range this morning — functional, clearly, because she'd run and trained and cleaned a floor and was still standing with her weight evenly distributed and her posture straight.
But the shadows under her eyes were deeper than last week, and there was a quality to the set of her jaw that he recognised as someone operating on less than they needed.
"How are you sleeping?" he said.
She moved past him to return the bucket. "Fine."
"That's not what I asked."
She stopped. Turned around.
He looked at her steadily. She looked back — the particular way she did when she was deciding how much truth was the right amount.
"Not enough," she said.
"How much."
"Five hours. Maybe six."
He didn't react, because reacting was less useful than continuing. "Since when?"
She considered it. "The squad added morning sessions."
"I know they did. That's not new." He crossed his arms. "What changed?"
She was quiet for a beat. He waited, because he'd learned that she answered things in her own time and pressing shortened the answer rather than improving it.
"Late night," she said finally. "Last night."
He filed that away without asking about it. It wasn't his question to ask. "You're running in the mornings."
"Yes."
"Before the squad sessions."
"Yes."
"So you're up at—" he did the arithmetic. "Four, four-thirty. Sleeping at midnight if you're lucky. That's not six hours, Sorynne, that's four."
She didn't argue with the maths.
"I shortened the circuit this morning," she said. "Cut the extension."
"I know. I can see it." He could — the morning run lived in her legs and this morning they were heavier than last week, the compensation subtle but there. "That's not the same as actually sleeping."
She said nothing.
He looked at her for a moment — the bags under her eyes, the loose braid, the way she was holding herself upright by discipline rather than rest. Then he uncrossed his arms and picked up his bag.
"Put the bucket away," he said. "Then we work."
She went.
He set up the space while she was gone — moved the benches back, cleared the centre, pulled out the sparring bands. He heard her come back in and didn't turn around.
"I'm going to run you through the new contact sequence," he said. "Slow first. I want to see where the fatigue is sitting before we go to speed."
"I'm not that tired."
"I know you're not." He turned. "I'm not running you slow because I think you can't manage fast. I'm running you slow because I want to see what tired looks like in your body specifically, so that when you're in the air on no sleep and something goes wrong, I know what I'm working with."
He held her gaze. "Different thing."
She processed that. Then she nodded, once, and moved to the centre of the mat.
He came at her from the left — slow, deliberate, telegraphed. She blocked clean, weight forward, elbow where it needed to be. He came again from the right. Same result.
He pushed the pace up by a fraction.
She tracked him, adjusted, held her ground. The fatigue was there — he could see it in the slight delay on the fourth repetition, a fraction of a second where her body asked for something her mind had to supply instead. She covered it well. She always covered it well.
"Again," he said.
She reset.
He worked her through the sequence six more times, each pass fractionally faster than the last, watching the point where compensation started to creep in — the shoulder that rose slightly, the weight that shifted back instead of staying forward.
It came later than he expected. Later than last month, even.
He called a pause. She stood in the middle of the mat breathing carefully, evenly, the way she breathed when she was managing something.
"You're stronger than you were," he said.
She looked at him.
"Not a compliment," he said. "An observation. The fatigue threshold is higher. Which means the training is working and also means you're going to push past it further than you should before your body tells you to stop."
He picked up a sparring stick from the rack.
"So I'm telling you instead. Four hours is not sustainable. Not at this pace."
"I know."
"Good." He threw her the stick. "Then you can think about what you're going to do about it while we go again."
She caught it cleanly.
They went again.
~
The mess hall at midday was loud in the way it always was — trays, voices, the scrape of benches on stone. She'd collected her food and was crossing toward the squad's usual corner when she heard it.
Two voices, low but not low enough. She recognised them without looking — Bran and Kellen, already seated, not watching the room.
"—still cleaning floors while the rest of us are in Carr's."
"To be fair, she can't exactly go." A pause. "Dragon hasn't done anything yet, has it."
"Exactly. We're already three months into signets theory and she's — what, just waiting? At some point that starts to matter."
"It already matters."
She kept walking.
She set her tray down at the end of the bench, two seats away from anyone, and picked up her spoon.
The soup was the same as yesterday. She ate it.
She didn't look at Bran. She didn't look at Kellen. She didn't think about what their faces were doing, whether they'd noticed her pass, whether they'd lowered their voices a half-second too late on purpose or by accident. None of those things were useful, so she didn't think about them.