Hector came to his room before dawn.
Three knocks. The specific knock — Lysander had learned it the way you learned anything repeated often enough, without deciding to. Hector's knock had a particular quality: unhurried, evenly spaced, the knock of a man who was not in a hurry but was also not going to knock again.
He opened the door.
Hector was in training clothes. Simple, worn, the leather padding of a man who had put this gear on ten thousand times and had stopped noticing what it looked like.
He said: *"Come."*
No further explanation.
Lysander dressed and followed.
---
They went to the south training ground.
Not the main ground where the palace guard trained — a smaller space on the south side of the complex, half the size, with a lower wall and no permanent equipment. Lysander had walked past it several times without paying it much attention. It looked like a space that was used occasionally for something other than regular training and then left alone.
There was one lamp burning on the wall, and the early sky above was the particular blue of just-before-dawn, not yet light, the stars still visible in the west.
Hector handed him a training sword.
He said: *"Show me what you have."*
---
Lysander showed him what he had.
He had been calibrating his performance since the first day — not performing badly, not performing well, finding the specific level that explained improvement without raising the questions that real competence would raise. He had been doing this for weeks and had gotten comfortable with it.
Hector watched him go through a basic drill.
He said: *"Stop."*
Lysander stopped.
Hector walked around him slowly. The way a man walks around something he is examining, not unkindly, with the attention of someone who knows what he is looking at and is taking his time to see it clearly.
He said: *"You are performing."*
Lysander said nothing.
*"Not the drill. The level. You are performing a level of skill."*
He stopped in front of him.
*"I have been watching you for two months. In the main training ground. The progression is — too even. Too consistent. Real improvement has uneven edges. Someone learns a thing, loses it, relearns it better. What you show is smooth. As if you decided what rate of improvement to display and you are displaying it."*
He looked at Lysander.
*"Show me what you actually have."*
---
Lysander held the training sword.
He thought about it for a moment — not long, the decision was not actually complicated, it was just the moment of committing to it.
He had two choices.
Deny it — maintain the calibration, insist the even improvement was simply how he learned, manage the situation. Hector would accept this because Hector was not the kind of person who pushed past a denial. He would file the doubt somewhere and they would continue.
Or: stop performing.
He thought about what Hector had said when Lysander came back from Sparta. *I told father you were useful before you left. I was not entirely sure it was true.* The honesty of that. The refusal to retroactively pretend certainty he hadn't had.
He shifted his grip on the training sword.
He moved through the drill again — the same drill, the same sequence — but this time at his actual level. The level he had built from three things: the knowledge he had brought from his old life about how Bronze Age combat worked, the body's own muscle memory which had been developing under the calibrated performances without his fully realizing it, and the specific adjustments Hector himself had made to his form over the past weeks.
It was significantly better.
Not extraordinary. Not beyond explanation. But clearly, obviously, not the same as what he had been showing.
He finished and lowered the sword.
Hector was still.
After a moment he said: *"How long."*
*"Since the beginning,"* Lysander said. *"I was — I thought it would cause questions I was not ready to answer."*
*"The questions would have been: how did you improve this much this fast."*
*"Yes."*
*"And the answer."*
*"Is complicated."*
*"Yes,"* Hector said. *"I assumed it would be."*
He was quiet for a moment.
Then he moved to the center of the space and gestured: *"Come here."*
---
What followed was two hours of the most demanding physical work Lysander had done in this body.
Hector taught the way he did everything — without excess. No long explanations, no philosophy of combat, no anecdotes. He demonstrated a thing, had Lysander attempt it, corrected exactly what was wrong and nothing else, had him attempt it again.
The things he was teaching were not the things the training ground covered.
The training ground taught forms — the standard positions, the standard attacks, the standard defenses that made up the shared vocabulary of Bronze Age combat. What Hector was teaching was what happened when the standard vocabulary failed.
How to recover from a missed attack without leaving yourself open.
How to use the momentum of a block rather than killing it.
How to read the shift in an opponent's weight that happened a fraction of a second before they moved.
