The training post had been there longer than Liam had been alive.
It stood at the far edge of the Emrold family's yard — if yard was the right word for the flat-packed earth between their root-home and the nearest root-arch, which Liam suspected it wasn't, but he had never found a better one. The post was a section of old root, roughly cylindrical, about as wide as a grown man's thigh, driven into the ground at a slight angle and wrapped at its mid-section with layered bark-cloth that had been replaced so many times the original surface was buried under twenty years of repairs. The wrapping was dark with use. Some sections had been re-done so recently the bark-cloth was still pale.
Jingahr had been hitting it, Liam estimated, for most of his adult life.
This was relevant context for the morning's lesson, which had begun forty minutes ago and was currently going poorly.
"Again," Jingahr said.
Liam reset his stance — feet shoulder-width, weight slightly forward, the way his father had shown him three times now — and threw the same strike at the wrapped mid-section of the post. The impact came back up through his wrist wrong, the way it always did when he hit at an angle instead of straight, and he felt the familiar sting of a force not properly channeled.
Jingahr watched from behind him. He did not wince on Liam's behalf. He also did not say I told you so, which Liam appreciated, because he had in fact told him, twice, that the angle was wrong.
"What happened?" Jingahr asked.
Liam looked at his wrist. "I came in at an angle again. The force reflected instead of transferring."
"Why?"
"Because my elbow was out." He considered. "Because I was thinking about the impact instead of the path."
Jingahr said nothing, which Liam had learned meant correct, continue.
"If I focus on where the strike lands, my body compensates toward the target on the way there. If I focus on the path — the line from my shoulder through my elbow and wrist — the landing takes care of itself."
"Again," Jingahr said.
He tried again. Better. Not good, but better — the impact came back less jagged, and his wrist didn't sting in the same way. Jingahr made a low sound that was not quite approval and not quite neutrality. Somewhere between.
This was how the lessons went.
Jingahr was not a patient man in the conventional sense — he did not offer reassurances, did not soften corrections, did not praise incremental improvement with the kind of warm encouragement that Liam had read about in the handful of novels that featured training montages. What he was, Liam had concluded, was consistent. He said a thing once, sometimes twice. He did not repeat himself a third time because he had already moved on to the assumption that the information had been received and the only question was how long application would take.
It was, in its way, a form of respect. He expected Liam to process and use what he was given. He did not treat the gap between learning and doing as a failure; he treated it as a variable. Different things took different lengths of time to integrate. This was simply how the body worked.
Liam found this more useful than encouragement would have been.
"Footwork," Jingahr said, moving to demonstrate. He stepped through a pattern — not elaborate, nothing a performance would call impressive, just an efficient geometry of weight and balance. Forward and left. Pivot. Back and right. The post as the fixed point, his body moving around it in a tight, deliberate orbit. "You don't stand in front of something that wants to hit you. You move so that you are never where it expects you to be."
"What if it's faster than me?"
"Then you move before it decides to be fast."
Liam filed this away under the category he had mentally labeled things my father says that sound like riddles but are actually just practical if you think about them long enough. The category was fairly extensive.
He spent the next half hour on footwork. It was, if anything, harder than the strikes — strikes required his arms to do something unfamiliar, but his arms were small and young and had limited expectations of themselves. His feet, on the other hand, had opinions. They had spent seven years navigating the root-paths of the deep forest, which had their own irregular logic, and they were not immediately convinced that the flat-packed earth of the yard required them to do anything differently.
Jingahr corrected his weight distribution four times. He demonstrated the pivot twice more. On the third time through the basic pattern, Liam's feet did something approximately correct, and Jingahr stopped him.
"What changed?"
Liam thought about it honestly. "I stopped thinking about where my feet were and started thinking about where I was going."
Jingahr looked at him. It was a considering look — the kind that had a calculation behind it, though Liam had never been able to determine exactly what was being calculated. His father did this occasionally: stopped and looked at him as though seeing something that didn't fit a prior assessment and was updating accordingly.
"The strike and the step are the same problem," Jingahr said finally. "You think too far forward — to the contact, to the landing, to the outcome. The body can only be where it is. Work from there."
Work from where you are. Another one for the category.
Liam nodded and reset his stance.
They worked until midday. By the end, Liam's arms were heavy and his feet ached and the heels of his hands had the beginning of blisters from the post's bark surface. None of this was dramatic — it was simply what training felt like, the ordinary tax of asking your body to do things it hadn't done before. He was familiar with fatigue. He had just never been familiar with this particular kind.
As a scholar, his body had mostly been a vehicle for transporting his mind from one library to another. He had respected it in the abstract — fed it, maintained it, rested it when necessary — but had not thought of it as a thing that could be developed, sharpened, made into something more than what it currently was. He was coming to understand that this was a significant gap in his previous thinking.
This body was seven years old and already, under Jingahr's consistent attention, doing things that seven-year-old bodies in Loki's world would not have been asked to do. The dark elf children he observed in the settlement moved with a physical competence that went beyond typical child development — they were sure-footed, spatially aware, quick to recover from falls. Not because they were inherently better at it. Because the deep forest required it early.
