The second week started with my legs refusing to hold me when I tried to get out of bed, and ended with a household guard captain refusing to look me in the eye.
I want to say the change came gradually, the way growth is supposed to. It didn't. It came in jumps, each one steeper than the last, like a hill that kept revealing more hill behind it every time I thought I'd reached the top. Joseph noticed it before I did, mostly because he was the one keeping score.
"Your stance from Tuesday," he said, on what I was fairly sure was Thursday, watching me hold a guard position that had made my arms shake three days earlier and now felt almost restful. "You've already outgrown it."
"Is that good?"
"It's unnatural." He said it without heat, the way you'd note that the sky had turned an unusual color. "A boy your age, with your background, should not be outgrowing forms this quickly. I've trained squires for fifteen years, Young Master. None of them moved like this in a month, let alone a week."
I didn't have an answer that wouldn't have required explaining a golden apple I kept wrapped in cloth at the bottom of a drawer, so I gave him the only honest thing I could. "I don't know why either. I just know I don't intend to stop."
He studied me a moment too long, the way he'd been doing since Hackendor, and then set me back to work.
The changes weren't only in what I could do. I caught sight of myself in the washroom mirror one evening near the middle of the week and stood there longer than I meant to, turning my own forearm over like it belonged to someone I was meeting for the first time. The softness that had still clung to me a week ago, the leftover shape of a noble's son who'd never done a day of honest labor in his life, had started burning away. What was underneath it was lean in a way that looked earned rather than lucky, muscle laid down in the economical, functional pattern of a body that had spent every waking hour being asked to do something difficult and had simply stopped arguing about it.
---
We trained through mornings and into afternoons that bled together with a sameness that would have been unbearable if I hadn't been able to feel, almost hour by hour, that the sameness was a lie. Joseph ran me through footwork until my legs stopped fighting the shape of it, then loaded weight onto my back and ran me through it again. He had me holding water buckets at arm's length until my shoulders screamed, then had me do it once more after that, because pain, he said, was a poor teacher if you let it win the argument too early.
In the evenings, once the sword work was done, he had me sit cross legged in the yard and simply breathe, guiding mana in slow circuits through channels that were still, technically, only a few weeks old. I felt my core each night like a room being renovated while I sat inside it, walls pushed outward, foundations reset, the whole structure a little larger by the time I opened my eyes than it had been when I closed them. Joseph called it cultivation and treated it like the slowest, most sacred part of the day. For me it felt like watching a fire being fed faster than any fire should burn, and going to sleep each night uncertain whether I'd wake up still able to hold it.
"You'll hear people sort themselves by rank at the academy," he told me, during a rest between sets, his bad arm still in its sling, his good hand turning a whetstone over a dull blade out of habit more than need. "Mages by star. Warriors by realm. Learn both, because both will decide who bows to you and who doesn't."
"Start with the stars."
"A One-Star Mage can hold a spell in their hand without dropping it, which sounds unimpressive until you've watched someone fail at it for a year. Two-Star means you can cast without a focus item. Three-Star, you can hold multiple spells in circulation at once, which is where your brother sits, and where most court mages spend their entire careers." He set the whetstone down. "Beyond that it stops being about technique and starts being about scale. Five-Star mages can level a city block if they're careless. Seven-Star mages fight wars by themselves. Nine-Star is a title, not a rank anyone's actually measured, because nobody's been foolish enough to test it against the one man who holds it."
"Merlin."
"The Sorcerer King himself." Something dry crossed his face. "Two hundred years old, if the histories are honest, and still sitting his throne in Albion like the rest of us are simply waiting our turn to become interesting to him."
"And the sword ranks?"
"Beginner and Intermediate are what you'd expect, learning to hold a blade and learning not to die holding it. Advanced is where most professional soldiers spend their whole lives, competent, dangerous in numbers, forgettable alone. Swordmaster is the first rank that means something on its own, a warrior who can hold a battlefield by himself for as long as his mana lasts." He nodded toward his own sling. "Beyond that, Sword Saint, Sword King, Sword Emperor. I've met exactly one man who claimed Emperor, and I didn't stay to verify it. Sword God is a word people use for men who are already dead, mostly because it's rude to call a living man a god to his face."
"Where does that put you?"
"Swordmaster," he said, without any particular pride in it, the way a man states his own height. "It took me twenty two years and an A-Rank adventuring license to get there. I'd ask you not to feel discouraged by that number."
I didn't tell him why I wasn't. There wasn't a version of that conversation I could afford to have.
---
I kept trying the void on my own, in the hour after Joseph finally gave up and sent me to bed, because a blade was only ever going to be half of what I needed to survive a place built to grind people like me down to nothing. It never came. I stood in the dark of my room with my palm open the way I'd held it in that clearing, reaching for the same nothing that had opened a hole in Faelan's chest, and got nothing back but a faint, useless tug at the edge of my senses, like a rope I could feel but couldn't grip.
