Chapter 8: Learning Your Limits vol 2

The week dragged.

Etiquette classes. Tea service. Proper posture for court presentation. The correct order of address when speaking to a baron versus a viscount versus a duke. Hallah sat through them all with her jaw clenched so tight she thought her teeth might crack.

She hated it. Every minute of it. The way the deportment instructor—Lady Protocol Seraphina Dawnshield, whose voice was like a knife on glass—kept correcting her stance. “Elbows in, Miss Sovringard. A lady does not occupy space so aggressively.” The way the other girls giggled behind their fans when Hallah’s curtsy looked more like a fighter’s bow. The way she could feel Bear laughing in the back of her skull, mocking the entire performance.

“You gonna let her talk to you like that?” Bear’s voice, rough as Anchorage gravel. “Back in my day, we settled disputes with chains and parking lots.”

“Different world,” Hallah thought back. “Different rules.”

“Same shit,” Bear countered. “Different wrapping.”

But there was one thing she looked forward to. One thing she would never admit aloud, not under torture, not at sword-point, not even to the boy who sat across from her in the empty ballroom every Tuesday and Thursday while the dance instructor played the same waltz on a scratchy phonograph.

Dance lessons. With Lucan.

He was terrible at it. Worse than terrible. He stepped on her feet, forgot which hand went where, and apologized so profusely that Lady Protocol Seraphina Dawnshield—who taught deportment and dance with equal severity—had finally banned him from speaking until the music stopped.

“Your Highness,” Seraphina had said, exasperated, “the dance is a conversation. You are currently delivering a lecture.”

Lucan had gone red to the roots of his hair. Hallah had almost smiled.

Almost.

She wouldn’t admit that she liked the way his hand felt at her waist, tentative and warm through the fabric of her training tunic. She wouldn’t admit that she deliberately messed up her own steps sometimes, just to feel him catch her, to see the panic in his eyes replaced by relief when she didn’t fall. She wouldn’t admit that the thrum in her chest—the same resonance that had started with Valerius’s blessing—pulsed warm and steady whenever they moved together, however clumsily.

She was Hallah Sovringard, daughter of a smith, Paladin of the Six, reincarnated biker from Anchorage. She didn’t look forward to dance lessons with boys. She didn’t.

But she did.

---

Combat class finally arrived, and Hallah practically ran to the training grounds, leaving Lucan to jog to keep up with her longer stride.

The instructor was waiting for them—Marshal Castor Ironheart, Marquis and warrior, practical to the bone. He stood with his feet planted, arms crossed, watching the Class S students file in with the expression of someone who had seen too much and expected worse.

“Listen up,” Castor barked. His voice was rough, the voice of a man who had spent more time on battlefields than in ballrooms. “Most of you are here because you have power. Raw power. The kind that makes you think you’re invincible.”

His eyes found Hallah. Found Lucan. Held them longer than the others.

“You’re not invincible. You’re reckless. In the past month, half of you have overextended your reserves. Three of you passed out in the dining hall. One of you—” he pointed at a girl from Class A who flinched “—burned out her channels so badly she couldn’t cast a light spell for a week.”

Castor began to pace, his boots crunching on the gravel.

“Today, you learn control. You learn limits. You learn that magic is not infinite, and that stupidity is not a strategy.”

He stopped, turned to face them full-on.

“Here’s the physics. Every spell you cast costs energy. Not magical energy—physical energy. The mana in your reserves is just a converter. It takes the same effort to move a rock with magic as it would to pick it up with your hands. The same effort to start a fire as it would to rub sticks together for an hour. Magic doesn’t make things easier. It just makes them faster.”

Hallah frowned. She thought of the Weaver’s Judgment, of the way it had felt—not like effort, but like authority. Like speaking a law and watching reality obey.

“Different,” she thought. “That’s divine. Not magical.”

“The difference,” Castor continued, as if hearing her thoughts, “is efficiency. A trained mage can accomplish with one percent of the effort what would take a mundane person a hundred percent. But that one percent adds up. Cast enough spells, and you’re running a marathon in sprints. No breaks. No water. Until you collapse.”

He spread his hands.

“So you learn to measure. To feel your reserves like a waterskin. To know when you’re at half, at quarter, at empty. Because empty isn’t just tired. Empty is vulnerable. Empty is dead.”

Lucan raised his hand. Castor nodded at him.

