They trained until they couldn't.
That was the agreement, unspoken, arrived at on the first morning they'd trained together and maintained every session since. Not a fixed duration, not a specific number of repetitions — just until the body communicated clearly that the available output had been spent. Sylvia had trained this way her whole life. Charlotte had adapted to it faster than expected, which told Sylvia something about what Charlotte was using the training for.
The R.K training yard was empty at this hour. The others were on patrol rotation or administrative duty, the specific machinery of a military headquarters that kept running regardless of how many of its members were currently on a weeks-long trek through Blizzaria's wilderness. The yard had the specific quality of a space designed for use that was currently not being used — the equipment present, the cold air still, the snow on the ground at the edges undisturbed.
They were in the centre of it.
Charlotte moved through the wind form her father had taught her with the focused precision of someone who had been doing it long enough that the movements were in her body rather than her mind. The wind responded to the sword artistry the way wind responded to someone who understood it — not as an external force being directed but as something that was already moving and was being given shape. The blade caught the cold air and the cold air gathered along it and the specific quality of a wind ability expressed through sword technique was both more controlled and more natural than either element alone.
Sylvia watched her.
She had been watching Charlotte train since the first session and had been revising her initial assessment with each subsequent one. The initial assessment had been: competent, developing, the specific stage of someone whose ability was capable and whose technique was solid but whose integration of the two was still being worked out. The current assessment was: Charlotte was further along than she looked, and what looked like developing integration was actually restraint — the specific holding back of someone who understood what full output felt like and had decided the training yard wasn't the place for it.
She filed this. It was useful information.
They pushed through the last sequence — a combined form, the two of them working in the specific proximity of a paired drill, Sylvia's fire and Charlotte's wind occupying the same space without competing, the heat and the current finding a working relationship that neither of them had directed. It had taken three sessions to develop. Now it was automatic.
Charlotte's sword arm dropped first.
Not failure — the specific controlled lowering of someone who had reached the agreed threshold and was acknowledging it. Sylvia let her own output go a moment later, the fire pulling back to the low idle that was her resting state, the specific warmth she ran at regardless of circumstance.
They stood in the yard in the aftermath of effort. The cold came back in as the heat dissipated. Charlotte's breath was visible in the air. Sylvia's slightly less so — the fire running in her meant cold found her differently, the temperature differential between her body and the air smaller than it should have been.
Neither of them moved toward the equipment storage. Neither of them moved toward the door.
The exhaustion had a quality to it — the specific lowered state of someone whose body had been occupied and was now not, the guard that physical effort maintained coming down with the effort itself.
Charlotte sat down on the cold ground.
Not carefully — just down, the legs deciding and the rest following, the specific surrender of someone who had been upright for long enough. She sat with her knees drawn up and her sword across her lap and looked at the snow at the yard's edge.
Sylvia sat beside her.
✦ ✦ ✦
The silence lasted long enough to become comfortable. Not the silence of two people who had nothing to say but the silence of two people who had things to say and were waiting for the right moment, which the exhaustion was providing by removing the usual reasons to wait.
Charlotte spoke first.
"I keep thinking about his hands," she said.
Sylvia looked at her.
"My father's hands." Charlotte was looking at the snow. "When he was teaching me the wind forms. He had this specific way of adjusting my grip — not correcting it, adjusting it, like the difference was important to him. He'd put his hand over mine and move my fingers to exactly the right position and then step back without saying anything." She paused. "I can still feel exactly what that felt like. The weight of his hand." She looked at her own hands on the sword's hilt. "And then I think about the fact that I'm never going to feel that again and it's—"
She stopped.
Not because she'd decided to stop. Because the sentence had reached a place where the words ran out.
"Yes," Sylvia said.
Charlotte looked at her. "You know what I'm going to say."
"I know what you're going to say," Sylvia said. "Because I've been trying to say the same thing for weeks and I keep hitting the same wall."
Charlotte looked back at the snow. "I thought it would get easier. Everyone said it would get easier. Not better — easier. Like there'd be some point where the weight of it became something you carried rather than something that carried you." A pause. "It hasn't."
"No," said Sylvia.
"How long has it been for you?"
Sylvia thought about the specific calculation — the days since Olympia, since the casket, since the last time she'd seen her mother alive. "Long enough that it should be easier," she said. "If it was going to get easier."
Charlotte made a sound that was almost a laugh. Almost. "That's not reassuring."
"I know," said Sylvia. "I'm sorry. I don't have anything reassuring." She looked at her own hands — the fire running under the skin at its low idle, the warmth that had been her mother's gift to her as surely as the wind forms were her father's gift to Charlotte. "I keep using the ability and thinking about her. Every time. It's like she's in it — not as a memory exactly, as a presence. Like she left something of herself in what she taught me."
Charlotte looked at her.
"The wind forms," Charlotte said quietly.
"Yes," said Sylvia.
They sat with that for a moment — the specific recognition of two people who had found the same thing in different forms, the people they'd lost present in the abilities those people had shaped.
