Chapter 16: Learning To Loosen Up.
"Me..?"
"Yes. You."
Rowan Vale didn’t elaborate further, already stepping back to open up the center of the yard.
"Up." She gestured with her arm, her expression clearly indicating that she wasn’t going to ask twice.
Elian stood, the Everbloom’s weight suddenly very present in his hand, painfully aware of four sets of eyes settling on him at once. Darrow’s easy curiosity, Rudra’s flat assessment, Oizys’s unreadable calm, Milena’s something close to sympathy, which he was surprisingly thankful for.
"What am I supposed to be doing...?" he asked, mostly stalling.
"Whatever you’d do if I told you I was about to attack you."
Vale rolled her shoulders once, unhurried, entirely too relaxed for someone announcing that.
"Which, for the record, I am."
"That’s not - you didn’t give me a moment to!"
"Neither will anything that actually wants to hurt you."
She was already moving as she finished the sentece, closing the distance faster than her earlier stillness had any right to suggest.
Elian’s body reacted before his mind fully caught up—staff coming up on instinct, grip already too tight, the old ’Still the want’ reflex kicking in before he’d even had time to think better of it.
Vale’s strike never landed.
She pulled up a foot short, arms dropping back to her sides, studying him with an expression that wasn’t disappointed so much as unsurprised.
"There it is," she said.
"There what is?"
"That grip."
She nodded at his hands, which were white-knuckled around the staff exactly the way they’d been in the vault, at the gates where Vale found him. Looking exactly like the way Roderic had spent weeks trying to talk him out of.
"You’ve had it, what, since i first saw you in the morning? The second something actually threatens you, you go straight to strangling the poor thing instead of trusting it."
Elian felt his face heat, uncomfortably aware of Rudra’s faint, unimpressed exhale somewhere behind him.
"I didn’t have time to..."
"You’ll never have time," Vale said, not unkindly, though it didn’t feel gentle either.
"That’s the whole point of this exercise. I’m not testing your power today. I’m testing what you default to when you don’t get to choose."
She tilted her head slightly, studying the staff’s single lit petal like it was a data point rather than a miracle.
"And right now, apparently, you default to exactly the thing that’s been failing your family for several generations."
The yard had gone very quiet.
She let out a long exhale.
"Relax. Loosen up a little, you’re not going to get anywhere if you keep that up."
Elian gave her a hesitant nod, looking at this staff.
He made himself loosen his grip, too late to matter for whatever she’d just seen, which he understood. And said nothing, because he didn’t have a good defense for something that was, undeniably, true.
"Good," Vale said, like his silence had answered something.
"Now we know where to start."
Vale came at him again without warning, faster this time, and Elian’s brain short-circuited somewhere between think and react.
His grip loosened even further out of pure panic rather than any lesson learned he learned before, staff nearly slipping from his hand entirely as he stumbled sideways to avoid the strike.
It shouldn’t have worked. He knew, even as it happened, that it wasn’t skill.
His foot caught wrong on the stone, his balance tipped, and what should have been an undignified collapse turned instead into an accidental, off-balance dodge that put him a full pace outside Vale’s reach before either of them had processed it.
The staff’s petal flared, bright and sudden, and the world narrowed to a single instinct: swing.
Which he never came to understand why he swung it instead of casting a spell.
Nevertheless, it was not like he did decide to do it. His arm simply moved, staff arcing up and around on the momentum of his stumble, and Vale—for the first time since he’d met her—actually looked surprised as she had to take full step back to avoid it.
Silence.
Deafening silence, actually.
Elian just stood there, staff still raised, breathing hard, absolutely certain he’d done something wrong.
"Huh," Vale said.
"That wasn’t on purpose, sorry."
"I’m aware." She studied him a moment, something shifting behind her flat expression.
Not quite approval, but close enough to it that Elian felt his stomach do something complicated.
"You didn’t think about that. Any of it, did you?"
"No, I fell."
"Well, you fell correctly."
She rolled her shoulder, unbothered by having been forced to move at all.
"I presume everything you’ve done since you picked up that staff has been you thinking too hard and it going badly. That—" she pointed at him, at the staff in his hands still frozen mid-attack, "—was the first time you didn’t have time to think, and it went considerably better than the first time."
"That’s... concerning, actually."
"It’s informative."
Vale was already waving him back toward the stone seats, already turning to the rest of the group.
"Sit. We’ll work on making that on purpose."
Elian dropped back down beside Milena on legs that felt distinctly unreliable, catching Darrow’s low whistle of approval and Rudra’s carefully blank expression, which was somehow worse than if he’d looked openly unimpressed.
Darrow went next, and it turned out ’unbothered’ translated directly into his fighting style as well.
It was loose, economical, absorbing Vale’s opening strikes without much visible effort before directly converting it into an opening of his own that actually made her adjust her footing. No flash to it. Just competence, worn in the same soft, practical way as his gear. An easy going smile still stretched on his face as they finished.
"Good instincts," Vale said, when it ended. "Untrained ones still. We’ll work on fiixing the second part."
Rudra fought like he’d been born already annoyed at the concept of losing. Sharp, aggressive, every strike thrown like it needed to prove something. He lasted longer against Vale than anyone before him, genuinely pushing her back a step at one point, and the flicker of real effort on her face when it happened was the closest thing to a proper compliment she’d given all morning.
"Talented," she said afterward, in the same tone she might’ve used for the weather.
"Woefully angry though. We’ll see if that’s useful or a liability once we get started properly."
Oizys moved like she’d never once had to be told how to hold herself in a fight—measured, precise, giving away nothing until the exact moment she chose to. She didn’t win. She also didn’t lose in any way that looked like losing, disengaging at precisely the right beat to avoid being caught out.
"Controlled," Vale said. "Almost too controlled. I’ll want to know why, eventually."
Milena’s fight was short and brutal in the specific, efficient way Elian was already starting to associate with her—no wasted motion, no flourish, just a series of exchanges that ended with Vale actually taking a hit to the shoulder before disengaging.
"There we go," Vale said, rubbing the spot without much concern.
"Someone who trained like it mattered."
***
By the time Elian made it back to the dormitory, every part of him ached in ways he hadn’t known were possible from a session that had lasted less than two hours, and all he wanted in the world was to lie face-down on a bed and not move again until tomorrow.
Bellamy was already there when he opened the door, sprawled across his own bed with a book he clearly wasn’t reading, and sat bolt upright the second Elian stepped through.
"There he is!" Bellamy swung his legs off the bed, delighted in the specific way that meant Elian was about to be asked several questions in rapid succession.
The boy looked like Christmas had personally arrived for him.
"I heard you hit Vale." He said, closing the book.
"Not me, that was Milena."
"That’s not what I heard."
"That’s exactly what happened." Elian said, staring at him.
"Sure." Bellamy grinned, entirely unconvinced, already patting the empty space on his own bed like Elian hadn’t just walked in the door.
"Sit, and tell me everything. And then, once you’re done, I need your opinion on whether illusion-craft can replicate that haircut convincingly, I’ve been thinking about it all day and I even have notes."