The voices grew sharper the closer he came.
Then one climbed over the rest.
"Why are they still here?!"
Vel's feet stopped on their own, out of sight, behind the archway that opened onto the courtyard.
Half the Academy was out there. Navy blue across the whole field, uniforms tailored to class and discipline, gathered into one mass, and every one of them facing the same direction.
The guards were gone. The accounting was over. But something had kept the students here.
He followed their eyes.
They led him to a spot just short of the archway.
Tomas.
Rohen and Enya at his sides. Mira and Konomi half a step behind. Five of them, and all of that crowd on the other side.
"Your instructor was a cultist."
The voice belonged to a tall boy standing a stride ahead of the crowd, an elite's patch on his uniform. Not a face Vel knew.
"We didn't know that either," Mira said.
"Convenient."
He said it without even looking at her.
"Then tell us why your class trained before dawn. Away from everyone's eyes."
"You saw what happened on the first day," Enya said. "That's why."
"Then explain the rest."
He turned away from her, his words going to the crowd at his back.
"Ask yourselves. Since when could the Clouded, the Academy's charity cases, make it that far in the Ternion?"
Heads tilted. Murmurs picked up. Even from here, Vel could see the words landing.
"Year after year, their kind gets cut in the first round. Then this one class reaches the finals, and the moment they do, the cult tears the arena open."
He let it sit.
"On the exact day. At the exact match. And we're meant to call that luck?"
"That doesn't prove anything!" Rohen snapped.
"They had help," someone said from the crowd.
"From their own instructor. She was close enough to every one of those matches."
So this is where the day's fear decided to go.
Vel ran his eyes over the crowd. Not all of them agreed. But the ones who did were louder, and the quiet ones were listening.
"Hand them to the guards!"
"Their matches don't count!"
"Run the tournament again!"
That one caught. It passed backward through the crowd, gathering voices as it went.
Of course. A rerun wasn't justice. It was opportunity. Strip the result, and every team gets another shot at the title.
His hand had found the edge of the archway.
His foot moved. Then stopped.
He could explain exactly what happened. It would turn half that crowd around before he finished.
But what they needed to know, half of it, the prince had ordered buried.
Step out with nothing, and he might hand the crowd more accusations. The kind they wouldn't get out of.
Before he could decide, Rohen's voice cracked across the open ground.
"A rerun? They fought the cultists while all of you ran!"
"So you say." The elite turned back to them, unhurried. "Did anyone see what happened in there? Anyone?"
No answer came. He knew there wouldn't be.
"No one. We were told a story. And the only ones telling it..."
His finger moved down the line of five.
"...are your little group."
Enya stepped forward. "When that barrier came down, everyone saw what they'd been fighting. And what it cost them."
"We saw the end." He shook his head slowly. "Not what led to it."
He's rehearsed this. Every answer already has a door shut in front of it.
This is the story Emeric warned us about.
Then a different voice came from the crowd. A girl's, thin, barely holding together.
"My roommate was caught in the crush at the gates. The healers say she may never walk again."
No shout. No accusation. But no one talked over her.
"Someone has to answer for it."
The elite didn't waste it.
"You heard her." His hand opened toward the crowd at his back.
"Everyone here lost something that day. All we ask is for justice to be served."
The murmurs swelled behind him. The mood was tipping, and he straightened with it.
"And you."
His eyes settled on Tomas, and stayed there.
"You stood on that floor. The only one here who did."
"Your friends have been defending you this whole time. Yet you won't speak a word in your own defense."
He waited. The courtyard waited with him.
Tomas said nothing. He hadn't spoken once.
He couldn't.
He's holding the same silence I am.
Tomas's eyes had dropped to the ground between them.
"Look at him. The one person who was there, and nothing to say."
"If the truth would clear his name, he would be shouting it by now."
The murmurs stirred again. Every beat of silence handed him more ground.
"Then I will answer for you."
"Your team sabotaged the tournament. Let the cult in. And now that they've been taken, silence is where you hide."
"You don't deserve the title of a Ternion finalist."
He rolled his shoulder, loose and easy.
"Even I could beat you myself."
He started toward Tomas, closing the ground between them.
"I'll prove it to everyone," he said, louder now, thrown back over his shoulder for the crowd.
"You're nothing but a leftover of your instructor. Nothing without others to hide behind."
He kept walking. Closer. Closer still, until barely an arm's length remained.
The courtyard had gone quiet. The next words were low, meant for one person.
"This time, no one will save you. Be good, and maybe it will be less painful than the last."
The last?
Even in profile, Vel could see Tomas's face. Whatever those words were meant to stir in him, none of it surfaced.
