"He was watching the Vampire House entrance," I say.
"Yes."
"Before he saw us. He was watching it before we came out."
"Yes," Sage says again, carefully.
I think about his expression when he turned and saw me. The way his gaze moved from the building to my face and stayed there for a second longer than it needed to. The fact that he was standing at a gate he had no administrative reason to be standing at, at this hour, in this particular direction.
"He knew I was in there," I say. "With Caspian."
"Probably." Sage pulls open the main building door and holds it for me. "The Vampire House summons you for a private interrogation, your detention supervisor last night would reasonably know about it. He files reports. He reads reports. He probably knew before you did."
"And he came to stand outside."
"He came to stand outside," she confirms, her voice carrying exactly zero inflection, which is how I know she has an opinion she's decided not to share.
"He didn't come in," I say. "He stood outside and watched the door."
"Ryder Ashford," Sage says, "does not do anything without a specific reason. Whether the reason makes sense to anyone else is a different question." She lets the door swing shut behind us. "He also files dormitory complaints within twelve hours of receiving them and doesn't typically supervise student detentions personally. But sure. Unrelated."
I put my hand over the amulet through my jacket, feeling the faint warmth of it against my palm.
"You have a theory," I say.
"I have several theories," Sage says. "I'm keeping them to myself until I have more data."
"That's what Malik said about his theories."
"Malik and I are very compatible people." She steers us toward the stairwell leading up to the morning lecture. "Come on. If we're late to Healing Arts, Instructor Penwick will make us demonstrate basic wound closure on each other and she always pairs people who clearly shouldn't be paired."
I follow her up the stairs. My hand drops from the amulet. The warmth of the stone stays with me even when I stop touching it, and I carry it through the rest of the morning the way you carry something you weren't sure you needed until you had it and then couldn't imagine putting down.
Caspian Thorne said I wasn't worth his effort, and he knew where the ring was before he summoned me, and he told me that at the end, after the circling and the commentary on what he could smell, and I'm aware that this is a specific kind of game I don't know the rules of yet.
Ryder Ashford stood at a gate in the cold and watched a door I was behind, and then looked at me across a courtyard and walked away without acknowledging any of it.
I file both. Date, method, what was said and what wasn't. The same way I always file things. The record exists even when Idon't look at it, sitting in the part of me that keeps track so the rest of me can keep moving.
The amulet sits warm against my sternum, Malik's careful work, and I decide that counts as one thing going right today. The math still holds.
Chapter 6
The combat arena smells like chalk dust and old blood. Someone tried to clean the stone floor between sessions, but blood gets into the grain of things and doesn't come out.
"Fairmont." The trial coordinator calls my name off her board without looking up. "You're paired with Dax Varro. Dragon House. Second ring."
Dax Varro is built like someone designed him to take up space and then kept going. He's already in the second ring when I get there, rolling his neck side to side, and he looks at me the way people look at a door they're about to walk through without checking what's on the other side.
"A null," he says. Not to me. To the two Dragon House students watching from the barrier. "They paired me with a null."
"Technically I'm a four-house anomaly," I say. "If we're doing introductions."
He faces me fully. His eyes have the gold flicker that dragon shifters can't fully suppress when they're amused or angry, andright now they're doing both. "You going to absorb my fire, null? Little trick you can do?"
"I don't know," I say. "Let's find out."
The coordinator signals the start. Dax doesn't hold back, which I respect even as the first wave of fire rolls toward me across the ring.
