The audience with Osric, Celeste's father, took place the next morning in a solar washed gold by stained glass, and it went badly from the very first sentence.
Celeste couldn't keep the joy out of her voice even trying, words tumbling ahead of themselves. "Father, look, I have wings, I can wield Enochian, the covenant answered me, I don't have to marry Torvent anymore, the whole reason for the alliance is gone!"
Osric did not stand from his chair. He was a heavyset man with a kind, tired face that had clearly spent decades practicing the specific art of delivering bad news gently, and every line of that face was working against him now. "Celeste," he said, and the gentleness in his voice made the words that followed land worse rather than better, "I am so proud of you. I never thought I'd live to see it. But the wedding is not about your magic anymore. Not really. It was never entirely about that."
"What do you mean it was never entirely about that?" Celeste's voice cracked on the question, hope curdling fast into something closer to betrayal.
"The alliance with Clan Magnus was set three weeks ago, in writing, before you ever came to me about the chant." Osric's hands, folded in his lap, tightened visibly. "Magnus wanted the bloodline regardless of the magic. A binding contract, a dowry already exchanged, terms my own father agreed to a generation before either of us was born. Your gift changes what you bring to that marriage. It does not change that the marriage is happening, three days after the upcoming exhibition, exactly as planned."
Celeste's composure, held together by sheer will through everything else that day, finally broke. She turned and ran, and Corren went after her, following the sound of her footsteps through corridors too grand to hold that particular kind of grief comfortably, catching up to her in a small courtyard where she'd stopped, finally, against the cool marble base of a statue, tears running freely down a face she no longer bothered trying to compose.
"Celeste," he said, coming to stand near her, careful not to crowd whatever space grief needed. "I'm sorry."
"You did everything you promised." Her voice had steadied into something raw but controlled, wiped clean of the crack from a minute ago, a girl practicing the specific discipline of dignity in the exact moment it hurt most to have any. "You gave me back something my whole clan lost three generations ago. That was never going to be enough to buy back my own life. I think I knew that before I asked you. I think I asked anyway because hoping felt better than not hoping, even for a day."
"That's not nothing," Corren said quietly. "Hope isn't nothing just because it didn't get you everything you wanted."
She looked up at him, tears still tracking down a face that managed, even now, to hold itself with a kind of formal grace that had nothing performative left in it. "Thank you for everything, Corren. Truly. You gave me something to hold onto, even if it was only for a moment." She stepped closer, and before he could decide how to respond, she kissed him gently on the cheek, a farewell dressed up as gratitude, or gratitude dressed up as a farewell, he genuinely couldn't tell which and suspected she couldn't either.
Osric found them a short while later in the courtyard, carrying a heavy pouch that clinked with the promise of glass vials inside it. He held it out to Corren with the remorse of a man who knew exactly how little his generosity was worth measured against what his daughter had just lost. "This is for you," he said. "Celeste asked me to see it packed properly. Aloewater, honeywater, moonwater, ginseng root, lunar moss. The rest of what you'll need is close to impossible to find, even for a man with my contacts. But I wish you luck finding it regardless."
Corren accepted the pouch, murmured his thanks, and stowed it away into the small pocket of folded space he'd learned to carry with him everywhere now, a habit that had already saved him from more inconveniences than he could count. He bid Osric farewell and walked back toward the Academy alone, the ache of Celeste's unresolved grief sitting heavier in his chest than he expected a stranger's misfortune to sit, made worse by the specific, useless guilt of a man who had solved exactly the wrong half of somebody's problem.
He felt the wrongness in the air the moment he crossed back through the Academy gates: too few voices in the courtyard, an unnatural quiet holding its breath around bad news it hadn't finished absorbing yet. Master Doss found him before he'd made it halfway to the dormitory, expression carved from something Corren had never once seen on the old blademaster's face in all their late-night training sessions.
"Corren." Doss never used his name without Trainee attached to it, not once, in weeks of secret rooftop lessons. That alone told Corren more than the words that followed. "Bad news. Your friend Baris is badly hurt."
He ran the rest of the way. The infirmary smelled of antiseptic herbs and candle wax, and the sight waiting for him inside stopped his breath entirely: Baris on a narrow bed, wrapped in bandages from collar to wrist, his broad, familiar face twisted around pain he was clearly fighting not to show. Three mages worked over him in shifts, hands lit gold, expressions drawn tight with the specific tension of healers who weren't yet certain their work would hold.
Wrenna sat at the foot of the bed, and the look she turned on Corren when she noticed him carried none of her usual softness. "Where were you?" The question came out sharp enough to draw blood, tears already tracking down her face even as her voice stayed hard.
"What happened?" Corren asked, coming closer, his own chest gone tight and cold.