We drank from a stone basin that tasted faintly of iron. The room hummed once, a quiet acknowledgement, and remembered it was supposed to be quiet. My shoulders had been behaving for almost an hour, a fact that made me unreasonably proud.
Julius didn't let me enjoy it. He set his cup on the rail, and his sword became scenery again.
"The blade can wait," he said. "You still steal tempo when you're tired, and you still leave me the afterglow of your cuts to play with. Fix those here, and the tower will stop teaching you the same lesson twice." His gaze sharpened. "But your sword is not your only tool. Show me your Grey."
I hesitated. "It's unreliable here. The tower burns it to ash."
"Because you use it like a panicked librarian tearing a page from a book to dodge a thrown rock," he said, brutally accurate. "Effective. Wasteful. Artless. You are a Mythweaver. It is time you learned to write, not just tear."
