She kept walking.
The path from the form circle to the healer’s tent was short, but her ribs made it feel longer, each step pulling at the place where Dorian Cass’s last blow had landed.
Behind her the noise of the crowd hadn’t died, only turned into something else, voices trading versions of what they’d seen, someone repeating the moment she’d put a Cass heir on the ground like it needed repeating to be believed.
She didn’t look back to see who had lingered to watch.
She already knew.
The tent smelled of crushed yarrow and iron.
An attendant took her arm without asking and started winding linen around the cut, hands too fast, more afraid of the General’s daughter than of the wound itself.
Seren let her work.
The copper taste in her mouth had gone flat.
The line on her forearm had already dried dark against her skin, and the girl was wrapping over dried blood instead of cleaning it first, which meant this bandage would need redoing within the hour.
She didn’t correct her.
It cost nothing to let the girl feel useful.
“You beat a Cass heir bare-fisted and you’re letting someone butcher a bandage job.
Some priorities you have.” Seren looked up.
The girl at the tent flap had her uniform half-undone at the collar, sleeves pushed to the elbow like she’d come from somewhere she wasn’t meant to be.
Dark hair pulled back without much care.
An expression that assumed the room already belonged to her, the specific unbothered arrogance of someone who had never been told no and hadn’t yet learned to expect it.
Felize Arlington.
Something in Seren went cold and exact.
She knew this girl.
Knew the years waiting for her, a father backing the wrong side of a war that hadn’t started, a title stripped down to nothing, a hurried marriage to a family friend meant to save her and doing the opposite.
Knew what came after, a husband’s contempt worn openly, a son fathered on someone else, and Felize standing over a body with a blade in her hand before she turned them on herself.
Pity moved through her, quick and unwelcome, gone from her face before it could reach anyone watching.
She hadn’t expected it.
Felize hadn’t done anything yet to earn a share of Seren’s sympathy beyond wearing a face Seren remembered from an ending that hadn’t happened, not to this version of her, not yet.
“The attendant’s fine,” Seren said.
“I’ve had worse from my own doing.” Felize’s eyebrows went up, delight arriving faster than manners.
“Careless, then.
I like that better than the alternative.” “There wasn’t an alternative.
Dorian doesn’t fight clean.” “He doesn’t fight, period.
He postures and calls it fighting.” Felize dropped onto the edge of the cot without being invited, close enough that the attendant flinched and surrendered a foot of space rather than argue the point.
“I watched the whole thing from the east stand.
My father dragged me along—something about visibility, about being seen at academy events now that he’s back in the Alpha King’s favor.
I nearly left after the second round.
Then you put Dorian on the ground and decided the afternoon was worth staying for.” “Glad I could earn my keep.” “You didn’t earn anything.
You were just entertaining.” She said it the way someone corrects an error in the record, no cruelty in it.
Her eyes dropped to Seren’s forearm, to the raw line under the half-finished wrap.
“That needs actual pressure, not whatever she’s doing to it.” She reached over and took the linen out of the attendant’s hands before the girl could object, wound it herself in three quick turns, tighter and faster than what had come before.
Whatever the arrogance cost her, it hadn’t cost her competence.
Her hands didn’t hesitate.
“You’ve done this before,” Seren said.
“My brothers spar.
Someone has to patch them up after, since none of them will admit they need it.” Felize tied off the linen and leaned back to survey her work.
“There.
Better than you deserved, given you’re the one who went and got hit in the first place.” Seren held the difference between them a breath too long—the girl in front of her, pleased with her own joke, against the woman who had died with shears in her hand and no one left to grieve her.
“What,” Felize said, catching the look.
“Do I have blood on my face too?” “No.” Seren shook her head.
“You reminded me of someone.” “Good someone or bad someone?” “Undecided.” Felize snorted, apparently satisfied with an answer that told her nothing at all.
“Fair enough.
I’m undecided about you too.
General’s daughter nobody talks to, and then suddenly you’re putting a Cass heir on their back.
Where did that come from?” “Practice.” “Liar.
I’ll let you keep it anyway.” She stood, brushing dust off her uniform that hadn’t been there a moment before, more habit than necessity.
“I’m coming back tomorrow to check that bandage.
If it’s fallen apart because you let her near it again, I’m telling the entire academy the great General’s daughter can’t hold a wrap in place.” “You don’t need an excuse to threaten me.” “I don’t.
I just like having one ready.” She was already at the tent flap, one hand on the canvas, throwing the rest of the sentence over her shoulder without turning around.
“Tomorrow.
Don’t make it a wasted trip.” Then she was gone, dark hair and half-undone collar disappearing into a crowd busy working out what it had just watched.
Seren sat with the wrap Felize had tied, cleaner and tighter than anything the attendant had managed, and let the pity sit where it had landed.
It wasn’t mercy.
Mercy came with a decision attached, and Seren hadn’t made one.
She’d looked at a girl who didn’t yet know what was coming for her and minded it, more than she expected to.
She flexed her bound arm.
The wrap held.
Outside, the last of the crowd was thinning back toward the dormitories, the story of the duel already reshaping itself in a dozen mouths into something larger than what had actually happened on the form circle.
In her first life, the Arlington collapse had been years off yet, and Seren had never given the girl behind that name a second thought until it was far too late to matter.
She was thinking of her now.
That alone was new.