"We won't abandon you here," he said, meeting her eyes with as much sincerity as he could put into four words. "I'll be the first face you see in class. I promise."
"You promise?" she asked, and the tremor in her voice suggested the question wasn't really about the promise itself so much as whether she deserved to be worth keeping it for. She had, after all, walked away from her parents' shop for this. Every fear she carried about that decision seemed to live somewhere behind that one small question.
"I promise," he said again, and sealed it with a brief, warm hug and a kiss to her cheek that left her blinking rapidly before she turned and followed the other girls toward their own dormitory, looking back once before the doors swallowed her from view.
Baris watched the whole exchange with an expression he schooled back into neutrality a beat too slow to fully hide it. "Hey, Wrenna," he called after her, forcing brightness into his voice, "I'll be around too!" He got a small wave in return before she vanished entirely, and then rounded on Corren with mock offense the moment she was gone, using the complaint to bury whatever he'd actually been feeling a moment before.
The boys' dormitory smelled of fresh linen and old stone, its corridors alive with the chatter and laughter of hundreds of freshmen finding their rooms for the first time. Corren's eyes caught on one room in particular, a corner unit with a window overlooking a small, well-kept courtyard, and he and Baris claimed it before anyone else could.
Inside waited two beds arranged bunk-style, and Baris, moving faster than Corren expected from someone his size, threw himself onto the top bunk before Corren had even set his pack down.
"Top bunk's mine," Baris announced, already bouncing experimentally, the wooden frame groaning in protest under his weight.
Corren, briefly unbothered, resettled onto the lower bunk without argument, right up until the frame's groaning became a genuine structural concern. "Actually," he said, eyeing the ceiling above his own head with sudden wariness, "maybe I should take the top after all."
Baris refused on principle, invoking finders-keepers with the total conviction of a boy who had clearly used that exact argument to win a hundred childhood disputes before this one. "Losers weepers," he added, grinning. "You don't always get what you want."
"Rock, paper, scissors," Corren countered. "Best of three."
Baris's competitive instincts lit up instantly. "You're on."
They faced off with the gravity of men deciding a matter of considerably greater importance than bunk assignment. Scissors beat paper on the first round. Paper beat rock on the second. Baris sagged like a man watching his last coin roll under a wagon, having genuinely believed the third throw might save him, and lost that one too.
"Fine," he groaned, hauling his things down to the lower bunk with theatrical suffering. "You win. Bottom bunk it is."
"No hard feelings?" Corren asked, extending a hand.
Baris took it, grinning despite the loss. "None at all. Fair and square." He paused as Corren settled into the top bunk, then added, with the air of a man delivering a devastating blow, "That makes it three to nothing in your favor, though, if we're counting."
"Three?" Corren frowned down at him. "I count two. The race, and this. Where's the third?"
Baris's grin faltered. "Never mind," he mumbled, and refused to elaborate no matter how much Corren pressed, which only made Corren more determined to find out eventually.
Their first week of classes began before dawn, the rooftop training grounds bathed in the pale orange light of a sun still deciding whether it wanted to rise. Swordsmanship always came first, before the fires of spellcraft in the afternoon and the fumes of alchemy at night, a schedule designed, Corren suspected, specifically to punish anyone ambitious enough to attempt all three disciplines at once.
A great phoenix emblem had been painted across the rooftop stone, and the students gathered around it in a loose circle, breath visible in the cold morning air, eyes fixed on the man standing at its center with a wooden practice sword held loosely at his side.
"Welcome to Fyre Academy, where you will learn to master the blade," the instructor said, his voice cutting cleanly through the morning chill. "You will address all your teachers as Master. I am Master Kaldric. You are here because you have shown promise. Promise alone will not carry you far. You will need discipline. You will need skill. You will need the courage to be wrong in front of everyone here and try again anyway." He raised his sword overhead. "Are you ready?"
"Yes, Master Kaldric," the assembled freshmen answered, in the ragged near-unison of a group still learning how to be a group.
Kaldric produced a crate of practice swords, heavy and balanced like the real thing but with edges dulled and coated in a paralytic derived from tomb weaver spider venom, meant to simulate the numbing shock of losing a limb in real combat without the inconvenient permanence of actually losing one. He warned the class at length about handling the blades with care.
Baris, predictably, ignored every word of the warning within minutes, nicking his own forearm out of pure curiosity about what the venom actually felt like. His arm went instantly, alarmingly limp, his tongue thick and clumsy in his mouth when he tried to speak, and academy mages hurried him off the rooftop for treatment while Kaldric sighed with the weariness of a man who had clearly seen this exact mistake made by a dozen students before this one.
Corren watched his friend go with a knot of worry in his chest that had nothing to do with any real danger and everything to do with simple, uncomplicated fondness for an idiot who had, in under a week, become genuinely important to him.
Kaldric spent the remainder of the class walking the rest of them through the fundamentals: slash, stab, strike, parry, block, counter, and the formal rules governing duels within academy walls, which required mutual consent, clearly stated terms, and a witnessing blademaster to keep things honest.