"You didn't have to." Wrenna's hands were shaking now, and Corren realized, watching her, that the anger pouring out of her had almost nothing to do with Celeste at all. "Some people just walk into a room and everyone around them starts bleeding for it, and it isn't your fault, exactly, but it isn't nothing either."
"Wrenna." Corren said her name quietly this time, and the steadiness underneath it finally reached past the wall of her own grief. "This isn't like you."
She turned on him next, and for a moment he thought she might actually shout, but what came out instead was smaller, more exposed than anger had any right to sound. "I keep thinking that if I'd been faster, if I'd said something the second Baris told me how he felt instead of staying quiet and letting him hope, maybe he never goes looking for a fight to prove something to himself. I keep thinking everything that happens around us happens because I didn't do the one small, honest thing that might have stopped it before it started." Her voice cracked on the last word, and she sat back down hard, hands pressed over her own face, shoulders shaking with a sob she'd clearly been holding back since the moment she'd first seen Baris carried in.
Celeste crossed the room slowly and knelt beside her, tentative, as though unsure whether the gesture would be welcomed or thrown back at her. "It isn't your fault either," she said, quiet now, all the earlier sharpness gone out of her voice. "None of this belongs entirely to either of us. I think it belongs mostly to Torvent, and to whatever he did to Baris that made him pick up a sword he had no real chance of winning with."
Wrenna didn't answer, but she didn't pull away either, and the two of them sat together at Baris's bedside in a silence that wasn't quite peace but wasn't quite war anymore either, something more honest than either, grief finding a shape it could share even if it couldn't yet be comforted.
Corren watched from the doorway, turning over what Celeste had just said with the same careful attention he gave every half-finished puzzle. Torvent had won a sanctioned duel using nothing but a sword and, if Baris's broken confession was to be believed, some manipulation of feeling that no one had ever seen him chant for. You can't cast magic spells without a chant. He'd heard that stated as absolute fact by three separate people in the last two months, and every one of those people had also, in the same breath, admitted that Torvent had been getting away with exactly that for years. Something about the shape of that contradiction sat wrong in his chest, the specific unease of a scholar noticing an anomaly nobody else in the room seemed willing to name out loud.
"He didn't chant," Corren said aloud, mostly to himself. "Whatever he did to Baris. Whatever he's been doing to people for years, according to the rumors. No chant."
Wrenna looked up, eyes red. "Everyone knows that. No one knows how."
"I intend to find out," Corren said, and the quiet certainty in it made both women look at him a moment longer than the sentence alone would have warranted.
He requested the exhibition duel the very next morning, formally, through the proper channels, before Torvent's own reputation for delay could catch up with him. Word came back within the day: Torvent had accepted eagerly, delighted, by every account, at the prospect of humiliating the boy who'd apparently decided his friend's crippling deserved a personal sequel. The match was set for one month out, under the Academy's exhibition rules: consensual, witnessed by a blademaster, and, unlike ordinary sparring, permitting lethal force and any spell that wasn't drawn from the destruction school.
That same night, Corren slipped out through the dormitory window under cover of dark, the same well-worn path he'd walked a dozen times already that semester, and knocked on Master Doss's door.
Doss opened it in the middle of his own private drills, shirtless, sweat-damp, and looked down at Corren with an expression that had, over the past month, softened from irritation into something closer to reluctant investment. "Let me guess," he said. "You need something from me again."
"I need everything you've got," Corren said. "A month from now, I'm fighting Torvent of Clan Magnus. Exhibition rules. He's never lost, not once, not even against you."
Something flickered across the old blademaster's face, gone almost as fast as it arrived. "He's never lost because no one's ever made him work for it long enough to find his limits," Doss said. "WingBat won't be enough against him. He'll read every opening you give him before you've finished making it." He turned and walked toward the rooftop stairs without waiting to see if Corren would follow, already thinking three steps ahead the way he always did once a problem genuinely interested him. "Forget everything I taught you about fighting fast. I'm going to teach you how to fight slow."
The month that followed left its own kind of mark on Corren's body, one that had nothing to do with mana and everything to do with the ordinary, honest ache of a human frame pushed further than it wanted to go. Doss called it the Patience Form, and the name undersold, badly, exactly how much it demanded: tight, economical circles instead of aggressive lunges, every motion built around redirecting an opponent's force rather than meeting it head on, absorbing violence instead of answering it, holding a defensive shape for minutes at a stretch that felt, in the moment, like hours.
"It has almost no offense of its own," Doss told him, more than once, correcting the angle of Corren's wrist for what felt like the hundredth time under a sky gone from black to grey to the first pale hint of dawn. "That's not a flaw. That's the whole design. You're not trying to win a fight with this. You're trying to survive one long enough to learn its shape, and then you abandon the form entirely the instant you've learned enough to strike."