Frost arrived at the north yard on day seven with his practice log tucked under one arm and his focus already narrowing toward the drills. He'd held the ice shard steady for eleven seconds on day four. Today he wanted twelve. He set his log on the stone bench and rolled his shoulders, calling the cold into his palms the way he'd done every morning since he started. The air sharpened around his hands. Then he saw her walking toward the supply shed near the yard's edge. Hiveria the Rimebuilder stopped twenty paces away and set something down on the cobblestones. A small winged creature with iridescent pink wings sat perched on a delicate ice formation she'd shaped. The creature groomed its paws while Hiveria adjusted the base. Frost's breath caught. She was working right there. Right where she could see him. He turned back to his drill and forced the cold through his fingers, watching the shard take shape in his palm. It trembled. He steadied his breathing and held it. The shard stayed. Eleven seconds. Twelve. Thirteen. He didn't look up. He built it clean, built it solid, and when it finally dissolved he wrote the number in his log without checking if she'd noticed. She was still there when he glanced up, crouched beside her work, and he realized he'd forgotten to care whether she was watching. He shaped another shard. This one came faster. The edges held cleaner than before. Behind his practice area stood the remains of yesterday's work, a tower of linked ice rings he'd built to test stability under vertical load. It leaned slightly, imperfect, but it hadn't collapsed. Hiveria rose from her work and walked past it on her way to the shed. She paused. Her hand reached out and touched one of the rings. She tapped it twice, testing the surface, then continued walking. Frost's chest tightened. Not because she'd noticed. Because he'd built something solid enough that she'd stopped to check if it was real. He opened his log and wrote the time, the count, and then something new. The shard held because I understood the structure. Not because I wanted her to see it. He stared at the words. They looked different from everything else on the page. The winged creature chirped from its perch and Hiveria glanced back toward the yard. Frost was already shaping the next drill. His hands were steady. The magic was his.