---Part 7. Chapter 48.7: No Pain, No Gain.
They broke for lunch at midday.
The palace kitchens had prepared a large meal in anticipation — Hexia had arranged this in advance, because whatever else he was, he had spent enough time building things to know that you fed the people doing the work. The students gathered in the palace's secondary dining hall, the long table arranged to seat human-sized diners alongside the significant space requirements of Kraignor and — through specially constructed long benches — the three centaurs.
The meal was loud.
"I feel things," Durgan announced, addressing his plate and the room at large, "that I have never felt in places I was not previously aware I had feelings."
"Muscles," Durin said, eating with his characteristic efficiency. "You've discovered you have them."
"I have *always* had muscles."
"You have had muscles. You have not previously asked them to do anything sustained for more than five minutes without an explosion involved."
"Engineering is physically demanding—"
"*Standing still and pulling a lever* is not the same as ten kilometers."
"It was a *very large* lever."
Nerissa, seated beside Elaine, was eating with the methodical focus of someone replenishing stores that had been genuinely depleted. Elaine was doing the same thing with more composure, but Nerissa had noticed the elf's left hand pressing lightly against her thigh under the table — testing whether the muscle was as unhappy as it felt.
"Your legs," Nerissa observed, without judgment.
"My legs are *perfectly fine,*" Elaine said, with the precision of someone controlling every syllable to ensure it did not reveal anything it was not supposed to.
"Elaine."
A pause. Elaine ate a bite. "My legs are protesting certain decisions."
"The breakfalls?"
"The *everything.*" Elaine's impeccable composure slipped by one degree. "I am the Grand Imperial Magus of the Verdant Throne. I have studied combat magic for two hundred years. I have never once needed to *fall down on purpose* two hundred and sixty times in succession."
"Was it two hundred and sixty?"
"I counted."
Nerissa considered this. "That's very you."
"Everything I do is very me. It's my primary distinguishing feature."
"You're tired," Nerissa said.
"I am *tired and grateful,*" Elaine corrected. "There is a difference. Both can be true simultaneously."
Across the table, Kiara's fifteen warriors were eating in the particular aggressive way of young people who have been physically pushed to their limits and are refueling with the conviction that no amount of food could possibly be unreasonable. Little Lyssa had reorganized her drawing of the Sweet Chin Music into a more prominent position beside her plate, as though she needed it in eyeline for motivational purposes.
"Today," Lyssa informed the table, in the declarative manner of someone making a public policy statement, "was the hardest day of my life."
"You're ten," Rhaine said. "Most days haven't happened yet."
"This one was still the hardest."
"You did all of it," Rhaine said. "Every rep. Every kilometer. Every breakfall."
Lyssa considered this. "I did."
"You didn't stop."
"I didn't stop," Lyssa agreed, and then a grin spread across her face that was approximately three sizes too large for her face in the best possible way. "I'm going to be *incredible.*"
Rhaine looked at the drawing beside the plate — Hexia's kick rendered in enthusiastic and anatomically approximate detail.
"You're already getting there," she said.
At the far end of the table, Kraignor ate in his customary deliberate silence, but his large dark eyes moved through the room — watching Kiara's warriors, watching the companions, watching the way the meal's noise organized itself into conversations and laughter and the particular sound of people who had been through difficulty together and were processing it as shared experience.
Grome, beside him, was eating with concentrated energy and occasional interjections of the grunt that served him as commentary on anything he found either impressive or displeasing, without particularly distinguishing between the two.
Hargen ate quietly. Efficiently. He did not speak unless a conversation arrived at him directly, in which case he answered it with the economy of someone who had long since decided that most sentences could be shorter.
He was watching Hexia.
Not in surveillance — there was a difference — but in the focused attention of someone who was piecing together a picture one brushstroke at a time. Hexia was at the end of the table, eating as he did everything else: without excess, without performance, but *present* in a way that made the space around him feel more organized simply by his being in it.
He was talking to Kiara. Or rather, Kiara was talking and he was listening, which in Hexia's relational economy was the active form. She was describing something about her kingdom's grain shortage — an administrative problem, not a military one — and he was asking quiet questions that redirected her toward a solution she'd already had without quite knowing it.
"So the northern granaries have excess," Kiara was saying.
"And the southern provinces have the deficit."
"But transporting between them takes three weeks by cart—"
"Does it need to be cart?"
Kiara stopped. "What?"
"Is there a water route?"
She stared at him. Then she stared at the ceiling. Then she looked back at him with an expression that suggested she was going to be very privately annoyed about this for several days.
"There's a river," she said. "It's faster."
"Yes."
"We already have river barges for trade."
"Yes."
"This was obvious."
"To you. You just hadn't gotten there yet."
Kiara narrowed her eyes. "You did that on purpose."
"I asked questions."
"You *guided* me to the answer on purpose and now you're going to sit there and be very calm about it and not take any credit and that is *extremely irritating.*"
Hexia's expression held something that was quite close to a smile.
"Solve the problem," he said. "The irritation can come later."
Hargen watched this and filed it. Not for any particular purpose. Just because it was useful to understand who Hexia was when the sword was put down.
---
After two hours, they returned to the training yard.
The afternoon was the throws.
Hexia began with *O-Goshi* — basic hip throw, the fundamental from which much of judo's throwing vocabulary descended. He demonstrated on Grome, because Grome was the largest person readily available and demonstrating throws on large people made the point more efficiently than words.
He moved through kuzushi — taking Grome's grip, off-balancing him forward — then stepped in, loaded Grome across his hip, and executed the throw.
Grome went over cleanly and hit the mat with his breakfall — which was, after the morning's work, significantly better than it had been.
The class watched.
"*How,*" Aelindra said, and then stopped, and then tried again. "The size — you're a third of his size. How does the physics—"
"His mass works against him once he's off-balance," Hexia said. "I don't lift him. I redirect him. His own forward momentum completes the throw. My job is to point him at the ground and move out of the way of his fall." He looked at her. "Which is why the kuzushi is everything. If I skip it and try to throw Grome with strength, it doesn't work. If I create the off-balance first, his own weight does most of the work."
Aelindra was quiet for a moment, and then nodded in the way of someone integrating new information into an existing framework in real time. "Redirection over opposition."
"Yes."
"That's similar to redirecting arrow trajectories through wind deflection. You don't fight the wind. You account for it."
"Same principle."
Aelindra looked at Grome, who had risen from the mat and was standing with his arms at his sides, processing the experience of having been thrown by someone significantly smaller than him with the stoic introspection of someone determined to understand rather than be embarrassed.
"Can I practice on him?" Aelindra asked.
"Only if he agrees."
"He threw *me* into a wall one time during sparring," she said, looking at Grome with the settled patience of someone who has not forgotten this and who is not in a hurry.
"That was a training session," Grome said.
"During which you threw me into a wall."
"You had just broken my guard with an arrow at point-blank range."
"That was *practice archery,*" Aelindra said.
"It *hurt.*"
They looked at each other.
"Partners?" Aelindra suggested.
Grome exhaled through his nose. Then he stepped toward her and presented his gi lapels with the bearing of someone accepting a challenge that he believed he was going to regret and was committed to anyway. "Partners."
---To be continued in part 8...