One week, she'd said.
She used the week.
Not carefully — not in the holding-back, conserving sense. Fully, completely, with the intensity of someone who understands that time is a resource she cannot afford to waste. Every day had the compression of days that matter, every hour the weight of hours that are building something.
The training deepened. With Thessaly guiding and Aldric partnering and the Vane pack's earth as her constant context, she pushed every discipline further than the previous day. The earth-connection reached farther. The thread-reading became more reliable, less fragmentary, more conversational. And the pack-bond awareness — the most complex and the most profound — began to do something she hadn't expected.
It began to work both ways.
She had understood the ability