Thacian's hand curled into a fist.
"Thacian, that's too far," someone called from the crowd.
"Too far?" He didn't so much as turn.
"The Crown had to leave the palace for this place. My father would call what I'm doing the least the family owes them."
Then Vel saw Tomas's mouth move. Barely a murmur. At that distance, only the man standing over him could have caught it.
"What did you just say?"
Tomas gave him no answer.
That was the last of it.
Vel's body moved before the thought finished. A half-step out of the archway.
Thacian wound up and drove his fist into Tomas's middle.
The thud rang out across the courtyard. Deep and flat.
The front of the crowd flinched. A few gasped.
That sound...
A few seconds passed. No one spoke.
Tomas stood exactly where he had been standing. His feet hadn't shifted. His back hadn't bent. He hadn't so much as raised a hand.
Thacian's face was the one that changed.
Surprise first. Then confusion. And beneath both, arriving late, pain.
He snatched his hand back and clutched it, teeth bared against the sound that tried to escape him.
His eyes came up to Tomas, and stayed there.
He swung again, higher, at the chest, everything behind it.
His other fist met the same thing.
The same flat thud. The same stillness.
Thacian staggered back, clutching both hands tighter against his body, shaking.
And Tomas stood there like a mountain, refusing to give a single inch of ground.
Thacian stared down at his hands.
"What..."
His fingers trembled where they refused to close.
Then Tomas finally spoke up, loud enough to be heard.
"I don't need anyone saving."
At his side, his hand curled tight. Behind him, his friends stared at him in surprise.
"You were right. I was weak."
He lifted his head.
"So weak that my friends had to keep fighting without me. So weak that they had to lay down their lives."
"I don't deserve to stand here."
"But I am."
"And I'll be damned before I let their sacrifice go to waste."
Tomas took a step forward.
"If hurting me eases your anger..."
"Then do it."
"But touch my friends..."
"...and you'll have to go through me."
Tomas stood straight through all of it. His legs, always the first to shake when nerves took him, did not so much as tremble.
And behind his eyes, a fire burned. The kind that would consume everything in its path, if not for the shell of earth keeping it contained.
The courtyard held still.
"A defensive spell?"
For a moment Thacian only stared. Then the confusion burned away, and what filled its place was pure rage.
"He attacked me!"
He thrust his ruined hand toward Tomas.
"You all saw it! He used a spell against another student!"
"Those heretics must have taught him how to conceal it!"
No answer came from the crowd.
The voices that had carried him this far had gone quiet. Some looked away.
Thacian's eyes swept across them, searching, and found nothing to stand on.
Not one of them would hold his eyes.
Nothing he'd said had been disproven. But something about the way Tomas had stood through it left no one willing to keep pointing.
Then his search stopped.
"Lady Fairwind."
Heads turned, following his call. Vel found her then. Lysithea, near the edge of the crowd, a fan opened over half her face.
"You fought them in the arena. Surely you, of all people, can attest to how they trick everyone."
If the call caught her off guard, none of it showed.
Her eyes moved from Thacian to Tomas, and held there a moment.
Then she snapped the fan shut, turned, and walked away from the crowd without a word.
"You little..."
It slipped through his teeth loud enough to carry.
"That's it. First, I will take you down for using spells to harm other students. Then I will unmask every last one of your frauds."
His hand went to his hilt, and steel rang free.
Tomas's hand moved at once, to the wand at his side.
The crowd shifted. The front rows pressed backward, murmurs turning into something sharper. Whatever this dispute had been, it was becoming something else.
Thacian raised his sword and pressed forward.
Cold vapor curled around the blade, fading as it ran down the edge.
Tomas spoke the incantation. A magic circle spun into form before his wand, and molten rock began to gather within it.
Behind him, Rohen, Enya, and Mira moved as one. A single step back, not a retreat. They were falling into formation.
"Terr-aer-lea orbis-agitare—"
"Aqu-terra-lea formiz-etahn—"
"Aqu-alea-voltis fulmen-iter—"
Circles bloomed in front of each of them as the words left their mouths.
The blade came down.
But before the two could meet, something burst from the ground between them.
The blade slammed into it.
Steam blasted outward, swallowing both of them.
"What?!"
Thacian wrenched back out of the steam.
As it thinned, a form of fire stood in the middle, right where the blade had been stopped.
The construct held its place a few seconds longer. Then it dispersed, scattering into nothing.
Vel knew that shape.
Thacian stood facing Tomas, sword still raised.
And behind him, three glowing magic circles hung suspended in the air. A ring of orbiting pebbles. A cluster of razor clay shards. A crackling dark cloud of lightning.
