The ridge still smelled of last night's storm—wet mineral, singed sap, the faint metal taste of air that had been held too tight and finally let go. He moved along the spine of it in a half-crouch, not hunting and not idle, testing what his body had kept from the lightning and what it had only borrowed.
He didn't wait for the day to begin. He put a hand out and let the air prickle his palm, feeling for the leftover charge that lived in the needles, the bark, the small places where water beaded. It was there—thin as a thread, but there. He breathed with it, not to pull it in the way he would coax a coal, but to let it notice him.
Fire had taught him manners. Lightning would accept nothing less.
He chose a strip of open stone no longer than a boat and no wider than a cart's axle, flanked by dwarf pines that had learned the hard grammar of weather. He set the sword across two rocks within reach and worked without it first—footing only. Slow shifts. Heel to arch, arch to ball, toes feeling for edges, knees soft. Earth answered the way it always did when he moved with respect: not words, but agreement up his bones.
"Again," he said, and began to bind the new to the old.
Lightning wasn't something he summoned. Not yet. It was something he timed. Thunder had left a pulse in him, a drum he could almost hear if he went still enough. He let his breathing shorten and sharpen, like a coil drawing in. Then he chose a point at the end of the stone strip and went for it—not a run, but a burst.
For three steps, something extra lived in his legs—calf and thigh firing together with a clean, stack-click feeling, as if joints had become notches on a bow. He covered the distance faster than he should have, landed a fraction early, and had to catch himself with a low skid that left grit under his nails.
"Too much," he said. "Soften the end."
He worked the same stretch ten times, then twenty. When the burst came, he let it be small. When it didn't, he moved anyway, refusing to teach his body that it needed the sky's blessing to do its work. The trick—the beginning of the trick—was to build a rhythm lightning could drop into, the way a fish joins a current it likes.
Only after his feet felt honest did he take up the sword.
He started in the old square stance his father had lived inside like a second body: front foot pointing, rear foot braced, hips aligned but not locked. Cut, recover. Thrust, recover. He did it whisper-light, the edge making a thin sound in the wet air.
Then he added the ground. Then the small bursts.
First pass, he nearly cut his own timing in half and had to hop to save his ankle. Second, he smoothed the hop into a glide. Third, the world agreed with him for a breath: Earth sent his weight forward at the same moment his calves tightened, and the blade arrived where he meant it to be without dragging the rest of him behind like a clumsy thought.
He stopped, holding the last position—a low guard with the tip angled to threaten an approach from either side—and let the satisfaction register and leave. Pride made its own gravity. He didn't need that in his stance.
By midmorning he had a sequence that felt like it belonged to him: a short burst to cross a step-and-a-half, a diagonal cut that didn't waste the borrowed speed, a brake with the back foot that let the ground take the cost instead of his knees, then a thrust off that same brake—like stepping down off a boat and shoving it away in one motion.
He ran it until his breath rasped and his hands shook. He ran it one more time because his father would have asked for that. The last pass was clean enough that he almost smiled.
"Water," he told himself, and went for the bottle he'd hung under a cedar branch where the shade held. The cool hit the back of his throat like an answer to a question he hadn't remembered asking.
On the far slope, something clattered through stone—light, too regular for bear, too careless for deer. He eased into cover, peering through the comb of branches. A serow nosed along the broken rock, dark coat wet to the knees, horns black hooks against the day. It moved with the sturdy caution of a thing that knows it doesn't have to be fast if it is sure.
He did not plan to hunt it. Not today. But the body wants tests, and this one had four legs and a direction.
He slid along the edge of the clearing until he found the angle that would carry his scent away. The ground fell in shallow steps—the kind a man could break his ankle on or use to move like water if he let the body of the hill make the choices. He set the sword across his back and took the spear to hand instead; the throw would let him practice the suddenness without demanding the blade's precision.
