Wrenna found Corren still standing in the courtyard a long while later, the space where Baris had been already filled back in by ordinary students crossing between classes as though nothing at all had changed there, and stood beside him without speaking for long enough that he almost forgot she'd arrived until she finally broke the silence herself.
"I said goodbye to him at the gate," she said. "He didn't tell you that part, I think. He didn't want to make it harder for you than it already was, and he asked me not to mention it, and I've decided I'm telling you anyway, because I don't think either of you gets to decide alone anymore what the other one is allowed to know."
"What did he say to you."
"That he loved us both," Wrenna said, "and that loving us both was exactly the problem, because he couldn't find a version of staying that didn't mean watching you become someone he wasn't sure he recognized anymore, one careful, reasonable choice at a time. He said he didn't want to end up hating you for it. He said leaving now, while he still didn't, felt like the only honest way to keep that from happening later." She wiped at her eyes with the back of one hand, quick and businesslike, the same discipline she brought to bandaging a wound she didn't want to be seen minding. "I don't think this is the last time we see him, Corren. I refuse to believe that. But I think it might be a very long time, and I think you should let yourself actually feel that instead of filing it away with everything else you've decided not to look at directly."
He did not try to convince himself, standing there with Wrenna's shoulder pressed lightly against his own, that this particular wound would eventually close as cleanly as every other one so far had. Something in him had already decided, with a certainty that felt older than the grief itself, that this one simply wouldn't, and that the decision, however much it hurt to sit inside, was not entirely his to unmake.
Voss's ultimatum arrived the same week, delivered with the brisk urgency of a man trying to outrun a Duke's growing patience. "Maravent knows you're alive," he said. "My sources inside Blackmere confirm it within days, not weeks. You need the protection of a Knight's rank before that happens, which means distinctions in all three disciplines, swordsmanship, magic, and alchemy, inside seven days rather than the usual full term."
"A week is not enough time," Corren said.
"It's what we have," Voss said. "If anyone can manage it in that window, it's you. You learned the Vaelora binding, badly, tragically, but you learned it, in a single sitting from watching me demonstrate it once. I have some confidence left in what you're capable of under pressure, even after everything."
Doss met him on the rooftop the next morning with a training sword and no other students present at all, the private session Corren had half expected once he understood what the week actually required of him. "You've already earned a passing grade here," Doss said. "The Headmaster wants a distinction. I've been holding back on you for two years, Corren. Today, I stop."
The duel that followed left Corren's ribs aching and his admiration for his own teacher considerably deeper than it had been that morning, a blur of steel and footwork that pushed every reflex Corren had built past its previous ceiling, and when he finally found the opening to flick Doss's blade wide and set his own edge against the old swordsman's throat, the victory felt earned in a way none of his easier wins over the past year had.
"Distinction," Doss said simply, lowering his guard, something like real pride threading through the word.
Vaelith's magic trial two days later ran him through all five schools in a single grueling afternoon, destruction, alteration, illusion, conjuration, healing, each demonstration routed carefully through whichever chant's grammar he'd already earned the right to correct, and the crowd of watching students gasped in genuine unison when a dead fish on Vaelith's testing tray flopped back to life under a healing working that combined three separate traditions into one seamless, corrected phrase.
"Magus Excellent," Vaelith announced, red eyes gleaming with something close to real respect. "The highest grade this Academy awards."
He had barely begun assembling the rare ingredients Renwick's alchemy trial demanded, aloewater, golden lily, a phoenix feather he had no honest idea yet how to acquire, when Wrenna found him in the library with news that emptied every other concern out of him entirely.
"Your family," Wrenna said, breathless, having run the whole way from the Headmaster's office. "Corren, it's your family. Something's happened."
Voss's face carried none of its usual composure when Corren burst into the office a minute later. "Scarlet Fever," he said, before Corren had finished crossing the threshold. "The entire Ashvale clan, struck at once, something we haven't seen this virulent in decades. Your mother is the only one untouched, and the imperial fort near your family's villa has taken her into custody under suspicion of having poisoned everyone else herself."
"That's not possible," Corren said, the words arriving hollow, disconnected from the panic already building underneath them. "She would never."
"I know," Voss said, and his voice dropped, carrying a grief that felt, suddenly, considerably older than the current crisis. "I suspect Maravent's hand in this entirely. It carries his particular signature: cruelty dressed carefully enough in bureaucracy that no one can prove intent, only convenient, devastating timing." He crossed the room and set both hands on Corren's shoulders, an uncharacteristic gesture that steadied him more than the words alone managed. "You carry the Vaelora regeneration now, incomplete as the working left it in Baris, but complete in you. It makes you immune to poison and disease both, the same as it's made me immune for longer than you've been alive. You will not fall ill no matter how close you sit beside them. Your family may not share that fortune."