Elsie had been keeping count since the morning after the festival. Forty-three days. Forty-three mornings in the empty training yard before the fifth bell, working through the same narrow set of exercises she had designed for herself, and she had told nobody about any of them, not Arthur, not Yseult, not even Rowan, who had watched her compression work at the precision course and had asked, twice since, whether she'd been developing it further. She had answered vaguely both times.
It was not secrecy exactly. She had simply discovered, across the weeks since the festival, that she preferred the work unwatched, and had stopped interrogating herself about why. The morning was cold in the particular way early spring mornings still managed despite the season having technically turned, and Elsie stood at the yard's center with her hands raised and the wind gathering slowly around her forearms in a tight, controlled band. She had stopped celebrating this part months ago.
The compression itself had become reliable, the initial breakthrough that had once felt miraculous now settling into something closer to routine, and she had discovered, as most people eventually discovered about any hard-won skill, that arriving at competence simply relocated the difficulty somewhere further along rather than eliminating it. The difficulty was currently duration.
She could compress the wind readily now. She could hold it for perhaps eleven seconds before the concentration required began to fracture and the whole tight structure blew apart into ordinary dispersed air, and eleven seconds, she had determined across roughly two weeks of careful measurement, was nowhere near sufficient for anything genuinely useful. She began again.
The wind gathered. She drew it inward, tighter, feeling for the specific point where compression became strain, and held.
One. Two. Three.
Her arms began to shake somewhere around six, the particular tremor of muscles being asked to maintain something that fought back, and she pushed past it, holding the structure steady through seven, eight. At ten, her focus fractured. The compression blew apart, the wind dispersing outward in a sudden useless gust that scattered dust across the packed earth, and Elsie lowered her arms, breathing hard. Ten seconds. She had managed eleven twice, three days ago, and had not repeated it since.
ELS: Again.
She worked through fourteen more attempts across the following hour, and found herself, somewhere around the ninth, noticing something she had not previously considered. The failures were not identical. She had been treating each collapse as the same event, a simple failure of endurance, but paying closer attention now revealed that the compression broke differently depending on what she was doing with her attention in the moments before it went. When she concentrated hard on holding the structure, it collapsed at seven or eight. When she let her attention drift slightly, thinking about the shape of the wind rather than gripping it, she reached ten or eleven consistently.
ELS: Oh.
She said it aloud to the empty yard, and stood for a moment turning the observation over. She had been holding it too tightly. That was the entire problem, and it was, she recognized with the particular exasperation of someone encountering a lesson they had already learned once in a different context, precisely the same error she had made months ago when first attempting compression at all. She had spent weeks then trying to force the wind into a shape it resisted, and had only succeeded once she stopped forcing and started guiding. She had done it again. She had solved the initial problem and then immediately reverted to the same wrong instinct when the difficulty relocated.
ELS: You'd think I'd learn faster.
She raised her hands again. This time, instead of gripping the compression with her full concentration, she deliberately loosened her attention, holding the structure the way she might hold something delicate rather than something escaping, guiding rather than clamping.
One. Two. Three.
The tremor arrived later, around eight rather than six.
Nin*e. Ten. Eleven.*
She held.
Twelve. Thirteen.
The compression broke at fourteen, and Elsie stood in the empty yard with her arms shaking and her breath coming hard and something bright and enormous rising in her chest. Fourteen seconds. She had added three seconds in a single morning by doing less rather than more. She managed fourteen twice more before the fifth bell rang across the grounds, and lowered her arms for the final time with her whole body aching pleasantly and the particular deep satisfaction of a morning genuinely well spent. She thought, briefly, about telling someone.
Rowan would want to know. He had asked twice, and would ask again, and would be genuinely, uncomplicatedly delighted by three seconds of improvement that most people would consider entirely unimpressive. Arthur would understand it immediately. He had spent six years adding half-beats and small corrections to sword forms nobody else was watching him practice, and would recognize exactly what fourteen seconds had cost and exactly why it mattered. She could tell either of them. She could tell both. She found, walking back across the waking grounds toward West Hall, that she still did not particularly want to. Not yet.
There would be a moment, eventually, when the work had accumulated into something worth showing rather than describing, and she intended to wait for it, and she found the waiting itself had begun to feel less like secrecy and more like something closer to anticipation. She had forty-three mornings behind her. She was genuinely curious how many more it would take.