Page 98 of Legacy Ascended

“She's such a bitch.”

“Yep.”

“Three Great Houses and a professor?”

“Apparently I'm very organized.”

Sophia snorts. “You should put it on your résumé.”

“Right under kidnap victim.”

“Definitely. Shows commitment.”

I laugh despite myself.

“Come on,” Sophia says. “We're going to be late for Voss.”

Voss's practical is in the lower hall, which smells like chalk dust. He has painted a long center line on the floor with a second line on either side of it.

“Nobody touches anybody,” he says. “This isn't a fighting exercise. This is the thing that makes fighting possible, which is knowing where your own weight is. Miller, you're within your clearance on everything I'm about to ask. If that changes, you'll tell me, and we'll stop.”

“Yes, Instructor.”

“Good. Pairs. Mirror work.”

You stand on your side of the center line facing your partner on theirs. They move along their line — left, right, a stutter, a long slide — and you match it on yours, staying square to them and the same distance apart. You don't cross the center, and at every moment, one foot stays on the floor.

I am terrible at it.

I'm terrible at it because I keep trying to beat it. I read the shoulder, I decide, I go — and I'm fast, really fast now, and I get there first. Voss stops me every single time.

“You were airborne. Again.”

“I matched her.”

“You jumped to match her. If she'd changed direction, you'd have been in the air with no vote in the matter.” He crouches and taps the line twice. “Your weight's going up. That's your wolf. Send it sideways.”

Torres is working at the far end of the hall on the same exercise as everybody else. When he passes behind me, he says, not quietly enough to be secret and not loudly enough to be a lesson, “Lower. It's not a jump, it's a lean that got away from you.”

“I know what a lean is.”

“Then do one.”

I do one. I shift my hip instead of my shoulder, stop pushing off, let my weight fall in the direction I want to go and then catch it. I arrive a fraction later than I would have, with my trailing foot flat on the boards the whole way.

“That,” Voss says. “Now do it until I believe it wasn't luck.”

I do it until he believes it. One of them is bad. The rest are fine.

At the end of the hour, Voss calls us in.

“If you're still trying to move faster, stop. Miller spent the first part of the session using a very large wolf to solve a problem that had nothing to do with size.”

“It seemed reasonable at the time.”

“It wasn't.”

A couple of people laugh.