It started over training.
Petra had been watching Zane in the training ring for years — not romantically, the watching was professional, the assessment of someone who understood physical capacity the way she understood everything, with precision — but she'd noticed, in the last year or so, that the assessment had acquired a quality it hadn't had before. Not professionalism. Something else she hadn't named.
Zane was not a natural athlete. He had the Navigator's specific gift for orientation, for knowing where things were in relation to each other, which made him technically competent in the ring — he never misjudged distance, never committed to a direction he couldn't sustain. But the actual movement had the quality of learned skill rather than native aptitude, the kind of body that had f
