Day Three.
The Lance reached forty-two meters at intention-first output.
Fenris caught it in his open palm — the amber light of it pressing against his skin and dispersing — and looked at the distance, and looked at Ervalen, and said nothing.
Which was, Ervalen had already learned, better than most things Fenris said.
---
Day Seven.
The footwork clicked.
Not completely. Not the way it would eventually click, where the reading became automatic and the response followed without a gap between them. But Ervalen tracked four out of seven of Fenris's direction changes using the snow-signal method — not in time to respond, but in time to be looking at the right place when Fenris arrived there.
Fenris stopped after the seventh.
"Four of seven," he said.
"I know," Ervalen said.
"What happened on the other three?"
"I was still processing the previous read when the next signal came."
"So the problem is—"
"Clearing time," Ervalen said. "After each correct read, I'm spending a fraction of a second confirming it instead of releasing it and moving to the next one."
"How do you fix that?"
Ervalen thought about it honestly. "I stop confirming. I trust the read and let it go."
"Try," Fenris said.
He moved.
Ervalen watched the valley.
Six out of seven.
---
Day Twelve.
Something new.
Fenris hit him — calibrated, the same angle, the same output level as the first morning's first strike — and Ervalen moved.
Not fully clear. The hit still landed, still sent him backward, but not three hundred meters. Forty. He hit the snow at forty meters, rolled, came up on his feet, Soul-Brand blazing.
Fenris was looking at him from across the valley.
Neither of them spoke for a moment.
"You read the pre-signal," Fenris said.
"The weight transfer," Ervalen said. "Your right shoulder drops approximately eight hundredths of a second before the right arm extends."
Fenris was quiet. Then: "I've had that tell for six hundred years."
"It's very small," Ervalen said.
"Nobody has caught it before."
"Nobody was watching the valley instead of you before."
Fenris looked at him for a long moment with those ancient amber eyes. Something moved through them — not surprise exactly, but the specific quality of someone updating an assessment.
"I'll stop dropping the shoulder," Fenris said.
"I know," Ervalen said.
"Good," Fenris said. "Or it won't be training anymore."
---
Day Fifteen.
The Lance stopped improving.
Ervalen stood in the valley at the end of the morning session and looked at the distance markers they'd established — stakes in the frozen ground at ten-meter intervals — and the Lance was reaching sixty-two meters at intention-first output. Sixty-two meters. Same as yesterday. Same as the day before.
He said nothing about it. Ate. Rested.
Fenris, who had been watching from the ridge, came down at midday.
"It stopped," Ervalen said.
"Yes," Fenris said.
"Is this the slow period you mentioned?"
"No," Fenris said. "The slow period comes later. This is a ceiling." He sat. "The Lance is running at the limit of your current Brand integration. Intention-first output is more efficient than managed output, but the underlying soul-force quantity is still Rank 4." He looked at the sixty-two-meter stake. "You're extracting full value from your current level. The next gain requires the level itself to change."
"Rank 5," Ervalen said.
"Rank 5," Fenris confirmed.
"Which happens when enough has accumulated."
"Yes."
"How do I know when it's accumulating?"
Fenris looked at him. "You don't. You keep working. It accumulates or it doesn't. If you're doing the right work, it does."
Ervalen looked at the sixty-two-meter stake.
"Are we doing the right work?"
Fenris was quiet for a moment that contained eight centuries of considered opinion.
"Yes," he said.
---
Day Nineteen.
Fenris hit him at full output.
Not calibrated. Not controlled. Full.
The difference between full and calibrated was the same as the difference between a training weapon and the real thing — not a matter of degree but of category. Ervalen understood this in the half-second between Fenris's weight transfer and the arrival of the fist, and in that half-second his Brand responded in a way it hadn't before.
Not defense. Repositioning.
He didn't try to absorb the impact. He used the pre-signal to step perpendicular to the line of force, and the fist that would have hit his chest hit his left shoulder instead, and instead of three hundred meters of air he traveled sixty and hit the frozen ground in a controlled tumble that brought him back to his feet in four seconds.
