The first week of classes settled into a rhythm that was both familiar and suffocating.
Oryth's schedule was packed. Lessons ran from early morning until late afternoon, and no two days were alike. The academy had built its timetable around rotation rather than routine—Theory of Magic one morning, foundational sciences the next, healing practicals the day after, combat in whatever slot was left open. By the end of the first week he'd sat through lectures on six different subjects, and no two days had followed the same pattern. The only constant was combat, which claimed more hours than any other subject in the curriculum and appeared in the schedule nearly every day.
The academy clearly believed in immersion—cramming as much knowledge into their students' heads as possible before the practical applications began in earnest. Every hour was accounted for, and the sheer volume of material was enough to make most first-years stumble under the weight of it.
For Oryth, it was a different kind of burden entirely. He'd expected the science curriculum to be primitive. He hadn't expected it to be so uneven. Some lectures were precise to a degree that sat oddly beside others—catalogued in exhaustive detail, described in confident terms—while adjacent subjects were touched in a single sentence and left alone. When a student asked a question that crossed one of those boundaries, the instructor didn't improvise and didn't speculate. He said the question was on the research list, and that any student who wanted to pursue it could claim the topic at the office of studies and earn points toward their end-of-year total.
The research list, Oryth learned, was not a record of student curiosity. It was a catalogue of the academy's own accumulated unknowns, offered to students as a source of points. Every item on it represented something the academy wanted solved and lacked the manpower or funding to solve on its own. Handing the work to students accomplished two things at once: it gave the students a path to the points they needed to advance, and it gave the academy a rotating workforce of people desperate enough to spend their evenings on problems the faculty had already failed to crack.
The point total at the end of the year determined whether you advanced to the next year or repeated the current one, and research was one of the few categories a student could actively push higher at will. Class assignments were fixed. Duel rankings were competitive and unpredictable. But the research list was always open, and a student willing to put in the hours could always earn something.
Which meant that noble students had an obvious advantage. Research cost money—equipment, materials, hired expertise—and a student from a wealthy house could simply purchase their way to a solution. Oryth understood the mechanism immediately. The academy wasn't just teaching. It was extracting. Noble houses poured gold into the research program year after year because their children needed the points, and the points could be bought. The academy got equipment, records, and findings. The nobles got advancement for their heirs. Both sides considered it a fair trade.
The one thing that cut against the arrangement was the rare scholarship—occasionally, a student who produced a genuinely significant finding was awarded a stipend for it. It was rare enough that Oryth heard it mentioned only in passing. It existed mostly as a promise, something to keep the less wealthy students grinding away at topics they'd have to pay for themselves.
It didn't take him long to connect the dots. The academy taught in depth whatever their spells happened to describe, because that knowledge had survived the Collapse alongside the spells themselves. Everything past that point had not survived, and what the academy didn't know sat on the research list waiting for someone to buy their way through it. Where a spell described something in order to function, the description was taught. Where no spell required it, the answer was a research topic. A few findings the academy had established on its own had been significant enough to open up subjects none of its spells covered, and those were the reason the research program had never been abandoned. But a few over the academy's entire history was not many.
---
The healing practicals were held in the same building Vara had shown them on the tour—the beds, the charts, the sedated prisoners serving out their sentences as practice subjects. Oryth had seen the room before. What he hadn't seen was the work itself.
He looked at the prisoners' faces often enough over the first weeks—peaceful in sleep, unaware of the room around them—and found himself wondering how many had actually done what they'd been convicted of. Serious crimes meant murder, usually. But the law was administered by nobles and enforced by whoever the local lord had appointed, and he'd seen enough in his previous life to know that a conviction was not the same thing as a fact. A man could end up on one of these beds for a killing he hadn't committed, if someone with enough influence had wanted him gone. He had no way of knowing which of the faces belonged to the guilty and which to the unlucky, and the law had already decided it didn't matter.
The core of the curriculum was the relationship between detection and treatment, and Mira spent the early sessions hammering it into the class. A detection spell on its own was useless—it swept an area and returned raw data about everything inside it, an undifferentiated mass of information with no way to tell what mattered. Every functional spell built on detection was a detection sequence plus a filter, and the filter was what made the spell work. The filter described what needed to be detected, and only when the detection found something matching that description did the rest of the spell proceed. Without a filter, the detection returned everything, and everything was unusable.
