Garrick was already in the training hall when I arrived. Wooden practice sword in hand, working through a form alone in the center of the floor—slow, deliberate, each position held for two or three breaths before he moved to the next. Not warming up. Thinking with his body. I'd seen him do it when something was bothering him.

  I waited at the edge of the floor until he finished the sequence.

  He lowered the sword and looked at me. "You're early. That's either dedication or trouble."

  "Permission to miss this morning's session." I held the casing under my arm. "There's a southern market. The others are going."

  He looked at the casing. Then at me. "First time you've asked to miss a session."

  "First time I had a reason."

  He set the practice sword against the wall and crossed his arms. "Show me."

  I strapped the case on and pulled on the left glove. Garrick stood where he was and watched. Not my hands—my body. Posture and intention rather than mechanics.

  I pushed aether through the contact point deliberately—a push separate from the passive flow, felt the silk convert, heard the faint crack as the coil discharged, and the blade was in the dummy's shoulder before I'd consciously registered it had left the casing.

  The dummy swung hard on its post, rocking back and straining against the anchor chain.

  I held still.

  The retraction trigger next. The motor wound the rope in—smooth, no jam, no tangle—and the blade pulled free with a resistance that said the hit had seated deep. As the chain came back the blade followed, caught at the flared mouth of the barrel and seated home. Flush. Silent.

  Garrick hadn't moved.

  I ran it twice more. He watched both without comment, arms still crossed, face unreadable—the look he had when actually thinking rather than suppressing a reaction.

  "How long to discharge again?"

  "Reset's about a second. Faster once I understand the mechanism better."

  He came forward and looked at the dummy without touching it. The entry points were clean—roughly a finger's width, deep, no tearing at the margins. He turned back to me.

  "You're limited to what you can see and what you can angle."

  "Yes."

  "No tracking once it's out."

  "No."

  He nodded slowly. "A closed guard stops it. Anything on the line between the barrel mouth and the target." He paused. "They get one reaction window as soon as they hear the discharge."

  "I know. Already working on it." The crack was small. In open air during testing I'd noticed it clearly—the formation priming everything a little sharper made it hard to miss, and the jyun jam I'd eaten this morning hadn't helped with subtlety of perception either. An opponent paying attention in a quiet arena had enough to work with. That was going to need addressing before the tournament.

  Garrick studied me for a moment, then looked back at the casing. "Your left shoulder dips when you trigger it."

  I hadn't caught that one.

  "Go to your market. Back on the floor tomorrow." He picked up the practice sword. "Work on the shoulder."

  I unstrapped the casing and took it back to the tower, then went to find the others.

  Lyra and Cassia were at the academy gate. Magnar came out behind me from the grounds a few minutes later, which meant he'd been inside doing something and reversed course when he saw us. He walked with the ease of someone with no social anxiety about being last to arrive anywhere.

  Lyra was in a deep green coat too good for a market and clearly chosen on purpose. She smiled when she saw Magnar with a smile she seemed to think was subtle. It wasn't. Cassia was beside her in plainer clothes than usual, her hair caught back, the gold of it muted in the flat morning light.

  "You came," she said to me.

  "I said I would."

  "Why hello, Cato. I haven't seen you since your birthday! We should get to spend more time as a group." Lyra greeted me excitedly.

  "As if you need to see him." Cassia grumbled loud enough for both of us to hear.

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  Lyra's smile crumpled into a wry version as a result. As soon as Magnar came close enough we moved on toward the market.

  The southern market had set up in the open square west of the main gate district, the wide-paved area the city used for larger gatherings twice a year. The stalls were different from the usual market. Wider low tables instead of tall stalls, fabric hung overhead for shade, awnings in deep reds and warm ochres that were already unnecessary in the early spring cold but had gone up anyway—habit from another climate entirely.

  The traders themselves made the difference immediately visible. Darker skin, some of them deep brown, others somewhere between that and the olive-tinted complexions common in Aethelgard's southern provinces. Headscarves on most of them, folded and wrapped in ways that varied stall to stall, the wrapping style carrying more information than I could read. They moved through their displays with the ease of people who'd done this in many cities and expected the crowd to be curious and slightly cautious.

  The Seridia Empire was desert country, south past the Iron Gate. Whatever they'd brought through the pass was either light enough to make the journey profitable or rare enough to justify it.

  Both, mostly.

  Spices everywhere—different ones than the city's usual stocks, some I didn't recognize. Dried fruits packed into oil. Woven fabrics in colors richer than the local dyes could produce, something in the pigment catching light differently. Small carved pieces in pale stone, translucent at the edges where the stone was thinnest.

  Lyra moved through it like she was cataloguing everything for a later decision. Magnar walked beside her and occasionally said something that made her laugh. Cassia drifted slightly ahead of them—the unconscious buffer distance of a person making sure she was participating and also making sure she didn't have to watch.

