"I hear you, Master Doss," Corren said. "I won't let myself get in deeper than I mean to."
Doss's look suggested he doubted that promise could be kept in full, but he let it go with a final nod, and Corren continued on toward the Headmaster's office with the warning sitting uneasily alongside everything else he already had to carry.
Voss's office occupied the highest floor of the Academy's central tower, and the man himself sat behind a desk stacked with correspondence, not glancing up immediately when Corren knocked and entered. The office smelled of ink and hot wax, shelves lined with ledgers rather than spellbooks, more a treasury of favors owed than a scholar's study, though a single sword hung mounted above the hearth, plain steel gone dull with age, the only decoration in the room that looked like it had ever actually seen use.
"What do you want?" Voss asked, still writing, not troubling to look up, the voice of a man who received a great many requests and had learned to ration his attention accordingly.
"Headmaster Voss." Corren kept his own voice steady despite the pounding in his chest. "I need you to teach me your clan's regeneration chant. Clan Vaelora's. I believe it can save my friend's life, or at least save what's left of it."
Voss set down his pen at that, folding his hands together, and regarded Corren with a stare that felt, for the first time, genuinely assessing rather than merely tolerant. "Renwick sent you," he said. Not a question.
Corren nodded rather than argue the point.
"He's spent decades trying to pry my clan's secrets loose by any means available to him," Voss said, something between weariness and dry amusement in his voice. "Hiring him to teach alchemy here was, in no small part, my own way of keeping him close enough to watch. Amusing, that he'd finally succeed by sending someone else to ask on his behalf." He studied Corren a moment longer before continuing. "Will I teach you? Perhaps. Every trainee who walks through that door asks me for power, Corren. Precious few of them ever think to ask what it will cost to keep it once they have it. Which are you?"
"I don't know yet," Corren admitted, the second time in one day he'd given that exact honest answer to a mentor testing him for it. "I know I want to save my friend more than I want to protect myself from whatever this costs."
Voss's expression shifted, a flicker of genuine interest breaking through the practiced political mask he otherwise wore like armor. "There's something you can do for me first," he said. "Torvent, the young man you defeated and, I understand, exposed rather more thoroughly than you intended. He was being groomed by a certain man to serve as a spy within his own organization. That man will need a replacement now, and I have every reason to believe he'll come looking for you specifically, given the spectacle you made of yourself in that arena. When he does, I want you to accept his offer. Convincingly. This is not a man who forgives a lie once he's caught it."
Corren felt his pulse quicken. "Who is he? What would I actually be doing for him?"
"I can't tell you that yet," Voss said, not unkindly, though the refusal itself carried its own weight. "Go back to your dormitory. Wait. When contact comes, it will come to you directly, and I will send someone of my own to receive whatever you learn, so that I know it and can act on it in turn." He reached into his robes and drew out a small silver pendant shaped like a phoenix, holding it up so lamplight caught along its edges. "You'll recognize my go-between by this."
"I've never spied on anyone in my life," Corren said, the anxiety finally breaking through his composure. "I don't know if I have whatever it takes to lie convincingly to a man like that."
Voss's smile carried real amusement this time. "The fact that you're visibly afraid will serve you better than false confidence ever could. Fear reads as sincerity, to the kind of man we're discussing. Calm reads as rehearsal." He set the pendant down on the desk between them, a clear signal that the conversation, and the negotiation along with it, had reached its natural end. "Go home, Corren. Wait for the invitation. When it comes, and it will, remember that everything I've asked of you buys your friend a chance at a life he otherwise won't have."
Corren left the tower with the pendant's weight sitting strange and heavy in his palm, the shape of an agreement he hadn't fully understood the terms of even as he'd already accepted them.
He hadn't made it more than a few strides from the tower's base before a column of soldiers in gleaming bronze armor stepped into his path, their helmets stamped with the same bronze phoenix Corren now recognized as the Academy guard's own insignia rather than any outsider's. One of them produced a sealed letter, its wax stamped with the unmistakable shape of a black phoenix.
"By order of Duke Maravent," the soldier said, formal and unhurried, "you are invited to try out for a special position within his household, continuing your Academy education under his additional patronage. Should you succeed, you will receive training beyond anything the Academy itself can offer, and potentially a personal recommendation from the Duke to stand as Champion Knight before the King himself."
Corren accepted the letter with hands that betrayed only a fraction of what he actually felt. "I accept," he said, and meant, silently, an entirely different agreement than the one written on the parchment in front of him.
The soldiers departed as briskly as they'd arrived, leaving him alone in the courtyard with two sealed letters now weighing down two different pockets, one promising power, the other promising the price of it, and no honest way yet to know which promise he'd actually end up paying for.