Month six was ending.
Lysander could track it in the quality of the light more than the calendar — the mornings coming slower now, the training grounds still half-dark when the early risers arrived, the air carrying the specific sharpness of a season preparing to change. He'd been back at full capacity for three weeks. The arm had stopped being something he thought about. The ancient circulation practice had become part of the morning the same way draw practice had — not a task, just what the day started with.
He was running Flash Draw repetitions against the east wall when he noticed the second year.
The beastkin student was a second year.
Lysander noticed him first — wolf clan, the specific build and bearing of someone from the northern territories, moving through the training grounds toward the equipment storage with the unhurried confidence of an upper year who'd stopped finding the space impressive. He didn't pay him particular attention. The training grounds had enough traffic that cataloguing everyone who passed through was inefficient.
Taro noticed him second.
The change was small. Taro had been mid-set — gauntlets up, working through the third sequence of Storm Fist variations with the specific energy of someone who had been doing this long enough to make intensity look effortless. Then the second year crossed into his peripheral vision and something in Taro's movement changed. Not worse. Just different. A half-second of stillness between strikes that hadn't been there before.
The second year slowed.
He was looking at Taro the way people looked at things they recognized from a distance — that specific quality of someone reassessing what they thought they were seeing. His ears were up. His tail had stopped moving. He stood at the edge of the training grounds for a moment that stretched.
Then he continued toward the equipment storage without saying anything. Whatever he'd recognized he'd decided not to address it. The decision cost him something — visible in the set of his shoulders as he walked away.
Taro finished his set.
He stood for a moment with his back to where the second year had gone. His tail was very still. His ears were in the position they took when he was processing something that sat somewhere between his chest and his throat and hadn't decided what to do with itself yet.
Lysander didn't say anything. He ran his own draw practice — three repetitions of the second Flash Draw form, keeping his arm loose, not pushing the speed. The motion was familiar enough by now that he could maintain it without occupying his full attention.
He let the silence have its space.
After a while Taro came and sat on the low wall at the edge of the grounds. Not defeated — just sitting the way someone sat when they needed to be still for a minute. He watched the rest of the training grounds without really watching them.
Lysander finished his current set. Came and stood near the wall. Not next to Taro exactly — just in the general vicinity, the specific proximity of someone who was available without requiring anything.
"You know him," he said. Not a question.
Taro's ears moved. "Clan Grayfang. Northern branch." A pause. "We were at the same territory summit three years ago. Before." He stopped there.
Lysander waited.
"He recognized the name," Taro said. "Stormfang. Not me specifically." His voice was even. The specific evenness of someone who had decided on a tone before speaking. "The name carries weight in beastkin circles. Stormfang's chief son showing up at a human academy without clan backing —" He stopped again. His tail moved once. "It tells a story."
"What story."
Taro looked at him. The question had been direct — not invasive, just direct, the way Lysander asked everything. No performance of casualness around it. No pretending he hadn't noticed what he'd noticed.
"That something went wrong," Taro said. "With me. Or the clan. Or both."
He didn't elaborate. Lysander didn't push. The training grounds continued around them — other students running their own sessions, the ambient sound of technique work and controlled exertion that was the background noise of every morning.
"The name carries that much weight?" Lysander said.
Taro was quiet for a moment. His tail moved once. "My father is the chief."
A pause.
"Was," he said. "My father is still the chief. I'm the one who isn't what I was."
Lysander processed this. The weight of it — not just losing a position, losing the entire structure of what you were supposed to become, what you were supposed to mean to the people who were supposed to be yours. He knew something about that in a different register. The specific quality of having been built for something and then being separated from it without choosing the separation.
He didn't say any of that. There was nothing to say that Taro didn't already know.
"That second year," Lysander said. "He's going to tell people."
"Probably." Taro picked up a stone from the wall's edge, turned it over once, set it back down. "Beastkin community at Eclipse isn't large. Word moves." A pause. "It'll get back to Grayfang territory eventually. Might already have."
"Does that matter."
Taro thought about it. Genuinely — not performing consideration, actually working through whether it mattered.
"I don't know yet," he said.
Lysander nodded. Filed it. He understood the specific quality of not knowing yet — the situations where the impact hadn't finished arriving and you were still waiting to understand what you were going to feel about it.
They sat in the quiet of the training grounds for another few minutes. Not talking. Not needing to.
Eventually Taro stood. Rolled his shoulders. The specific motion of someone who had put something back where it was going to have to live for now.
"You didn't ask what happened," he said.
"You didn't offer," Lysander said.
Taro looked at him for a moment. Something in his expression that wasn't quite a smile and wasn't quite the other thing either — somewhere in the specific space between them that had been developing since chapter one, since the gate at Blackroot, since every morning of shared training and every meal and every moment of Taro waiting up without admitting he was waiting.
He bumped Lysander's shoulder with his fist once. Brief, light, no ceremony.
"Yeah," he said. "Okay."
He picked up his gauntlets and went back to work.
Lysander watched him for a moment.
"Taro."
He looked back.
"If anything comes of it — at the academy, or otherwise — let me know."
Not a reassurance. Not a speech. Just a statement of availability, delivered in the same tone he used for everything practical.
Taro looked at him for a second. His ears did something complicated.
"Yeah," he said. "Okay."
He went back to work.
Lysander went back to work too.
The morning continued. The second year didn't come back through.
The name Stormfang sat in Lysander's files alongside everything else he'd accumulated — the Divine Forging gaps, the thread in the gate, Elara's invitation — and he turned it over once before setting it aside.
Not yet. But he would return to it.
He always returned to things eventually.