Chapter 163: Two Thirds Through

Chapter 163: Chapter 163: Two Thirds Through

Sophie had decided, three days ago, that watching Ban get corrected was the single best entertainment the estate currently offered.

It wasn’t that she enjoyed him struggling. She liked Ban. He’d carried her on his shoulders through the east garden more times than she could count and never once complained about it, even the time she’d fallen asleep up there and he’d stood perfectly still for forty minutes rather than risk waking her by moving. But there was something endlessly satisfying about watching someone enormous and capable get told, gently and repeatedly, that he’d been doing a very difficult thing slightly wrong for years.

"Again," Alvis said.

Ban reset his stance. The training ground still bore the faint fracture lines from the night of the restoration, hairline cracks in the stone that nobody had bothered to repair, as if the estate itself had decided the scar was worth keeping. Berth stood at the training ground’s edge with her arms crossed, watching with the particular focus of someone determined not to let her own turn catch her unprepared.

Ban moved through the Breathflow’s third form. Sophie watched his shoulders, because Alvis had taught her to watch shoulders first — shoulders told you what someone believed about their own effort before the rest of the body caught up to it. Ban’s were doing the thing they always did, dropping half an inch too early on the transition.

"You’re anticipating the exhale," Alvis said, before Ban had even finished the movement. "You always have. I taught you to anticipate it because it was the only way I could show you the form without being able to demonstrate what should actually be happening underneath it." He stepped forward, adjusted Ban’s shoulder with two fingers, no more force than that. "The exhale should follow the movement, not announce it. Like this."

He didn’t demonstrate with words this time. He simply moved through the transition himself, and Sophie — who had watched this form performed incorrectly for as long as she could remember, by Ban, by Berth, by Alvis himself before the restoration — felt something in her chest go quiet and attentive the way it always did when she saw something done exactly right for the first time.

It didn’t look dramatic. That was the part she was still learning to appreciate. It looked like almost nothing at all, a small correction in timing, and the mana around Alvis’s hands simply arrived where it needed to be instead of a half-second late, the way water found the lowest point without needing to be told.

"Oh," Ban said quietly.

"Yes," Alvis said. "Oh."

Ban tried it again. Sophie watched his shoulders. This time they held their position half a second longer, and something about the whole shape of the movement changed — not more powerful, exactly, just less like effort and more like agreement.

"Better," Alvis said. "Considerably. You’ll lose it again in an hour and we’ll do this another forty times before it stays. That’s the honest timeline. I’m not going to promise you it’s faster than that."

"Forty times," Ban repeated, with the specific weary fondness of someone who trusted the person telling him something difficult.

"Forty at minimum." Alvis’s mouth did the thing it rarely did, the almost-smile that took people who didn’t know him well several months to learn to recognize. "You’ve been compensating for a gap in the technique for six years, Ban. I’m not offended that unlearning it takes longer than an afternoon."

Berth stepped up before her turn was called, which Alvis allowed without comment, because Berth had never once in Sophie’s memory waited to be told when she was ready.

Sophie settled onto the low wall at the training ground’s edge, Mittens arranging itself against her side with the unhurried contentment of a creature that had decided the afternoon required no urgency. She liked these sessions better than almost anything else about the estate right now — better than lessons, better than the quiet hours in the library, better even than the letters that came sometimes from wherever Raze currently was, which she read twice each and then folded carefully away because they were the kind of thing you didn’t want to wear out from too much handling.

"You’re thinking loudly," Alvis said, without turning from Berth’s stance correction.

"I wasn’t thinking anything."

"You were thinking about the letters." He adjusted Berth’s wrist angle with the same two-finger precision he’d used on Ban. "You get a particular quality when you think about them. Quiet, but not the same quiet as when you’re actually paying attention to something in front of you."

Sophie considered denying it and decided against it, because Alvis noticed things and there was no point pretending otherwise to a man who’d spent twenty years teaching people to read the smallest possible signals in a body under strain.

"He said seventeen days," she said. "In the last one. Not seventeen days until something good. Just — seventeen days."

Alvis was quiet for a moment, still watching Berth’s form, still correcting the smallest details of her weight distribution as if the conversation and the teaching were two entirely separate things happening to occupy the same afternoon.

"He’ll manage it," Alvis said eventually. "I’ve watched him manage things that had no business being manageable. Seventeen days is more warning than he usually gets."

"That’s not really comforting."

"No," Alvis agreed. "It’s honest, though. I find those overlap less often than people would like, but when they do, it’s usually worth more than the comfortable version." He glanced over at her, something steady and certain in his weathered face. "You fixed your third form transition faster than either of these two managed it, incidentally. Faster than I did, the first time I learned it, though I’ll deny saying that if you repeat it."

Sophie felt something in her chest loosen slightly, the particular relief of being handed a fact instead of a reassurance. Facts she could trust. Reassurances always felt like something offered to make her stop asking questions.

"How much faster," she asked.

"Ask me again once you’ve stopped fishing for the specific number and started caring about the actual form," Alvis said, and turned back to Berth’s stance, and Sophie let herself laugh — small, but real — and settled back against Mittens’ warm bulk to watch the rest of the afternoon’s forty repetitions unfold.