“A teacher’s final job is to show you what you already are. Everything before that is preparation.”

  Haldis had been the garrison’s senior cultivation instructor for eleven years, and in that time she had developed very firm opinions about what made a student worth the effort.

  She shared those opinions with Leif on the first morning not as a warning, but as orientation.

  “I’ve been watching you for two years,” she said, standing across the open practice floor. There were no tools in the room, no weapons, nothing to hide behind—just clean space and her steady attention. “Breath-release. Current reading. Your letters with ásmundr. The apprenticeships.” Her gaze sharpened slightly. “You work hard. That’s not the question.”

  Leif stood very straight. His notebook was in his hand, though he hadn’t opened it yet.

  Haldis noticed.

  “Not yet,” she said mildly. “You’ll need your hands.”

  He closed it at once.

  Good.

  “What I know about you,” she continued, “is that you’re good at anything that involves flow. Breath, current, channels—you feel where things want to go, and you don’t fight it.” She shifted her weight, not quite a stance, just movement that somehow still felt deliberate. “What you don’t understand yet is the difference between reading a system and being inside one.”

  Leif’s brow tightened slightly.

  “Run the full breath-release sequence,” Haldis said. “From the beginning. Don’t think about it.”

  He inhaled and obeyed.

  From the wall, Eirik watched carefully. He’d seen Leif run this sequence dozens of times. Today it looked… smoother. Not faster, exactly. Cleaner.

  Haldis watched without moving.

  When Leif finished, she said, “Again. Faster.”

  He did.

  “Again. Eyes closed.”

  This time Leif hesitated a fraction of a second before complying. When he ran the sequence blind, something subtle shifted in the flow of his shoulders and spine. Even Eirik could see it.

  Haldis went very still.

  When Leif finished, she said quietly, “Open your eyes.”

  He did.

  “Do you know what you just did?”

  “The breath-release sequence,” Leif said carefully.

  Her mouth twitched.

  “You ran three current paths at once.”

  Silence fell across the room.

  Leif blinked. “That… isn’t standard.”

  “No,” Haldis agreed. “Standard runs one. You’ve been running three in parallel for months, I’d guess. Your instincts found the faster road and never bothered to ask permission.” She studied him a moment longer. “Has ásmundr mentioned that in his letters?”

  “…No.”

  “No,” she said again, almost to herself. “I didn’t think he had.”

  For the first time since the lesson began, something like real interest lit her eyes.

  “This week,” she said, “is going to be useful.”

  By the third day Haldis had quietly discarded half the standard drills.

  Not because they were wrong. Because Leif had already grown past them.

  She rebuilt from what he actually did rather than what the manuals expected him to do, and the process left Leif visibly unsettled in a way Eirik almost never saw.

  “You keep calling Current Reading a sensing skill,” Haldis said that morning.

  Leif was sitting cross-legged now, notebook open at last. She had stopped correcting the posture once it became clear he thought better that way.

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  “It isn’t,” she continued. “You’re not just sensing the current. You’re matching yourself to it. Sliding into the same shape.”

  Leif’s pencil slowed.

  “The fletching,” he said slowly.

  “What about it?”

  “Skúli said I read arrow flight the way I read water. I thought he was being metaphorical.”

  “He wasn’t.”

  She crouched to his level.

  “Every time you’ve been exceptional this year, it’s been the same motion underneath. River. Arrow. Channels. Even the wheelwork.” Her voice softened slightly. “You don’t just observe systems, Leif. You enter them.”

  Leif stared at the page for a long moment.

  “I read systems,” he murmured.

  Haldis tilted her head. “Who told you that?”

  “I worked it out. Eirik named it.”

  From the wall, Eirik pretended very hard to be invisible.

  Leif looked up again, more serious now. “What is it, then? The thing under all of it.”

  For the first time all week, Haldis hesitated.

  It was brief, but it was real.

  “I have an opinion,” she said at last. “But you don’t need my opinion. Your Naming Day is close enough that guessing would only muddy your footing.”

  Leif’s shoulders tightened despite himself.

  “The Wyrd will offer you three paths,” she continued. “One will look familiar. One will feel wrong in your bones. And one…” Her gaze sharpened. “…will feel uncomfortably correct.”

  Silence stretched between them.

  “When that happens,” she said quietly, “have the nerve to take it. If you do, you’ll step onto a Blár road from the beginning.”

  Leif didn’t write that down.

  He just sat there, very still.

  Good. Some things were better left off the page.

  The patrol came on the fifth day of Haldis’s week.

  Eirik had been waiting for it since Skeggi first mentioned cores.

  When the duty roster went up, he read it twice before going to find the older man.