Four seconds to standing after a full-output strike from FENRIS.
He stood on the frozen ground with his shoulder screaming and his Brand at eighty percent and he was standing.
Across the valley, Fenris had not moved.
He was very still.
"Again," he said. His voice had a quality in it that Ervalen couldn't name immediately — something that was not quite encouragement and not quite warning and sat in the space between them like a question.
Ervalen walked back.
---
Day Twenty-Two.
They didn't train.
Ervalen woke before dawn with the specific awareness of a body that had been pushed into red territory and needed a day not to break. He lay in the shelter he'd built into the ridge face — stone and packed snow, warm enough, solid enough — and stared at the ceiling.
His Brand was dim. Not damaged — tired. The specific tired of over-integration, where the soul-force had been drawn on so heavily that it needed time to replenish before it would respond at full capacity.
He stayed still.
He thought.
He thought about the dual-formation problem — the second layer of intention that Fenris had pointed at in the first morning. He had not stopped thinking about it. It lived in the background of every session, every Lance throw, every footwork read. It was the goal beyond the immediate goal, the architecture he was building toward without yet having the structural capacity to build.
Two simultaneous force signatures.
The Lance carrying kinetic approach multiplier — that was the first layer. He already had that; the Prussonian engagement had demonstrated it. The second layer was a compression releasing at point of impact — a second force application that detonated when the Lance arrived, inside whatever resistance it had driven through.
The problem was intent-splitting.
The Brand could sustain one fully committed intention at full output or two partial intentions at reduced output. What he needed was two fully committed intentions simultaneously, which required a Brand integration depth that he didn't yet have.
Unless, he thought, staring at the stone ceiling, the second intention isn't simultaneous.
He sat up.
Unless the second intention is sequential. First intention: throw the Lance. Second intention: embedded in the Lance itself, dormant, activating on contact rather than at launch. Not two simultaneous output channels. One output channel with two instructions — the second instruction sleeping inside the first until the trigger condition was met.
He stared at the opposite wall.
That's not a Brand output problem, he thought slowly. That's a construction problem. I'm not splitting the output. I'm building a more complex projectile with a single output.
He grabbed his coat and went outside into the pre-dawn cold.
---
Fenris was sitting on the ridge above him, where he sometimes sat through the night, the amber glow of his eyes visible in the dark.
"I think I found the dual-formation architecture," Ervalen said.
Fenris looked down at him.
"Not splitting intent," Ervalen said. "Embedding a sequential trigger. One formation with two instructions — the second dormant until contact."
Fenris was quiet for a long moment.
"Try it," he said.
"My Brand is at sixty percent," Ervalen said.
"Try it anyway," Fenris said. "I want to see the concept, not the output."
Ervalen stood in the pre-dawn dark and threw a Lance.
It went twenty meters — weak, underpowered, the formation incomplete. But inside it, barely, like a thread running through the structure: a second signature. A different intention, quieter, waiting.
It dissolved at twenty meters before demonstrating anything.
But it was there.
"You felt it?" Fenris said.
"I felt it," Ervalen said.
Fenris descended from the ridge in one movement. He stood in the dark valley and looked at where the Lance had dissolved.
"Rest today," he said. "Tomorrow we work on the trigger structure."
---
Day Thirty.
The Lance left Ervalen's hand at full output, carried kinetic approach multiplier from a forty-meter running start, traveled ninety-two meters —
And detonated.
Not in a flash. Not dramatically. But at the ninety-two-meter mark, at contact with the test stake they'd driven into the permafrost, the Lance delivered its first force signature, and then — half a breath later — the second signature released from inside the impact point, the dormant trigger activating exactly as designed.
The stake — six inches of iron driven two feet into frozen ground — snapped at the base and flew forty meters into the valley.
Ervalen stood with his arm extended.
Fenris walked to where the stake had been. Looked at the impact crater. The first signature had produced a standard entry wound in the permafrost — a circular depression, two feet across. The second signature had produced an eruption from inside that depression outward, a secondary blast pattern radiating from the initial point.
