The following days no longer intertwined in an opiate of pain. Still there was pain, incessant, obstinate, inexplicable but it had a different nature. It was no longer like a storm of the enemy attacking his senses. It stayed there, as an old-fashioned friend reminding Ethan James of all the boundaries that he was attempting to cross and all the boundaries he was not willing to follow. He was still breathing sharp, first, when he awoke every morning in the thin bed in the shack, but afterwards it was less difficult than the day before. That was a step in the right direction and progress, which Ethan had studied, was never noisy.
He got up early in the morning, being mindful not to disturb Lily James whose breathing was muted in the far corner of the room. Now she was accustomed to his motions, to the unrest of his nature, to his unwillingness to stay in one place long, and yet he made her as quiet as he could. Black Stone City was slumbering restlessly outside, with its narrow streets and leaning buildings entangled in a gray and indecisive silence. Ethan shivered out into the cold and stood a minute or two, letting his body get accustomed to it, letting the cold creep in his blood and sharpen his senses.
He had learned restraint. Where he would previously have beaten his way through obstacles, and had bought his passage with blood and vertigo, he heard first. He was moving very slowly, very deliberately, probing pain with thinking pain, not with irritation. His ribs had not yet ceased to complain as he drew in his breath, and his legs were trembling slightly as he changed his position, but the trembling was not now going to hurl him over backward to the ground. His balance had improved. His breathing had steadied. These were little conquests, such as nobody ever heard of, yet they were better than any historic triumph.
Ethan stooped in front of the shack, between broken rocks and intractable grass, and touching the ground. He sat back straight with his hands loosely placed on his thighs, with half-lidded eyes. He also looked inward and did not impose awareness but beckoned. The small warmth in the lower part of his abdomen remained, weak and tenacious. It answered now to patience rather than to hurry. He moved it softly so that it barely scratched his meridians and did not cut them. The pain was in sharp strokes, but it was bearable. More to the point, it was washed away quicker than ever.
The time went by unseen by him. The sky grew gradually, and the city had started to awaken, and voices and feet were heard in the distance bleeding into the morning. Ethan threw open his eyes, and the sweat chilled into his flesh, and he gave himself a long measured breath. He was tired, but a fatigability of labour instead of failure. His body felt used, not broken. That distinction mattered.
On his coming back in, Lily had wakened. She was staring at him with a kind of anxiety and even a kind of awe, at which she made an effort to be indifferent. She gave him a cup of water without any word, and he took it with a nod. The silence between them was easy because they were accustomed to it due to their mutual understanding and not separation. She did not request him to cease any more and he did not feel like defending himself.
Towards the end of the same morning Ethan walked further out of the shack than ever. He was making his way slowly along the fringes of Black Stone City, head down and company minimal. It was not the city that had changed but it was his vision of it. Where it had seemed so overbearing and unfriendly, it was now so regardless. Such apathy was some sort of freedom. Nobody was interested enough to pay close attention to him and that provided him with time to develop.
He stamped over crumbling wall, half-empty street-corners, and gangs of young men laughing too hard. He heard a moment of professional truculence and sneering, reminiscent of the academy, of Marcus Reed, but he did not allow the sensation to linger. Anger would spend energy which he could not spare. Instead, he noted, he kept impressions, learnt rhythms. The city had patterns and patterns could be expected.
His legs throbbed so when he got back that they brought him back at full speed. He lay against the wall of the shack breathing fast, his clothes wet with sweat. Lily hurried up to him, at which he cussed her softly, as she assisted him into the house. He allowed it. He had learned that he was not to accept assistance and give up control.
Each afternoon that he was lying on the bed, and gazed at the ceiling, Ethan thought of Victor Hale. The recollection was no longer like a blow of the sword, yet it still was a cut. Once a trust was destroyed, it left scars that could not be removed even with a lot of cultivation. He no longer speculated on the betrayal as such; he analyzed it as the infirmity which it had enabled. Complacency. Faith without verification. Those are some of the mistakes he would never make again.