  “Standard eastern sweep,” Skeggi said. “Tier 1s mostly. There’s been noise about a Tier 2 in the hollow.”

  “If there is—”

  “You observe,” Skeggi cut in calmly. “Your father handles the kill. You handle the harvest.”

  That was fair.

  “Dispersal window?”

  “Tier 1 bleeds off quick. Tier 2 gives you about an hour before the good density starts thinning.” Skeggi tapped slightly left of his sternum. “Cluster sits here most of the time. Your Touch will find it faster than steel.”

  Eirik nodded once.

  That was exactly what he needed.

  The patrol moved out at dawn.

  Bj?rn took point. Eirik ran at his left shoulder.

  The first hours were Tier 1 cleanups—nothing dramatic, but instructive. With the Athletics integration settling in his bones, the beasts’ movements looked different now. Cleaner to read. The body always committed before the strike. Always.

  Bj?rn had been right about that.

  Eirik handled two of the Tier 1s himself. Not pretty, but controlled. The harvests went smoother.

  Four minutes for the first core.

  Just over three for the second.

  Small. Marble-sized. Low Grár.

  Still valuable.

  Still warm in the hand in that particular way cultivation materials had, like holding something that remembered being alive.

  They found the Tier 2 in the hollow beyond the second waystone.

  It was big enough to make the air feel tighter.

  Bj?rn ended it in about ninety seconds of very efficient violence.

  Eirik watched every movement.

  Then moved in.

  Appraiser’s Touch flared the moment his hand crossed the rib line.

  There.

  Dense. Clean. Bright at the center of the beast’s fading structure.

  He cut carefully and extracted the core in just under forty seconds.

  Fist-sized.

  Hot.

  Upper Grár, with the faint pressure at the heart that hinted it might brush Blár quality at the very center.

  Bj?rn glanced down at it.

  “Forty seconds.”

  “The Touch helps.”

  Bj?rn grunted once. Approval enough.

  “That’s a good pull.”

  Eirik allowed himself a small nod.

  Yeah.

  It was.

  Skeggi turned the core slowly in his hand when they returned.

  Long enough to matter.

  “Upper Grár,” he said at last. “Healthy.”

  He set it on the bench between them. “What stage?”

  “Mineral bind. Early.”

  “Why early?”

  “Locks the beast signature before it starts leaking out of the matrix.”

  That earned a longer look.

  Good.

  They ran the modified batch that evening. The smell shifted first—deeper, warmer, something faintly feral under the brine and mineral notes.

  Skeggi checked it at six hours.

  “Your proportions are cautious,” he said.

  Not criticism. Just fact.

  “A little more core next time,” he added.

  “I’ll note it.”

  “Note it as a hypothesis.”

  Eirik inclined his head.

  That mattered.

  As Skeggi turned to leave, he paused in the doorway.

  “You built this,” he said.

  Eirik didn’t answer.

  After a moment, Skeggi added quietly, “Keep going.”

  Then he was gone.

  Nobody noticed the fish had changed.

  Which, in retrospect, was the most impressive part.

  The carved fish Bjarki had given Leif had sat on the windowsill long enough to become invisible in the way familiar things did. Rí dusted around it. Leif glanced at it when thinking. It had simply… belonged.

  Skeggi made the swap on a Wednesday.

  Eirik noticed on Friday.

  His Touch brushed the wood and paused.

  Different residue.

  Fresh.

  Same shape. Same dimensions. Same wear carefully copied along the tail.

  But a different hand.

  “Leif,” Eirik said slowly.

  Leif looked up.

  “This isn’t the original.”

  Everything that followed unfolded exactly as it should—Rí’s quiet betrayal, Bj?rn’s slow realization, and Skeggi’s absolute refusal to admit anything at all.

  In the end, Leif only turned the replacement fish over in his hands and said thoughtfully, “It’s a very good copy.”

  Then, after a moment:

  “When Bjarki sends the original back, I’ll have two.”

  From across the yard, Skeggi laughed.

  That night Eirik ran body tempering with the core-modified preparation for the third time.

  The difference was unmistakable now.

  Not louder.

  Deeper.

  The work was reaching further into the stubborn places in his channels.

  He checked his S?fnun.

  65%.

  Good.

  Still honest.

  Still earned.

  He closed the window of it in his mind and lifted Heimskr into the extended hold.

  Twelve minutes.

  Shoulder burning.

  Hips steady.

  Spine aligned.

  Better than last week.

  Still not right.

  But closer.

  Three weeks until Leif’s Naming Day.

  Not long at all.

  Eirik set the blade down carefully and went to bed.

  Tomorrow would come early, and there was still plenty left to fix.