Oryth had heard the principle from Theron months before, and he'd recognized the mechanic the moment it was first demonstrated to him. The spell spawned a collider at a specific point relative to the caster's position, firing once when anything intersected it. The filter was attached to that collider and decided what counted as a hit. The callback was what happened when a hit was registered—in the inherited spells, it was the treatment itself, the closure or the cure or whatever else the spell had been designed to do.
He'd translated the wound closure spell only recently, in his dorm room, working from the runic sequence he'd memorized from Theron's lessons and the healing texts he'd borrowed from the academy library. He'd known exactly what the spell did and how it worked. What he hadn't known was how to structure it in his syntax. He'd sat hunched over his desk with a knife, opening shallow cuts on his own forearm and testing whether the translated version did anything at all—which, if anyone had walked in, would have looked like something well past madness. It had worked. The result matched the runic version exactly.
What he was still working on was a detection spell of his own.
Not a healing spell. Something more general. Building a callback was the only way he had to test whether the filter could be written at all—whether his syntax could express a description general enough to catch anything alive or moving. The filter either caught something or it didn't, and the only way he'd know was to make the callback do something he could see.
The callback had to act. When the field caught something, it would raise a defense on its own. The field would sense the approach, and the defense would be up before he'd had time to think about it. Against a projectile coming at his back. Against someone stepping up behind him in the dark.
Somewhere down the line, if he ever worked out a way to be notified directly, he could add that too. And the wards were worth thinking about. Vara had said the instructor warded the platform so that nothing cast on it could escape—which meant the ward had to sense something crossing its boundary and respond to it. That was the same shape as what he was building. The solution existed somewhere, certainly—either the academy would teach him, or it was sitting in the library waiting to be found, or he'd have to work it out himself.
---
The combat classes were where the real work began.
Commander Vaelin was exactly what Oryth had hoped for—a practical instructor who valued experience over theory, results over flash. She didn't care about elegant spellcasting or impressive displays of power. She cared about whether you could survive a fight.
"The first thing you need to understand," she announced during their first session, "is that combat is not a tournament. It is not a spectacle. It is not a contest where points are awarded for style. Combat is the business of killing or being killed, and everything else is secondary."
She stood before them on the training ground, arms crossed, expression hard. The afternoon sun cast long shadows across the dirt, and the practice weapon rack stood behind her like a promise of pain.
"Most of you have been taught magic as if it were a performance. Get the runes right, get the sequence right, produce the expected result. That is fine for a classroom. It is useless in a fight."
She began pacing slowly, eyes moving across the assembled first-years.
"In a real fight, your enemy is not going to wait while you visualize your runes. They are not going to stand there politely while you complete your casting. They are going to try to kill you, and they are going to do it as quickly and efficiently as possible."
She stopped, turning to face them directly.
"Which means you need to be able to defend yourselves. Not just with magic, but with your bodies. Because there will be times when you can't cast—when your mana is depleted, when you're too close to an enemy to have time for a spell, when something interferes with your concentration. And in those moments, if you can't fight physically, you're dead."
Oryth felt something stir in his chest. This was what he'd been training for—the practical application of everything he'd learned.
"The knights of the realm understand this," Vaelin continued. "They train their bodies as much as their minds. They channel mana to their muscles and bones, enhancing their strength and speed and durability. They can run faster, hit harder, endure more damage than any ordinary soldier. And if you think you can face them with nothing but spells, you are going to die very quickly."
She gestured to the training area. "Which is why we're going to start with the basics. Physical conditioning, body enhancement, and practical combat. Magic is not an almighty weapon. It supplements physical capability—it does not replace it."
What followed was the most intense training Oryth had experienced since his sessions with Davan.
Vaelin pushed them hard—harder than any instructor Oryth had encountered. She ran them through drills until their muscles screamed. She forced them to spar with wooden weapons until their hands blistered and their arms ached. And she watched everything.
Vaelin's training sessions were also, to his genuine surprise, the most intellectually satisfying part of the academy.
She taught by example and by counterexample. When she explained a blocking technique, she demonstrated what happened when you used it wrong—she had a student step into a guard position with the wrong foot planted, and then she walked him through what an opponent would do to exploit it. She never made a claim she couldn't demonstrate.
"Channeling mana only to your brain is not enough," she said. "It is a beginner's habit. You channel to your brain, you cast your spell, you're done. That works for a demonstration. It does not work in a fight."
She had them start with the simplest possible task—push mana from the core into the torso, and hold it there.
For Oryth, it was like breathing. He'd done it before he could walk.
