"When do I know I've learned enough?"
"You'll know," Doss said, with the confidence of a man who had watched this exact realization dawn on a dozen students before this one. "It feels like relief. Like putting down something heavy you didn't realize you were carrying."
Corren trained until his arms shook simply lifting the practice sword, until his legs gave out under him more nights than they didn't, until the ache became so constant it stopped registering as pain and became simply the background hum of being alive during this particular month of his life. He filed every session away with the same rigor he'd once reserved for grading, cataloguing which circles felt natural and which still betrayed him under pressure, building, syllable by syllable, a physical grammar he intended to speak fluently enough to fool a man who had never once, in his entire dueling career, been made to work past the first five minutes of a fight.
There was a night, two weeks into it, when he finally understood what Doss meant about relief. Doss came at him in a sudden flurry meant to test whether exhaustion had eroded his form, six strikes in rapid succession from six different angles, and Corren's body answered before his mind had fully caught up to the shape of the attack: circle in, circle out, weight shifting off the heel a half-beat before it would have mattered, no single motion large enough to notice on its own, all of it together forming a kind of stillness that absorbed violence instead of resisting it. Doss stepped back afterward, chest heaving, and studied him for a long moment with an expression Corren hadn't yet learned to read. "There it is," the old blademaster said. "Now do that for forty minutes against someone who actually wants you dead." Corren didn't sleep much that night, replaying the sensation of his own body doing something correctly before he'd consciously told it to, the specific, disorienting thrill of skill finally outrunning conscious thought.
Between training and classes, he found time for one more thing that needed finishing. He tracked the senior down three days after their collision in the corridor, found him in the sword-training yard between drills, and offered the duel he'd promised without either of them bothering to raise their voices this time.
It went quickly, and cleanly, and without any of the fury that had provoked the challenge in the first place. Corren fought with a clear head, Kaldric watching as the required blademaster witness, and disarmed the senior within a handful of exchanges, more restraint in the final blow than the man's earlier arrogance had strictly deserved.
"No hard feelings?" Corren asked, offering a hand to help him up off the training-yard dirt.
The senior took it, some of the arrogance visibly deflated. "None," he admitted. "Should've watched where I was walking." He hesitated, then added, with something almost like respect, "Heard about your friend. Sorry. Hope Torvent gets what's coming to him."
Corren said nothing to that, only nodded once, and walked away with one loose thread finally tied off, small and unremarkable next to everything else pressing in around him, but tied off all the same.
He found the true breather he badly needed on a quiet evening two weeks before the exhibition, when Wrenna showed up at the infirmary with a basket of bread and cheese she'd bartered off a kitchen worker and simply sat down beside Baris's bed without any plan beyond company.
Baris was well enough by then to sit upright, color back in his face even if his left arm still hung wrapped and useless at his side, and the three of them ended up sharing the bread cross-legged on the infirmary floor, because none of them had the heart to point out that there were perfectly good chairs an arm's length away.
"I used to think," Baris said, tearing a piece of bread in half and passing it to Wrenna without being asked, "that getting hurt in a duel would feel heroic. Like something out of a story." He examined his own bandaged arm with a rueful, unhurried honesty that hadn't been there a week ago. "It mostly just hurts, and it's boring, and the food here is terrible."
"The food here is objectively fine," Wrenna said, mouth full of exactly that food, and Baris laughed hard enough that he had to press a hand to his ribs to steady himself.
Corren leaned back against the foot of the bed, letting the ordinary warmth of the moment settle over him without reaching for anything useful to say. No plot demanded his attention for once. No injury needed healing, no chant needed correcting, no duel loomed close enough to think about tonight. Somewhere outside the infirmary window, the Academy's evening bell rang the hour, distant and unhurried, and for a little while the three of them simply sat together in candlelight, eating bread that was, in fact, objectively fine, and let the quiet do the only work it needed to do.
"I'm glad you're both here," Baris said eventually, quieter than his usual register, looking at neither of them directly. "Whatever else happens. I'm glad it's the three of us."
Nobody answered that with words. Nobody needed to.
The Inferno Arena on the day of the exhibition held more people than Corren had ever seen gathered in one place in either of his lives, tiered stone benches packed shoulder to shoulder under a sky gone hard and bright, the air thick with the smell of roasted nuts from vendors working the crowd and the electric hum of a few thousand people who all believed, correctly or not, that they were about to witness something worth telling their grandchildren about.
The story circulating through the stands, Corren gathered from overheard fragments on his way to the staging area, had hardened into something close to romantic legend: the rookie challenging the favorite for a maiden's hand, never mind that no one had asked Celeste's opinion on the matter and never mind that she wasn't even present to watch. Boos rained down on him as he crossed to the center of the arena, good-natured in the way crowd cruelty toward an underdog often is, right up until it isn't.