Cassie is a warm weight along my side when I wake, her breath ghosting the hollow of my throat, the world still blue and hushed behind the bed curtains. For a moment I pretend I don’t have to move—that I can keep her legs tangled with mine, keep the faint scrape of her ponytail tie against my wrist where I must’ve fallen asleep clutching it. Then the thought of Uncle Tharion waiting in the yard drops into me like a stone.

I sigh, drag my knuckles over her cheek. She makes a small, indignant sound that would be adorable if it weren’t aimed directly at me.

“Up,” I whisper. “If I let you sleep, we’ll both die.”

“It’s not morning,” she mumbles into my neck, smug in her denial, voice rough with sleep. “It’s… not anything.”

“It’s the part of morning that scares cowards,” I say. She groans like I’ve just stabbed her. I slide an arm beneath her shoulders and shove until she flops onto her back, hair a feral gold halo. She could be dragged from a hurricane and still look like an advertisement for perfume. Unfair.

“Come on, Captain. My uncle has exactly two moods: disappointed and more disappointed.”

One eye cracks open. “Your family is a cult.”

“Correct.” I steal a quick kiss from the corner of her mouth before she can weaponize that glare. Her lips twitch like she’s going to bite me for it, but she doesn’t. That’s somehow worse. “And you joined.”

“I was seduced,” she says, but she’s upright now, scrubbing her face with both hands, the sheet sliding to her waist. The complaint still lingers when she looks at me again, but so does the spark. She grins, sharp and smug. “Lead the way, Firefly.”

We dress fast—sports bra and fitted top for her, banded wrap and sleeveless for me. I twist my hair into a rough braid I’ll regret the second sweat glues stray strands across my face. Cassie slips on training flats and stretches until her spine clicks. I try not to watch the long line of her body, the neat control even in a yawn. My eyes still snag, traitorous. It would be so easy to let that be the morning. To fold us back into the sheets and pretend nothing exists outside the small, private universe we built last night out of quiet breaths and steady hands. Easy. Weak. I don’t get easy. And the yard waits. Uncle Tharion waits.

Emberhall holds its breath at this hour. Stone ribs sweating yesterday’s heat. Wards humming along the archways like beasts in their burrows. We slip through with the ease of people who belong here now—or will keep pretending until the walls agree. Outside, the air bites cold against my cheeks, though the stones are already warming from the belly of the keep. The world tastes of iron and dew. Weapon racks line the wall like patient soldiers, staves and dulled blades catching the first gray.

Tharion is already in the ring. Broad shoulders, sleeves rolled to bare the white map of old cuts on darker skin, hair tied back with no regard for court polish. He looks at us, and I feel sixteen, eleven, eight in the same heartbeat—years of his voice carved into me, the shape of his shadow over mine as he corrected a grip or set my stance with two fingers and a grunt. Bronze-hazel eyes sweep over us once.

“You’re late.”

We’re not. The sun hasn’t even bothered with the horizon. My protest sharpens on my tongue anyway.

“You’re late,” he repeats, the way he’d tell a blade it is steel. Not about the clock. About who owns it.

“Family drill sergeant,” Cassie mutters under her breath. I elbow her. She elbows me back, because of course she does. My scent flares sharp citrus before I can cage it, and her smirk only deepens.

We’re not alone. Kaelen perches on the fence, legs tucked up, hair exploding in all directions like he fought a wind elemental and won. Grass stains already drying on his tunic. Sugary-bright lemon drops drift across the ring every time he wiggles in excitement. He waves at me with both hands, then cups them to his mouth and stage-whispers, “Beat him, Mira!”

I choke on a laugh. “Not how this works, gremlin.”

And—of course—she is here. My mother stands at the far edge of the yard, arms folded, face arranged like a statue commissioned to terrify an empire. Gold clings to her like a second skin, catching what little light the sky allows. The air around her cuts sharp with burnt orange and clove, beautiful as a threat. She’s not here for me, not really. She’s here for optics, or for some reason I’ll never be allowed to see, and the knowledge sits heavy in my stomach. Still, some treacherous part of me straightens under her gaze. Reaches. Wants.

“Foundations first,” Tharion says, and the yard shrinks to the circle of his voice. His attention drops onto me, weighty as an anvil. “You’ve grown lazy.”

Heat climbs my throat. “I have not—”

“Lazy,” he says, and flicks a staff from the rack with his forearm. It arcs once, lands at my feet with a clean wooden kiss. “Stance. Now.”

Pride flares. The old anger—never about him, but always arriving in his shape—flares with it. I snatch the staff up, let muscle remember before thought can ruin it: heel rooted, knees soft, hips tucked, hands finding third and third along the grain. Shoulders settle. Breath boxes itself: in for four, hold for four, out for four, hold for—

“Too rigid.” Tharion taps the ash of my staff with his own—no flourish, just authority. “You’ll shatter at the first strike. Relax. Flow.”

