The lightning formation was running before I left the tower.

  Six days since it first ran. The sessions with Garrick in that time had been uneven—the rope's feedback buzzing up through my palm sharper than usual, his footsteps on the stone floor louder than necessary, the occasional sound from outside the hall pulling at my attention at the wrong moment. Not enough time to call it familiar. Enough to know what to expect from it.

  The aether gathering formation I left alone. Perfected over months, sitting in the pool without running—it existed as a structure I could activate when I needed the faster jing refinement, but not here, not around Garrick.

  The formation drew aether inward from the surroundings in a current any decently trained person could feel if they were paying attention. A sensible flow pulling toward me from all directions. Not something I wanted noticed, same reason I'd kept the Taoist methods to myself since the beginning. Some things were better left undetected.

  I strapped the cases on before heading out. The new elbow pieces and leather backhand gloves added a few seconds to the process but the difference in fit was immediate—no more pivot at the elbow end under impact, the cup holding the joint firmly and transferring the case's motion back into the arm where it belonged. I flexed both arms once, checked the hand loops, and left.

  Garrick was already in the hall when I arrived, his practice sword loose in one hand, watching me come through the door with the expression he used when he was gauging how I'd moved overnight.

  "Cases again," he said.

  "Cases again."

  He looked at them the way he always did. He'd stopped asking what was inside them after the third session where I'd declined to explain.

  "Same as last time. Full contact. I won't hold back for the cases."

  "I know."

  He rolled his shoulder once and took his position. I took up the rope and let the weighted end find its arc, short and tight, feeling the formation's effect settle into the motion—the feedback coming back through my fingers with the particular clarity that made it easier to read where the weight was going before it got there.

  He came forward on the third swing.

  Not a charge—Garrick didn't charge. He closed distance at an angle, his sword arm extended to create a line I'd have to go around to reach him. The point was to make me either commit the rope wide and leave myself open, or pull it in and lose the threat of it.

  I let the weight loop out to the right, keeping the arc going rather than pulling. Wide, yes—but wide meant the rope crossed the space between us, and Garrick had to track it. His eyes went to the weighted end for a fraction of a second.

  That was enough. I stepped left and snapped the rope back hard, redirecting the arc across his extended sword arm rather than away from it. Not a strike—the rope weight skimmed his forearm without real force. But it put the rope in contact with his guard side, and his wrist had to adjust.

  He adjusted fast. The sword came down and across, trapping the rope against his forearm to kill its momentum.

  I was already pulling. The rope went taut against his arm and he had two options: let it pull him toward me or step with it. He stepped with it, shortening the distance, and brought the sword up in a short thrust that I had to move sideways to avoid.

  We separated.

  "Better," he said, with the flatness that meant he'd noticed something he hadn't expected.

  I kept the rope moving. Short loops, variable rhythm, never letting it fall into a pattern he could predict. The formation meant I could feel the weight's position with unusual accuracy—not just where it was but where it was going, the small shifts in tension that telegraphed direction a half-beat before the motion completed.

  Garrick didn't press immediately. He circled, his sword held close, watching the rope. Then he feinted left, drew the rope that direction, and came right.

  I'd read the feint—the formation sharpened that kind of perception, the slight tells in posture and weight transfer visible a beat earlier than they would have been—but reading it and responding cleanly were different things. I got the rope across in time but the redirect was loose, the weighted end swinging wide instead of across his sword line. He stepped inside it and tapped my shoulder with the flat of the blade.

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  "Head," he said.

  I reset. He'd walked through the gap in close-quarters coverage—inside the rope's effective range, where the weapon became awkward and the cases were the better defense. I'd been too focused on keeping the rope moving and hadn't transitioned when the distance closed.

  We went again.

  This round I let him close. When he stepped inside the rope's arc I dropped to a short grip and used the weighted end as a flail—short, fast, aimed at his sword hand. He blocked it with the flat and shoved my arm out, but the shove put him slightly off angle and I drove the elbow piece into his guard.

  He stepped back and looked at the cases again.

  "What are those made of?"

  "Bone and hide."

  He made a sound that wasn't quite approval and wasn't quite otherwise.

  We worked for another hour. He adjusted his approach with each exchange—using the sword's reach to keep me from establishing the rope's arc, pressing when I tried to widen it, backing when I shortened. The problem with the rope against a sword was that the sword controlled lines and the rope controlled space, and neither naturally dominated the other. It was problem-solving as much as fighting, each exchange a question about distance and timing with no clean answer.

