Athea did not look away. She set the data slate down on the desk in front of her.

"The plus-one policy was removed for a reason, Valerie," she said, her voice cool and even. "And that reason has not changed in the three months since the council voted on it."

"It’s one plus-one, Athea," Valerie tried.

"There is no such thing as a single plus-one when the rest of the list is watching." Athea’s voice did not rise, but it sharpened in a way that did not need volume. "The moment Sage Stellan is granted an exception, every guest of comparable standing will have grounds to request the same. The council will spend the next decad fielding those requests instead of preparing for the event. That is not good diplomacy. That is bad scheduling wearing diplomatic colors."

Valerie opened her mouth to argue. Athea did not give her the opening.

"Moving on," Athea said.

She picked the guest list back up, and the conversation about plus-ones was over.

★★★

Back in Sector Seven, the air over the estate’s poolside training mats was already thick with the heat of exertion.

The sun was lower now, the shadows on the patio gone long and clean across the mats. The pool reflected the last warm light back up against the underside of the awning, and the climate system kept the small breeze at exactly the temperature Zaeryn had grown used to.

Arya was already on the mat when he stepped onto it. She was rolling her wrists out, working through the small final motions of her warm-up.

Mireille was seated on the chair at the edge of the pool area, watching the two of them with the calm attention of someone who had already decided how the next hour was going to unfold.

"What about you, Mireille?" Zaeryn called over to her. "Ready to spar today? The patio survived last time. I think we have proven I can be trusted around furniture."

"No," Mireille said.

"That was fast."

"It was an easy question." Her icy blue eyes moved from him to Arya and back again. "You cannot beat Arya yet. Come back to me when you can, and we will revisit the conversation."

With a nod, Zaeryn turned back toward the mat, shaking his head. Arya was already grinning.

"Ready?" Arya asked.

"Always."

Her eyes narrowed at him. "That is a lie. Come at me."

He came at her.

The opening exchanges told her everything she needed to know about how this session was going to differ from the last one. She started the way she always started, probing at him with the same sharp angular entries that had put him on the floor over and over the previous time, and he refused to bite on any of them.

The feint to his lead shoulder that had dropped him twice before slid past empty air, because he had already stepped off the line before her weight finished committing.

Mireille smiled, watching this. She could see a lot of improvements from Zaeryn.

Arya tried the low entry next, the one that hooked behind his knee, and his foot was simply not where it had been when she arrived.

Arya adjusted. That was what she did, and it was what made her dangerous.

She stopped feeding him patterns he had already eaten and started improvising, layering her angles two and three movements deep, and for a while the spar settled into something genuinely competitive instead of the patient demolition it had been before.

Unlike the first time they sparred, where Zaeryn had been plainly outmatched, this time it felt like he was matching her. Arya had a clear and clean fighting style, refined across generations, and against it Zaeryn brought something messier, harder to read and impressive to watch. He was good at improvising, and his instincts let him defend and attack in the same breath, where most fighters had to choose one or the other.

He still hit the mat from time to time. She caught him with a beautiful shoulder-turn throw about ten minutes in, and a few minutes after that she trapped his arm against her hip and folded him down with a pressure he had no answer for.

But where the last session had been him standing up just to be put down again, this one had stretches where she was the one resetting, circling, recalculating, because the easy openings were gone and the cheap ones were getting expensive.

Somewhere around the twenty-minute mark, he did something that genuinely surprised her. She sold a high feint toward his jaw, the kind of bait that had worked on him every single time before, and instead of flinching back from it he caught her wrist out of the air mid-motion and used her own committed weight to walk her two full steps off her base.

He did not capitalize on it. He did not know how to yet.

But he had seen it coming, and they both knew that a short time ago he would not have.

"Okay," Arya said, pulling her wrist back and shaking it out, a grin breaking through the focus on her face. "Who taught you that?"

"You did. About forty falls ago," he said.

Arya grinned arrogantly, "I want it noted that I am an excellent teacher."

"Noted," Zaeryn said.

Mireille, still watching the fight with an amused look, said, "Impressive, Zaeryn. You seem to be creating your own fighting style."

"Thanks, Mireille," he responded, turning back to Arya. "Now stop stalling."

She laughed and came at him again, and the spar rolled on.

Almost thirty minutes later, Zaeryn dipped his shoulder, selling a strike to Arya’s midsection completely. It was the same improvised leg-sweep he had used to take her down the previous time they sparred, but he had changed the entry.

Last time it had come off a fake retreat. This time it came hidden inside an exchange she thought she was winning, his heel hooking sharply behind her ankle while her attention was still committed to the strike that never arrived. She recognized it exactly one half-second too late to do anything about it.

Arya’s feet flew out from under her, and she hit the smart-foam mat with a heavy thud.

"Damn," she said, pushing herself up onto her elbows and blowing a stray lock of hair out of her face. "That must be your signature move by now."