In the evening there was a knock at the door. Lily was about to jump, the terror in her face, but Ethan put up a hand to reassure her. The knock was again made, not aggressive but timid. Ethan went and opened the door ajar to look out. There was a man there, old, skinny, his eyes jerking up and down the alley behind him. The man did not know Ethan but Ethan knew him.
You are the one Marcus Reed beat, that the man said to him, not meanly.
Ethan did not say anything, he only waited.
I came not to make trouble, the man went on. "Just... word travels. Humans become aware of the fact that somebody does not vanish after such a thing.
Ethan observed him a long time and then replied. "And what do they say?"
The man hesitated. "That you're stubborn. Or foolish. Or both."
Ethan smiled feebly and humorlessly to himself. "That sounds about right."
The man went away a little later; he left nothing behind him but that remark, but that experience was not forgotten. It was a token that he had not escaped to die without being noticed. That fact did not thrill Ethan. It sharpened him. This concentration may prove hazardous when he was not ready.
He was fell that night and he strode harder than ever before but not in recklessness but with a purpose. He used regulated movements, slowness of blows in the air, precise changes of weight, which did not harm tissues and enhanced muscle memory. His body was complaining, but it answered. He experienced some sort of coordination, which was weak but undeniable. His hands could not shake so much. His stance grew more stable.
He had at last to halt, and, with chest heaving up and down, lay on the bed. Lily spent some time standing in the door, looking at him and looking worrimented, though she did not take action. She had now come to realize that this was not self-destruction. It was reconstruction.
Ethan was thinking about the silent transformations that were occurring in him as the sleep came. There was no other way the world regarded him as stronger. He was unable to conquer Marcus Reed, unable to fight academy, unable to get what he lost. But a deep rooted something had changed. He was no longer able to check himself against other people. He compared himself with yesterday.
That fact sunk in his bones.
Black Stone City outside was living the troubled life of a forgetting place, not knowing that somewhere in one of its forgotten corners, someone was gradually, obstinately rewriting his destiny. Ethan James shut his eyes, and hummed in pain, and embraced it. The pain meant effort. The effort meant movement. And motion, however slow, implied that he was no longer standing still.
Tomorrow would hurt. The following day would be sore too. But one day the agony would come with power rather than with weakness. And when it was that day, Ethan would be ready not because he had made it a hurried thing, but because he had gone through all the silent preparations.
This night sleep was not easily obtained. Even when his body at last slipped down into rest, Ethan mind was not asleep, wandering between recollection and will. Not of his old strength, not of the heights he had known before, had he dreamed, but of repetition, of slow movements, of disciplined breathing, of keeping himself to the same thing again and again, until it ceased to be foreign. As he rose before daybreak his muscles were hard, his joints sore, but there was something very familiar about them, as though his body was getting used to the beat at which he required it to keep time.
Then with a critical popping, he sat up, and waited until the dizziness came. It had come, and passed faster than ever. That alone told him enough. Development was not heard; it was seen in the incidents such as this, in non-comings, but incomings. He eased his legs down the side of the bed, and stood against the wall, holding himself with a hand. His knees were trembling, but very slightly; and he would have easily forgotten it.
Outside, the sky was fair and indecisive, between night and morning. Ethan jumped out into the cool and brought himself down. He went through his exercises once more, more slowly than on the previous day, more conscious. Every movement had a purpose, every rest enabled his body to react rather than to mutiny. The little warmth that was there in him resonates with an obedientness, no longer in pain, no longer in trepidation. It came, apprehensive by desire.
He eventually paused as sweat sat upon his skin and his breathing was deep and even. He laid his hands on his thighs, and gave himself a moment of repose. He had never felt anything near belief in this damaged vessel since he had awakened in this broken frame, not in vigor, not in destiny, but in the very procedure itself.
On the doorway, beyond him, stood Lily looking by without saying anything, knowing better than words. Ethan did not look back. He didn't need to. He himself knew she was there, because in the same way as he had known that this track would be a long one, hard, and solitary here and there. But it was his path now.
And he would walk it, a step by step.