For most of the class, it was a wall.
The pathways leading from their cores to their muscles had never been used. They were clogged, narrow, sealed—the same condition Oryth had found in his own body as an infant, before patient work had opened them one by one. Mana would flow out from the core and stall somewhere along the way, refusing to move past a certain point. Students pushed harder and got nothing. Some pushed too hard and flinched as a sharp spike of pain lanced through the blocked pathway, forcing them to stop.
Oryth recognized the sensation immediately. It was exactly what he'd felt in those first weeks after discovering his core—the slow, frustrating work of forcing energy through channels that had never carried it, coaxing rather than shoving, waiting for the blockage to give way a fraction at a time.
Vaelin walked among them, correcting. "Don't force it. You'll only hurt yourself. Work at the edge of the blockage—push until you feel resistance, then hold there. It opens with time, not with strength."
Once they could reach the torso, they moved outward. Each limb, one at a time. And the further a region sat from the core, the harder it was to reach. Some students could barely get mana into an arm at all. Some couldn't get it past the shoulder. And every region was its own separate fight, each one clogged and sealed and waiting to be opened for the first time.
Vaelin moved among them, and as she did, she talked.
"A mage who can only cast is a mage who loses to anyone who closes the distance," she said. "And that is why you will never fight alone. A mage needs someone covering him while he casts his longer spells—someone to hold the line, to keep the enemy off him, to buy him the seconds he needs. That is how battles are won."
She stopped, turning to face the class.
"But you never know which position you will take. You might be the mage. You might be the guard. You might be both in the same fight, switching back and forth as the situation demands. So you will learn both. You will learn to cast, and you will learn to fight, and you will learn to do them together."
She gestured at the struggling students.
"The ones who can cast in the middle of a melee, with a sword coming at their head and no one to cover them—those are the ones who live longest. Not all of you will get there. Most won't. But you'll all learn to try."
Once they could reach a muscle at all, she added the brain back into the equation. Split flow—mana to the brain, mana to the muscles, both maintained simultaneously. The class fell apart again. Students who'd just barely managed to open a single region now had to open more of them while also keeping their minds enhanced.
It cost them—the brain enhancement drained their cores faster—but the sharpened focus helped more than it hurt. With their minds enhanced, they could work at a clogged pathway for minutes without their attention slipping, and the longer they held it, the more the blockage gave way.
Oryth, who had been doing exactly this since infancy, kept his face neutral and let himself look a little slower than the rest.
Vaelin pushed them relentlessly, and the ones who kept at it slowly got better.
The next step came once they could reach the muscles.
"You've learned to fuel your muscles," Vaelin said. "Now you will learn to fuel them only when you need them, and only as much as you need. A full-body enhancement drains your core continuously, and in a long fight, that drain will kill you faster than any enemy."
She had them gather around as she demonstrated.
"Watch closely."
She turned to one of the training dummies—a post wrapped in padded cloth, mounted on a heavy base—and stood in a relaxed posture, wooden sword held loosely at her side. Then, without any visible preparation, she swung at the dummy's shoulder. The blade moved through the air with a sharp whistle.
"In that swing," she said, "I enhanced the muscles driving it—my arm, my shoulder, my core. Only those. For the fraction of a second when the blade was moving, they were reinforced with mana."
She did it again, slower this time, letting them watch. The dummy rocked slightly on its base.
"The enhancement started the moment I began the motion and ended the moment the blade stopped. The total mana expenditure was perhaps a tenth of what a full-body enhancement would have cost for the same duration. The strike was just as fast, just as powerful. The difference is efficiency."
Before they practiced, she stopped them again.
"One more thing, and this matters as much as the timing. How much mana you push into the muscle determines how much force you get out of it. A trickle for a light blow. More for a heavy one. If you cannot control the volume, you cannot control the strike."
She turned to a training bag and tapped it with her fist—barely a flick, the canvas hardly moving. Then she struck again, same motion, same timing, and the bag swung hard on its chain.
"Same arm. Same speed. The only difference was how much mana I fed it. Learn to feel the difference."
She had them practice. Simple movements first—a single step forward, a single punch, a single strike—with enhancement timed to the moment of action and measured to the strength required.
"Step," she commanded, and the class stepped forward. "Enhance the leg as you push off. Release as you plant. Light—just enough to carry you."
Then came the bags. Padded sacks of packed sand hung from wooden frames along the edge of the training ground, swinging slightly in the afternoon air. The class spread out among them, and Vaelin walked the line, calling the timing and the volume together.
