"Is he dead?"
Cael was already kneeling. Two fingers at Havier's neck.
"Unconscious. Breathing."
Arthur looked down at him.
The lower half of Havier's uniform was torn where the shadow hit. The skin beneath was dark. Deep bruising that had split at the center and was still spreading outward at the edges.
He had done that.
With something he just invented.
He filed that away somewhere he could think about later when his arm worked again.
"He needs treatment," Cael said.
"Can you cover it?" Arthur flexed the fingers of his dead arm. Nothing came back. "My situation with the Patriarch isn't something I need to add to right now."
Cael looked at him. "What happens when he wakes up."
Arthur glanced at Havier on the stones.
'Simple.' Vexis drifted down to his right, voice stripped of its usual performance. 'He has no family name backing him. No connections worth anything. Now that he understands the scope of what this body can do he will stay quiet.'
You want me to threaten him.
'I want you to remind him of reality. There is a difference.'
Arthur breathed out through his nose.
I can't believe that's actually the move.
"We make clear what he's dealing with," Arthur said. "He felt it. He'll understand."
Cael nodded once. He lifted Havier from the ground in one motion, arm still bleeding dark into his sleeve, face carrying nothing about it.
"The Vak investigation has escalated," Cael said. "The Vernon family is now under review as well."
Arthur went still.
"Not just Vak. The whole family."
"Yes."
He thought about the banquet. Both families. The gathering already planned.
"That still happens?"
"Probably." Cael adjusted Havier's weight. "Vernon family is a founding pillar of Vas Mercenary. The influence ceiling is too high for a council investigation to touch quickly."
Arthur said nothing.
Cael looked at him for a moment. Then the relic stone hissed and the intersection was empty.
Roz climbed back onto Arthur's shoulder without comment.
"Good work today brat." His voice was flat. Not warm exactly. Just present. "Your understanding of this system is strange. But it is working."
"Strange how."
"Most mages spend years learning what already exists." Roz fixed his bow tie with one hoof. "You keep trying to make things that don't."
Arthur started walking.
"You really believed me," Arthur said. "The other world story."
"Of course I did."
"Just like that."
Roz looked at him sideways. "You absolute idiot. When a bellus bonds it isn't just a mark on the wrist. I bond your emotional signals. I know when you're lying." A pause. "You weren't."
Arthur didn't say anything to that.
'So you really are from somewhere else.' Vexis drifted close. His voice had the specific quiet it got when he was working something out and hadn't finished. 'I assumed it was something you said to get this small creature's attention.'
Arthur smiled. Didn't answer.
"Let's go home," he said. "I'm tired."
——
The estate was the way it always was.
Big and empty and full of people who didn't talk to each other.
According to everything sitting in Vexis's memory the Lestilaut family had never eaten a meal together in any way that meant something. Siblings existed in separate wings. The Patriarch moved through the house like weather. You knew he had passed through a room because the air in it felt different after.
He opened his room and fell face-first onto the bed without taking his shoes off.
His arm was still half numb. His side ached where the blade had caught him. His sternum felt like someone had scooped something out of it and hadn't put anything back.
He lay there and let the ceiling be a ceiling.
He almost laughed.
I came into this world an extra bully with two weeks to live. And I just survived my own death flag.
Can I go home now?
He already knew the answer.
He closed his eyes.
"Goodnight Vexis."
Above him somewhere Vexis said nothing.
"Goodnight Roz. Thank you for today."
"Hmm." Roz's voice came from the armrest. That was all.
Arthur was asleep before he finished the exhale.
Morning came fast.
Warm on his face. The early kind, low and flat, coming through the gap in the curtains at an angle.
He lay there for a second and felt nothing specific.
No countdown running in his head. No date sitting behind his eyes.
For the first time since the cafeteria floor he woke up and didn't immediately calculate how many days he had left.
He noticed that. Sat with it.
Decided it was fine.
Vexis was doing something near the window. Testing the limits of his spirit form. Pushing his hand through the wall and pulling it back. Pushing it through again.
Roz was fixing his bow tie.
Arthur watched them both for a moment.
Then he got up.
The walk to the academy was twenty minutes on foot and every single one of them was punishment.
He used to have a car. Nothing impressive. A secondhand thing that made a sound on left turns that he had been meaning to get looked at for two years. But it got him from one place to another without his legs being involved and he had not properly appreciated that until now.
Vexis had a carriage.
Vexis was currently Class F.
The walking club, Arthur thought. Incredible.
He passed the outer road, the long stretch before the academy came into view, Roz on his shoulder and Vexis drifting somewhere behind him and the morning going about its business like it had no idea.
The alley came up on his right.
The narrow one. Stone walls on both sides. The same cold that lived at the base of walls in the morning.
He didn't look at it.
He had stopped counting. He had stopped watching every doorway. He had gone to sleep last night feeling something that was almost close to fine and woken up and kept feeling it and he was still feeling it right now as he walked past the alley mouth without breaking stride.
The hand came from the shadow of the wall.
Gloved. Fast. It caught his collar and yanked.
Roz went off his shoulder from the force of it and Arthur's feet left the ground for a second and then the wall was at his back and something was at his throat and everything happened in the space between one breath and the next.
The blade was already there.
He didn't see the face. Just the hood. Just the dark. Just Vexis appearing directly in front of him with an expression Arthur had never seen on him before, not fury, not entitlement, something stripped of all of that, raw and too late and completely useless.
'No.' Just that. Quiet enough that it barely carried. 'No no no—'
The blade moved.
The cold came first. Immediate and specific, a line across his neck, and then the warmth followed it and the warmth was worse because it didn't stop.
His legs made a decision without him.
The ground came up.
Concrete met his cheek and the world tilted sideways and stayed there. The morning light was still coming in at the end of the alley, indifferent, same angle as always.
His hand was in front of his face.
He looked at it.
Vexis was somewhere above him. Still saying something. The words weren't reaching anymore.
Roz's voice came from somewhere to his left. Sharp. Not unbothered. Actually sharp.
Arthur looked at the light at the end of the alley.
He thought: I forgot to keep counting.
His eyes closed.