By noon the yard was melting. Heat lay on the pear-stones like a hand, the gray bellies of them shining under a sky so blue it looked noisy. Swallows corkscrewed over the inner wall, stitching the air with quick black thread. Somewhere off toward the stables, a farrier’s hammer rang in an easy rhythm. Cicadas answered from the trees, a thin, restless chorus under the heat. Somewhere else, someone burned onions and decided that was supper. The yard itself smelled of dust, old sweat, and oiled leather left in the sun too long.

  Reece and Zak were already soaked through.

  They’d been at it since midmorning—circling the same two pear-stones, striking, stepping off, cursing, circling back. The stones rose out of packed dirt like bleached gray fruit grown for giants, each wider at the shoulder and tapering toward a rounded crown, barely taller than a man’s chest. Every knight of Highmarsh had left something on these in the end—thin lines, deep bites, a signature here and there like a mason’s mark. Some cuts ran shallow and clean the way a quill draws; others gouged like anger.

  Sire Ray’s old mark still drew the eye: not a cut at all but a single fist-sized dent, web-cracked and deep as a heart’s beat—left from the day he’d struck the stone barehanded, and the Art had answered.

  Beside it stood the newest statement in Highmarsh: Toby’s mark. The stone that bore it had been cut in half by the strike—a clean, impossible break through its middle. The upper half had been carried reverently behind the line and set upright again, the two pieces together forming a quiet defiance of their separation. It upset the formation, a pair of stones now half the height of its brothers, as if the mason’s order itself had flinched. Yet no one had moved to replace them. The broken pair remained, a reminder that even what stands in line can still be changed.

  Reece stood at his stone with his wooden practice blade in both hands, shoulders set, jaw tight. He looked smaller when he was frustrated—drawn inward, as if corded up behind the ribs. Zak looked the opposite. Agitated meant bigger on him. He prowled his chosen stone with his hair stuck to his forehead, forearms streaked white with limestone dust where he’d wiped them, mouth already shaping the next joke he didn’t quite believe in.

  Toby had chosen the shade. Not because he didn’t care—because he did, and he knew too much sweat turned patience sour. The ash by the yard’s edge threw a modest triangle of mercy. He’d planted himself there with a skin of water and his cloak for a cushion, watching like a cat left in charge of a granary. When either of them looked his way, he tried on Maxwell’s face—the one that said both I see you and I will not rescue you.

  “Again,” Reece muttered to himself. He raised the wood, breathed once, and cut down and through with his body set right—hips, shoulders, breath, the way Maxwell had barked them into learning. The blade knocked stone and skipped off with a sound like a dropped ladle.

  He stepped back, gave the strike a careful look, and then grimaced at the faint scuff he’d added to the thousands of faint scuffs.

  “Again,” Zak said brightly, which was Zak for I’m about to make this worse. He whirled his blade in a little figure-eight, set his feet too wide, and brought the wood across at rib height with everything he had. The crack was louder. The result was not better. The pear-stone stayed a pear-stone. Zak did a quick hop back because his own momentum nearly pitched him into it.

  “Saints take it,” he groused, blowing a lock of hair off his brow. “The stones get smugger every year.”

  “Stones don’t get smug,” Toby called from the shade. “People do.”

  Zak pointed his wooden stick at him without looking away from the rock. “You know, for a fellow lounging like a nobleman’s cat, you’ve an awful lot of opinions.”

  “I’m practicing patience,” Toby said. “Watching you two is very hard.”

  Reece snorted despite himself. He planted again. “Maxwell says the wood doesn’t matter,” he said under his breath. “Says it’s only a handle for what you’re actually doing.”

  “Maxwell says a lot of things,” Zak said. “Usually while I’m bleeding.”

  “You’re bleeding?” Toby sat up a little, instinct twitching through him. Maxwell had warned them often enough that overusing the Art could tear at the body from within—small vessels first, then worse if you kept pulling too long. The thought brought back the image of Sire Ray, and with it, the old anger toward Hudson—though the elves came first.

  “No,” Zak admitted. “In my pride. That counts.” He drew the back of his wrist across his mouth, leaving a pale streak. “All right. If I chip a tooth on this cursed fruit, I’m keeping the chip as proof.”

  He set his stance better this time and swung again. The sound was honest—wood, stone, air. The cut was nothing.

  By the time the bells in the hall had beaten out noon, both of them were glossy with sweat and stubborn with it. The sun in mid-summer didn’t warm; it laid claim. Their tunics stuck to them; their boots left half-moons of darker dust where they pivoted. Patience—what there was of it—breathed like a fly around them.

  Toby understood the hurry. South watched them from the border like a fox watching a yard of chickens. They were days from riding—two at most—down to the marches to scout and then beyond. No one said out loud that beyond could easily become not back. You didn’t say it because then you’d have to put your hand on someone’s shoulder and change the shape of their face with sadness before anything had actually gone wrong. But you thought it. The feeling sat under the skin like a splinter. Get something done, said that splinter. Mark something. Leave a line that says I was here.

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  Zak had said it first, in the half-joke way that means you hope someone tells you not to mean it. If I don’t come back, at least they’ll see I earned this. The “this” being the right to call himself what he’d been pretending at—a knight of Highmarsh. It was easier to joke at than to touch.

