Six months passed.
Sunny ate three meals a day, every day, at the same times, in the same room. The food changed, because monster meat came in dozens of varieties depending on what the hunting parties brought back, but the portions never did. They were calculated, he eventually realized, to the gram. Enough protein to rebuild the muscle tissue his body had been cannibalizing for years. Enough fat to insulate his organs. Enough carbohydrates to fuel the increasingly demanding schedule that filled every hour between waking and sleep.
He gained twelve kilograms. His skin lost the translucent quality that had made him look like something assembled from paper and wire, and color returned to places he hadn't known were supposed to have it. His hair thickened. His eyes cleared. When he looked at himself in the bathroom mirror, he saw a stranger who resembled the boy from the outskirts the way a finished sketch resembles its rough draft.
He was still small for his age, but Anvil said this was acceptable.
During those six months, Sunny did not leave the east wing of the inner keep. He saw Anvil for exactly one hour each week, during which the patriarch tested his memorization of whatever text had been assigned and then left a new one. The anatomy primer was followed by a treatise on poisons. The treatise on poisons was followed by a manual on lock mechanisms. The manual on lock mechanisms was followed by a history of the Awakened clans, written in dense, archival prose that gave Sunny headaches until he learned to parse the formal syntax.
He asked about the history book, because it seemed different from the others. Practical knowledge he could understand, since even an eight-year-old could intuit that anatomy and poisons and locks were tools, and tools implied a task. But history felt abstract. Why did it matter which clan had conquered which citadel three decades ago?
Anvil's answer was four words long.
"Know your enemy's shape."
Sunny thought about that for a long time after Anvil left. He read the history book again from the beginning, and this time he didn't read it as a record of events. He read it as a map of relationships, alliances, rivalries, debts. He read it the way he used to read the outskirts: who controlled what territory, who owed whom a favor, where the boundaries were and how violently they'd be defended.
The clans were just gangs with better clothes.
Once he understood that, the rest came easily.
The only other person Sunny interacted with during those six months was a woman named Lira, who brought his meals and collected the empty trays. She was Awakened, judging by the way she moved, though she never carried a weapon and wore no armor. Her face was pleasant and forgettable in the way that faces designed to be forgettable always are, and she never spoke to Sunny beyond the minimum required to perform her duties.
He tried talking to her once, in the second week, because the silence of the east wing was starting to press against his skull like a physical weight.
"What's your name?" he asked.
She set the tray on the desk and said, "Lira."
"How long have you worked here?"
"A long time."
"Do you know why I'm here?"
Lira looked at him. Her expression didn't change, but something behind her eyes shifted in a way that reminded Sunny, uncomfortably, of Anvil.
"Eat your food," she said, and left.
He didn't try again.
The isolation should have been unbearable. Sunny had spent his entire life surrounded by people, even if most of those people had been indifferent or hostile. The outskirts were loud and crowded and chaotic, and even when you were alone, you could hear the sounds of other lives pressing in from every direction. Here, in the east wing, the silence was so complete that he could hear his own heartbeat when he lay still.
But Sunny discovered something strange about himself during those months: he didn't mind.
The silence was uncomfortable at first, the way cold water is uncomfortable before your body adjusts. After a few weeks, though, the discomfort faded, and what replaced it was a kind of clarity he'd never experienced. Without the constant noise of survival, without the need to watch for threats and calculate escape routes and perform whatever identity the current situation demanded, his mind became very still and very sharp.
He memorized the anatomy primer in four days. Anvil had given him a week.
He memorized the poison treatise in three.
By the time the history book arrived, Sunny was finishing each text with days to spare and spending the remaining time doing the only other thing available to him: thinking. He thought about the east wing and its layout. He thought about Lira and her careful blankness. He thought about the enchanted lanterns that burned without flame and the running water that came from somewhere he couldn't identify and the food that arrived three times a day with mechanical regularity.
He thought about Anvil.
