I heard him leave on the twelfth night. Fabric shifting, weight redistributing, the controlled exhale of a body trying to be quiet and succeeding at the level a thirteen-year-old could manage. Which was not a level that escaped a woman who could hear a moth's heartbeat at forty meters.

  Wind had shifted since dusk. Colder now, carrying pine resin and the mineral edge of distant snow.

  Twenty meters east. The Wei-defined radius of privacy. He'd chosen this distance before. He was consistent.

  He trained alone. The stabilization exercises. My exercises. He performed them perfectly.

  Not competently. Perfectly. Qi-circulation smooth. Channel distribution balanced. Core interaction stable. Every element executed with the precision of a practitioner who had passed the point of learning and arrived at the point of owning.

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  His qi-pattern was clean. Cleaner than when I supervised. At twenty meters, the stream was weaker — his channels running on their own capacity, not mine.

  He trained better without me.

  Was he better off without me?

  Forty minutes. Then he stopped — and didn't come back. He sat cross-legged, facing east, hands on his knees.

  Someone deciding something sits like that.

  Then he walked back. Lay down. Faced the forest and slept.

  His breathing was calm. His core steady. The tremor in his hands — present even in sleep — was marginally reduced.

  The crack was quiet. But measurable.

  /x??p?↓/* — the old tongue's word for it. The sound of tearing — manifested in a language I'd helped shape when words were still simple, before the sects gave everything formal names. Not clean but jagged, not chosen but structural.

  The fire was embers. The forest was the forest.

  The problem was me.

  You'd have told me sooner. Or maybe not. You had your own version of staying too long.