This last one — Lysander had read about it. In the academic literature of a different century, scholars who had reconstructed ancient combat methods had identified this as one of the key skills that separated trained fighters from experienced ones. The experienced fighter had learned to read the body's preparatory signals before a movement. The trained fighter had only learned the movement itself.
He had known about it abstractly.
Hector was teaching him to actually do it.
By the end of the two hours he could feel the difference — not perfectly, not consistently, but he could feel it starting to build. The place in his attention where the information would eventually live when it was fully learned.
*"Enough,"* Hector said.
Lysander lowered the sword and breathed.
Hector was not breathing hard. This was not, Lysander had the impression, anything close to what Hector could actually produce. It had been a teaching session, not a workout.
He said: *"Tomorrow. Same time."*
*"Yes,"* Lysander said.
Hector picked up his own sword from the wall where he had rested it.
He did not leave immediately.
He stood in the early morning light — the sun was coming now, the lamp irrelevant, the sky above the wall going from blue to the first pale yellow — and looked at the training space with the look of a man who was about to say something and was deciding whether to say it.
He said: *"You knew the weight-shift principle."*
*"I had read about it."*
*"You had read about it."*
*"In various texts. The idea — that movement can be predicted from the body's preparation for movement. I understood it theoretically."*
*"But not physically."*
*"There is a large distance between knowing a thing and having it in your body. I knew that too."*
Hector looked at him.
He said: *"You read. Constantly. Things that — the texts you describe do not always exist in any library I am aware of."*
Lysander said: *"I read widely. Some of what I have found is in the library here. Some came through trade contacts — texts from elsewhere, older texts, texts from the eastern routes. I read everything I can find."*
*"And you remember it."*
*"Yes."*
*"All of it."*
*"Most of it."*
Hector was quiet.
He said: *"That is a remarkable thing."*
*"It is useful,"* Lysander said. *"It is not always comfortable."*
*"Why not."*
He thought about how to answer.
He said: *"Because knowing a great many things and being able to do very few of them is its own particular frustration. I can describe the principle of the weight-shift. I cannot do it. That gap — I feel it. Constantly."*
Hector looked at him for a moment.
He said: *"That is why you learn. Not because someone requires it of you. Because the gap irritates you."*
*"Yes,"* Lysander said. *"That is exactly why."*
Hector made the small sound — not a laugh, the thing before a laugh, the acknowledgment that something is genuinely funny to him even if his face doesn't commit to it fully.
He said: *"Good. Irritation is a reliable teacher. Better than ambition and much better than obligation."*
He walked to the gate.
He stopped.
He said: *"The weight-shift. You felt it starting. At the end."*
It was not a question.
*"Yes,"* Lysander said.
*"Tomorrow we build on it."*
He went out.
---
Lysander stood in the empty training ground in the early morning light.
He was breathing harder than he would have liked. The body was stronger than it had been — weeks of calibrated training had built something even in the constrained performance — but not strong enough yet. Not where it needed to be.
He thought about the conversation.
Hector had seen the calibration immediately. Had known for weeks, probably, and had waited for the right moment rather than confronting it directly. That was very Hector — patience not as passivity but as a deliberate choice to let things develop to the point where addressing them would be productive.
And when Lysander had stopped performing, Hector had not made a large thing of it. Had simply said: *show me what you actually have.* And then moved on to teaching.
No punishment for the concealment. No extended discussion of why. Just: *all right, now we work.*
He thought about what Hector had said about irritation being a reliable teacher.
He thought about the fact that Hector had been watching his progression for two months and had identified the deliberate calibration — the suspicious smoothness of it — before saying anything.
He thought about this man who knocked before entering rooms and taught by demonstrating and waited for the right moment and noticed things he didn't mention and said exactly what he meant without decoration.
*I know how you die,* he thought. *I know the date, roughly. I know the name of the man. I know the choice you will make to go outside the gates when you could stay inside.*
*And I know why you will make it. Because you are exactly this person. And this person does not stay behind gates.*
He stood in the training ground for a while.
Then he put the feeling somewhere he could carry it without being crushed by it, and walked back to his room.
Six hundred and fifty-eight words.
*Keep going.*