"Punch. Enhance the arm as you extend. Release at full extension."
"Kick. Enhance through the strike. Release after impact."
"Swing. Enhance as you begin the strike. Release at the moment of impact. Light on the first, heavy on the second."
The bags bucked and swayed under the blows, sand shifting inside the canvas. Oryth struck alongside everyone else, but he was afraid to hit it with everything he had—so he throttled down, feeding each strike only a trickle of mana, just enough to match what the others were producing.
"This is the difference between a brawler and a knight," Vaelin said. "A brawler floods his body with mana and hopes he outlasts his opponent. A knight applies enhancement where it's needed, when it's needed, and only as much as the moment calls for. He conserves his reserves for the fights that actually matter."
Oryth had long suspected he had more mana than most people. He'd been enhancing his body since infancy, and he'd never once come close to running out—there had always been enough to give every muscle everything it could take, and the idea of rationing it had never crossed his mind. Watching his classmates struggle with a single limb's worth confirmed it, and Vaelin's lesson only made it plainer.
How much more, exactly, he still had no idea. He'd never had a way to measure it against anyone else.
It was exhausting work for the class, more mentally demanding than any spellcasting they'd done. Splitting attention between the physical movement, the precise timing of the enhancement, and the volume of mana each strike required left most of them drained after each session. But the results were undeniable. Their movements became faster, sharper, more controlled.
And the mana cost was far less than before.
She had them practice with wooden weapons, running through drills that combined movement, enhancement, and physical combat. The class was a mess of stumbling students, most of them struggling to coordinate the timing. Oryth, who had years of practice with body enhancement and combat training from Davan, found the exercises almost natural—though he still had to throttle every strike down to something a normal student could produce.
She moved on to spacing next—the same principle of timing and efficiency, extended across the ground between two fighters.
She picked two students, one with a wooden sword and one who would play the mage, and positioned them at marks she scraped into the dirt with her boot.
"Toe-to-toe," she said. "Sword arm against chest. Mage, cast."
The mage tried. The swordsman didn't even swing—he just shoved, hooked a leg, and put the mage on the ground.
"No time to cast. No room to retreat. If you can't fight with your body at this distance, you're dead."
She moved them back one step.
"Sword reach. Mage, cast."
The mage started. The swordsman struck before the casting had gotten anywhere at all. Wood tapped against ribs.
"Still dead."
She moved them back again—just outside the sword's tip. The mage visibly relaxed.
"Now?" Vaelin asked the class.
"He has time to cast," someone offered.
"Does he?" Vaelin nodded at the swordsman. "Close."
The swordsman took one long step and stopped with the wooden blade resting against the mage's throat. The mage hadn't finished the spell.
"This," Vaelin said, "is the kill zone. You think you're safe because the blade isn't touching you. But he can cross that gap in half a second, and your spell takes two. You didn't lose because you were too close. You lost because you misread the distance."
She moved them back to three paces, then six, then twelve.
At three paces, it was a race—the swordsman needed two steps, and the mage might get one spell off. At six, the mage had time to cast, but if he missed or panicked, the swordsman closed before he could cast again.
At twelve, it looked safe. Then Vaelin had the swordsman enhance his legs at the push-off, and he crossed the gap fast enough to beat the casting, wooden blade at the mage's throat before the mage had done more than flinch.
"Twelve paces is nothing," Vaelin said, "if the man closing them can move faster than you can think. Distance only protects you if he can't cross it in the time you need to cast. Against an enhanced fighter, that distance is shorter than you think."
"So what have we learned?" Vaelin asked.
"Never assume you're far enough away," one student said.
"Good. Distance doesn't protect you. You're always either taking space or giving it up. Give it up without a reason, and you die."
She had them drill it—step in, step out, enhance the leg at the push-off, enhance the arm at the strike.
---
Next on the table were the duels.
Vaelin announced them during combat class—a series of matches that would determine rankings within each class. The duels allowed both wooden weapons and spells, and the objective was simple: defeat your opponent by any means necessary.
Before the first match, she walked the boundary of the dueling ground and raised the ward. It was quiet, efficient, nothing like the elaborate casting Oryth had half-expected—just a few moments of concentration.
Oryth watched the first matches with interest. None of them had any real talent. The noble children had been drilled in the basics—a few forms, a few poses—and could at least hold a sword without looking foolish. The rest barely knew which end to grip.
