The next morning broke gray and cold, the river valley swaddled in mist. Kai woke with the sharp ache of a dozen new muscles and a pleasant, unfamiliar sense of anticipation. Lena was already awake, pacing a line along the riverbank, her hair a pale streak in the fog.
She waved him over. "Come on. I want to show you how to not die in your sleep."
Kai stumbled over, rubbing grit from his eyes. "Is that a real risk?"
She grinned. "Only if you're careless. Or if you plan on making enemies, which you will. First lesson: Concealment."
She knelt, scraping a patch of earth clear. "Most life can sense a human camp from miles away. Magic leaks, heat leaks, sound travels. A good ward doesn't stop everything, but it makes you less interesting."
She pulled a bit of charcoal from her satchel and drew a circle on the ground, then added a tangle of lines and crosses inside it, muttering under her breath as she worked. When she finished, she dusted her hands and stepped back.
"Your turn," Lena said, shoving the charcoal at him. "Copy it. Doesn't have to be perfect, just get the bones right."
He crouched, nervous, and tried to trace the circle. His lines wobbled, his marks looked nothing like hers, but he got the general shape. Lena watched, head cocked, not helping but not judging either.
"Now," she said, "touch the center and imagine yourself disappearing. Not literally—just to whatever's out there. Focus on not being seen."
He felt ridiculous, but did as told. He pressed his palm to the dirt and pictured the camp as a little void in the world, invisible to birds, animals, hunters, anything. Nothing happened.
Then a sudden chill ran up his arm, and the air around him seemed to get thinner, quieter.
He looked up. Lena was staring at him, wide-eyed.
"You actually did it," she said. "Most people just get a nosebleed or a headache the first dozen tries."
He felt a surge of pride, then the world snapped back and he nearly toppled over.
Lena caught his shoulder, steadying him. "Side effect," she said. "You can only hold it so long. If you keep practicing, it'll stick."
They worked through the morning, Lena teaching him three more wards: one to warn of movement, one to deaden sound, one to keep firelight from traveling too far. Each was harder than the last. He failed, he tried again, sometimes he got it. Lena never mocked him; her criticism was sharp, but always came with the next step, the fix, the way forward.
Around noon, they broke for food. Lena ate hers fast, then pulled out her tattered book and started cross-referencing what he'd done, making notes in the margins with a bit of burnt stick. She looked up, catching him watching.
"What?"
"Nothing," he said, but couldn't help grinning. "You just seem like you actually enjoy teaching."
She rolled her eyes, but there was a softness in the set of her mouth. "I like seeing people surprise themselves."
"Is that what I'm doing?"
She pretended to think. "Maybe. But mostly you're a wreck in the mornings."
He laughed, and she joined him, the sound echoing off the river.
***
They sat by the river for a long while, the current slow and silt-heavy, light reflecting off the surface in a patchwork of silvers and off-whites. It was a lazy, safe spot, but Lena kept her gaze fixed on the water as if it would turn dangerous at any second. Her expression had gone flat, unreadable—a look Kai was learning to recognize as the precursor to one of her moods.
He skipped a stone across the channel, watching it bounce. By the third skip, he'd run out of things to say, so he just watched Lena.
She was staring at her own reflection, but not like someone admiring themselves. More like someone cataloguing errors on a machine part. Her features flickered in the moving water, sometimes sharp as a blade, sometimes losing resolution entirely. One moment, her eyes were a flat, uncanny blue; the next, they blurred into a patch of gray, like the river couldn't remember what she looked like and kept trying to redraw her from scratch.
"You alright?" Kai asked. It was the least useful question, but he didn't know what else to do with the silence.
She kept her eyes on the water. "Do you feel it?" she murmured.
Kai tried. He'd been practicing Lena's tricks—sensing the Well, mapping the world's currents—but this time, all he got was the chill of damp stones under his palms and the metallic tang of river air.
"I don't," he said. "Not like you do."
She exhaled, her breath fogging for just a moment. "It's not the Well. Not this time." She tapped the side of her head. "It's in here. It's like static. Like my thoughts keep getting interrupted by… noise."