I exhale; the stance softens into something that can bend.

“Better,” he says without raising his voice, and better is everything and nothing all at once.

“Fairborn.”

Cassie snaps to attention so fast her ponytail lashes the back of her neck. His gaze drags over her from ankles to crown—not cruel, just assessing, like a general mapping terrain. “Breath. Range of motion. Balance. I don’t care what you think you can do; I care what your body can do when it’s tired. Hands over your head.”

She obeys. He corrects the angle of her elbows with two fingers and an eyebrow. “Back stays long. Don’t hinge at the waist like you’re bowing to a crowd; bow to your spine. Good. Hold. Longer. Breathe in your ribs.”

She breathes. Her scent—frosted citrus, white camellia, the clean slip of vanilla—sharpens with effort. Sweat gathers at her hairline, catches on her lashes; she blinks it away without complaint. The stretch trembles, but she holds. My chest aches with the wrong kind of pride—too sharp, too hungry.

I don’t get to watch long. Tharion rolls a foot forward and suddenly the world is nothing but staff—the grain biting my palms, the burn crawling up my forearms as he snaps the end of his into mine. The jolt rings through wood and bone, bright as a struck bell.

“Hands,” he says. I realize I’m strangling the poor thing. I loosen my grip by a hair.

“Weight.”

I sink my hips one breath lower, find the coil he wants in my thighs.

“Eyes.”

I lift them off the ground and onto him.

“Good. Now move.”

We move.

The first pattern is simple: step, guard, inside parry, back, breathe. He circles me, tapping here, ghosting there, not to unsettle but to insist. When I think I’ve found the rhythm, he changes the count. When I adjust, he changes the angle. Inside, outside, drop-step, pivot, slip. The staff isn’t heavy, not really, but the repetition scalds my shoulders and stokes coals in my core. Every correction is merciless, precise. I am boiling, furious—and embarrassingly grateful.

Cassie breathes steady in the periphery, working through spine flow, hip series, ankle articulation. It looks easy until second twenty-three, when the sequence betrays you by design. She sways once, drops a hand to the ground, grimaces, tries again.

“Make the floor your ally,” he tells her. “If you’re going to meet it, choose how.”

He shows her a simple breakfall—shoulder corner, not blade; chin tucked; palm slap to bleed momentum. The second time she rolls, she pops up in one smooth line, eyes bright with shock and delight.

“Again,” he says, which in his language is a compliment. “Don’t look at me—feel where you’ll be two beats from now. The body is a question you answer with your feet.”

Kaelen claps like she’s just invented the concept of not eating dirt. “She’s gonna punch like Mira too!”

“Working on it,” Cassie says, eyes locked on Tharion. Gods help me, pride hits so hard I nearly miss the count on my parry. I recover, but Tharion’s staff angles into mine and my grip betrays me with a white-knuckled choke.

“Hands,” he says again, and the corner of his mouth shifts a fraction. With anyone else I’d call it a smile. With him it’s weather.

We cycle—staff to breath to footwork to staff again. He strips the choreography until what remains is language: weight in heel, translate through hip, express through hands. My thighs tremble. Sweat slips into the scar in my brow and burns; I swipe it with my sleeve, then immediately roll the cuff back down because the seam sitting wrong against my wrist could derail me entirely. The old stims itch to life—three-beat tap on the ash, foot bounce trying to sneak into stance. I force them into the rhythm instead. Pinky hook would settle it.

Cassie catches my eye without me asking. She steps closer on a reset, lets her pinky brush mine for a heartbeat—barest pressure, but it detonates like contact through live wire. The loop breaks. My breath sinks one floor deeper. She drifts back to her line as if she never moved, smirk daring me not to notice.

Seara watches. I feel her gaze before I see her—the air shifting, amber resin warmth edged with spiced citrus. It shouldn’t matter. It does. A child inside me is still starfished against a door, waiting for it to open. I hold my stance until my quads hiss. I keep my eyes on Tharion, because looking for her approval would be a violence I won’t do to myself.

“Drop your center by a hair,” Tharion says. “You are not a statue; you are a spring. Mira.” My name lands like a hand on the shoulder—steady, unyielding, not unkind. I obey. The next time his staff snaps into mine, the shock travels into the stones and dies there instead of knifing my wrists. He nods once. Praise, in his dialect.

He turns back to Cassie, sets her on a chalk line across the stones. “This is your world. The line is everything. Stand on it. Don’t let me move you.”

She plants. He applies barely a breath of pressure to her shoulder, and she tips. He steadies her by the elbow before she can step.

