Rynn had a systematic approach to getting better, which I respected.
She had been training for four years now with a consistency that I found genuinely impressive given that she had no external accountability structure, no coach, no training partner who showed up regularly enough to create obligation. She trained because she wanted to train, which is a rarer quality than most people acknowledge.
The gap between what she was doing and what she should be doing had narrowed considerably over four years. Her footwork was now legitimately good. Her timing was improving. She had developed a habit of reviewing her practice at the end of each session with a kind of internal after-action analysis that she did not have language for but which was clearly happening.
The problem, and there was a problem, was her Aether development.
Rynn had a small gift. I had known this since early in my life, from the way her baseline energy sat differently from Aldus's and Mara's, a slight additional quality that would have made a low-level rank scanner read her as E rather than F. She knew this too, had had it confirmed at a village testing event when she was nine. But she had been treating it as a separate concern from her physical training, something to address later when she understood it better.
This was an error. The physical and the energetic developed better together than separately. The Aether reinforcement of muscle memory was a compounding advantage that she was not accessing because she was building the physical foundation first and planning to add the Aether layer afterward, which worked but was significantly slower than the integrated approach.
I could not tell her this in direct terms without explaining how I knew it, which remained a conversation I was not ready to have.
What I could do was suggest things sideways.
'The breathing pattern in the forms,' I said one evening, watching her practice.
She stopped. 'What about it?'
'There's a version where the exhale on the extension pulls energy through instead of just timing the movement.'
She looked at me. 'That sounds like Aether technique.'
'It's just breathing,' I said. 'You can feel the difference or you can't.'
She tried it.
It took her about ten minutes to find it, which was faster than I expected. Rynn had good instincts for her own body, which was part of why she had gotten as far as she had without formal instruction.
'That's different,' she said, after the tenth minute.
'Yes.'
'How do you know these things?'
I considered the available answers. 'I read,' I said.
This was technically true. I had read everything in the house that had written information, which was not a large library but was a library, and several things borrowed from the village healer, and two books that a traveling trader had sold Mara because she could not resist books even when she was uncertain about the subject matter.
Rynn accepted this explanation, which said something good about her character and something slightly worrying about the quality of my cover.
The other thing I was tracking, in the background of all the ordinary days, was Rynn's stated timeline. She had told me when I was a year old that she was going to be the strongest knight in Eryndor. This had since been revised, through the natural maturation of ambition encountering reality, to the more specific goal of reaching rank B by her twentieth year and securing a contract with a named guild.
She was thirteen now. She was on track, by my estimate.
The guild she most often mentioned was Dustwalker, which was not a famous guild. It was small, underfunded, operating in the general region of the Aridun borderlands, and its reputation among the guilds that Rynn had read about in her borrowed materials was somewhere between unremarkable and negligible.
I had my own reasons for finding Dustwalker interesting.
The fact that it was the least prestigious option in the region, combined with the fact that it was physically close and therefore accessible to a young fighter from a border village without the resources to travel far for assessment, made it the logical starting point for someone in Rynn's position.
It also, I noted, would eventually put her in the same location as me.
I had been turning that thought over for approximately six months.
'What rank do you think I am now?' Rynn asked, at the end of the practice session.
I thought about it honestly. 'High E. Maybe low D if you push the Aether development.'
She made a face that was equal parts satisfaction and impatience.
'I need to be D before I apply,' she said. 'They won't take an E.'
'They might.'
'I won't,' she said, with the finality of someone who had decided their own standards were the relevant ones.
I did not argue. Rynn's standards were, in my assessment, appropriate for Rynn.
She went inside for dinner.
I stayed in the yard for a moment and looked at the evening sky and thought about timelines and how the things we are moving toward have a way of moving toward us at the same time.
The convergence point was not today. But it was no longer as far as it had been.
I went inside.