"Are you insane? Leave you two here?" Baris's protest came out fast and offended. "A knight doesn't run from a fight."
"We have no weapons," Corren said. "Wolves hunt in packs because splitting their attention breaks them. Use the chant. The corrected one. Now."
"I forgot it," Baris admitted, wide-eyed.
"Make my limbs lighter. Let me run like the wind."
Baris repeated it, and the words took hold, and he vanished from the clearing in a blur fast enough to leave three of the wolves baffled mid-lunge, tearing off after him into the dark while the remaining four turned their attention toward the fire and the two people still standing beside it.
Corren didn't hesitate. He drew breath, felt the familiar shape of the fire chant settle into his mouth, and adjusted it on the fly the way he'd learned to adjust every chant he ever touched. "Fiery breath, unleash a wall of blazing fire, and scorch all who dare to cross it."
Flame roared out of him in a sheet wide enough to separate the two of them from every remaining wolf, and one animal, bolder or hungrier than the rest, tried to leap the barrier anyway and retreated instead with a scorched flank and a yelp that faded fast into the trees.
The hollow, drained feeling sank into Corren's chest again the moment the flames died down, familiar now, manageable, a debt he'd learned the shape of well enough to know he could still stand upright while paying it. He filed the sensation away exactly where he'd filed it before: the well again. Smaller draw this time. Manageable.
Baris limped back into the clearing nearly half an hour later, dragging one leg badly behind him, bruised and scratched and bitten in a dozen places, grinning through all of it like a boy who had just survived the best night of his life.
"Corren, your chant worked," he crowed, breathless with an excitement that seemed to override the visible pain he was in. "Worked too well, actually. I couldn't slow myself down. Ran straight into a tree. Broke my leg. But I felt like I was flying."
He tried to insist Wrenna handle the healing, some instinct toward propriety that Corren didn't have the patience for. "Nice try," Corren said, twisting one of Baris's arms with practiced ease until the larger boy folded to the ground with a surprised grunt, "but I've got a better idea." He laid his hands over the break and let the corrected chant flow out of him, merging his own version of the Duskveil healing words with the shape of what he'd learned watching Wrenna work. "With hands as vessels, imbued with healing grace, I bring solace and peace to each weary embrace. A healing presence, my touch, a sacred deed, as waters cascade, a soothing balm they proceed."
Baris's leg, along with the worst of his scrapes and bites, mended itself whole under the golden light of Corren's hands, leaving him staring down at unmarked skin with something like awe.
"You're not even Duskveil," he said slowly, sitting up and turning his leg experimentally. "How does that even work? Isn't that supposed to be blood magic or something?"
Corren shrugged, filing away the fatigue gathering behind his own eyes for later. "Language doesn't check your blood before it decides to work," he said. "Maybe it should. Might explain a few things about this whole system that nobody's bothered to ask yet."
He didn't have an answer beyond that, not yet, and the way Wrenna's eyes lingered on him a beat too long, watching the exchange from across the fire, suggested she'd filed the question away just as carefully as he had.
The Fyre Academy announced itself long before they reached its gates: towers rising pale against the morning sky, banners snapping in a wind that smelled faintly of cut grass and distant woodsmoke, and a crowd of new students milling in clusters near the entrance, all of them wearing the same mixture of thrill and terror that Corren suspected marked every first day of every school in every world that had ever bothered to invent one.
"Behold," Baris bellowed at full volume the second they crossed the threshold, "the greatest knight this academy has ever seen!"
Corren clamped a hand over his mouth before the sentence could fully land, while Wrenna hauled him bodily away from the stares they'd already attracted. They passed through the gates properly this time, quieter, and were guided by academy staff toward an admissions office where a stack of tedious forms awaited them, and then toward a supply room where they were fitted for uniforms: a red jacket trimmed in black, a golden phoenix badge stitched over the left breast, white shirts, red ties, black trousers, polished boots.
They followed the crowd into a great hall packed with hundreds of new arrivals, found three seats together near the front, and waited, the noise of the room pressing warm and loud around them.
"Look at this crowd," Wrenna murmured, glancing around at the sea of unfamiliar faces. "Do you think we actually have a chance at becoming knights, or is that only for the best of the best?"
"We're the best of the best," Baris said, with the total, unearned confidence Corren was starting to suspect was simply how Baris approached every uncertain moment in his life.
Corren squeezed Wrenna's arm gently, and she offered him a small, grateful smile in return, the kind that seemed to carry more relief in it than the moment strictly called for, as though she needed the reassurance more than she wanted to admit. Baris scowled faintly at the exchange before catching himself. "I helped too," he muttered, mostly to no one.
The room's chatter died all at once as a man stepped up to the podium at the front of the hall, radiating the specific, practiced authority of someone who had given this exact speech many times before and still meant every word of it.