He was behind. He was catching up.
Jingahr dismissed him with a tilt of his head toward the root-home, which meant you're done for the morning, get water and food. Liam obeyed, stopping at the water barrel at the home's entrance and drinking two full ladles before going inside.
───
He came back in the late afternoon, after Litrial had sent him on settlement errands that took two hours and involved three different stops, a brief interaction with an elder who looked at him the way most adults looked at him — with the specific attention given to something that seems slightly out of place but hasn't explained why — and a short detour to observe a section of the root-forest he hadn't mapped yet.
He came back because he had seen something that morning that he wanted to see again.
The yard was empty. Jingahr was still out — settlement business, something about the northern boundary repair that needed more hands in the afternoon. The training post stood in its usual slight angle, bark-cloth wrapping going dark with the forest's evening damp.
Liam settled himself in the narrow gap between the root-home's outer wall and the root-arch, which gave him a line of sight to the yard and the post without being immediately visible to anyone coming home from the settlement's main paths. He had used this spot before, for various purposes. It was useful.
He waited.
It took about an hour before Jingahr came home.
His father moved through the root-arch at the end of the settlement path in the usual way — slightly ahead of the other adults, not because he was in a hurry but because his natural pace was slightly faster than most, a long-legged unhurried stride that covered ground efficiently. He said something brief to the man walking with him — Mael, who handled the settlement's external trading — and then split off toward the Emrold yard.
He went inside first. Water, Liam heard. A brief exchange with Litrial in the low tones they used when they thought he was elsewhere. Then, after perhaps ten minutes, he came back out.
What he did next was not the same as the morning's lesson.
The morning's lesson was the visible thing — the instructional, parental, deliberately slowed version of what Jingahr could do. What he did alone in the fading evening light was the real version, and the difference between them was the difference between a scholar explaining a concept to a student and a scholar thinking freely in their own head.
He moved around the training post the way water moved around a stone in a fast river — not fighting it, not acknowledging it as an obstacle so much as simply incorporating it into the geometry of wherever he was going. The footwork was the same pattern he had taught Liam that morning, but at a speed and with a fluidity that made the morning's version feel like a rough sketch of this. His strikes, when they came, were short and economical — not the wide, committed blows of someone fighting for show, but small precise contacts that landed exactly where he intended and withdrew before the force had time to reflect back.
He was not, Liam observed, training at all.
He was working something through. The way Loki used to pace when a problem wasn't resolving, or work through a proof three times in different directions, not because the logic had failed but because repetition built a groove in the mind that made the thinking feel more solid. The body's equivalent of that. Moving through the problem until the problem became familiar enough to stop feeling like a problem.
Jingahr had something on his mind.
Liam stayed very still in his gap between wall and root-arch, breathing quietly, watching.
After perhaps twenty minutes, his father stopped. Not gradually — just stopped, one moment moving and the next completely still, facing the post with his hands loose at his sides. He stayed that way for a long moment. Then he reached out and pressed his palm flat against the post's wrapped surface, not a strike, just contact. The way you might press your hand against something to confirm it was real.
Liam thought about the merchant caravan from three weeks ago. About the conversation Jingahr had stood in and come home from without reporting. About the stillness at the dinner table afterward.
He thought about what his mother had said: the world is not comfortable with us.
He thought about a man who had spent his whole life being very, very capable at something that the world had arranged things so he would never be in a position to use fully. All that training. All that quiet discipline. All that skill developed in a yard at the edge of a deep forest settlement, against a post that had been there longer than his son was alive.
Liam was not a sentimental person, particularly. He had made himself efficient about emotion in the same way he had made himself efficient about most things — it was information, it was data, it had its place in the catalogue alongside everything else. But sitting in his hiding spot watching his father stand alone in the evening dark with his palm flat against a training post, he felt something in his chest that did not fit neatly in the catalogue. It was too large for its category and it didn't have a label and it felt, uncomfortably, like recognition.
He had been Loki, who was smart in ways nobody gave him credit for and careful in ways that looked like cowardice and capable of things he was never in a position to demonstrate because the world had arranged itself to make sure he never was.
He was watching Jingahr, who was the same.
He stayed until his father went back inside, then waited another few minutes before following. Litrial looked at him when he came in — that brief, precise assessment she had — and did not ask where he had been. He set the table for dinner. Jingahr came through from the back room and sat down. They ate in the comfortable, worn silence of a family that had lived together long enough that silence was a kind of conversation.
Liam ate his food and thought about paths versus landings. About working from where you are.
Jingahr, at the end of the meal, poured himself a second cup of the dark-forest tea that Litrial kept in a clay pot on the stove. He looked at Liam across the table. "Tomorrow," he said, "we start with your falls."
"My falls?"
"How to fall and not break anything important." He sipped his tea. "You went down three times today. All three times you caught yourself wrong. We'll fix that."
Liam nodded.
"Your balance is your best quality so far," Jingahr said, and went back to his tea.
It was the first direct positive assessment he had offered in the weeks since the lessons had begun. Liam kept his expression neutral. He filed it carefully, in a place he could find it later.
It felt larger than it was, and he allowed himself to let it be that.