Chapter 1206: Seen Once

"You can ask, if you want."

Valeria hadn’t realized the question was so visible.

She stopped herself and turned to face the courtyard rather than finding another excuse to inspect her sword. Jesse had crossed half the distance between them, with none of the readiness she had carried before leaving the practice hall.

That, more than the words, was the part Valeria couldn’t immediately place.

She reached for something to call it. Nothing fit, only the sense that Jesse was telling her something she couldn’t yet read.

"Ask what?"

"Nothing."

Jesse’s mouth curved. A near-laugh escaped her, quiet and short, though it never reached her eyes. What remained there had a thin, hard edge that hadn’t been present when she led Lucavion through the side entrance.

Jesse had come back changed.

Valeria didn’t need banquets and court dinners to read that much. She would have caught it across a battlefield.

"Your match with Lucavion," Jesse said before Valeria could decide whether to press. "That reversal near the end. Where did you learn it?"

"Olarion fundamentals. Adjusted."

It wasn’t a difficult question, and Valeria answered without thinking twice, only to notice too late that Jesse had steered the conversation somewhere else. Whatever she had meant a moment ago, she had no intention of returning to it.

"He fought you the same way he used to fight me," Jesse said. "At the banquet."

Valeria remembered it. Everyone who had been in that hall remembered how the Entrance Banquet duel turned from spectacle into something closer to a private conversation neither of them seemed to care was being watched.

"I’ve been looking for you."

"I’m here."

At the time, Valeria had assumed those words belonged only to whatever history the two of them shared. Hearing Jesse speak of it now, flatly, made it sound like something else.

A pattern.

Valeria studied her.

Jesse’s gaze remained upon the Zweihander. "I heard him admit he’d been fighting the Valeria he remembered."

The combat lane had gone quiet when he said it, and Jesse had been standing among those watching.

"That is what happened."

"Yeah." Jesse lifted her eyes.

Valeria’s hand slowed against the cloth.

"He looked at me and saw someone he already knew," Jesse continued. "Someone who was still where he left her."

Her voice flattened on the last words. Her sword hand closed at her side, then loosened when she noticed it.

"I took yours to be more than that," Valeria said.

"It was."

Jesse answered quickly, almost sharply, but the hostility failed to hide what lay under it. She had led Lucavion through the side entrance on anger enough to hold her upright. Whatever passed between them had taken most of it away and left her with nothing sturdy enough to replace it.

Her gaze moved over Valeria’s face.

"You looked happy when he finally saw you."

Valeria set the cloth beside the whetstone. "I wanted him to recognize—"

"I know what you wanted."

She cut in more wearily than sharply.

Jesse looked toward the residential path, and for a moment Valeria thought she might say what had happened beyond the side entrance. Her eyes came back to the Zweihander instead, and she gave it a small nod.

"Your reversal was good. Your footing afterward was shit."

"I am aware."

"He’ll find it again."

"He already—"

"Of course he did."

Jesse turned before Valeria could finish, her back as rigid as when it first drew Valeria’s eye.

At the edge of the courtyard, Jesse stopped.

"Just don’t mistake being seen once for being understood."

She left before Valeria could answer.

Valeria watched until Jesse had gone down the residential path and out of the courtyard. She held on to her final words.

Her hostility had been clear enough by then, but its direction made little sense. They had spoken once, at the banquet, with Jesse pressing and Valeria answering, and not at all since. Beyond that there was only the unavoidable awareness that both possessed some history with the same man.

Nothing between them should have produced that edge.

Unless it had not begun with Valeria at all.

Her gaze moved toward the side entrance.

Whatever Lucavion had said, it had not resolved the matter, only moved the pain somewhere Jesse could no longer strike at directly.

Valeria had decided earlier that she was not owed the reason. Now, with the side entrance still empty, she wanted to know anyway.

Movement passed through the side entrance.

Lucavion stepped into the open.

The familiar sharpness of his features remained, from the clean line of his jaw to the dark brows above eyes that usually seemed one provocation away from amusement. Yet his face appeared emptied of that restless ease now. His mouth rested too still, and his black eyes sat heavy under lowered lids.

When he left with Jesse, he had carried the guarded attention of someone preparing to receive an attack whose direction he could not predict.

Now he looked as though it had already landed.

Valeria knew.

Her hand pressed against the bench.

She was halfway to standing before she recognized the movement, the questions already forming: what happened, what Jesse had said, why both of them had come back wearing different versions of the same exhaustion.

Lucavion looked across the courtyard and their eyes met. Recognition passed over his face, followed almost immediately by a smile.

It was wrong.

A fraction of a breath passed between recognition and the smile. Small, but Valeria had spent years learning how much could happen inside smaller openings. His mouth lifted into the familiar curve he wore before teasing her, but his eyes stayed as they were, and even the tilt of his head followed a moment too late. He had seen her, decided what she should see in return, and arranged his face accordingly.

Valeria’s weight shifted forward.

Every instinct that had urged her to probe Jesse now urged her toward him, though Lucavion would evade a careless question and meet a harder one with some half-truth shaped well enough to end the conversation.

Still, she could press. Her fingers left the bench, and then she stopped, because she could already see what pressing would get her: that smile again, and nothing behind it.

’Leave him.’

For once she did not ask the thought to prove itself.

Valeria lifted her hand instead.

The gesture was small, only an acknowledgment across the distance. She had seen him. She would not pretend otherwise.

Lucavion’s false smile eased by a fraction. He raised two fingers in answer, held them there for a moment, then continued toward the opposite passage.

Valeria watched him go.

The questions remained. She placed them aside rather than discarding them.

Later, when his smile belonged to him again, she would ask.

For now, the Zweihander still waited upon the bench, and the weakness in her recovery had been found once and would be found again.

The courtyard quieted around her again. Practice lanterns brightened along the covered walkways as the afternoon thinned, laying pale bands across the stone. From the adjoining hall came the repeated impact of someone drilling the same cut past the point where fatigue had begun spoiling it. An instructor corrected the angle once. The next strike landed cleaner.

Valeria looked down at her rear leg.

Lucavion had found the failure where the continuation pulled her balance beyond the support of her stance. Strengthening the leg would only allow her to carry the mistake farther. The movement needed another place to land: some transition that preserved the remaining weight without forcing her to arrest it or surrender her center.

Perhaps the answer lay within the grip.

Her forward hand had already shortened the rotation. A smaller adjustment, performed earlier, might allow the blade’s weight to pass through her wrists and shoulders before it reached the compromised foot.

A student stopped at the end of the bench and glanced at the whetstone and oil beside her. Valeria looked down at the section of blade she had polished several times without noticing, wiped the remaining oil from the edge and returned the Zweihander to its sheath. The student thanked her and took the empty place.

Valeria rose, slinging the weapon across her back before turning toward the nearest available practice hall. The failure in her continuation had offered something more useful: a direction.

Her pace quickened as she passed under the archway.

There would be another match eventually.

By then, she intended to give Lucavion something else he had never seen.