By the time Ragna woke for his second day of training, every individual muscle in his body had apparently filed a separate complaint overnight, formed a small committee, and elected his ribs as spokesperson.
"You're walking like a man twice your age," Sabrina observed at breakfast, watching him lower himself into his chair with the slow, deliberate caution of someone defusing something explosive.
"I feel like a man four times my age."
"Good," she said, entirely without sympathy, and went back to her toast.
He decided, chewing through a breakfast that tasted mostly of dread, that he missed the version of Sabrina who used to throw cushions at him. That Sabrina, at least, had pretended to care when he was in pain. This new training-yard-adjacent Sabrina apparently found his suffering educational.
***
Hale did not believe in easing anyone into anything, which Ragna discovered approximately four seconds after arriving at the yard, when the morning's activities were announced not as a request but as a fact already in motion.
"Ten laps," Hale called out, to a chorus of groans that had clearly been groaned before, by every previous class of trainees, in the exact same spot. "Full circuit of the courtyard. Last three finished do it again."
The courtyard, Ragna had not previously appreciated, was enormous — the kind of enormous that looked perfectly reasonable from a distance and became personally insulting the moment you were required to run around its entire perimeter on legs that already hated you. He fell in near the back of the pack, behind the twins from the smithy, who ran with the relentless, joyless efficiency of people who'd clearly hauled heavier things than their own bodies for most of their lives and considered running, by comparison, almost restful.
Ronan, naturally, was near the front the entire time, setting a pace that looked less like effort and more like a man taking a brisk, mildly impatient walk.
By lap six, Ragna's lungs had begun negotiating directly with his legs over which of them got to give out first. By lap nine, the negotiation had broken down entirely and both parties seemed to be considering a joint resignation. He finished, by his own count, somewhere in the back third — not last, which felt like a personal triumph roughly equivalent to surviving a shipwreck, but nowhere near anything he'd have proudly reported to Lady Sentel over supper.
The pull-up bars came next, a long row of iron rails bolted between two posts, and here Ragna discovered a fresh and specific humiliation: five circles of magic, it turned out, did absolutely nothing whatsoever for a person's grip strength. He managed four before his arms simply stopped negotiating and started outright refusing, dropping him gracelessly to the dirt while the boy beside him — the quiet one in the once-expensive travel clothes — calmly finished his eleventh.
"You'll get there," the boy said, not unkindly, offering Ragna a hand up. "Took me three weeks before I could do more than six."
"You're being generous."
"I'm being accurate. Generosity would be lying about it." He smiled, faint and tired. "Devren," he added, the introduction arriving a beat late, the way introductions tend to between people who've just spent a morning collectively suffering together and only afterward remembered to exchange names.
"Ragna."
"I know." Devren said it without any particular weight to it, which Ragna appreciated more than he expected to.
Formation drills under the late-morning sun were, if anything, worse than the laps, if only because they demanded the kind of coordinated thinking that exhausted muscles were spectacularly unsuited for.
Twenty trainees, shields and practice spears, moving in lines that were meant to shift and reform on Hale's barked commands with something resembling unity, and instead mostly resembled twenty very tired young people stepping on each other's feet at irregular intervals.
"Again," Hale called, for what felt like the fortieth time, with the patient, unbothered cruelty of a man who had clearly given this exact instruction to exact this exact level of chaos every single season for years. "A formation that breaks under the sun breaks twice as fast under a sword. Again."
By the time he finally called a halt for sparring, Ragna's shirt was soaked through, his legs had the structural integrity of wet rope, and he was fairly sure his own arms had quietly given up reporting for duty several drills ago.
Which was, naturally, exactly when the real test of the day began.
He drew a different opponent this time — a stocky, even-tempered girl named Iris who fought, Ragna noted with grim appreciation, nothing like Ronan at all. Where Ronan had been all confident speed, Iris was patient, almost lazy in her movements, content to let Ragna come to her and punish him for it when he did.
He lasted longer this time. That much, at least, was true, and he held onto it the way a drowning man holds onto a floating plank — not because it was particularly seaworthy, but because it was the only thing currently keeping his head above water.
His footwork, he could tell even through the exhaustion, had genuinely improved.
The stance Hale had corrected yesterday held this time, mostly, his weight settling lower and more honestly than it had on the first day.
