"It wasn't ever about protecting you from Torvent." The words came out of Baris in a rush, like something that had been dammed up too long to hold any longer. "Wrenna's in love with you. Has been since before either of us noticed it happening. I've lost every fight I've ever had against you, every single one, the race, the bunk, the girl, everything, and now I can't even be the one thing I always told myself I'd be if nothing else worked out. A knight. That's it. That's all of it. My life is over."
Corren had no ready answer for that, no correction to offer, nothing clever enough to make the shape of it smaller than it actually was. "It isn't over," he said finally, quiet and plain. "I know that's not much of an answer right now."
"It isn't," Baris agreed, and gathered his crutch, and limped away across the rooftop stone without letting Corren follow, his silhouette shrinking against a sky gone the deep orange of a day finally ending, carrying a grief too large for either of them to fix that night.
Celeste came to find him that same evening, having heard the story in six different exaggerated versions before finally tracking down someone willing to tell her the truth of it. She found him alone on the rooftop training grounds, watching the last color drain out of the sky, and settled beside him without asking permission first.
"They took him away," she said. Not a question. "Torvent. Nobody at the Academy will say where."
"I don't know either," Corren admitted. "I saw something on him during the fight. A mark. It's what triggered the arrest, more than the loss did."
Celeste was quiet for a long moment, processing that alongside everything else the day had handed her. "My father sent word an hour ago," she said finally. "Clan Magnus severed the alliance the instant news reached them that their heir had been detained on suspicion of an unregistered heretical rite. No family wants that scandal attached to their name, not even for a bloodline as old as ours." She let out a breath that wasn't quite a laugh, too tired and too complicated for that. "I'm free of the marriage. I should feel relieved. Mostly I feel like my clan just lost the only leverage it had left, and gained nothing back except my father's humiliation in front of every noble house that heard the story before he could control it."
"That's not nothing you're feeling," Corren said. "You're allowed both things at once. Relief and loss in the same breath. I don't think they cancel each other out just because they're inconvenient together."
She looked at him for a long moment, something unreadable moving behind her eyes. "You have a strange gift for making complicated things sound like they make sense," she said. "I don't know if that's comforting or simply very good manners."
"Probably both," Corren said, and for the first time all day, she actually laughed.
Baris was back in the infirmary bed by the time Corren finally checked on him the following night, calmer than he'd been on the rooftop but still restless, his bandaged arm resting against his chest. The sight of Corren in the doorway pulled something complicated across his broad, familiar face: relief, and pride, and underneath both of those, something smaller and more painful that he tried, not entirely successfully, to keep off his features.
"Heard you won," Baris said, voice steadier now than it had been the night before. "Heard it took forty minutes. Heard the crowd chanted your name until their voices gave out."
"I heard you're exaggerating at least two of those details," Corren said, dragging a stool over to sit beside the bed.
Baris managed a weak grin, gone again almost as fast as it arrived. "I keep thinking about what you did," he said, quieter now, eyes fixed on the ceiling rather than on Corren. "The duel. Everyone cheering your name. That's exactly what I always wanted. Since before I could say it out loud without other kids laughing at me for it." He swallowed, hard, and when he continued his voice had gone rougher around the edges. "And instead I'm lying here with an arm that might never hold a sword again, because I went and did the exact reckless thing I always imagined myself doing, and it didn't make me a hero at all. It just made me a cautionary tale."
"It made you someone who tried to protect a friend at real cost to himself," Corren said. "That's not nothing, Baris. That's most of what being a knight was ever supposed to mean, before anyone dressed it up with parades and titles."
"Easy for the rookie everyone's chanting about to say." There was no real bitterness in it, only exhaustion, and something that might, given time, become something closer to peace. "I'm happy for you. I want you to know that. I'm just also allowed to hate, a little, that it wasn't me."
"You're allowed both," Corren said, echoing, without quite meaning to, the same thing he'd told Celeste an hour earlier. "I'm not going anywhere until we find a way to fix that arm properly. I promise you that."
Baris didn't answer right away, but the tightness around his eyes eased fractionally, enough that Corren counted it, quietly, as a start.
It was Wrenna, in the end, who caught him in the infirmary corridor afterward, her expression carrying a question she'd clearly been building up the nerve to ask all evening.
"Did you feel anything for her?" she asked, without preamble, arms crossed tight over her own chest. "Celeste. Everyone's been talking about the duel over her hand all day, and I know that part was never real, Torvent's stupid framing of it, but I saw the two of you on the rooftop earlier. From the window."
Corren considered lying, briefly, and found he didn't actually want to. "I don't know yet," he admitted. "There's something there. I'm not going to pretend there isn't, not to you." He watched her face carefully, bracing for whatever came next. "I also know how that sounds, given everything else."