I had a theory about it, one I kept to myself because explaining it would have meant explaining more than the theory itself. Void hadn't answered me in the grove because I'd asked politely. It had answered because a man was half a second from killing me, and some older, more honest part of me had reached for the only tool sharp enough to matter and hadn't cared, in that moment, whether I understood how to use it. Whatever the affinity actually was, it seemed to want desperation I couldn't manufacture on command in the safety of my own bedroom, no matter how hard I tried to convince myself the danger was real.
So I let it go, for now, and put the hours somewhere they'd actually earn interest. Swordsmanship didn't ask for permission the way magic did. Neither, it turned out, did fire, though not in any way that helped me. I borrowed a tutor's old primer from the estate library and tried twice, following the diagrams as faithfully as I could manage. Both times I produced something that could generously be called a spark and less generously be called an insult to the word flame, and both times the effort cost more than the aura work ever had, my core straining against a shape it clearly had no interest in holding. Whatever I'd been given wanted a sword in my hand and a body doing the work, not a spell leaving my fingers. I stopped wasting hours on it and gave them back to Joseph, where they were actually buying me something.
---
By the middle of the second week I stopped losing to the household guards Joseph borrowed for practice bouts, and by the end of it I stopped being asked to hold back.
The first time it happened, I hadn't meant to end the match as fast as I did. A guard named Rourke, a broad, patient man who'd spent a decade in the household watch, came at me with the kind of caution you show a child holding a sharp object for the first time. I read the opening before he'd fully committed to it, closed the distance faster than his eyes could track, and put him on his back with the flat of my blade at his throat before he'd finished his first real swing.
He looked up at me from the dirt with an expression that had nothing to do with losing a sparring match.
By the end of the week I was fighting two guards at once, then three, and the yard had gone quiet in the way a crowd goes quiet when it stops finding something entertaining and starts finding it uncomfortable instead. Servants who used to linger by the fence to watch the young master embarrass himself stopped lingering at all.
Joseph sparred me himself on the last day, arm freshly out of its sling and clearly not fully trusting it, and told me plainly, before we started, that he intended to fight seriously.
He kept that promise. It was the first bout since Hackendor where I felt something close to real fear, not of losing exactly, but of exactly how much faster he was than every guard I'd already put on the ground, how little wasted motion there was in a body that had spent twenty two years arriving at Swordmaster the honest way. He drove me back across half the yard in the opening exchange, and for a handful of seconds I was purely defending, arms burning, aura guttering thin around my blade every time it caught his.
Then something in me stopped defending and started answering, some seam between his last strike and his next one that a week ago I wouldn't have seen and today simply opened in front of me like a door.
We ended it an hour later, both on our knees in the dirt, both bleeding from cuts too shallow to matter and too numerous to count, neither one able to say honestly who would have won if either of us had been willing to go further.
"That," Joseph said, between breaths, "should not be possible."
I didn't have an answer for him that wouldn't have required the truth. I gave him silence instead, and he let me keep it, the way he'd been letting me keep most things since the forest.
---
Word of it went through the household anyway, the way word always does, servants trading it over laundry and knights trading it over dinner, each version a little more exaggerated than the last until it stopped resembling anything that had actually happened in that yard. Most of them didn't believe it. I heard enough of it filtered back through Joseph, and once, uncomfortably, through a maid who hadn't realized I was standing close enough to hear her, to understand the shape the disbelief took.
The Shame of House Vaelorian, fighting a Swordmaster to a draw. Sure. And next they'll tell us he's grown wings.
It doesn't matter what he does. Young Master Blake is a Three-Star Mage at fifteen. There's improved, and there's whatever that boy's doing, and it isn't the same thing as being better than a real prodigy.
I understood the logic even if I didn't like it. Blake had spent his whole life being celebrated for something visible, spells that lit up a room and made grown mages nod approvingly, while I'd spent mine being the son nobody expected anything from at all. A week of frightening improvement in a training yard wasn't going to unmake years of that story in anyone's head but mine.
Blake heard the rumors too, and heard them, apparently, more times than his patience could absorb.
He found me on the last full day before the academy, in the same corridor where he'd cornered me before, except this time half the household seemed to have followed him there, servants and knights alike drawn by the gravity that surrounds a fight about to happen.
"I'm tired of hearing your name in every hallway in this house," he said, his voice carrying the particular brittle confidence of someone who'd rehearsed the sentence more than once. "Everyone keeps whispering about how much you've improved, like that's supposed to mean something. Prove it. Right now, in front of everyone, so this house can finally remember which of us actually deserves the name Vaelorian."
I could have declined. Looking back, I understand that was the version of this that would have cost the least. But something in me, quieter and colder than anything I'd felt since waking up in this body, decided declining wasn't interesting, and I said yes before I'd fully finished thinking it through.
---
They cleared the training yard within minutes. My father wasn't present when it started, which I registered distantly, the way you register a detail that will matter later without understanding yet why.
