Three days after the duel, her ribs had gone from screaming to complaining, which was the closest thing to good news her body had offered her all week.
The story of the duel had spread across the academy in the meantime the way stories always spread at Ashgrove, badly, three different versions going around by the second morning, most of them making Dorian sound worse than he actually was and Seren sound sharper than her ribs currently allowed.
She let it run.
Killing a rumor cost more than it was worth, and a rumor that made her look dangerous was doing work she didn’t need to do herself.
The ledger-keeping class had grown more careful around her since Leandro’s question.
Fewer people offered wrong answers before she did.
She caught someone—she didn’t see who—watching her before they spoke, waiting to see if she’d answer first.
She put it down as useful and moved on.
The corridor between the ledger hall and the east stair was empty at that hour, the kind of gap that belonged to the ten minutes between one class ending and the next one starting.
Most students used it to eat, or gossip, or avoid whichever instructor had assigned the most homework that week.
Seren used it to get from one place to another without an audience.
Mykel Grey was leaning against the wall like he’d been there since morning, plain coat, hands loose at his sides, in no apparent hurry to be anywhere else.
No book, no papers, nothing that explained what a general had to do in a student corridor between periods.
He wasn’t waiting for anyone else.
She didn’t need to ask to know that.
“How’s the arm healing?” She hadn’t heard him approach and didn’t let that show.
She made herself go motionless, made herself breathe even.
“Fine.” “Fine meaning healed, or fine meaning you’d say that regardless.” “Does the distinction change anything you’re planning to do about it?” His mouth moved—just the corner, just barely, like the expression cost him something and he wasn’t sure it was worth paying.
“No.” Her hand went to the line on her forearm before she decided to let it, fingers finding the ridge of it through her sleeve.
She caught the motion a half-second after she’d already made it and stopped.
Her fingers curled back against her palm.
His face didn’t change.
She watched him the way she watched everyone, waiting for the tell that never came.
He reached into his coat and took out a small glass jar, plain, unlabeled, and held it out.
She looked at it before she looked at him.
“Bloodroot salve,” he said.
“The old kind, not what they hand out at the infirmary.
Closes clean.” He didn’t move closer to put it in her hand.
He waited for her to take the last step herself.
“Would be a shame if that scarred.” “You carry healing salve in your coat.” “I carry a number of things in this coat.” He didn’t say more, and the way he said it made clear he wasn’t going to, not today, maybe not ever.
She took it.
The glass was warm from his coat, warm enough to reach through her fingers, through the calluses on her palm.
Her hands had gone cold before she caught it.
He was already turning before she’d worked out what to say to that, and gone down the east stair before she’d decided whether thanking him was the right amount of currency to spend on a man like him.
She stood there, the jar small and warm in her palm.
She let herself do the one thing she never let herself do in front of anyone else, nothing.
No plan, no calculation, no next move already lining up behind it.
Her chest went hollow, not empty—hollow like something had been there and left before she could name it.
She’d read Dorian’s tell in thirty seconds.
She’d read Leandro’s whole test before he’d finished setting it.
Whatever this was, it didn’t behave like the rest of the room.
It didn’t want anything she could name, didn’t posture, didn’t wait around to be thanked.
It gave her something and left, the way a person left food for an animal they didn’t expect to come close enough to feed by hand.
Then a name surfaced, the way names did when she wasn’t guarding the door they lived behind.
Mykel Grey, young general, killed leading a stand in the Briarwood war.
She remembered the report crossing her desk during the years she wore the crown, one line in a column of the dead that week, filed and mourned by the ministry and no one else.
She hadn’t known him then.
A name on a casualty list didn’t get more than a passing glance from a queen with three ongoing crises and a mounting count of people she actually knew to grieve first.
She knew him now.
The report hadn’t included a face.
It hadn’t included the particular way he stood in an empty corridor like the waiting cost him nothing, or a jar of bloodroot salve pressed into her hand because a scar would be a shame.
It had included a name, a date, and a cause, and she’d turned the page without reading it twice.
She remembered the weight of that page, the thin paper of ministry reports, the way they’d stack on her desk until she couldn’t see the wood beneath them.
Whatever she owed him, she intended to work out before Briarwood got the chance to collect.
She closed her fingers around the jar.
The warmth was fading now, but she could still feel it.
She tucked it into her pocket and went to find Felize, who was waiting outside the ledger hall exactly where she’d left her, arms crossed, watching the empty corridor with open curiosity.
“Well,” Felize said.
“That took longer than checking a bandage.” “It wasn’t about the bandage.” “Obviously.” Felize’s eyes dropped to where the jar sat in Seren’s pocket, then back up, delighted.
“Bloodroot salve.
That’s not cheap, and it’s definitely not something a general hands to a student he doesn’t have an opinion about.” “He has an opinion about the injury.
That’s not the same thing.” “Sure.” Felize didn’t believe a word of it and made no effort to hide that either.
“Whatever you say.
Come on, we’re going to be late, and I’m not explaining to anyone why you were standing in a corridor with Mykel Grey for ten minutes.” Seren didn’t correct the number.
It hadn’t been ten minutes.
It had run shorter than that in the moment, and, going by the position of the sun through the corridor windows, had almost certainly been more.
Her fingers brushed the jar in her pocket as she walked.