He blocked two of Iris's opening strikes cleanly, real blocks this time, not the desperate flailing approximations of yesterday, and for one brief, glorious half-second, he thought he saw an opening — her guard dropped fractionally on the follow-through, a gap wide enough to land a clean strike if he moved now, immediately, without— Delay.
He thought about it.
That was the entire problem, and Ragna understood it even as it was happening to him, which made it somehow worse rather than better.
A full year of magic had trained his body to do exactly one thing whenever an opportunity appeared: pause, assess, calculate the most efficient response, and then act, all of which took perhaps half a second and was, with magic, perfectly fine, because magic waited for him.
The sword did not wait for him. By the time he'd finished thinking about the opening, the opening had already closed, Iris's guard resetting with the unhurried ease of someone who'd been doing this for years and had simply been testing whether he'd notice in time. He hadn't. Her counter caught him across the shoulder, not hard, almost gentle by comparison to Ronan's strikes yesterday, but final all the same — point, match, over.
"You saw it," Iris said afterward, not unkindly, helping him up the way Devren had. "I watched you see it. You just didn't take it."
"I was thinking about the best way to take it."
"That's the mistake," she said. "There isn't a best way. There's just the way that's fast enough, and the way that isn't. You can refine 'fast enough' for the next ten years. You can't think your way into 'fast enough' on the spot. Eventually your body just has to know before you do."
Ragna sat in the dirt for a moment, turning that over, and found — somewhat to his own surprise — that it bothered him less than yesterday's loss had. Yesterday he'd simply been outmatched, flat-out, no version of events where it had gone differently. Today he'd been close. Close was, he was beginning to understand, its own particular kind of frustrating, the sort that gnawed rather than stung.
It was during the afternoon's second round of drills that Lord Chavilon passed by the edge of the training yard, flanked by three men in full armor that Ragna didn't recognize — visiting officers, by the look of their bearing, or perhaps emissaries from one of the border garrisons, here on business that had nothing to do with the yard and everything to do, presumably, with whatever quiet political arithmetic Chavilon was always somewhere in the middle of running.
Chavilon paused.
It wasn't a long pause — a handful of seconds, no more, the kind of glance a busy man spares for something briefly more interesting than his immediate errand. But Ragna, mid-recovery from his fourth consecutive loss of the afternoon, caught the exact moment Chavilon's eyes found him across the yard, and caught, with unwelcome clarity, exactly what crossed the man's face when he did.
It wasn't anger. It wasn't even particularly cruel. It was something quieter and somehow worse than either — a flicker of disappointment so brief and so practiced that Ragna suspected Chavilon had stopped noticing he wore it years ago, the way a man stops noticing his own resting expression in a mirror he passes every morning.
Then Chavilon was moving again, already mid-sentence with one of the armored officers, the moment gone as quickly as it had arrived, and Ragna was left standing in the dirt with a fresh ache that had nothing to do with sparring at all.
He didn't mention it to Hale. He didn't mention it to Devren, or Iris, or anyone else nursing their own bruises nearby. He simply filed it away, quietly, in the same place he'd been keeping the secret of his five circles for the past year — another thing he wasn't allowed to say out loud, sitting next to all the others.
That night, Sabrina found him on the manor steps, still moving like a man four times his age, staring out at nothing in particular.
"How many losses today?"
"Eighteen."
"That's better than yesterday."
"It doesn't feel better." He flexed his hand, the bracelet's flat dead weight still strange against his wrist even after two days of wearing it. "I keep seeing the opening, Sabrina. I see it, and then by the time I've decided what to do about it, it's already gone."
Sabrina sat down beside him, uncharacteristically quiet for a moment, before offering — with the rare, genuine gentleness she usually reserved for when she'd forgotten to be insufferable — the only piece of advice she actually had.
"Then stop deciding," she said. "You're a mage, Ragna. You've spent your whole life being good at thinking your way into power. Maybe the sword isn't asking you to think faster." She shrugged, looking out at the same nothing he'd been staring at. "Maybe it's asking you to stop, for once, and just trust your hands to know something your head hasn't caught up to yet."
He didn't have an answer for that. But he turned it over for a long while after she'd gone inside, and somewhere underneath the bone-deep exhaustion of his second day, a small, stubborn part of him started, quietly, to listen.