They returned to the manor as the evening settled in, and Ivel, despite being thoroughly and entirely full of pastry, went back outside to train.
He couldn't have explained it precisely. The tournament was sitting somewhere at the back of his mind, quiet but persistent, and it was the kind of thought that made stillness feel like a waste. He drew the katana and began to move through his forms, the eye hovering at his shoulder, turning slowly in the dark.
He glanced up at it.
"I wonder if you can go any higher," he said.
The eye regarded him without response.
"Either way." He exhaled. "I doubt I'll be detecting Vas any time soon."
He kept swinging.
He had been at it for a while when he caught a silhouette crossing the far end of the training ground — the particular brown hair and grey eyes that gave her away well before she was close enough to speak.
"You never seem to skip a day," Verna said, "even on vacation."
"I have to keep up somehow."
She drew closer — not quite all the way, but closer.
"You got a haircut."
Ivel paused mid-swing.
"My father took me into the capital today. The workers looked like they'd done something genuinely meaningful afterward, for some reason."
Verna smiled.
"Also," he added, "you people have extraordinary pastry shops. We are not equally fortunate where I'm from."
She laughed — a short, surprised sound.
"You people. That is quite the way to describe us."
"Is that a bad thing?"
"Not for me." She seemed to consider it genuinely. "Others might take offense. But I find it refreshing, honestly — most people are very careful around me. It gets old."
"I see" Ivel said
Then Ivel looked at her for a moment. "Now would be the best time to see how powerful she is" he thought
"Would you care to spar? You seem to be out of the formal dress either way."
She was — dressed down to something practical, her hair pulled back. She glanced down at herself as though confirming this.
"I suppose it wouldn't hurt."
She raised her hand, and a sword materialized from nothing — formed of ice, clean-edged and sharp, carved as though by someone who had never once doubted what they were doing.
"I accept your challenge, Ivel of Revenant."
Something ran through him at that — not quite cold, not quite surprise. He looked at the blade, then at her, and felt a quiet piece of the world settle into new arrangement.
Royals can pass down their qualities after all, he thought. How intriguing.
"I suppose they don't call your family Frost for nothing," he said, and smiled as he settled into his stance.
"You may begin whenever you like," Verna said. "The challenger should have the first move, after all."
He moved the moment she finished the sentence.
He closed the distance between them in a burst — and felt the air around her shift before he fully arrived. Instinct turned him sideways, and in the same breath a spike of ice tore through the space where his shoulder had been, close enough that he felt the cold of it passing.
He stayed calm and kept pressing forward.
Their swords met. Hers was beautiful and terrible in equal measure — cold as deep winter and every bit as hard as steel, and she handled it with the ease of someone who had grown up with it in her hand. They exchanged, and Ivel feinted, dropping low to sweep her legs. She read it cleanly and stepped back — and launched another spike without hesitation.
He cut it in two.
The halves exploded.
Ice shards caught him across the arm and side, a dozen small bites at once. Not deep. Not enough to slow him. He kept moving and filed the information away.
She can shape it mid-flight. Control the element down to its nature.
He let out a slow breath.
That means every spike she throws is a trap, not just a projectile. I have to stop trying to intercept them.
How troublesome.
They kept at it — trading, resetting, probing. Ivel held his structure: a style built on patience, on creating openings through feints and layered defense, on waiting for the moment the opponent's read became a habit and then punishing the habit. It was disciplined. It was sound.
It wasn't working.
Verna was too sharp. Every feint gave her a reaction window that she used without fail, and the ice gave her options at every range that a steel blade simply didn't have. His style assumed an opponent who would eventually overcommit. She wasn't overcommitting.
He stopped mid-motion.
Dropped the style entirely.
What replaced it was something different — something less structured and far less forgiving. His natural instinct pressed through, unfiltered: maximum aggression, each attack bleeding directly into the next with no pause for setup or misdirection. A style that didn't ask for openings but tried to manufacture them through sheer unrelenting pressure.
He was in front of her in an instant.
He dropped again — same motion as the sweep, same angle — and she reacted exactly as he expected, weight shifting back. But he didn't sweep. He drove forward through the anticipation, using her own correct read against her.
He didn't sweep again—
A shield of ice rose between them, thick and fast. While it formed, something passed through her mind:
Has he used his quality? Not once — not in this entire spar.
She held the thought while the shield took the impact.
Either he doesn't need it, or he's holding it. I can't afford to assume either.
The shield broke.
He came through it.
His eyes caught the moonlight as he pressed — and then they weren't just catching it. They were holding it, something luminous and violet beginning to gather around his irises as the air around him shifted. Purple sparks crawled along his blade, muted this time, drawn inward rather than released — less voltage, more direction.
He moved through her guard.
One controlled strike — not a killing blow, not even a wounding one. Just enough to break the last of her footing and put her down.
He stood over her, the tip of his katana pointed at her throat, both of them breathing in the cool night air.
A beat of silence.
"Not bad," he said.