"Tea, young master?"
"Two cups. Make one weak."
The attendant paused beside the desk.
I kept reading Valeria's page for another second before noticing the silence.
"Will you be receiving someone?" he asked.
My eyes went to the empty chair across from me.
"No."
He waited.
"One cup," I said. "The usual."
"Yes, young master."
He left without giving me time to make the correction worse.
I put the paper down.
Two cups. I hadn't asked for that in years.
Back home, Hana used to claim she liked tea. What she liked was a warm mug to hold while she sat at my desk and complained about whatever I was doing on the computer.
Anything stronger than slightly brown water earned a look over the rim.
"You forgot the tea," I would tell her.
"I can see it."
"That's the mug."
"Then stop buying dark mugs."
It was a stupid argument. We had repeated it often enough to stop needing the whole thing.
Once, while we were cutting the sound for her school play, she tapped the side of her mug twice with a spoon.
I took off one side of the headphones.
"What?"
"Marker."
"For what?"
"The take. June says two taps are easier to find. Look."
She leaned across me and pointed at the sound track. Two sharp peaks stood above the smaller waves of our voices.
"There. You cut after those."
"I know how to cut audio."
"You deleted my captain's first line."
"Your captain breathed into the microphone for six seconds."
"For tension."
"For six seconds."
She pushed my hand away from the mouse and put the headphones on herself. They were too big. One side kept sliding down whenever she nodded.
The file names filled most of the left side of the screen. June had numbered her recordings. Hana had called hers things like USE THIS ONE and ACTUALLY THIS ONE, which made finding anything a separate job.
"Pick a number," I told her.
"Seven."
"For the file."
"I know."
She changed the name, then found another recording already called seven.
I looked at her.
She looked at the screen.
"Eight," she said.
I laughed hard enough to earn an elbow against my side. Not a hard one. She needed me close enough to explain why the next track had gone quiet.
We found the muted channel, played both recordings, and used the older one. She didn't argue about it once she heard them together.
June's voice came through faintly from the ear nearest me, followed by Hana's badly restrained laugh.
She stopped the track.
"Keep that one."
"You're laughing."
"June got the line right. I'll record my bit again."
She reached for her mug, remembered the spoon, and tapped twice.
I had spent the rest of the evening hearing those two little sounds every time she wanted another attempt.
Sometimes I complained just to make her do it again.
A knock brought me back to the desk.
One cup arrived on a small tray. I watched the attendant place it beside my papers, leaving enough space that the steam wouldn't damp the page.
"Anything else, young master?"
"No."
He withdrew.
I didn't explain the other cup. He hadn't asked for a story about a girl from somewhere he had never heard of, and I wasn't going to turn him into the person who listened just because he couldn't easily leave.
The tea smelled unfamiliar. I drank it while it was warm.
Then I turned Valeria's proposal face down and went back to the problem I could actually measure.
Yesterday, I had sat across from a dangerous woman without shaking visibly. That had felt like an achievement until I needed both hands on the desk to stand after writing my notes.
Looking fine was getting easier. Repeating anything useful wasn't.
I needed to know the difference before someone else tested it.
That afternoon, I cleared a space beside the clock in my room. The practice room was better for privacy in the morning, but I didn't need any fixtures for this. I needed a seat, paper, and something more reliable than my guess about how long a breath lasted.
I drew a table with room for six attempts. Then I crossed out the last three.
Three was plenty if I intended to learn something instead of hurt myself.
The first attempt followed the leftward path that caused less strain. I kept the cold narrow and moved it only to my wrist.
One breath. Two. At the third, a faint pressure formed under the old burn.
I let it return before it became heat.
The clock had barely moved, but my pulse had.
I wrote down the time and the feeling as plainly as I could.
Three breaths to wrist. Mild pressure. No release attempted.
Then I waited.
Waiting without doing anything was harder with the clock in front of me. I kept seeing Valeria's finger beside the unfinished names. I kept wondering whether the woman in the portrait corridor had spoken to the steward.
I caught myself reaching for the proposal and left it where it was.
One problem at a time.
When my breathing felt normal, I waited a little longer.
The second attempt reached my wrist more quickly.
Good, I thought.
Then the pressure arrived during the second breath instead of the third.
I eased the cold back and stopped.
Not good.
Faster hadn't meant easier. The path was familiar, but the ache underneath it hadn't fully settled.
I added that to the table. For the last attempt, I gave myself twice as long to rest.
I even stood and walked around the room to check whether I felt weak. My legs were steady. My hand looked normal unless I stretched the skin beneath my fingers.
From the doorway, I would have looked bored.
From inside my chest, I felt reasonably normal too.
I sat again.
The cold caught before my elbow.
Pain pinched under the ribs, small and sharp.
I stopped at once.
My hand hadn't even filled.
For a moment, I stared at the third row with the pen raised.
I wanted to try again.
Not because it made sense. Because three attempts were such a poor result that part of me wanted to blame the last one on breathing wrong.
One more would settle it.
I looked at the crossed-out rows. Then I put the pen down and got away from the chair.
The window latch was cool against my good palm. I opened it a little and stood in the draft until the urge passed.
In a game, I would have watched a bar refill. If it reached the top, I could use the skill again. I didn't have a bar for this.
The Ledger's rank hadn't told me how quickly my hand tired, how long an ache took to settle, or whether yesterday's strain remained after I stopped noticing it.
I had been treating the absence of pain as permission.
That was a poor measurement.
I returned to the desk and finished the third row.
Stopped before wrist. Longer rest did not restore first attempt.
Below it, I wrote: Do not judge readiness by appearance.
My own appearance, mostly.
I could hold a cup. I could walk across a room. I could keep my face still while someone asked questions that made me want to lock the door.
None of that meant I could safely send Aether down the same path three times.
I opened the primer again, this time looking for the sections I had skimmed because they contained no techniques.
Rest between exercises. Stop at persistent heat. Do not compensate for poor flow by increasing pressure.
Several warnings assumed a healthy beginner. I wasn't sure which parts applied more strongly to me and which needed changing.
That was another reason to keep the attempts small.
I copied only the warning signs I had actually felt. An elbow ache that remained after the flow ended. Pressure under the burn. A sharp catch near the core.
A list would not fix my body, but it might stop me from negotiating with it every time I wanted to continue.
When the attendant returned for the tray, I was reading rather than practicing.
He glanced at the open window.
"Shall I close it?"
"Leave it a little longer."
He gathered the cup and saucer.
I watched him fit the spoon against the edge of the tray. For a moment, I expected two taps.
There were none.
"The practice room," I said before he reached the door. "Tomorrow, leave it available for the maintenance work. I won't require it."
"For the whole morning?"
"Yes. Keep the following morning as arranged."
He bowed. I was already planning what to read with the time I'd freed. That wasn't an act of generosity. I needed a day without testing the same sore path, and reading could be done anywhere.
Still, someone would get a useful morning out of it.
After he left, I folded the exercise sheet and put it inside the primer at the section on recovery.
Valeria's page remained face down.
I left it that way until dinner.
Before eating, I tapped the table twice with the back of my finger.
The sound was duller than a spoon against a mug.
I remembered the headphones sliding down Hana's ear and the impatient way she had pushed them back up.
I moved the exercise notes away from the plate and reached for my spoon.