All three pointed toward Thacian.
Even he knew what that would do to him at this range. His grip on the sword tightened.
From within the crowd, a voice rose, footsteps closing behind it.
"Are you saying that I lost to a fraud?"
The crowd parted, and Severin Thornwood walked out of it.
"Severin?" Thacian's sword lowered an inch. "What are you doing?"
"What does it look like?"
Severin's steps carried him into the open ground, unhurried.
"I just heard someone say I lost a fight to a fraud. And that I spent three days in a recovery ward because of it."
He came to a stop.
"So I want to see it for myself."
"Then step clear," Thacian said, leveling his sword again. "Don't interfere."
Of all people...
Then again, the accounting had summoned every student. Of course he would be here.
"Go ahead, if you wish." Severin did not move out of the way. "Though it seems you've come unprepared."
"Haaah? You know who my father is." Thacian's grip tightened. "If they so much as graze me, just a hair—"
"I don't mean these." Severin's chin tipped past him. "Him."
They both turned toward the archway.
Toward Vel.
He had been ready to step in from the moment steel came out. Their eyes stopped him where he stood.
"Maybe you didn't hear what Atherwind said at the gate," Severin said, his voice level.
"Right now, everyone saw you attack them first."
"Swing that at his friend, and he will not stay in that archway."
"Ask me how I know."
"But—"
"If you want it settled, take it to the officials. Fight them where it counts."
"Somewhere no one can hand them anything."
"Do that, and count me in."
"Not here."
Thacian's jaw worked. Then the sword slid back into its sheath.
He turned to the crowd.
"The officials will hear of this! It will be resolved properly!"
Then he walked away.
Behind Tomas, the three circles unraveled. Stone dropped back to sand. Clay crumbled into dust. The bolt of lightning flickered out, leaving nothing behind but the smell of scorched air.
Severin looked at Tomas for another moment. Then he turned.
"I didn't need your help," Tomas said.
He stopped, but didn't look back.
"You think snakes would eat one another to help a prey?"
A pause. Tomas did not answer.
"This prey... might just grow into something worth devouring."
Then he was gone, hands in his pockets.
Footsteps came fast down the far walkway. Someone had run for help after all, and now the help had arrived. Three instructors, robes gathered in their fists, one of them still catching his breath.
"What is this?" The eldest of them looked over the courtyard, the students, the scorched ground between them. "Did I not tell all of you to go straight home?"
No one answered.
"Go now, unless you'd rather spend the night on the detention grounds."
The crowd began to thin at the edges first, students slipping toward the walkways, then in greater numbers, the mass breaking apart into pairs and small groups. Whatever they had come to see, none of them wanted to be the one still standing there to explain it.
"Did you see that? How they held those spells?"
"I thought only one of them could actually cast like that. But the other three—"
The voices faded with the rest of them, swallowed into the walkways.
Vel crossed to where the five of them stood. Rohen noticed him first, then Enya, and none of them said anything about where he had been.
He came to a stop in front of Tomas.
Tomas still had his shoulders squared and his jaw set, holding the same ground he had held through all of it. But his hands had begun to shake now that there was nothing left to face.
"Sorry I'm late," he said.
Tomas let out a breath, and something in his stance finally loosened.
"You weren't."
"Tomas." Konomi had come up beside him. "Are you hurt?"
"I'm fine."
He pulled his shirt loose. Fragments of rock slid out from under it and scattered across the ground.
"What was that?" Enya asked.
"Something I made for bullies like him."
Enya stared at the fragments on the ground, then at him, as though she were looking at someone she hadn't met before.
"Who was that?" Vel asked.
"Thacian," Mira said, like the name tasted bad.
"Kin to the Crown." Rohen said it flat, like he'd repeated it a hundred times already. "His father married the prince's aunt. That's the whole claim."
Enya watched the last of the crowd disappear down the walkway.
"You fought for every one of those matches." The words came out clipped, like she was holding something down. "And now it's all worth nothing."
"They didn't care who was guilty. The cult, Lyvenna, us." Rohen kicked a fragment across the stone. "They just want another shot at the tournament."
"Who would miss a chance to have it rerun?" Mira finished.
"People will stand wherever it pays them to stand."
The words came out flatter than Vel meant them to.
But not these five. Tomas, who had answered a sword with his own two feet. The four behind him, who had stepped back into formation instead of stepping away.
Konomi most of all. Not Clouded, not even a combatant, and she had stayed anyway.
Whatever the unstables had been at the start of this year, whatever the Academy had decided they were worth back then.
They weren't that anymore.
Even if the rest of the Academy decided to call them something else.