Zaeryn stood over her, his chest heaving as he offered her a hand with a lazy grin. "Well, it works, so yeah, it might just be."

She nodded, taking his hand and letting him haul her back to her feet. They reset their stances, and the hand-to-hand combat resumed.

Arya did not fall for the sweep again. She pushed him relentlessly after that, utilizing her fluid, angle-based combat style that punished any wasted movement, and Zaeryn leaned on his Combat Instincts, letting his body react to the threats without overthinking them.

The ability had been with him for a while now, but it was only through sessions like this one, hundreds of exchanges compressed into a single brutal hour, that it was sharpening into something he could genuinely trust.

And somewhere inside that relentless pressure, something settled into place.

He stopped splitting his attention. Until now, every spar had been a constant negotiation between defending himself and looking for chances to attack, his conscious mind dragged back and forth between the two.

But his Combat Instincts were already handling the defense without being asked. His body slipped her entries, gave ground when ground needed giving, and kept him alive entirely on its own. The moment he genuinely trusted that, his mind came free, and he turned the whole of it toward offense.

The change was immediate, and it was visible.

He fed her a sloppy, over-rotated strike, exactly the kind of wasted movement her family style existed to punish, and when she took the punishment her style demanded, his counter was already waiting for her inside it.

Arya had to abandon the exchange entirely, breaking away with a short hop that conceded the center of the mat for the first time all session. He took the center and did not give it back.

He attacked on the half second, changed rhythm mid-combination, threw techniques that were not techniques at all, just answers invented in the moment for problems she had only just created.

Her style was built to read systems and dismantle them, and he was not giving her a system to read. There was nothing to anticipate, because half of what he was doing had not existed three seconds before he did it.

Arya went onto the defensive. Fully. Her forearms took strikes she could not slip, her feet carried her backward in measured retreats, and her face lost its grin and settled into the hard, narrow focus of a fighter who has just been informed the rules have changed.

At the edge of the pool area, Mireille had straightened in her chair without realizing she had done it.

She had watched Arya fight for years. Arya did not get put on the defensive. Opponents survived Arya, weathered her, occasionally caught her with something clever, but they did not drive her backward across a mat and hold her there.

And it was not luck, that was the part Mireille’s mind couldn’t believe right now. Luck was random. And this felt like Zaeryn knew what he was doing.

He was baiting trained responses and punishing the response, over and over, with the calm efficiency of a man executing a system he had drilled for years. Except the system had not existed an hour ago. She had watched it get invented, exchange by exchange, on this mat, in this session.

Arya, to her enormous credit, did not stay passive. She picked her moment, planted her back foot, and committed everything to a single hard counter designed to break his pressure and reclaim the spar by force.

It was exactly what he had been waiting for.

Zaeryn caught the committed arm, turned through her instead of away from her, and used the full weight of her own counter to carry her over his hip. Arya went airborne for half a heartbeat and came down shoulder-first into the smart-foam with a thud that echoed off the water.

The spar was over.

For a moment, nobody said anything. The pool lapped quietly against its edges, and the climate system’s small breeze moved across the mats.

Arya pushed herself up slowly. She sat there for a second, rotated her arm in its socket, and pressed two fingers against her shoulder blade with a wince.

"Ouch," she said. Then she looked up at him, and there was no frustration anywhere in her face, only open, baffled delight. "How? That was... how?"

She couldn’t find the right words.

"I am not entirely sure," he admitted, offering her a hand for the second time that day. "I stopped thinking about defending. My body handles that part on its own now. So I just... attacked."

"You just attacked," Arya repeated, letting him pull her to her feet. "He just attacked, Mireille."

"I heard him." Mireille had risen from her chair and crossed to the edge of the mat, and her expression carried something it almost never carried, which was open recalculation and her eyes narrowed slightly, as though the next sentence physically resisted being said. "You appear to have built your own fighting style and begun mastering it inside a single session. I am still trying to decide how that is possible."

Zaeryn was proud of himself. Hard not to when he had taken one of the best hand-to-hand fighters he knew, driven her onto full defense, and ended the session standing over her. He was no longer climbing toward the level of the people around him. He was building his own ladder entirely, and at a pace that he suspected was starting to quietly unsettle the people whose job it was to measure him.

Arya seemed to be thinking along the same lines. She pressed her water bottle against the back of her neck and looked at him for a long moment.

She smiled. "You are the greatest anomaly of all anomalies, you know that? There is no way someone develops as fast as you." She said.

"Thank you," Zaeryn said.

"You know what the strangest part is?" she said. "One session ago, I could tell you exactly what you were going to do before you did it. Today, for the last ten minutes, I could not even tell you what I was going to do, because you kept deciding it for me. It was like I was fighting a totally different person. If you keep improving at this rate, I am going to have to start taking these spars seriously, and I do not say that to many people."