The patriarch of Clan Valor was a difficult man to think about, because there was so little to work with. In the outskirts, Sunny had learned to read people by their inconsistencies, the gaps between what they said and what they did, the moments when the mask slipped and the real face showed through. Everyone had inconsistencies. Everyone had a real face.
Anvil didn't seem to.
He spoke the same way regardless of context. He moved the same way whether he was entering the room or leaving it. His grey eyes held the same flat, appraising quality whether he was testing Sunny's memorization or explaining the properties of arsenic. There were no gaps, no slips, no moments of unguarded humanity.
Either the man had achieved a level of self-control so absolute that no crack existed for Sunny to exploit, or the mask had been worn for so long that it had fused with the face beneath it, becoming indistinguishable from the real thing.
Sunny suspected it was the latter, because the former was something he aspired to and the latter was something he feared, and life had taught him that the things he feared were usually the ones that turned out to be true.
On the first day of the seventh month, the routine changed.
Lira came for him at dawn, which was unusual because she normally appeared only with food. She led him out of the east wing, through the heavy gate, and down three flights of stairs to a part of the inner keep he'd never seen.
The room was large and empty, with a high ceiling and a floor made of dark stone that absorbed sound. Anvil was standing in the center with his hands clasped behind his back, wearing a plain black shirt with the sleeves pushed above his elbows.
There was a wooden training sword on the ground in front of him.
"Pick it up," Anvil said.
Sunny picked it up. It was heavier than he expected, dense and well-balanced, carved from some wood he didn't recognize that was dark enough to be mistaken for iron.
"Hit me," Anvil said.
Sunny stared at him.
He was eight years old and weighed thirty-one kilograms. Anvil was a Saint, the patriarch of Clan Valor. The gap between them was not a gap. It was an abyss.
"Hit me," Anvil repeated. His tone hadn't changed. He might as well have been asking Sunny to close a door.
Sunny hit him.
Or tried to. He lunged forward with the training sword in both hands and swung at Anvil's midsection, putting his weight behind it the way he'd seen fighters do in the outskirts, where technique was nonexistent and commitment was everything.
The sword stopped.
It didn't hit anything. It simply stopped, frozen in midair as though the space between Sunny and Anvil had solidified into glass. Sunny's arms absorbed the impact of their own momentum, and the shock traveled up through his elbows into his shoulders with enough force to make his teeth click together.
Anvil hadn't moved. He hadn't raised a hand or shifted his stance or done anything visible at all. The sword had simply been forbidden from reaching him, and it had obeyed.
"Again," Anvil said.
Sunny swung again. The same thing happened.
"Again."
He swung from a different angle. The sword stopped.
"Again."
Overhead. Stopped.
"Again."
Low, at the knees. Stopped.
"Again."
This time, Sunny didn't swing. He studied Anvil's stance, the spacing of his feet, the angle of his shoulders, and then he feinted left and thrust straight forward, aiming for the gap between Anvil's arm and his ribs.
The sword stopped.
But Anvil's eyes moved. Just slightly, just for a fraction of a second, they tracked the feint before snapping back to the real attack. It was the first involuntary reaction Sunny had ever seen from him.
"Better," Anvil said.
It was not a compliment. It was an observation, the same way a thermometer reading is an observation. But Sunny felt something flicker in his chest anyway, a small warm thing that he immediately distrusted, because warm things in cold places were usually traps.
"Every day," Anvil said. "One hour. You will attack. I will stand here. When you are able to touch me, we will move to the next stage."
He turned and walked toward the door.
"How long will that take?" Sunny asked.
Anvil paused.
"That depends on you."
The door closed.
Sunny stood alone in the training room, holding the wooden sword, and thought about the feint. Anvil's eyes had moved. It was almost nothing, a reaction so small that most people wouldn't have noticed it. But Sunny had spent his entire life watching for the small things.
that the invisible wall wasn't automatic. It required attention. It required Anvil to perceive the attack and respond to it, even if the response was too fast and too subtle for Sunny to see.
Which meant it could, in theory, be overwhelmed. Or misdirected. Or outpaced.
He looked down at the training sword. Then he looked at the empty room.
Then he started swinging.