It wasn't a fight. I understood that within the first exchange, and I think Blake understood it a few seconds after I did. He opened with a fire spell fast enough to have impressed anyone watching a week ago, a controlled lance of flame he'd clearly drilled a hundred times to hit exactly where he aimed it. I was already past where he'd aimed it before the flame finished forming, closing distance he hadn't accounted for, and put the flat of my blade into his ribs hard enough to fold him over before his second spell had even left his hand.
He got up. I'll give him that much. He got up three more times after that, each attempt more desperate than the last, spells fired wide and defensive rather than aimed, until desperate became something closer to nothing at all, just a boy on the ground trying to get his arms up in time.
I should have stopped there. Any honest measure of the fight had ended the moment he stopped being able to answer it.
I kept going.
I want to be exact about what that felt like, because I've turned it over more times since than almost anything else in either of my lives. There wasn't rage in it. There wasn't the ugly satisfaction I might have expected from finally winning at something in front of people who'd spent weeks writing me off. There was nothing in it at all, a flatness so complete it frightened me more than any amount of anger would have, the same quiet I'd felt kneeling over Faelan's body in the leaves, except this time there was no getting sick afterward to prove some part of me still understood what I was doing was wrong. I knew it was wrong. I felt the knowledge sitting there, intact and undeniable, entirely disconnected from anything that might have made me stop.
Somewhere in the middle of it, the yard blurred.
It wasn't Blake's face in front of me anymore. It was a servant boy, younger, maybe ten, his eyes gone wide with a fear that had nothing to do with the fight I was actually in. He'd looked up. That was the whole of what he'd done wrong, looked up from whatever task had put him in that hallway and let his eyes meet mine for half a second too long, and I felt, from somewhere that wasn't quite memory and wasn't quite mine, the specific, ugly satisfaction of teaching him not to do that again. I felt my own fists moving, felt the boy's arms come up too late, felt no more in it than I felt anything else that day, and understood, with a clarity that turned my stomach even as it held me frozen inside it, that this wasn't an invention. Somewhere in whatever was left of the body I was wearing, this had actually happened.
I didn't know, standing in that borrowed memory, whether I was looking at a piece of the boy who used to live here, still lodged somewhere I couldn't reach and couldn't cut out, or whether I was simply becoming something that could do this on its own now, with no old soul to blame for it at all. Neither answer was one I wanted.
The wall found me before the thought finished.
I hit it hard enough that the world came back all at once, brick and mortar exploding outward around me in a shape that had, a half second earlier, been the side of the equipment shed. My father stood where Blake had been, his hand still extended from the throw, his chest heaving with a fury I hadn't seen from him even the morning after Hackendor.
Blake lay in the dirt where I'd left him, breathing, barely, blood on his face and a stillness to the rest of him that made my own chest go cold in a way none of the fight had.
Nobody spoke. Nobody moved. My father looked at me across that yard with an expression I understood immediately and completely, disgust, plain and total, the specific disgust of a man looking at something he no longer recognized as his son.
"Everyone," he said, and his voice carried across the whole yard without needing to be raised, "leave. Now."
They left. Nobody argued, and nobody looked at me on their way out. I sat in the wreckage of that shed for a long time afterward, turning the same question over without ever getting closer to an answer. Something in me had changed since that grove, and I no longer had any confidence it was changing in a direction I'd choose for myself, if choosing was still something I got to do.
---
We left for the academy the next morning, before the household had properly woken, the same way I'd left for Hackendor two weeks earlier. Nobody came to see us off. I hadn't expected them to.
The carriage rocked along the eastern road in a silence that lasted most of the first hour, Joseph across from me with his arm finally free of its sling, watching the trees the way he always watched them when he didn't want to watch me instead.
"You don't have to come," I said, eventually. "To the academy. I doubt House Vaelorian keeps me long enough for it to matter who's assigned to watch me there."
He didn't look away from the window. "Your loyalty has always assumed I serve the house."
"Don't you?"
"No." He said it plainly, without any particular weight, the way you'd correct a small mistake in a report. "I never have."
I turned that over for a moment, waiting for the rest of the sentence, and when it didn't come, I asked the only question that made any sense to ask. "Then why. A man of your rank could serve anywhere in this kingdom and be treated like it mattered. Instead you've spent years attached to the son this house treats like scum. Why."
Joseph was quiet long enough that I thought, again, that he might simply let the silence answer for him. When he finally spoke, his voice had gone somewhere I hadn't heard it go before, careful in a way that felt less like caution and more like grief.
"I made a promise to your mother," he said. "A long time ago."
I waited. He didn't continue.
"What promise."
He turned from the window then, and looked at me with an expression I couldn't fully read, something that might have been fondness or might have been an old grief wearing fondness as a disguise, and shook his head once, small and final.
"Not today, Young Master."
He turned back to the window, and I understood, from the set of his shoulders, that pressing further wouldn't get me anywhere I hadn't already been. I let it sit, the way I'd learned to let most of Joseph's silences sit, and watched the trees slide past the glass, carrying both of us toward a place I'd built once out of boredom and was about to have to survive.