A hand landed on his shoulder.
His body reacted before his brain did.
He spun, weight dropping, arm coming up, and the tray in his hand sent food sliding sideways and nearly off the edge before he caught it with his other hand.
Cael stood behind him.
Both hands visible. That still face.
Arthur's heart was somewhere in his ears.
He stood there in the middle of the cafeteria noise and breathed and waited for his chest to stop doing what it was doing.
"Sorry," Cael said. He didn't sound surprised.
"Don't." Arthur exhaled. "Don't do that."
Cael looked at him for a second. Then his eyes moved sideways, just once, toward the room around them.
"Not here."
The Class A private room was small and neat and quiet in a way the main floor wasn't. A round table. Cushioned chairs. The kind of room that existed because some students were allowed to eat without being looked at.
Arthur had noticed it before but it was landing differently now.
Out in the main hall a scholarship student three tables from the door had a tray with two items on it. Plain bread and something pale in a bowl. Two tables closer to the center a student with a family crest on his collar had four dishes and a drink that came in actual glass. A group near the far wall was in the middle of a loud argument about something, trays pushed to the side, nobody watching their food because their food wasn't going anywhere.
The scholarship student was watching his bowl like it might.
Same cafeteria. Same meal time.
Arthur looked away.
Cael pressed a button on the wall and within a minute two women came through with trays. Clean dishes. Actual meat. A small pot of something that smelled like it had been made with some care. A second pot beside it with a lid, steam coming from the seam.
Roz was on the table before the tray finished landing.
"Havier has been dealt with," Cael said. He sat straight. Hands flat on the table. "I had him healed. Full assessment. No bruising. No tissue damage. Like nothing happened."
"Good." Arthur watched Roz investigate the tray with the energy of someone conducting a formal review.
"When he woke up he was compliant." Cael's voice stayed even. "Despite the measures taken."
Arthur looked at him.
The measures.
He'd said it the way you say something when you're choosing the word carefully. Not hiding it. Just filing the detail under a heading that didn't require elaboration.
Havier's mother ran a meat shop in the Shard district. That was in Vexis's memory. That was what Cael had used.
Arthur looked back at his food.
He thought about the scholarship student and his bowl.
He thought about what this world considered a reasonable move when you needed someone to stay quiet.
He didn't say anything.
"He maintained he had no knowledge of the tip," Cael said. "Consistently. Through all of it."
"I know." Arthur put his chopsticks down. "I can't pin it on him. It was an assumption. I pushed it too hard."
He said it flat. It was what it was.
He'd been so certain. The posture, the eyes, the compressed fury sitting behind them. It had all pointed in one direction and he'd followed the line all the way to the end and the end had been wrong.
Not completely wrong. Havier had come to that intersection with two blades and three years of intent. That part had been real.
But the tip. The anonymous council report. That had come from somewhere else.
Someone was still out there and he still didn't know who.
He filed it away under things to fix.
"There's something you need to know," Arthur said.
Cael waited.
"Someone is actively trying to kill me."
Cael tilted his head slightly. "Kill you."
"Yes." Arthur turned his head and pulled his collar to the side. The scar sat above the collarbone, raised and pale, jagged at the center where the skin had sealed wrong. "In fact. I got killed this morning."
Cael's eyes went to the scar.
Held there.
Then moved to Arthur's face.
"That wasn't there yesterday."
"No."
A beat of silence.
"The attack," Cael said. "Where."
"Alley off the main road. Between the estate and the academy." Arthur pulled his collar back. "Single attacker. Hooded. Wind acceleration type. In and out before I hit the ground."
Cael was quiet for a moment.
"Professional," he said.
"That's what I thought."
"Wind acceleration is not common. It requires a secondary aetheric channel running parallel to the main core. Most mages can't sustain it past thirty seconds without the channels crossing." He paused. "Someone paid for that. You don't develop that kind of magic casually."
Arthur looked at him.
Sometimes Cael said very little. And sometimes he said exactly the right thing in the fewest possible words and it landed like a door opening.
Paid. Not trained. Paid.
Which meant hired.
Which circled back to Vak and the Vernon family and an investigation that was getting louder by the day.
"How's the Vak situation," Arthur said.
"Moving fast." Cael lifted his cup. "The Allright council pulled three of his known associates in for questioning yesterday. Two of them have already given statements."
"About the operation."
"About the operation. The supply chain. Some of the student names involved." A pause. "Your name has not come up yet."
Yet.
Arthur absorbed that word and kept his face where it was.
"The Vernon family is applying pressure through the Mageia Order to slow the investigation down," Cael continued. "They have enough standing to delay it. Not enough to stop it entirely."
"How long do they buy themselves."
"A month. Maybe six weeks."
Arthur looked at the steam coming off the pot on the tray.
A month. The culmination tournament was inside that window. The Vak situation was inside that window. Whatever was left of the assassination attempt was inside that window.
Everything was inside the same window.
He exhaled through his nose.
"How did you survive." Cael said it like he'd been waiting to come back to it.
Arthur pointed at Roz.
Roz had a pork leg in both front hooves and was working through it with complete focus. The pork leg was twice the size of his head. He didn't look up.
"My bellus healed me," Arthur said.
Cael looked at Roz.
Then back at Arthur.
"A fresh summoned bellus."
"Yes."
Something moved through Cael's expression that didn't make it all the way to the surface. "That's not how it works. A newly bonded bellus has no developed magic. They arrive as a blank. You have to nurture them first, build the bond over months, sometimes years. Even then you're the one who teaches them whatever they learn." He looked at Roz again. "A fresh bond shouldn't be capable of healing magic. Certainly not enough to close a throat wound."
Arthur looked at Roz.
Roz pulled a clean strip of meat off the bone with the efficiency of something that had been eating for several centuries and knew exactly how. He turned the bone once. Checked it. Set it aside and reached for the next piece.
Arthur thought about the X mark on his wrist.
Not common. Not rare. Not mythic.
Ex grade. Retired. Not bonded in over two hundred years.
The ancient retired bellus who had more to him than he was showing.
Obviously.
Arthur picked his chopsticks back up.
He kept all of it to himself.
Roz looked up from the tray.
His red eyes found Arthur's across the table.
"What the hell are you looking at, brat."