But most of them didn't understand what it meant to actually fight.
A student would open a duel by planting their feet and starting to cast, as if the fight would politely wait for them to finish. Every spell they had ever cast had been cast in safety—in a study, a garden, a training yard, with a tutor watching and nothing trying to kill them. Some part of them still expected the spell to land before anything else happened. It rarely did. Their opponent would close the distance, and you could see the panic set in—the longer they stood there with that distant look, the worse it got, and the spell either took twice as long as it should have or failed to manifest at all. They had forgotten the first thing Vaelin taught them: that no one was coming to hold the line for them, and that a mage who stands still in the open is a dead man.
Vaelin noticed it too.
"You're fighting like you're performing," she said, stopping one match early. "Both of you. You're not trying to win—you're trying to put on a show. That's not how this works."
She turned to the rest of the class. "Combat is not a tournament. It's not about style. It's about efficiency. Find your opponent's weakness and exploit it. Use everything you have. Stop holding back."
The matches continued, but the tone shifted. Students fought more aggressively, more desperately. The duels became genuine contests, not demonstrations.
Oryth didn't cast a single spell.
He didn't need to. His first opponent opened by planting his feet and starting to cast, and Oryth crossed the distance before the casting had gotten anywhere at all. The second tried to keep space and cast at range, so Oryth simply didn't give him space. The third was a girl who was no better than either of them, and her match lasted about as long as the others.
Three matches. Three wins. Not one spell cast.
By the end of the first round, he was ranked first.
It wasn't supposed to happen. He'd been careful, holding back, trying to blend in. But the gap between his capabilities and those of his classmates was too large to hide—and when it came down to it, he could not bring himself to fight at their level.
The problem was that his classmates were terrible at fighting. They had no instinct for it—no sense of distance, no timing, nothing but the handful of forms they'd been drilled in. They reacted slowly, hesitated, left openings that any trained fighter would exploit.
Oryth saw those openings the moment they appeared. Years of training with Davan had conditioned him to read a stance, anticipate an attack, respond before conscious thought caught up. In the ring, that conditioning simply did what it had been trained to do—and every match ended before it had really begun.
After the last match, Vaelin called the class together.
"Every one of you should have been watching Morvhal," she said. "Watch the footwork. The timing. The way he closed distance and the way he didn't waste a single movement doing it. That is what fighting looks like." She looked across the assembled first-years. "Most of you have been taught the sword the way noble children are taught it—a few forms, a few poses, enough to look respectable at a tournament. That is not fighting. Morvhal has been taught to fight. Someone put real time into him, and it shows." She paused. "If you want to pass this class, you would do well to learn from what you saw today."
She dismissed them without another word.
Cael caught up with him on the path away from the training ground, still talking before he'd even drawn level.
"—and I'm sorry, but what in the gods' names was that?"
Oryth glanced at him. "What?"
"The class. The whole thing. The entire time I've been here, it's been combat, combat, conditioning, combat. Morning drills, afternoon drills, more drills, and then the bags. Again." Cael gestured broadly at nothing in particular. "I came here to learn magic. I assumed that an academy of magic might, at some point, teach me some magic. Instead I've spent the last weeks learning how to stand and how to swing a sword. When exactly does the magic start?"
Oryth laughed. "You do get to cast."
"Once. In the first class. Since then it's been bags and footwork and getting knocked on my back." Cael shook his head. "And in the duels, what am I supposed to do? Try to cast and hope the other person waits politely? I spend the whole match trying not to lose, and my concentration's shot, and nothing works anyway. So no, I don't get to cast. I get to lose."
"Ohhh." Oryth drew it out, deadpan. "Don't get sad. To make you feel better, I'll leave some girls for you."
Cael stopped walking. He turned to face Oryth, eyes wide, one hand pressed to his chest like he'd just been handed a medal.
"Really?" he said, voice wobbling. "You'd do that for me?"
"Of course." Oryth clapped him on the shoulder, solemn as a priest. "It's the least I can do."
"I—" Cael's lip trembled. "I don't know what to say."
Oryth stepped forward and pulled him into a hug. "Shhh. It's alright. It's alright."
Cael stood there rigid for a second, arms pinned at his sides, then let his forehead drop onto Oryth's shoulder and started making loud, theatrical sobbing noises.
They held the pose for a few seconds longer than either of them had planned. A pair of passing students stared. Oryth patted him twice on the back and let go.