  Reece hadn’t joked. He’d met the pear-stone with the same careful attention he used to meet any brave thing that scared him. Earlier, when the shadows were shorter, he’d told Toby that his father’s only mark left walking around was him. He’d smiled when he said it, and it had broken something quiet in Toby’s chest. Reece meant to leave something that stayed if he didn’t. He meant to leave it the right way—not by accident, not from rage, but by intention.

  So Toby watched them both and let their effort work its own temper for a while. Then he said, as Maxwell would, “You’re courting it too hard.”

  Zak leaned the wooden blade against his shoulder and breathed like a forge. “Courting? I’ve been married to this rock for three hours.”

  “Annulment,” Reece said dryly, even while he swayed. “Irreconcilable differences.”

  “Maxwell would say,” Toby went on, doing the voice lightly because they’d mock him if he didn’t, “that your hands are ahead of your breath and your breath is ahead of your mind. That’s why the stone’s saying no.”

  Zak rolled his eyes. “Maxwell would also say to stop talking and hit the thing.”

  “Not yet,” Toby said. “Hit it wrong for another hour and all you learn is how to miss politely.” He nodded at Reece. “Step back. Don’t swing. Put your hand on it.”

  Reece did. His palm looked very human against the gray curve. The stone had been touched by so many hands it felt almost polished, the dust soft as flour. As soon as Reece laid his hand to it, something shifted—an almost imperceptible weight pressing against Toby’s senses, as though the air itself leaned closer to listen. The quiet hum of the yard dimmed. He could feel it, faint but sure—the weight of the Art beneath Reece’s skin, the hush of something waking. It made the hairs on his arm lift.

  “Breathe,” Toby said.

  Zak flopped onto the dirt in a graceless sit. “Wonderful. We’ve entered the part where Toby says breathe five hundred times and we all feel mystic and somehow more annoyed.”

  “Close your mouth unless you’re using it for air,” Toby said. “In three, hold one, out five. Again.” He nodded toward Reece. “Quiet your face.”

  Reece grimaced—he’d heard that line too often not to—but obeyed. The flutter in his throat eased. Toby saw his shoulders drop, just a thumb’s width, and the weight around him settle smoother. Good. Breath was rhythm. Rhythm was control. Sire Ray’s voice echoed faintly in Toby’s mind, layered beneath Maxwell’s—two different kinds of stone in one wall.

  “Remember,” Toby said, “how it feels when it answers. You don’t grab at it. You don’t chase it around your chest like a fly. You line yourself up and let it go where you meant.”

  Reece’s fingers spread. He stepped back, set his feet hip-width—left kissing the dirt, right dug just enough. He lifted the wooden blade like it weighed something true. No flaring elbows. No tight jaw. Breath in. Hold. Out.

  Then he cut.

  The sound was wrong for a heartbeat—the way a distant door sounds when you’re not sure whether it closed. The air thickened. A shimmer slid down Reece’s arms and along the wood, faint as heat above stone. The weight Toby had felt pressed heavier for that instant—an unseen tide, close enough to touch. Then, with a quiet, certain whisper, the blade traced a line across the pear-stone, and the stone allowed it. Not deep. An inch, maybe a fraction more. Clean and diagonal, the way Reece had pictured it—shoulder to hip if the stone had a body.

  He froze there for a beat, the blade carried through the arc of its follow-through, like a man who’d built a bridge with a plank and was waiting to see if it held. Then he sucked in a laugh that sounded like someone opening a window.

  Toby was already on his feet. Zak beat him there, which he forgave only because Zak knocked Reece off balance with how hard he clapped his shoulder.

  “You utter show-off,” Zak said, grinning too wide. “You lovely little—look at that. Look at it.”

  Reece looked. The cut caught the sun along its thin floor, pale dust powdering the lip. He reached toward it as if it might be hot, then didn’t quite touch it. His mouth trembled. He held himself still by force and then failed on purpose, letting out something between a laugh and a breath and a prayer.

  “It’s not much,” he said, because humility had its own habits, “but—”

  “It’s a line,” Toby said. “No one gets to decide how big it should be except you.”

  Zak leaned in to examine the edge. “We need a better measuring system than ‘the width of a finger.’ I’m going to start using ‘the width of Zak’s pride,’ and then everything will be two feet deep.”

  Reece snorted. He wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand and then his forehead with his sleeve and then just stood there looking at it—like a man looking at a day he thought wouldn’t come, and then arrived anyway, shyly. Finally, he sat down beside the stone. Toby placed a hand to the back of his neck for a single second—there and gone. Reece nodded once. Toby nodded once. It was enough.

  “Right,” Zak said loudly, stepping back to his own pear-stone as if it had wronged him personally. “My turn to outperform miracles. Everybody stop breathing near me. It’s distracting.”

  He set up well for the first time in an hour. Shoulders down. Hands where they belonged. Breath where it belonged. He swung.

  Nothing.

  “Fine,” he said through his teeth, “it’s subtle.”

  He tried again. Nothing but a sturdier clack.

  “All right, fine,” he told the pear-stone. “You’re stubborn, I’m stubborn. We’ll get along.”