In Greyhaven, Rowan's camp had a different sound, which was mostly no sound at all, and the sound of Walt counting very slowly, for other people. Walt refused, at the outset, to train her for Kieran. He trained her, he said, for the rematch, which was a different opponent: it was longer, it was watched, it was wanted by people with money and cameras riding on it, and it would try to make her hurry in ways Kieran personally never could. "Holt is honest," Walt said, surprising her. "He will come at you with everything he has, in a straight line, at full speed. That is not your danger. Your danger is the night itself. The walk out. The noise. The feeling that four hundred people paid for a show and you owe them a faster one. Every show in the world is a machine for making careful people careless. We are going to rehearse you refusing the machine."
So they rehearsed refusals. Walt had students stand at the edge of the mat and shout encouragement that sounded like instructions to hurry. He played crowd noise through the gym speakers at a volume she found faintly comic, then, on the third day, genuinely oppressive, which was the point at which it began to work on her breathing and the point at which they could finally train the breathing back down. He had her begin rounds from the worst positions he could devise, mounted, back taken, a lapel already fed deep, and the instruction was never to escape quickly. The instruction was to become uninteresting. "Be a locked house," he said. "Let him spend himself knocking. Houses do not get tired of standing." Ilya, on his twice weekly visits, sat in a folding chair that Walt kept for him without ever discussing it, and offered commentary so spare it was almost weather. Once, after a round in which Rowan had waited out a frantic passer for four full minutes and then taken his back in the single exhausted second he gave her, Ilya said, "You see. The river does the running. The bank does the deciding." On another occasion he said nothing at all for an entire session, and at the door, putting on his coat with the care of a man whose shoulder also had opinions, he remarked that she was ready in every way except the way that could not be trained, and that she should not worry about that way, because worry was an attempt to train it, and it resented the attempt.
Tess Gallagher tested her on a Thursday, at her own request, and she did it the way only a true friend can, which is to say without any protective kindness at all. Tess was thirty, a purple belt with a wrestler's base and a nurse's shift worker's stamina, and she knew Rowan's game the way you know the route of a walk you have taken a hundred times, which made her the most dangerous training partner in the building. She did not try to outrun the guard. She tried to provoke it. She faked, she feinted, she offered false openings engineered from long knowledge to look exactly like the real openings Rowan had built her finishes on, and twice in the first round she caught Rowan reaching a half second early for a gift that was not a gift, and punished it, kindly and completely.
Between rounds she sat with her back against the wall and her bottle in both hands and said, "There. That is what he will do in the second week, once Doyle has watched enough tape. Not the speed. The acting. He will learn to lie with his shoulders because you read shoulders. So what are you going to do about being read back?"
Rowan, breathing hard in a way she would not have been breathing if the question had not mattered, said, "Wait longer."
"Wait longer is not a plan. It is a hope wearing a plan's coat."
"It is a plan if what I am waiting for changes. First week, I wait for his weight. Now I wait for his second intention. The first thing he shows me is an advertisement. I do not buy from advertisements. I wait for the delivery."
Tess laughed and then, because she was Tess, immediately made her prove it, and the second round was a long, grinding, almost silent argument in which Rowan bought nothing at all for three minutes, refused two beautiful lies and one ugly one, and finally, when Tess committed to a pass with her whole and honest weight, took the sweep that had been standing patiently in the room the entire time like a piece of furniture. Afterwards Tess lay on the mat looking at the ceiling and said, to nobody in particular, that it was deeply unfair that patience could be trained like a muscle, and Walt, passing with a mop, said that everything could, and that was the tragedy and the consolation of the whole sport.