“How do we learn that, Marshal? The feeling, I mean. How do we—”

“You fight,” Castor said simply. “Real fights. Real stakes. Not sparring matches with padded blades and healers standing by.”

The class went still.

“Effective immediately,” Castor continued, “every student in this course is required to register at the Adventurers Guild, take the assessment examination, and complete seven job requests by the end of next week.”

Murmurs rose. Panic. Excitement. Castor let them chatter for three seconds, then slammed his boot into the gravel. The sound cracked like a whip.

“Silence.”

They silenced.

“The assessment will determine your rank. The jobs you pull will be within that rank—no higher, no lower. You will be paid in Royals, spendable in any nation. You will be bound by Guild law, which supersedes Academy regulations in matters of combat and contract.”

He paused, let that settle.

“And you will be limited to parties of two.”

His eyes swept the room, found the pairs already forming, the desperate glances, the calculations.

“Two,” he repeated. “No more. The Guild’s research is clear: three or more, and you start relying on each other. You stop learning your own limits. Two forces you to cover each other’s weaknesses. Two forces you to trust one person completely.”

His gaze landed on Hallah and Lucan, held there.

“Choose wisely,” he said. “Your partner is the only thing standing between you and a dungeon full of monsters that don’t care about your family name or your magical potential. Your partner is the one who drags you out when you overextend. Your partner is the one who knows when you’re lying about being fine.”

Hallah felt Lucan’s shoulder brush hers. She didn’t look at him. She didn’t need to.

“Registration closes at sundown,” Castor said. “Dismissed.”

The class scattered, students already grabbing for each other, forming alliances, negotiating. Hallah stood still, feeling the sun on her face, the weight of the assignment settling over her like armor.

“So,” Lucan said, his voice carefully casual. “Partners?”

Hallah turned to look at him. At the boy who had held her hand in the infirmary. Who had burned men alive to protect her. Who stepped on her feet in dance class and apologized like it was a capital crime.

“Yeah,” she said. “Partners.”

“Good.” He smiled, small and tired and real. “I was going to follow you around until you agreed anyway.”

“Stalker.”

“Determined.”

“Same thing.”

They walked toward the Academy gates together, the Royal Guards falling into step behind them at a respectful distance. Hallah could feel the eyes on them—the other students watching, whispering, wondering why the freak and the prince had chosen each other when they could have picked anyone.

She didn’t care. Let them wonder. Let them whisper.

She had a dungeon to clear, a rank to earn, and a partner who knew when she was lying about being fine.

The Adventurers Guild of Verdantis waited in the merchant quarter, its golden spire visible from the Academy walls. Hallah had seen it a hundred times from a distance, never thought to enter. It was for real adventurers. For people who risked their lives for coin, not for students playing at heroism.

But as they passed through the Academy gates, as the guards checked their permits and the city opened up before them, Hallah felt something shift. The thrum in her chest pulsed warm. Expectant.

Bear’s voice, rough and approving: “About damn time.”

“Hey,” Lucan said, as they walked through streets that grew more crowded, more colorful, more alive the farther they got from the Academy’s rigid order.

“Yeah?”

“What’s your guess? For the assessment?”

Hallah thought about it. Thought about the Judgment, about the way her reserves felt—deeper than they should be, oceanic, a well that went down to something older than magic.

“Doesn’t matter,” she said finally. “Rank is just a letter. The job’s the same.”

“Practical.”

“Learned from a practical teacher.”

Lucan glanced at her, curious, but she didn’t explain. She wouldn’t tell him about Bear. Not yet. Maybe not ever. Some things were too raw, too real, too hers to share.

But she walked beside him, close enough that their shoulders brushed, and she didn’t pull away when his hand found hers in the crowd.

Partners.

The Guild spire grew larger, golden in the afternoon light, and Hallah Sovringard—daughter of a smith, Paladin of the Six, reincarnated biker from Anchorage who had once killed a man with a chain and a lock—walked toward her first real job.

Behind them, unseen, a figure in a grey cloak watched from a rooftop, noting the way they walked, the way they touched, the way the guards followed at a distance that suggested trust rather than imprisonment.

The watcher made a note on a scrap of paper, folded it into a tube, and attached it to the leg of a pigeon that had been trained to fly to the palace towers.

The message was simple: “They come. Two together. As predicted.”

The pigeon took flight, and the watcher vanished into shadow, and the game that had begun with assassins in the dark continued in daylight, with new pieces moving onto the board.