The serow fed with its head down. He timed the rhythm of its chewing: pull, grind, listen; pull, grind, listen. It lifted once, ears traveling over the slope like hands feeling for a wall in the dark. He stilled everything—a stillness so complete that his heart had to lower its voice not to be overheard. When the head lowered again, he let himself breathe.
He moved between two breaths.
The burst came like a felt memory—the legs tightening, the ground giving, three clean steps that cost him less than they should have. He came to the edge of the last rock ledge and did not stop there; he let the ledge spend him into the throw. The spear left his fingers flat and true, the shaft turning once like a thought reconsidered and then committed.
The serow jerked at the wrong moment—for him, the right—so the point took it high and back instead of the perfect place behind the shoulder. It screamed, a sound like a saw striking stone.
He was already moving—another short burst, this one uglier, the landing sloppy but serviceable—closing the distance to finish what he'd began. He grabbed the shaft, felt the animal's weight fight the wood, and went with the pull instead of against it, guiding the head down while drawing the knife with his free hand.
He made it clean on the second try. He hated that there had to be a second try.
When it was done, steam lifted from the wound in the cold light. He stood a long moment with his hand on the animal's neck, not as apology and not as victory—only as acknowledgment that one thing had stopped moving so another could go on.
"Thank you," he said to the place. He meant it.
He took only what he could carry without losing the day, and even that he cut small: haunch meat in tight wrapped strips, organs to eat now while they told the truth to the blood. He left the rest where rock would keep it clean. He made the small nod toward the trees that had become his custom and turned away. If the wolves came, they would come. If not, the ridge would remember.
The air went heavy again by noon. Not heat—pressure. Clouds gathered from three directions at once, shouldering each other for room above the peaks. The wind died and left a silence that wasn't silence at all but the absence of all the usual busy talk.
He ate standing up—a slice of liver, still warm, salted quick with what little he spared for such things—and felt strength arrive in him the way a hand can set a thing properly on a shelf. Then he set the sword where it lived and returned to the stone strip.
He did not mean to court the storm, but when it began to speak, he did not pretend not to hear.
The first thunder walked across his chest without hurry. He let it. He breathed in on the tail of it and felt the old calling rise—less a voice than a direction inside his muscles. He laid the blade flat across his palms and let his hands tingle until the steel itself seemed to taste the air. Fire would have asked for stillness now. Lightning wanted something else. He listened for the shape of what.
Ready, came the shape. Not a word. A posture.
He moved.
The sequence that had felt clean in the morning built teeth in the afternoon. The short burst across the strip carried farther. The diagonal cut could start a hair late and still arrive early. The brake was the hardest thing—stopping without spending everything he'd just saved. Twice he overshot and had to catch himself with a scramble that would have embarrassed him if there had been eyes to see.
There were.
On the ridge to his left, two pale shapes and a darker one, arranged like a thought with edges. They stood in that way wolves stand when they are not deciding but witnessing. He looked once, lowered his head enough to confess that he had seen them, and went back to the work.
The second thunder came shattering and immediate; lightning had already thrown itself into an old pine halfway down the slope, blowing sap into a scream and splitting bark in plates that slapped the ground. He felt the strike in his teeth. He stepped into it.
Not toward the tree. Toward the timing.
Burst. Cut. Brake. Thrust.
He landed the thrust and felt—for a single, clean breath—the current run with him. It didn't live in the blade. It lived in the tendons of his wrists, in the calf that held, in the back foot that offered and refused, all at once. He knew, absurdly, that if a man had been there within the sword's true reach, that man would have worn the point before his mind could have put a word to why.
He stepped back out of it and let it go. The cost came immediate: a thunderhead of ache behind the eyes, a tremble in the small muscles that behave without being asked. He sat on his heels and pressed finger and thumb into the bridge of his nose until the drum in his skull consented to play softer.
"Not a toy," he told himself. "Not a friend. Something you respect."
Rain began that way it begins when the cloud has already made all its decisions—hard and full, each drop a coin spent. He took the water gladly, opened his mouth and let it rinse the resin from his tongue, shook his head to clear the hair from his eyes and set the blade down to breathe.
