She was already on the roof when he arrived.
Same spot. Same stillness. The morning light hadn't fully cleared the eastern walls yet, everything still cast in that pale, undecided color before the sun committed to being bright. Yvaine stood at the parapet with the katana already in hand, and she didn't turn when he climbed over the edge.
"You're early," she said.
"You're earlier."
"I'm always earlier."
He crossed the roof and drew Hollow Fang. No sitting this time. No conversation first. She turned to face him and there was something different in the set of her shoulders — not aggression, just readiness, like yesterday had been an introduction and today was the actual lesson.
"Show me what you worked on," she said.
He didn't ask how she knew he'd worked on anything.
She came at him the same way she had yesterday — that same impossible fluidity, no telegraphing, the katana arriving from an angle that felt like it had skipped the part where it was supposed to be visible first. He met the opening exchange the same way too, Hollow Fang up, the impact traveling up his arms.
The second exchange, she tried the wrist rotation again.
He'd felt it coming this time — not seen it, exactly, but felt the shape of it in the half-second before it happened, the way the weight of her blade shifted just slightly before the turn. He pulled back instead of holding firm, let her redirect empty air instead of his sword, and used the half-second that bought him to reset his footing properly.
Small. But real.
She didn't comment on it. But something in her expression — barely anything, the same fractional shift from yesterday — registered it.
The third exchange, he used Void Step.
Diagonal. The angle he'd drilled twenty times the night before, his body finding it without conscious direction. He arrived not where he'd been the day before, not in the straight line she'd have learned to read after one exchange, but off to her flank at an angle that put him, for the first time, somewhere she hadn't already accounted for.
For exactly one half-second, Yvaine wasn't where she should have been.
Her blade came around a fraction late. Not late enough that it mattered — she recovered with a speed that made the gap meaningless, and the exchange still ended with him on the back foot, his sword pushed wide, her katana resting lightly against his shoulder rather than his throat this time.
But it had been a fraction late.
They both knew it.
She stepped back. Lowered the blade. For a moment neither of them moved.
"That's new," she said.
"Last night."
"All night?"
"Most of it."
She looked at him for a moment with an expression he couldn't fully place — not quite approval, something quieter and more clinical than that, like she was recalibrating a number in her head.
"Again," she said.
◇ ◇ ◇
They went through eleven more exchanges before the sun cleared the walls properly.
He lost all eleven. But three of them lasted longer than the four from yesterday combined, and on the ninth he managed something he hadn't planned — catching her blade with the flat of Hollow Fang at an angle that absorbed the strike instead of redirecting it, buying himself a full second of recovery time before she closed the gap again.
A full second, against her, was an eternity. He still lost the exchange. But he'd bought the second.
By the end of it his arms were shaking and his shirt was soaked through and the bruise on his forearm from yesterday had a new one layered over it. He sat down on the parapet ledge — without being told this time — and Yvaine sheathed the katana and stood looking out at the city, the way she had yesterday.
"You're catching up faster than I expected," she said.
"Is that good or bad."
"It's accurate." She glanced at him. "I don't deal in good or bad. Just accurate."
He almost smiled. Didn't, quite. "We move to a new base tomorrow," he said. "Casa de Esperanza. Bigger. More defensible."
Something flickered behind her eyes — there and gone too fast for him to read it. "I know," she said.
"You've been watching that too."
"I watch most things."
He looked at her for a moment. "Will you still be here? After we move?"
She didn't answer immediately. The morning wind moved her hair, and she let it this time, watching the smoke that still hadn't fully cleared from the eastern gate.
"I haven't decided," she said finally. "Casa de Esperanza is further from where I've been staying. The distance would make this—" she gestured slightly between them, "—less convenient."
"You could stay closer."
"I could."
"Is that a yes."
She looked at him with that expression that gave nothing away for free, and for the first time since he'd met her, something underneath it seemed almost like hesitation — quickly buried, but present.
"Ask me again when you've moved," she said.
She stood, and walked to the edge of the roof, and this time she paused before going over — just for a second, looking back at him.
"Same time tomorrow," she said. "Wherever you are."
Then she was gone.
Lucian sat on the parapet a while longer, catching his breath, looking at the city waking up below — Intramuros in the early light, old and scarred and somehow, slowly, becoming theirs.
Tomorrow they'd have seven floors and a courtyard and room to actually grow into something.
He wondered, climbing back down, whether that growth might include one more person than they were currently planning for.
He didn't mention it to anyone when he got back. But he thought about it the entire walk home.