The master stood ten feet away, watching him.It was breathing harder than before. Not much harder — it was vast and old and built for endurance — but harder. The wounds the dagger had opened weren't healing the way the pack wolves' wounds healed, the silver luminescence in the blade apparently disagreeing with whatever ran through the master's veins on a fundamental level."You should be dead," the master said. Not cruelly. Factually, the way one states a weather observation."Working on it," Daren said, and pushed himself back up the tree trunk to standing.The master's head tilted — that almost-human gesture, that infuriating suggestion of thought behind the amber eyes. "Why?" it said. "Not why are you still standing. I can see why you're still standing — whatever lives in that blade and whatever lives in your eyes, they're keeping you upright past the point your body should have quit." It took one step closer, deliberate, unhurried. "I mean why do you keep getting up. You have no

Vasha pulled Daren back to the training ground before the morning was half over, and the session she ran him through was different from any previous one — less structured, less corrective, more like controlled violence with educational commentary attached. She pushed him harder than she had before, and he understood, without her saying it, that the previous night had changed the calibration. Sparring for training's sake was one thing. Sparring because the thing that had thrown him into a tree trunk was coming back, and coming back soon, and coming back with less patience than it had shown the first time — that was something else entirely.His left arm was still compromised, Lyset having done what she could with a healing working that reduced the damage without erasing it entirely — *the body needs to remember the injury*, she'd said, *or it learns nothing from surviving it* — and Vasha used that deliberately, pushing him into exchanges where the useless arm became a liability that had

The city did not sleep well.Daren could feel it even before he opened his eyes that morning — something in the quality of the air coming through the house's single window, the particular silence of a place that had been awake too long and was only now, reluctantly, allowing itself to rest. Aldenmoor's mornings usually carried a certain texture: the early carts on the stone roads, the market stalls opening, the sound of the river threading through everything else like a constant low note. This morning those sounds were present but muted, subdued in the way that sounds are subdued when the people making them are doing so carefully, as though noise itself had become something to be cautious about.He lay on his cot for a moment and took stock of his body the way Vasha had taught him — not dramatically, just a quiet inventory, starting from the feet and moving upward, noting what hurt and what worked and what was somewhere in between.Left arm: functional. That was the surprise. Lyset's

He pushed back from the table and stood, picking up the practice sword from where he'd leaned it against the wall when he came in. He looked at Vasha."You said I was dropping my right shoulder," he said. "Show me again. Slower this time. I want to understand why I'm doing it, not just that I'm doing it."Vasha looked at him for a moment — something moving through her expression that came and went too fast to name, a brief warmth that her face didn't usually permit — and then she stood, picking up her own sword, and walked back toward the training ground without a word.Daren followed.Behind them, Lyset opened her spellbook again and began writing, and the scratch of her pen against the page was steady and unhurried, the sound of someone documenting something they understood was important without yet knowing exactly how important.---The afternoon session was longer than the morning one and quieter, the two of them working through the shoulder problem with the specific, focused pati

He went to the market in the early afternoon.Not because he needed anything — the house was stocked well enough, Vasha having managed supplies with the same quiet efficiency she managed everything else. He went because Vasha had told him to, in the specific and indirect way she had of telling him things by describing their strategic value rather than expressing a preference: *moving through the city normally on the day before an expected attack is useful intelligence — it tells you what the city knows, what it feels like, whether the target has changed anything visible about its pattern.*What she had not said, but what was present underneath the strategic framing like a current beneath still water: *you've been in the training ground for two days. Go breathe some different air.*Daren had not pointed out the distinction. He'd simply gone.The market was busy in the particular way of a city trying to insist on its own normalcy — people moving through the stalls with the slightly deli