They didn't talk much on the way back from the gorge. Not because there was nothing to say, but because the wrong word might snap whatever thin, invisible thread had carried them through.
In the dormitory wing, the halls were quiet and stone-cool. They stowed the herb satchels with the quartermaster, signed the ledger, and walked out into the little cloister where ivy climbed a cracked column. Mira rested her hands on the rim of the empty fountain and stared at the sky. Kael checked the straps on his bracers as if they might decide to fail him in the next five minutes. Elira touched the pendant under her collarbone and felt nothing but its calm weight.
"What happened out there," Mira said at last, eyes still on the dusk, "wasn't standard support. It didn't come from me or from Kael."
Kael grunted. "Wasn't a spell at all. I felt the pressure even out behind me—like someone put a hand on the whole mess and leveled it." He glanced at Elira. "You said… you asked."
Elira nodded, the motion small. "I did. I said 'help me.' And something did."
They stood with that for a while, letting the words settle. The Sanctum's flags lifted once on a mild breeze and fell still again.
"It didn't feel like a stranger," Elira added, quietly. "It felt… close. Like a presence that knew exactly how I stand and breathe. Not something from the outside."
Mira's mouth twisted. "And Vaelis will call it 'favorable conditions' and tell us to hydrate."
"He'll do more than that," Kael said.
He did.
The briefing the next morning lasted three minutes. They gave the report: herbs secured, convoy intact, two skirmishes repelled. Elira mentioned, with care, that they'd observed a gray-cloaked man meeting Nakea at the second patch. She described his posture and his voice, the way he had stood very still and then not-still, the exact cut of his cloak where the fabric fell wrong over something hidden beneath.
Vaelis had been all composure until that moment. Then a single beat of stillness—eyes unfocused, mouth thinning, a breath not taken—before his face returned to stone.
"Good work," he said. "The rest is above your grade. There were no unusual incidents. Do you understand?" He didn't wait for an answer. "Dismissed."
They filed out. The door closed. The sound of it was too soft and too final.
In the corridor, Mira didn't curse. It might have pleased someone. She only said, "Well."
"Gray-cloak was him," Kael said, no flourish, just the fact of it laid on stone.
Elira didn't argue. The memory of that voice matched the shape of the man behind the desk too perfectly to be coincidence. Her stomach felt hollow, like she'd missed a step in the dark and was still waiting to land.
They cut through the east garden and found a bench under a pear tree whose fruit never quite ripened. Mira pulled her knees up and hugged them, chin on the top. "Two days ago Nakea told someone that Elira is 'a descendant of—' and then hid the rest. Yesterday Vaelis met her in secret. Today he tells us nothing happened." She lifted her head. "You don't have to be a scholar to draw a line."
Kael's eyes went to Elira. "What do you think?"
"I think," Elira said, tasting the words to make sure they fit, "that Nakea knows something about my family and Vaelis knows it too. And I think whatever it is, they both want me ignorant for different reasons." She pressed a thumb to the smooth curve of the pendant. "Nakea's face when she said my name wasn't cruel. It was… almost careful. Like she was stepping around something that might break."
"If she's stepping around it, it's sharp," Mira muttered.
Elira let out a slow breath. "When I was little in Rionne, people would stop in the lane with a basket and look at me the way people look at weather. Like they're wondering if they should bring in the washing." She hadn't meant to say that part. It came anyway. "I don't want to be weather."
Kael's mouth softened. "You're not."
Mira kicked his boot, gentle. "We know. The problem is getting the people who know more than we do to admit they know more than we do."
Elira looked out over the clipped grass. "We can't force Vaelis. If we push inside these walls, we'll be watched closer. He closed the lid on this before it finished opening."
"And the more he pushes it shut," Mira said, "the more I want to pry it up with my bare hands."
"We need a different lever," Kael said.
Silence held. Far down the path, a novice ran drills, wooden blade precise and earnest. A bell rang somewhere high, the sound thin as a silver thread.
"We could try to recreate it," Mira said suddenly. "Whatever steadied you. Not with data. With… whatever you felt. If it wasn't outside help, if it was something tied to you, then maybe you can invite it again. Properly."
Elira's pulse picked up. "Last night, after we set camp—the wind around my hand…" She closed her eyes, trying to find the right words. "It didn't swirl. It lined up. Like it had been waiting to be asked instead of told."
Kael nodded once. "You did ask."
They took an empty practice space after sundown—a square with high walls and a roof open to the stars. No wards humming, no measuring devices, no officers. Just stone, sky, and breath.
"Low output," Mira said. "No names. No show. We're not trying to make anything happen. We're making room."