“Don’t lean at me. Grow up from your heels. Imagine your bones are posts sunk to bedrock. Again.”

The second time she doesn’t budge. His brows lift half a finger. “Good. Now walk the line without looking at it.”

She does. It wobbles her at first, then it doesn’t. The neat precision she lives in unspools into something more animal, control loosening into flow. Her scent sharpens—citrus with a bite like winter air at the back of the tongue; vanilla warming toward musk. She looks like she could do this for hours—until she pivots wrong, balance betrays her, and she windmills, laughing breathless as she drops to a knee.

I can’t help the small, wicked smile tugging at my mouth.

“Shut up, Firefly,” she says without looking at me, cheeks flushed, eyes lit. It isn’t sharp. It’s ours.

“Eyes,” Tharion says to me, immune to charm as a concept, and I drag them back to the staff.

We grind. The sun lifts itself out of the horizon and pours gold over the yard; sweat stings the corners of my mouth, salt and metal. My palms cook where the ash rubs them raw. Tharion pivots us into hand-to-hand—slow blocks, no strikes, scaffolding only. Forearm shield. Inside parry. Elbow tucked. Ribs closed. Ankles alive. He makes me hold a low guard until my shoulders quiver, then says nothing while I learn that holding is not the same as being held. He shifts me to the wall, tells me to keep the distance with breath alone. When I fail, he studies the ground as though the ground has disappointed him personally. When I succeed, he still studies the ground. Deliberate. His approval never a reward, his correction never a punishment. The work is the point. It shouldn’t feel like love. Sometimes it does.

Cassie learns to fall, then to stand, then to step through a turn without letting her top half desert the bottom. He gives her a staff and refuses to let her strike with it. The first time she tries, he takes it back and leans it against the rack without a word. For a heartbeat she looks like she’ll argue; then she chooses not to. He notices.

“Good,” he says. “Steel will wait. Foundation first. Your spine is the blade you carry every day.”

Kaelen slides off the fence to mimic us, earnest and absurd, copying my stance with his feet comically far apart until his little legs tremble. “Look!” he yells, thrilled at the shake. “I’m strong like Mira!”

“You’re ridiculous like Mira,” Tharion says, not quite hiding the softness in his voice. Two fingers adjust Kaelen’s knee by a breath. “That’s it. Don’t overdo it. Anchor in your heels; don’t drown in them.”

Seara’s scent cuts closer, sharp as a knife. I don’t look, but my nerves know her placement the way a field knows the sun. I can’t tell if she approves. I can’t tell if I want her to. Wanting anything from her galls—even here, even now, where sweat is honest and her politics cannot touch me. I think about leaving the yard without glancing once to see if she’s still there. I think about doing it anyway. I don’t decide.

“Breathe,” Tharion says, and the command slips into the chamber where my anger lives, waters it into something useful. I breathe. The air tastes like charred oak and sweat. My own scent runs feral—sugar toasted to the edge of burning, bloom spiced hotter than manners allow, ozone-prickle of power leashed tight. Cassie drifts near on a reset and the cool of her cuts the heat; for a second all I can smell is the exact seam where winter kisses flame.

He sets me to a tempo and then steals it, makes me find the beat inside instead of taking it from his stick. The staff becomes less prop, more limb I haven’t earned. He knocks the butt of his against mine, cracks my guard open by a thumb’s width. I retake it. He does it again. I retake it. Again. Again. Until the movement lives in me. And then he changes something small, because of course he does.

Cassie trembles. She won’t admit it, but her mouth goes slack at the corners, and dirt smudges her jaw like war paint. She’s beautiful when she’s ruined—sharp edges blurred by effort, polish stripped to something raw. Pride swells in my chest until it’s hard to hold the shape of it. Tharion says, “One more,” in the voice he saves for recruits he respects. She gives him three. He doesn’t comment. She grins into the earth anyway.

Then it happens, because of course it does. Tharion steps in fast to reset Cassie’s hips and my body—ridiculous autopilot, fueled by the part of me that hoards the people I love—moves before my head can stop it. Cassie does too. Half a step forward, the same protective tell, as natural as breath. It would be comical if it weren’t so honest. Tharion halts, consideration flickering across his face like cloud over sun.

“You don’t protect your partner from me,” he says, gentle as a warning. “You protect your partner with me.”

“Working on it,” Cassie answers, steady, and he nods once. I let out the breath I’d been holding clenched in a fist.

By the time the sun is a coin you could spend, my arms are rope and my legs an argument I’m losing. My braid has escaped into a halo of damp defiance; a curl keeps sticking to my lip no matter how many times I blow it out. The staff’s grain has kissed my palms raw, and the burn is a clean, distracting pain I might marry. Cassie lies flat on her back at the edge of the ring, one knee bent, chest sawing like a bow across strings, sweat banding her ribs. Kaelen flops beside her in solidarity despite having done eight minutes of effort at most, his tiny chest heaving theatrically, lemon-sugar bright in the heat.