  I found a stall with stones and mineral samples. Dense pieces, some faceted, some raw. This was the circuit Magnar had found the wolframite on—not this specific trader, but the same route. I'd asked him two days ago and he'd said it was someone who moved with the southern sellers.

  "He has a mineral stall," Magnar had told me. "Buys from mountain hunters. The pass runs close enough to the Ironspine foothills that they get unusual ore occasionally."

  The dealer was a short, heavily built man with a grey-streaked beard and the kind of hands that had moved heavy rocks for most of a life. He glanced up when I stopped at his table.

  Most of the display was ornamental—cut stone, polished pieces for setting, a few raw crystals. In a wide shallow bowl in the back sat a handful of dense dark pebbles. The same weight-to-size ratio that had made Magnar curious enough to buy them the first time.

  "What are these?" I pointed at the bowl.

  The dealer shrugged one shoulder. "Mountain pebbles. Twice as heavy as their size suggests. Hunters find them in the riverbeds near the high passes. Dense stones have their uses."

  "How many do you have?"

  He counted without picking them up. "Twenty-two in the bowl. Maybe fifteen more packed."

  "I'll take all of them."

  He gave me the look traders gave when they hadn't expected a full buy. "Two large copper per handful."

  I bought them all. He wrapped them in cloth and I put the bundle in my jacket pocket where it pulled noticeably at the fabric. The weight was consistent with what I'd already tested.

  Magnar watched without comment. He'd long since stopped asking why until later.

  Cassia had drifted back toward us by then. She'd found a stall with carved decorative pieces and wasn't buying anything—looking closely, without touching.

  There was a collection of hair pins at the far end, carved from the same pale Seridia stone as the rest. Most were elaborate. One wasn't—small, flat, a narrow leaf shape left mostly unpolished, only the edges smoothed. I looked at it for a second, then looked away. Getting her something she could attach personal value to was exactly the kind of thing I'd been careful not to do. I'd already drawn that line once and I wasn't going to quietly walk it back at a market stall.

  I moved on.

  Two stalls further along, a trader had small pastries laid out on a cloth—compact, dense things dusted in something dark and fragrant that I didn't recognize. I stopped. Cassia stopped beside me, and I saw her eyes go to them before mine did.

  I bought two without making anything of it. Handed her one. Got a look I didn't acknowledge.

  They were good. Honey and something roasted, pressed together tightly enough that nothing fell apart when you bit into it. Cassia ate hers without comment, which with her meant she approved.

  We went through most of the market over the next hour. Lyra bought a small jar of something spiced and a length of fabric. Magnar bought nothing and seemed perfectly comfortable with that. Cassia bought two items on her own, things she'd circled back to after passing them the first time.

  I found a spice trader with a jar of dried pepper I didn't recognize—long-dried, very dark, from the coastal edge of the desert according to the trader. The price was low. I tried one. Excruciating. I chewed it anyway and bought two jars. I'd been eating jyun jam for months, my tolerance had climbed past any reasonable threshold, but this was still no joke.

  Cassia had drifted over. She looked at the jar, took one, ate it. Nothing happened on her face.

  "It's sweet," she said. "And a little smoky. Earthy."

  "That's it?"

  "There's something else underneath. Floral, maybe." She took another one. "Strange combination."

  Magnar, who'd been standing behind us watching this exchange with what I'd read as boredom, reached past me and took one from the jar himself.

  What followed was not dignified. He got about two chews in before his face changed completely, made a sound from somewhere below language, hit his knees on the market cobblestones, and stayed there with both fists on the ground breathing in long controlled pulls like a man trying very hard not to die. The trader had backed into his own stall. People passing slowed down.

  "Water," Magnar said, to no one in particular, to the universe, to whatever had done this to him.

  "Water will only make it worse. Hold your breath and don't breathe through your mouth—that usually lowers the pain."

  Cassia looked down at him, then at the jar, then ate a third one thoughtfully. "I do get the floral more now."

  Lyra dropped down beside him, alarmed.

  "What happened, are you alright?" The questions came one after another, leaving no room for answers. "What can I do to help?"

  Slowly, Magnar recovered, not without throwing a fearful look at my jar and a resentful one at Cassia, who ignored him and ate two more.

  We walked back along the main road when the market thinned out in the early afternoon. Lyra and Magnar were talking quietly. Cassia was beside me, slightly behind.

  We came back through the academy gate and the others peeled off toward the dormitory wing. I turned toward the tower.

  The shoulder dip when triggering was going to be the easier fix. The acoustic signature was harder—the crack had to either be dampened at the coil level or masked by something else in the environment. Neither option was simple, and five weeks wasn't much time.

  I walked faster.