Elira stood in the center and let her shoulders drop, letting the hard parts of the day slide off the edges of her bones. She lifted her hand, palm up. A thin curl of air gathered there, shy as smoke.
"Don't shape it," Mira warned. "Let it decide."
Elira smiled without meaning to. "All right."
A minute passed. Two. The air kept its polite distance.
She thought of the gorge—the screaming sky, the split-second where everything might have collapsed—and of the plain truth she had spoken then. Help me.
Not a command. A knock.
"Help me," she whispered now, the words so small the wind had to lean in to hear them.
Warmth touched the pendant. It was not heat. It was recognition. The wind at her palm paused, considered, and lay down, the way a hound might lay its head on a familiar knee.
Mira's breath caught. "I saw that."
Kael folded his arms. "And I felt it."
Elira didn't open her eyes. She didn't want the moment to think it was being observed. She stood very still with her hand open and the world just… agreeing to meet her there.
The warmth faded. The wind loosened and drifted apart like polite guests making room for other polite guests to pass. Elira lowered her hand.
"No shape," Mira said, quietly. "But something was listening."
"And choosing," Kael added.
Elira looked at the stars. "It's enough to know I'm not lying to myself."
They walked back through the courtyard with their boots whispering over grit. Between the pillars, Elira thought she saw a slice of gray cloak. It vanished when she looked twice. Perhaps it had never been there. Perhaps someone was still deciding what to do with the fact that he had been seen.
"Now what?" Mira asked. "If we stay, he keeps his hand on our mouths. If we run, we look guilty."
"We don't run," Kael said. "We walk. With a reason."
Elira nodded. The decision had been building in her since the briefing door shut. "We take leave. Real leave. Not a day in the city. Two weeks. 'Field conditioning,' 'personal recuperation,' whatever words let us step outside these walls without a leash."
Mira's eyes lit with a feral kind of joy. "And once we're off the ledgers we can ask questions no one will answer here." She hopped a little on the balls of her feet, then sobered. "We keep our mouths shut about last night. We don't say the word Nakea said. We don't say the word Vaelis can't bring himself to say."
Kael reached for the simple things first, as always. "Pack only what you can carry at a run. Leave the glitter. Take coin. Travel light."
Elira laughed, soft and surprised, because planning felt good. "At dawn we file the request."
"Before dawn," Mira said. "Paperwork looks more honest when it yawns."
They did. The clerk at the staffing desk blinked at the three requests and stamped them without comment. "Two weeks," he said, as if they had asked for the weather to hold. "Return the day the bell rings twice after midmorning. Try not to get married or killed."
"We'll do our best," Mira said gravely.
By dusk their approvals came back rolled tight in blue ribbon. "Field conditioning and personal recuperation," the letter read. Permission to leave the mountain in pairs or alone with route notices to be filed and canceled upon return. No one stopped them in the corridor. No one asked them into a room "just for a moment."
They ate together in the mess one last time: bread, stew, a bowl of sour cherries that Mira stole and split three ways. No toasts. No speeches. Afterward, Mira disappeared with a satchel of maps, and Kael went to the yard to cut precise shapes into the dark until the torches burned down.
Elira packed in silence. Shirt, spare shirt. Trousers. A cloak that shed rain and attention. A whetstone, a water skin, a length of waxed cord. She laid her sword on the blanket last and looked at it until the lines of it became familiar again instead of a story about what she wished she was.
She didn't light the lamp. Moonlight was enough. It laid a pale stripe across the floor and turned the edge of her blade to milk.
She untied the pendant and set it in her palm. "I don't know who you are," she said, because pretending otherwise would be a kind of disrespect. "But I'm grateful."
The stone stayed cool. A breeze slid through the window and moved her hair against her cheek, gentle as a mother's hand in a childhood she barely remembered.
Elira smiled into the dark. "We're leaving tomorrow," she told the empty room and whatever wasn't empty about it. "We're going to look where we're not supposed to look, and ask what we're not supposed to ask."
She closed her fingers around the pendant. For an instant—no more—the coolness warmed under her hand as if to say, I heard.
Across the courtyard, a shutter lifted and fell. Somewhere up the mountain, a door opened and closed once without footsteps to accompany it. Perhaps a man stood in a small, unlit room and measured the distance between what he could still control and what had already slid beyond his fingers.
Elira lay down and set the pendant where her pulse could find it. She didn't pray. She didn't bargain. She made a simple promise inside herself: to keep walking as far as the truth would let her, and then a step further.
Outside, the banners rose and fell as if practicing for morning. Inside, the air stood very still and very kind.
When sleep came, it was the clean kind that arrives after a decision. She did not dream—or if she did, the dream folded itself small and waited.