Chapter 32
Aftermath
The Academy took approximately four hours to finish processing what it
had seen.
He could track the stages of it from the way people looked at him â€" or
stopped looking at him, which was its own kind of statement. In the
first hour after the duel, he was invisible in a new way: not the
invisibility of someone too unimportant to notice, but the invisibility
of something people needed to think about before they could look at
directly.
In the second hour, the looking started. Careful, sideways, the
assessment of people recalibrating.
By the third hour, clusters of students in the common hall went quiet
when he walked in, and he understood that conversations had been
happening about him that would resume once he left.
Fen found him in the library before dinner.
'The duel result hasn't been officially recorded yet,' she said, sitting
across from him and keeping her voice low. 'The faculty witness filed
his report but the committee that processes duel results apparently had
a procedural question about how to categorize the win.'
'What's the question?'
'How to record the ability used.' She looked at him steadily. 'Standard
duel records list the winning technique â€" Pyros burst, Terros
shield-break, Aeros chain, and so on. Your technique doesn't have a
category in the existing record system.'
He'd expected something like this. 'What are the options?'
'They can create a new category, which requires faculty committee
approval and draws attention. They can record it as Umbros â€" which is
officially a suppressed school, which draws a different kind of
attention. Or they can leave the technique field blank, which is
apparently also a procedural issue.'
'What does the faculty witness recommend?'
'Unknown. But Vael is on the committee that processes unusual results. I
noticed that from the administrative board this morning.' A pause. 'She
may have already known this would come up.'
Cyan looked at the books in front of him that he hadn't been reading.
'Orris,' he said. 'How is he?'
'Recovering. Mana depletion at that level takes a day or two.' She
paused. 'He's not filing a grievance, if that's what you're wondering.
He could argue the technique was unregistered and therefore invalid, but
a grievance would require him to explain publicly that he lost to a null
result provisional, and apparently he's decided he'd rather absorb the
loss quietly.'
That was the thing about people like Orris. They understood the cost of
drawing attention to certain kinds of failures.
'The other provisionals?' Cyan asked.
'Varied. Aldous thinks it was well-executed. The noble-adjacent group is
uncomfortable â€" you've disrupted the implicit hierarchy they were
relying on. The twins are apparently telling everyone you're secretly
Gold-rank which is wrong but entertaining.' She folded her hands. 'Dain
is telling anyone who will listen that he knew about you before the duel
and that this is consistent with his prior assessment, which is also
wrong but in a different way.'
Cyan thought about Dain saying that with the particular enthusiasm Dain
brought to most things.
'And General Cohort?'
Fen was quiet for a moment. 'The Gold students have been very deliberate
about not commenting. That's its own statement.' She met his eyes. 'Sera
Voss was in the observation tier. I don't know where she was sitting â€" I
didn't see her until after â€" but she was there.'
He thought about a girl who'd had a dream about him for nine years
looking at the Mark on his palm from across a duel hall.
'All right,' he said.
'All right?' Fen raised an eyebrow.
'I mean that I hear you.' He looked back at his books. 'What I did today
was going to create exactly this kind of attention eventually. I chose
to create it in a controlled context rather than waiting for an
uncontrolled one. The attention is the cost. I paid it.'
Fen looked at him for a moment.
'You planned it,' she said.
'I was standing somewhere,' he said.
She looked at him for another moment.
Then, very faintly, she smiled. It was the first time he'd seen her
smile. It lasted about two seconds.
'Eat dinner,' she said, standing. 'Tomorrow is going to be a longer day
than today.'
She was right about that.