The wolves did not leave when the rain came. They shifted uphill a few paces, like umbrellaed men stepping back from a gutter, then stood again. He could not see their eyes at that distance, but he did not need to. He felt the line of attention between them and him like you feel the slack go out of a rope.
"Watch, then," he said softly, and stood.
He practiced the small thing—the little three-step burst—without the sword. Then with it. Then he tried the mean, close work his father had loved: short cuts made inside a man's reach, where elbows and hips were the real blades. Lightning tried to turn that into wildness. He refused it. He made it a knife instead of a hammer. When he felt the urge to spend everything at once, he let the ground counsel patience—one beat saved is two beats earned. He could almost hear Regnar's grunt of approval when he finally broke the habit and landed a cut that didn't ask the world to admire it.
The storm slid sideways across the ridge, walking its noise into other valleys. What it left behind in him was not empty. He could feel small charges riding the hair on his forearms, ghosting the skin of his jaw, tickling the arches of his feet. He imagined—only imagined, not yet tried—what it might mean to let that live in his eyes for the blink of a strike, in the fingers for a catch, in the spine for a turn that arrives before it begins.
"Later," he said to the idea, and the idea behaved.
He cleaned his blade with a strip of spare cloth and oiled it with a fingertip of fat he kept in a twist of bark for that purpose. He wanted to run the sequence again. He didn't. The ache behind his eyes told him what the body had spent.
On the walk back toward shelter he let himself move the way the new lessons wanted—bursts used not to arrive but to disappear, little forward steps that became sidesteps when the ground advised a root was waiting, pauses shaped like decisions someone else would have made. Twice he startled birds he had not seen until they changed their minds about where to be. Once he reached a rock unaware he had meant to stand on it until he discovered he was looking farther than he could have from the soil.
He came down into the little basin that had become his camp and stopped because another had stopped there before him. On the flat rock where he put bones when there were bones to put lay the tongue of the serow, neat as a word placed where a word goes. The rain had rinsed it. The teeth marks around it were careful. A gift, or a lesson, or both.
He set a tiny fire under the windfall's roof—small enough to warm his hands and not the sky. He didn't ask fire for more than heat. He didn't need to—lightning still talked too loudly in his blood for that kind of conversation. He cooked the tongue quick on a hot stone and ate it with the kind of attention that food deserves when it arrives this way.
When he was finished, he sat with his back against the root-woven wall and set his palms together, fingers not quite touching, the way Matteo had shown him when the lesson was that sometimes the space between is the part that carries the truth. He held them there until he felt a fur of warmth where there was no flame. He split his hands slowly and that warmth stretched like something that wanted to remain whole.
"Fire," he said, quietly, in greeting. He lifted his hands higher and the faint prickle along his fingers rose as if to meet it. "Lightning." Not a greeting. A name spoken to the room so the room would recognize it later.
He slept early because his body insisted. Rain wrote its old stories on the roof. Once, deep in the night, a rumble far off pinned his heart to the inside of his ribs and then let it go. He dreamed of running downhill with too many feet and not tripping with any of them.
Before dawn he woke to cold air and the kind of quiet a place makes when it has allowed you to rest and now wishes you would go back to being useful. He dressed the stone where the wolves had left their word with a clean palm and then left it alone; touching it felt like speaking when listening would be better.
On the ridge, he practiced the first three steps until they were as boring as breath. Then he practiced not using them when he didn't need them. Then he practiced spending half of one. Lightning disliked halves. He wanted it to learn.
When the sun finally put light into the wet places, he sheathed his sword and started down toward the water. He did not walk straight. He did not walk crooked. He walked the line the ground offered where a boy and a wolf might both be telling the truth.
From above came a low sound—not quite a howl, not quite anything else—a ribbon of tone that bent and held. He paused and tilted his head in that direction the way he had seen them do. His answer was a quiet exhale he did not mean to make, and then he moved again, lighter than he had been yesterday.