He crouched. Examined it.
He picked up a handful of frozen earth and let it fall.
Then he walked back to Ervalen.
He held out his palm.
"Throw it at me," he said.
Ervalen looked at the open palm. At the amber glow of eight centuries. At the entity that had been absorbing his full-output Lances for thirty days and treating them as diagnostic tools.
He threw the dual-formation Lance at Fenris's palm.
The first signature hit.
The Lance pressed into the palm — drove two centimeters into it, the amber light meeting the ancient amber skin, and Fenris's fingers started to close —
The second signature detonated.
Fenris's hand snapped backward.
Not blown away. Not injured — the skin hadn't broken, the structure hadn't damaged. But the hand moved. The hand of an eight-hundred-year-old Rank 8 Primordial, the hand that had been absorbing Ervalen's full-output Lances for thirty days without registering them — moved.
One centimeter. Backward.
Fenris stood with his hand returned to center, looking at it.
He looked at Ervalen.
"Now we're working on something," he said.
His voice had a quality in it that Ervalen hadn't heard in thirty days of training. Not approval — Fenris didn't deal in approval. Not surprise — he'd been moving toward this conclusion since day one.
It was the quality of something that had been waiting for a specific thing to happen and had just watched it happen.
Anticipation.
For the first time in thirty days, Fenris looked south.
Not the habitual south-look he did sometimes — the ambient awareness of distance. He looked south the way you looked at something you were making a decision about.
"How long until Rank 5?" Ervalen said.
Fenris was quiet for a moment. "Sixty days. Maybe less."
"Solomon said six months."
"Solomon calculated from your current trajectory," Fenris said. "Your trajectory changed on day nineteen." He looked at his own hand — at the one centimeter of movement it had just made. "The accumulation is already ahead of the estimate. You'll feel it before you can measure it." He turned away from the south. "Tomorrow we start on the approach vector. If you're throwing that Lance at him, I want you carrying maximum kinetic multiplier at the exact right angle."
"What's the right angle?" Ervalen said.
"We're going to find out," Fenris said, "by being wrong about it repeatedly until we're not."
---
He walked toward the ridge.
"Fenris," Ervalen said.
The enormous figure stopped.
"You looked south," Ervalen said.
Fenris didn't turn around.
"He sent reconnaissance into Hyperborea ten days ago," Fenris said. "I've been aware of them since they crossed the border." A pause. "They'll find you here eventually. They'll see the training."
Ervalen absorbed this. "Does that change anything?"
Fenris was quiet for a moment.
"He needs to know the Lance changed," he said. "He needs to see the direction of it and build his counter. Otherwise the adaptation is too fast when it matters."
"You want him to see it," Ervalen said.
"I want him to see enough to be interested," Fenris said. "Not enough to have an answer." He finally looked back over his shoulder. The amber eyes were very clear in the cold afternoon light. "There's a difference."
He walked up the ridge and over the other side.
---
The valley was quiet. The three moons were rising. The cracked granite had settled two inches further in thirty days of freeze-thaw cycles, and the valley floor bore the evidence of a month of serious work — impact craters, stake holes, a pattern of compression marks in the permafrost that told the story of someone being thrown, and walking back, and being thrown again.
Ervalen looked at his hand. At the amber Brand burning steady at full capacity for the first time in five days.
He thought about one centimeter of movement in Fenris's palm.
He thought about twenty-five meters.
He thought about thirty for reliable penetration.
Sixty days, Fenris had said. Maybe less.
He closed his hand.
Somewhere south of the Caledonian mountains, in the Prussonian Pass, Straze was building. And in Byzantium, a white-haired man was reading grain assessments.
And somewhere in the mountains between them, a reconnaissance unit was watching a training session and trying to understand what they were seeing.
Good, Ervalen thought. Watch.
I want him to know it changed.
He opened his hand and threw another Lance into the evening air — full output, dual formation, kinetic approach from a standing start, the second signature embedded and waiting.
It flew a hundred and four meters before dissolving.
He watched it go.
Sixty days, he thought. Let's make it forty.