Kai watched as she dropped a pebble in the water, the ripples breaking up her face into a dozen shifting fragments. He wished he knew how to help.
Lena drew her knees to her chest. "I used to come to rivers when I was small. My mother said they could wash away stray magic, clear the head." She gave a tight, humorless smile. "I think she just liked the quiet."
Kai hesitated, then reached out and set his hand on her shoulder. She didn't shake it off.
"I haven't heard you mention her," he said softly. "Your mother."
Lena's jaw worked back and forth, like she was chewing glass. She pulled the pendant from under her shirt, rolling it between her fingers. The chain was so thin it looked ready to snap.
"She was the best of us," Lena said, voice flat. "Better than the old Sages. I don't remember much, but I know she fought—fought everyone, really—to keep me alive."
Kai tried to picture a younger version of Lena, but the thought wouldn't line up. He couldn't see her as anything but the way she was now: sharp, driven, and always in motion.
"How did she die?" he asked, careful.
"My mother didn't just die, Kai. She was... unwritten. She stayed in the gap so I could get out. My father—the man he was then—he tried to reach for her. But he didn't have the stomach for the cost. He chose the scalpel over the soul."
Lena's expression hardened. "She died because someone believed the world would be better off without her."
She took a deep breath, steadying herself against old memories. "That's why I can't afford to lose anyone else," she said, her voice firm despite the tremor beneath it.
Kai nodded, understanding the weight of her words.
The afternoon passed in a blur of practice and mistakes. By dusk, Kai had managed to set up a passable perimeter around their new camp. Lena tested it by throwing pebbles at him, sneaking up behind, even pretending to be a night-beast. She found every flaw, then made him fix it.
When the sun dipped below the ridge, painting the sky in bruised purples and red, Lena called it. "Enough for today," she said, collapsing onto a flat rock. "My brain is soup."
Kai dropped beside her, letting the exhaustion melt his bones. They sat in companionable silence, listening to the river and the distant, lonely call of something hunting in the woods.
After a while, Lena spoke. "You're not the only one who's had to learn to hide."
He turned, watching her face in the half-light. Her expression was distant, her eyes fixed on the water.
"My mother was a mage," she said. "Old school. She could shape metal, stone, sometimes even living things. But she was always afraid—always looking over her shoulder. There were people who wanted what she knew, or who thought she was dangerous just for existing."
She paused, picking at the seam of her glove. "She taught me that power is never just a blessing. It's a target. The world hates things it can't explain."
He nodded, thinking of the orphanage, of the way people looked at him after the test.
"She kept us moving," Lena said. "Different towns, different names. Sometimes she'd get work fixing farming tools, or healing animals, but we never stayed long. If anyone asked about my father, she'd just say he was 'gone to war' and leave it at that."
Kai waited, sensing there was more, but Lena shook her head, closing the door.
"She died a while back," Lena finished, voice flat. "After that, I figured I'd just keep running. But it gets old."
He didn't know what to say, so he just sat, shoulder to shoulder with her, letting the silence fill up with things that didn't need to be spoken.
When the cold grew sharp, they built a small fire, careful to keep it low and shielded by rocks. They ate in silence, the warmth a comfort against the night.
As the stars came out, Lena surprised him by pointing out constellations—The Bastion, The Cinder Queen, The Archer's Path. Her voice was gentle, almost like Maya's when she used to read bedtime stories to the orphans.
Kai watched her, saw the way the firelight softened the lines of her face. He wondered what it had cost her to be alone all those years, to carry that much knowledge with no one to share it with.
When Lena finally looked back, her expression was softer than he'd ever seen it.
"You'll be a good Sage," she said. "Just don't lose yourself in your pursuit of magic. Promise?"
He nodded, meaning it. "Promise."
They banked the fire and lay side by side, the stars wheeling overhead. Kai drifted toward sleep, the echoes of Lena's story following him into his dreams.
He still didn't know everything about her. But he trusted her.