Cael staggered away, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. "I'll never forget this."
Oryth looked at him. Cael looked back.
Then they both lost it—Cael folding first, then Oryth, the two of them standing in the middle of the path laughing hard enough that the students who'd been staring a moment ago decided to keep walking.
"Your face," Cael managed. "You just—you just committed to it—"
"You cried on my shoulder."
They got themselves under control eventually, mostly.
They walked on a bit.
"Practically every noble in that class has had tutors since they could walk," Cael said, once he'd recovered. "You're the only one it seems to have actually stuck to."
"Well, I already knew back then that life wasn't going to be easy."
Cael glanced at him, and whatever he'd been about to say next didn't come out. They walked a few more steps before he spoke again.
"Lucky you," he said. "Having someone to teach you at all."
"I could show you a few things," Oryth said. "When you've got time."
Cael stopped walking. "You mean it?"
"I mean it."
Cael studied him for a second. "What's the catch?"
"You owe me a favor. Sometime. When I ask."
"That's it?"
"That's it."
Cael stared at him a moment longer, then broke into a grin. "Alright. Deal. I'll hold you to it."
"Fine."
"And if they ever run duo duels," Cael added, "we should team up. I'll handle the moral support."
"Or I hold the line," Oryth said, "and you finally get to cast something."
Cael's face lit up. "That would be awesome."
Oryth shook his head slowly, smiling.
They turned toward the dormitories, and he told Cael to meet him on the training ground early in the morning, before classes, and he'd show him some basics. Cael stopped for half a step, caught off guard by the suddenness of it, then recovered and agreed. He'd be there.
They walked on together after that, the talk drifting to smaller things, until the dormitory doors came into view.
---
Oryth was on the training ground before the sun cleared the walls.
Cael arrived some time after, shuffling onto the flagstones with his practice sword in hand.
"Who normally wakes up at this hour?" he said. Then he yawned—a long one, jaw-cracking, the kind that made his eyes water—and wiped them with the back of his wrist. "This is the hour I'm usually rolling over."
"You're late."
Cael stuck out his tongue.
Oryth shook his head and waited for him to come over.
Cael sighed, dragged himself into something resembling a stance, and lifted his sword.
He was not talented. He was stubborn, though, which Oryth was beginning to suspect mattered more.
Oryth had him do the same movement over and over—the step-in, the block, the counter—until Cael's arms were shaking.
"I'm going to die."
"You'll wish you had, once we speed this up."
Cael groaned, reset his feet, and did it again.
He was halfway through the next repetition when Oryth heard footsteps on the flagstones behind him.
"Am I interrupting?"
He turned. Selene was standing at the edge of the training ground with her arms crossed, looking between the two of them with open amusement.
"Not really," Oryth said.
"I'll wait." She walked over to the low wall that ringed the training ground and sat on it, one leg drawn up, elbows resting on her knee. "Don't mind me."
Cael was still moving through the drill, but his attention had clearly gone somewhere else. His guard had dropped without him noticing.
"Guard up," Oryth said.
Cael blinked and raised it. It was, if anything, worse than before.
Oryth sighed and stepped back. "Selene, this is Cael. Cael, this is Selene."
"Hello," Selene said.
"Hi." Cael's voice cracked. He cleared his throat. "So—sorry—is this one of the ones you said you'd leave for me?"
Selene's eyebrows went up. She looked at Oryth. "You said what?"
"I said I'd leave some girls for him. He was complaining—"
"I was not complaining—"
"You were complaining."
"You won three matches in a row and none of the girls were looking at me."
Oryth turned to Selene. "That's what I have to deal with."
Selene laughed. Cael's ears went red, but he was grinning too.
"So that's the story," she said. "You promised him girls."
"I promised him nothing. I said I'd leave some."
"Very generous." She stood and walked over. "Alright. Show me what you've got."
She stayed for part of the session. Her pointers were much the same as Oryth's, though she framed them a little differently.
Then she stood, brushed off her clothes, and said she'd go on ahead and hold a table for them at the cafeteria.
Oryth finished his own routine—stretching, forms, the drills he did every day whether or not anyone was watching. Cael lasted until his arms gave out and then sat on the wall to recover.
When Oryth was done, the two of them walked back together, splitting off at the dormitories to wash and change.
By the time they reached the cafeteria, Selene was already at a table by the windows, her book open in one hand. She didn't look up until Oryth set his tray down across from her.
"Finally," she said, and closed it.