  By the end I was breathing hard and my right forearm had taken three solid hits from the flat of his blade in places the case didn't cover. The lightning formation had run the whole session—the heightened feedback useful for tracking the rope, less useful when Garrick's blade came in fast and the amplified sensation of impact briefly overwhelmed everything else.

  "You're better with it than last week," Garrick said, sheathing the practice sword. "Still too committed to the wide arc. When someone closes distance you lose the weapon."

  "I know. I'm working on the short range transitions."

  "Work faster. Tournament's in twelve weeks."

  He looked at the cases once more, then decided against whatever he'd been about to say. "Same time tomorrow."

  After he left I stood in the empty hall and let the formation wind down. The static dissipating slowly, the amplified feedback fading. The hall, which had felt loud and sharp for an hour, settled back into something quieter.

  Twelve weeks. The cases were done. The gloves were still ahead of me. The iron cores were still waiting for the cold to pass and the forge to be lit.

  I went to find someone in the domestic buildings that afternoon.

  The glove design had been sitting in the back of my thinking for weeks, the logic clear but the execution waiting on someone who could actually do the needlework. Long gloves, open-fingered, with channels in the fabric for the spider silk threads—positioned precisely enough that the contact points at the palm lined up with the fittings on the cases.

  Push aether deliberately into the hand, it runs through the silk, converts to electricity, starts the mechanism.

  The first two people I asked pointed me along the same path. The third was an older woman folding linens outside a workroom, who looked me over with the expression of someone who'd dealt with unusual student requests before.

  "What sort of gloves?" she asked.

  I described them. Long, open-fingered, channels at the base of specific fingers at specific intervals, connecting to precise contact points at the palm.

  She listened without interrupting. "You want embroidery channels."

  "I want channels that hold a conducting thread under tension without slipping."

  "Embroidery channels." She set down the linen. "The thread—what is it?"

  "Spider silk. The kind that reacts to aether."

  She looked at the cases on my forearms, then back at my face. "You're the one with the bone-and-hide pieces."

  "Yes."

  Her eyes moved over the cases with the attention of someone whose trade meant they noticed how things were made. Whatever she concluded she kept to herself.

  "How many pairs?"

  "One to start. If the design works, maybe two."

  She named her price. We spent ten minutes at the workroom table with chalk and a board going over the channel positions. I drew the contact points on a palm diagram, marked each finger channel and its direction of run, indicated which fingers carried which channels.

  She made two corrections—closer spacing at the junction point to prevent thread slip, reinforced borders at the fingertip openings to stop fraying under repeated use. Both good.

  "Two weeks," she said.

  I left her with the measurements and walked back across the grounds. The gloves would come. The forge would come after that.

  The gloves arrived on the fourteenth day. Tighter weave than I'd specified, the channel walls firmer, the contact points at the palm cleaner than anything I could have managed myself. The fingertip openings sat flat against the last knuckle without bunching.

  I put them on in her workroom doorway. Flexed each finger, made a fist, opened the hand slowly. The channels lay flat without binding. The palm points sat exactly where the case fittings were.

  I paid her. She nodded and went back inside.

  I fitted the silk threads that afternoon. Every contact point sat where it needed to. The aether moved through the silk the moment I pushed it deliberately and the conversion started in under a second.

  The cases were finished. The gloves were finished. The iron cores were still waiting on the weather.

  About a month after that, the frost left the courtyard stone.

  Not warmth—just the absence of the worst of the cold, the air settling into something that no longer made the cinder stone ring with trapped ice when struck. That morning the ground didn't freeze back after the afternoon thaw. I could tell from the silence when I opened the door, a different quality to it, the pressure of winter no longer sitting on everything.

  I went out and pressed my palm flat against the forge face. Cold, but not bitten through. I ran my thumbnail along the crack lines I'd mapped in autumn. None of them had opened.

  I could fire it.

  I stood in the courtyard for a moment. The cases finished. The gloves finished. The lightning formation running cleaner than it had when winter started, the threshold easier to hold, the sessions with Garrick longer before the sensory overload started pulling at the edges of focus.

  Six weeks left until the tournament.

  I went to the back and started bringing the coal to the forge.