The infirmary corridor was quiet at this hour.
Azrael walked without destination and Lyssael walked beside him with the particular expression of someone who had decided to accompany a person without being asked and was now questioning the decision. Their footsteps echoed against the stone floor in the specific way that footsteps echo in empty corridors too loud for the silence around them, too quiet to justify the space.
Neither spoke for the first two minutes.
Lyssael: "Where are we going?"
Azrael: "I don't know."
Lyssael exhaled through his nose.
Lyssael: "You're a savage."
Azrael looked at him.
Azrael: "Why?"
Lyssael: "The man from last night." He said it the way he said most things flatly, without embellishment, as a series of facts the listener could arrange however they chose. "They found him this morning. What was left of him."
Azrael said nothing. He kept walking.
Lyssael: "His face was unrecognizable. Completely destroyed. His throat had been mutilated to the point where the flesh had stopped being solid." He kept his eyes forward. "His chest was open. Emptied of everything it had contained."
The corridor passed around them. A door. A window admitting pale morning light. Another door.
Lyssael: "The physicians said the death must have been long. Painful. Every vital point was missed. Every single one." A pause. "You just kept going until he stopped moving."
Azrael's eyes darkened slightly. Something settled in his expression not guilt, not satisfaction. Something quieter and more permanent than either. The specific quality of a person who has done something and has made their peace with it in the time between doing it and being asked about it.
Azrael: "He got what he deserved."
Three words. Said without heat, without defensiveness, without any particular need to justify them. They arrived and stayed in the air between the two of them and Lyssael looked at Azrael for a moment the particular look of someone recalibrating something and then looked forward again.
He exhaled once more and said nothing more about it.
They walked until the corridor ended and the building opened onto the morning gardens.
The light was different out here. Early and clean and unhurried, the kind that exists in the hour before the day has complicated itself. The gardens stretched ahead in ordered rows trimmed hedges running along stone paths, the occasional bench placed with the deliberateness of someone who had thought carefully about where a person might want to sit. Dew still on the grass at the edges of the paths. The academy buildings visible above the hedges, their stone catching the morning at angles that made it look briefly warm, briefly like something other than what it was the rest of the day.
A bird somewhere in the hedges announced itself and was not answered.
They kept walking. Not toward anything in particular. The particular aimlessness of two people who had somewhere to be eventually and had collectively decided that eventually could wait without consequence.
Azrael's bandaged hand was at his side. He had not looked at it since leaving the infirmary room. It was pain, present and manageable, the kind he had accumulated enough experience with to know exactly how to file. Not the worst he had carried. Not close.
Maria left early.
The thought arrived without being summoned. She had been gone when the physician came to check the bandaging something had come up, something she had kept to herself, and the specific quality of her absence was different from the specific quality of her presence in a way he was choosing not to examine.
He looked at the garden instead.
Azrael: "Are you entering the Arden tournament?"
Lyssael: "Yes." No hesitation. Immediate and absolute. "I have to win."
Something in his voice carried weight that the words alone didn't explain. Not confidence Lyssael was always confident in a way that required no announcement. Something underneath the confidence. A reason that had texture to it, a specific gravity that suggested it wasn't about the tournament itself but about something the tournament was connected to.
Azrael noticed this the way he noticed most things. He registered the slight tension in Lyssael's jaw on the word have, the particular way his posture had shifted by a fraction when he said it, the fact that he had answered immediately rather than with the measured deliberation he usually applied to statements of intent.
Something personal. Something he was not going to share unprompted.
Azrael decided not to ask.
Azrael: "I'm entering too."
Lyssael looked at him. The look lasted slightly longer than necessary the specific quality of someone who had something to say and was deciding in real time whether this was the moment to say it. His pale rose eyes moved over Azrael's face with the attention of someone reading something carefully.
He decided against it.
Lyssael: "I pity whoever draws your name."
Something moved at the corner of Azrael's mouth. Just slightly. The shape of something that was not quite a smile and not quite not one the particular expression of someone who has received a compliment phrased as a warning and found both parts accurate.
Lyssael's mouth did the same thing.
It lasted approximately two seconds. Then both of them looked forward again and the moment passed the way such moments pass when neither party is willing to acknowledge what just happened.
Lyssael reached over and hit him on the shoulder once open-handed, brief, the same economy of gesture he always used. The kind of contact that acknowledged something without naming it and expected nothing in return.
Lyssael: "I'm going to find Victoria."
Azrael: "Go."
They parted without ceremony. Lyssael's footsteps faded toward the east wing of the gardens, even and unhurried, and Azrael stood where he was for a moment after the sound was gone.
The morning continued around him. The bird in the hedge made its announcement again. The light moved incrementally across the stone paths in the way light moves when it has nowhere particular to be. Somewhere in the distance the academy was beginning its day voices, footsteps, the particular sound of a building filling up with the business of existing.
He breathed the garden air. Clean and cool and smelling of cut grass and stone. The particular smell of early morning before the day had added its layer of everything else on top of it.
Then he turned back toward the infirmary building.
One step. Two. Three.
He was thinking about the tournament. About Lyssael's jaw on the word have and what kind of reason produces that specific quality of gravity in someone who usually carries their reasons without showing them. About his own bandaged hand and whether it would be functional in time. About the fact that Selena was at the Silver Palace and he did not know when she would return and had decided three times in the last hour not to think about that and had failed all three times.
Four steps. Five.
He felt it before he understood it.
A pressure first. Then a wrongness the specific wrongness of something encountering resistance it had not been designed to encounter, a sensation that arrived from somewhere in the middle of him and communicated itself to the rest of his body before his mind had processed what it meant.
Then the cold.
He looked down.
A blade.
Protruding from his abdomen at an angle that suggested it had entered from behind driven with the deliberateness of someone who knew exactly what they were doing and had waited for the precise moment when his attention was directed elsewhere and his back was turned and there was no one in the garden who would see.
It was a blade.
He looked at it for a moment.
Then the pain arrived.