"I used to think that was comforting," Charlotte said. "That he was in the technique. That using it was a way of keeping him close." She paused. "Sometimes it still is. And sometimes it makes it worse because I use it and it reminds me that the technique is all I have left of it and then I—"
She stopped again.
"Charlotte," Sylvia said.
"I'm fine," Charlotte said, with the specific quality of someone saying the thing that was least accurate because the accurate thing was too large for the current moment.
"You don't have to be fine," Sylvia said.
Charlotte looked at her. The rawness was visible now — the composure that the training had maintained coming down with the effort that had sustained it, the specific face of someone whose grief was close to the surface and had been close to the surface for weeks and hadn't been given permission to come up properly.
"I lost everything in one day," Charlotte said. "My father. My aunt. The palace. The kingdom. The life I'd had my entire life up to that point." Her voice had the specific quality of someone speaking a truth they had known for a long time but hadn't said out loud. "I joined the squad because I thought being around people would help. Being around people who understood what had happened, who were dealing with the same things." She paused. "And it does help. It does. But it doesn't—"
"Fix it," Sylvia said.
"Fix it," Charlotte confirmed. "Nothing fixes it. I know that. I know that intellectually. And then I wake up in the morning and the first thing my brain does is remember and the remembering is the same weight every single morning and I think — is this just what it is now? Is this just who I am now? Someone who wakes up and the first thing they feel is—"
She pressed both hands over her face.
Sylvia said nothing. She didn't move to stop it or redirect it or offer anything that would give Charlotte a reason to pull back from what was coming up. She just sat beside her in the cold yard with the fire running low and waited.
Charlotte cried.
Not quietly — the specific sound of someone who had been holding something back for a long time and had finally found the place where holding it was no longer possible, the grief coming up without the architecture of composure around it. The wind stirred in the yard in the specific way it stirred when Charlotte's ability ran without direction, the ambient expression of an emotion too large to be contained by the person feeling it.
Sylvia put her arm around her.
Charlotte leaned into it and cried and the wind moved around them both and the cold was present and the training yard was empty and there was nobody to perform anything for and nobody to be fine for and that was the first time since Olympia that Charlotte had been in a space where that was true.
She let it run its course.
When it passed — not resolved, just completed, the specific exhaustion of grief that had been fully expressed rather than managed — she sat up and wiped her face and looked at the snow at the yard's edge with the specific expression of someone who had been somewhere and had come back.
"I'm sorry," she said.
"Don't," said Sylvia.
"I just—"
"Don't apologise for it," Sylvia said. "It needed to come out. It's been needing to come out for weeks and you've been — I've watched you, Charlotte. You've been carrying it perfectly and perfectly is the wrong way to carry something that heavy." She paused. "I know because I've been doing the same thing."
Charlotte looked at her. "Have you cried? Since it happened?"
Sylvia was quiet for a moment. "Once," she said. "The morning Levi left. After he was gone." She looked at her hands. "I went back to my room and I sat on the bed and I pressed my hands over my face and I cried." She paused. "And then I went to find Curwyn because there was work to do and I haven't — since then I haven't."
"But you need to," Charlotte said.
"I know," said Sylvia. "I keep not doing it because doing it feels like — stopping. And if I stop—"
"It all catches up," Charlotte said.
"Yes."
They sat in the specific quiet of two people who had just said the truest things they'd said to anyone since Olympia and were sitting with the weight of the truth rather than the weight of its absence.
—
"She would have known what to say," Charlotte said. "Aunt Melissa. She always knew what to say. Not comfort exactly — she wasn't soft about it. But she always found the thing that was true and said it and somehow that was enough."
"She told me once," Sylvia said, "that grief wasn't something you got through. It was something you learned to carry. Like a second body. It was heavy at first and you kept dropping it and picking it back up and eventually you got strong enough that you could carry it without thinking about it. But you never put it down." She paused. "She said the people who told you it got better were telling you the wrong thing. It didn't get better. You got stronger."
Charlotte was quiet for a moment. "That sounds like her."
"Yes," said Sylvia. "It does."
The wind moved through the yard one more time and settled.
"I miss her," Charlotte said. Simply. Just that.
"So do I," said Sylvia. "Every day."
They sat in the cold together for a while longer — two people in the same grief from different angles, neither of them further along than the other, neither of them pretending otherwise. The yard around them was empty and the cold was present and the fire ran low at Sylvia's skin and the wind had gone still and it was enough, for now, to just be in it together without trying to be anywhere else.
✦ ✦ ✦
Then Curwyn appeared at the yard entrance.
His expression had the specific quality of someone who had received information and was managing the weight of it with the professional composure of someone whose job required that he manage it.
"There's been an attack," he said. "Kolderia. We need to move."
Sylvia was on her feet before he finished the sentence.
Charlotte was half a second behind her.
The grief went back where it lived — not resolved, not addressed, just returned to its place with the specific efficiency of people who had learned to pick it up and carry it and keep moving. They moved through the yard entrance and into the HQ corridor and the training session was behind them and Kolderia was ahead.
The wind picked up with Charlotte as she walked.