The first training session happened on the Sunday evening of the second week of term, in the Room of Requirements, with Harry, Hermione, Ginny and Luna.
He had given them a week to find their feet in the new term's rhythm before adding anything. This was deliberate — starting on day one would have produced people who were already tired managing something new. Starting in week two produced people who knew what they were carrying and had decided they could carry more.
The Room gave them what he needed: a large open space, well-lit, with the practice dummies he had bought during the summer arranged along one wall, and a clear area in the center for movement work. The dummies had the specific quality of things built to the correct level of resistance — not the performance of challenge but the actual thing, calibrated to adjust.
He looked at the four of them and thought about where to begin.
'The first thing,' he said, 'is footwork.'
Harry looked at him. 'Footwork.'
'Every spell you cast is delivered from wherever your body is,' Ron said. 'If your body is in the wrong place — if you're standing flat-footed, if you've committed your weight before you know where you need to be — the spell is already compromised before you've said a word. Footwork is not interesting. Footwork is not what anyone thinks they're here for.' He looked at each of them. 'It is also the reason most wizards lose duels they should have won.'
A pause.
'Show us,' Hermione said.
He demonstrated slowly at first — the weight distribution, the default stance, the three ways to move from it. Then at half speed. Then at the speed it was actually used, which was fast enough that the footwork disappeared into the movement and became invisible, which was the point. The movement was not the thing. The movement was what made the thing possible.
He watched them practice it. Luna took to it with the ease of someone who had an unusual relationship with her own physical self and found new physical grammar interesting rather than awkward. Ginny picked it up in twenty minutes — unsurprising, given years of Quidditch reflexes and the specific physical intelligence of someone who had been flying at speed since she could reach a broom. Harry was slightly too inclined to lean forward into the movement, which was the habit of a Seeker and would be corrected.
Hermione was precise and slightly too controlled, which was not a problem with the footwork itself but a signal about what the work was going to require from her specifically. She could do it correctly. She was thinking about doing it correctly, which was not the same thing.
'Less thinking,' he said, passing behind her. 'Your body knows where to go. Let it.'
She looked like she wanted to argue that bodies did not in fact know things. She didn't argue. She tried it again.
Better.
They worked for ninety minutes. No spells — just movement, positioning, and the physical vocabulary of someone who intended to be somewhere specific when the moment required it.
At the end Harry looked at him with the expression he had when he was recalibrating.
'That was genuinely unpleasant,' Harry said.
'Yes,' Ron said. 'That's what I told you.'
'You weren't exaggerating.'
'I don't, about this.' He looked at them all. 'Same time next week. Practice the stance every day between now and then. Ten minutes at least. It doesn't need to be long. It needs to be consistent.'
Luna raised her hand. 'What are we working toward?'
He thought about how to answer this honestly. 'Silent casting,' he said. 'Point casting after that. And then the specific applications you'll each need for the year ahead.' He paused. 'Some of what we're building you won't use this year. Some of it you will use sooner than you'd like. The preparation doesn't wait for the moment — the preparation is what makes the moment survivable.'
The Room was quiet for a moment.
Then Ginny said: 'Ten minutes, every day.'
'Every day,' he confirmed.