Tharion doesn’t glisten. I hate him a little for it. He plants his staff against the stone and lets silence fall until I can hear swallows catching under the keep’s eaves and Kaelen’s heel tapping against the fence as he tries not to move.

“One hour,” he says at last, voice carrying without effort. “Every morning. No excuses.”

His gaze lands on me first, and something in my scapula unclenches at the naked fact of discipline returned to my life without politics braided through it. His eyes shift to Cassie. There’s appreciation there, quiet, serious. “By the end, you’ll hate me. But you’ll thank me later.”

He turns, just like that, and crosses to the rack. The world exhales. Kaelen shoots upright, throws both arms high.

“Did we win?”

“We survived,” I say, dropping to sit, staff across my thighs, palms cooling now that the air can find them. “Better prize.”

Cassie rolls to a hip and then onto her knees with the care of a woman who has negotiated a peace treaty with every muscle in her body and does not trust any of them to honor it. Dirt has smeared along her cheekbone and the edge of her jaw; I rub it away with my thumb without thinking. She catches my wrist, presses a kiss to the heel of my hand as if it didn’t just hold a weapon, and I have to look away for a second, because my chest has become complicated.

When I look back up, Seara is still at the edge of the yard. She has not moved; she is a knife on a shelf. For a heartbeat—one stupid, fragile heartbeat—I imagine she will come forward, say something precise that means more than it says. Her eyes flick from me to Cassie to Tharion, and whatever calculus she came to see, she has solved. She turns without a word and is gone, that amber-spice line of her scent unspooling after her until the air swallows it.

It stings. I hate that it does. I push the feeling into my palms and let the rawness there remind me of what I own.

“Hey,” Cassie says softly, reading what I won’t show. She hooks her little finger through mine and squeezes once. The loop breaks; the world levels. “You were—” She stops, searches for a word that isn’t worship. “You were you.”

I huff a laugh that sounds a little like a sob and hope no one but her can tell. “You didn’t die.”

“High praise.” She levers herself to stand and wobbles exactly once before finding the line Tharion drew for her in chalk and setting her heel on it like a promise. “Tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow,” I say, and my voice does not shake.

Tharion returns from the rack with two cloths and tosses them—one to me, one to Cassie. She fumbles hers with hands that forgot they’re attached to a brain; he pretends not to see it, which is as close as he comes to kindness in the yard. When she finally gets the cloth to her face, she groans, muffled. “Everything hurts.”

“That means it’s working,” he says. “Pain is the body taking notes.”

“I hate your notebook,” she says into the cloth.

“You’ll thank me later,” he replies, deadpan, and I can’t tell if he knows he’s repeating himself to make a point or simply insists on the world being made of his refrains.

“Are you gonna punch like Mira now?” Kaelen asks, bouncing to his feet with the explosive energy of a child who has been still for fully seventeen seconds.

“I’m going to punch like Cassie,” she says, which sends something incandescent through my chest that no one but me and maybe the air will ever notice.

We leave the yard slowly—Cassie moving like the floor is made of sleeping animals she refuses to disturb, me with my staff nestled against my shoulder more carefully than it deserves. My skin hums with the after of effort; my magic paces the inside of my ribs like a caged thing, satisfied and not dangerous for once. I smell like toasted sugar burned at the edges and cedar and the metal tang of my own blood where the staff bit a line at the base of my thumb; she smells like cold lemon after a sprint and vanilla that has decided to be a little wild. Kaelen buzzes ahead of us, narrating an imaginary battle in which he saves us both by clobbering the enemy with a half-eaten honey bun.

Before we reach the archway, Tharion’s voice comes again, softer, enough that it might not carry if I weren’t always tuned to it. “Mira.”

I stop. Cassie does too, a half-step in front of me without thinking, then catching herself and shifting back so our shoulders touch instead. We both turn.

He considers us a heartbeat. “You held the line,” he says to me. Not praise. A fact. Then, to Cassie: “You chose discomfort over display. Keep choosing it. The rest will follow.”

She nods, all humor gone for a second, something flinty and fine in its place. “Yes, sir.”

He inclines his head, a gesture that would be ridiculous on anyone else. On him it is a benediction. “Tomorrow,” he says, and strides past, the grounded scent of charred oak and leather furrowing the air behind him like a plow.

We stand there until the quiet feels like it belongs to us. I tip my head to rest against Cassie’s for a breath, and the world lines up in a way that has nothing to do with politics or prophecy or the woman who built me to withstand both.

I am wrung out. I am shaking. I am alive.