The draw came on a Thursday, which Ragna would later insist was significant and everyone else would insist was a coincidence, and the truth — as with most arguments Ragna picked for the sake of picking them — was somewhere unglamorously in between.
He and Iris came at each other on the afternoon's final spar with the particular tired recklessness of two people who'd already lost track of how many rounds they'd fought that week, and for once Ragna didn't stop to calculate anything. He simply moved when the opening appeared, the way Wren had moved, the way Sabrina had told him to weeks ago on the manor steps — stop deciding, trust your hands — and his blade caught Iris's wrist at the exact moment her own strike caught his, both wooden swords clattering into the dirt within a half-second of each other, both combatants left standing there, weaponless, blinking at one another like the outcome had surprised them both equally.
"...Huh," Iris said, looking down at the twin swords in the mud.
"That's a draw," Hale called from the sideline, sounding almost amused, which from Hale counted as practically a parade. "First one of the season. Don't get used to it."
Ragna didn't get used to it. But he kept it, tucked away next to the secret of his circles and the growing pile of things he wasn't ready to say out loud, as proof that the gap between thinking and doing could, in fact, be closed — not all at once, not reliably yet, but closed all the same, at least for one wonderful, mud-streaked Thursday.
The weeks that followed blurred together the way training weeks tend to, each day distinguishable from the next mostly by which specific muscle group had elected itself spokesperson for the morning's complaints.
He lost to Ronan twelve more, though the margins narrowed each time, Ronan's easy confidence curdling, by the second loss, into something that looked suspiciously like genuine effort — which Ragna privately considered a victory in its own right, even if the scoreboard disagreed.
He drew with Iris again, then a third time, until Hale started pairing them less for the lesson and more, Ragna suspected, because watching two evenly matched fighters slowly wear each other down was simply better entertainment than the alternative.
And then, on a grey, unremarkable Tuesday that Ragna would remember far more clearly than the Thursday he'd insisted was significant, he won.
It wasn't against Ronan, and it wasn't against Iris. It was against one of the smithy twins, a boy named Garrick who fought with the blunt, honest power of someone who'd spent his whole life swinging hammers and had simply traded one heavy object for another. Garrick was strong enough to end the match in a single clean hit if it landed, and slow enough, Ragna had finally learned to notice, that the opening before that hit telegraphed itself a full half-second in advance if you'd trained yourself to stop staring at the sword and start watching the shoulders instead.
Ragna watched the shoulders. He moved before the half-second finished. His blade caught Garrick's wrist at the perfect angle, the disarm clean and complete, and the wooden sword went spinning out into the dirt while Garrick stood there, more impressed than upset, already laughing before Hale had even called the point.
"There it is," Hale said, with the closest thing to satisfaction Ragna had heard from him yet. "Took you long enough."
It had taken him, by Ragna's own private count, four weeks, seventy seven losses, and three draws. He decided that was a number worth being proud of, and went to bed that night, sore in every place a body could reasonably be sore, more satisfied than he could remember being in a very long time.
It rained, hard, through most of the fifth week, and Hale — true to every prediction Devren had quietly made about him — did not so much as consider cancelling.
"Wars don't wait for clear skies," he announced to a yard full of trainees standing ankle-deep in mud and visibly reconsidering every life choice that had led them here, "and neither do we."
The rain made everything worse and, somehow, also better. Footing turned treacherous, drills that had grown almost comfortable became newly humiliating, and more than one trainee went down hard in the mud only to come up laughing, half because there was nothing else to do about it and half because there was something about twenty people equally miserable, equally soaked, equally determined not to be the one who quit first, that turned misery into its own strange kind of camaraderie.
Ragna sparred Ronan again that day, both of them slipping and recovering and slipping again in mud that had turned the careful footwork Hale had spent weeks drilling into something closer to controlled chaos.
Neither of them landed a clean point. Both of them ended the match flat on their backs in the mud, soaked through, laughing — actually laughing, the real, surprised kind — at the sheer indignity of it.
"You're not as useless as I thought," Ronan said, lying beside him in the mud, staring up at the grey sky.
"High praise."
"Don't let it go to your head. Still beat you Eighteen times to your one."
"I'm aware. I was there."
But it landed differently than it would have five weeks ago, and they both knew it. Somewhere in the mud and the losses and the one hard-won draw and the single clean win against Garrick, Ragna had stopped being the Queen's one in the eyes of the yard, and started, slowly and without any particular ceremony, becoming simply one of them — Zochus, lowest rank, soaked through and stubborn, same as everyone else standing in that rain.
Devren offered him a hand up out of the mud, same as he had on the very first day.
This time, Ragna noticed, he didn't say I know about anything. He didn't have to. Nobody in that yard needed reminding anymore of who Ragna was, because they'd all, somewhere in the last five weeks, simply stopped finding it relevant.
Lady Sentel watched it from her chamber window that evening, the rain finally tapering into a thin, persistent drizzle, the training yard below mostly empty except for a handful of stragglers too stubborn to call it a day — Ragna among them, running through footwork drills alone in the half-light, mud-streaked and exhausted and entirely, visibly unwilling to stop.
She'd watched him a great many times over the years from this same window — as an infant, as a small boy stacking blocks that refused to burn, as a ten-year-old declaring he wanted to learn the sword with the same blunt certainty he seemed to bring to most things that mattered to him. But there was something different about watching him now, alone in the mud under a darkening sky, practicing a drill nobody was making him practice anymore.
She found herself smiling, quiet and a little sad in the way pride sometimes was, before she could decide whether smiling was the appropriate response to a soaking wet, exhausted child refusing to come in out of the rain.
"You'd be proud of him," she said softly, to no one in particular, to a man two hundred miles away who very likely didn't know the boy he'd lost a field dimension to still existed at all. "Whoever you are."
She did not see, because the angle of the window did not allow it, what waited in the treeline at the yard's far edge.
She was very good at not being seen. It was, in fact, the entire point of her.
She crouched low in the shadow of an old oak at the yard's outer edge, two slim daggers turning slowly between her fingers in a habitual, idle rhythm that had nothing to do with any threat currently present and everything to do with hands that had simply never learned to be still. From this distance, in this light, she was less a person than a suggestion of one — a shape the trees seemed to have agreed, collectively, not to mention.
She watched the boy in the mud for a long while. Watched the way he moved through the drill, slow and deliberate at first, then faster, the motion settling into something that no longer looked borrowed from instruction but was beginning, unmistakably, to look like his own.
Five circles, hidden under a tutor's careful discretion. A Will of Fire that hadn't fully woken yet, but would. A body learning, week by stubborn week, to stop thinking and start trusting itself.
She smirked, slow and private, the expression of someone watching a plan unfold exactly the way it had been drawn years before anyone currently standing in that muddy yard had been born.
"Your plans are still perfect as ever," she murmured, low enough that not even the rain would carry it, the words aimed at no one currently present to hear them, "Orchest."
Then she was gone, the way shadows go when you stop looking directly at them — no sound, no disturbed branch, nothing to mark she'd ever crouched there at all, except the faint, lingering impression that the treeline had, for a little while, been watching back.