Wrenna's jaw tightened, and for a moment he thought she might simply walk away rather than continue a conversation with an answer she clearly hadn't wanted to hear. "I don't know what I wanted you to say," she admitted instead, quieter now, some of the earlier hardness draining out of her posture. "Maybe I wanted you to say no, so I wouldn't have to figure out what I'm supposed to do with feeling the way I feel about you while you're busy having feelings about someone else."
"I'm not going anywhere," Corren said carefully. "That much I do know."
"That's not actually an answer," Wrenna said, and there was no anger left in it now, only a kind of tired honesty. "But I suppose it's the only one either of us has right now." She held his gaze a moment longer, then reached up, before either of them could think better of it, and kissed him, brief and searching and nowhere near as certain as either of their previous kisses with other people had looked from the outside. She pulled back flushed, and troubled, and didn't offer any explanation for it, only turned and disappeared back into Baris's room, leaving Corren standing alone in a corridor that suddenly felt considerably more complicated than it had five minutes earlier.
He stood there a long while, turning the whole tangled evening over in his mind the way he turned over every unfinished translation, and arrived, in the end, at no cleaner an answer than either of the women in his life currently had. Whatever this was becoming, it wasn't going to resolve itself with a single conversation, and some stubborn, honest part of him suspected it shouldn't.
Grand Alchemist Renwick received him the following morning in a study that smelled of dried herbs and something faintly metallic, surrounded by shelves of labeled jars whose contents Corren didn't recognize and, in several cases, wasn't entirely sure he wanted to.
"I need everything you know about mana pathway damage," Corren said, without preamble, the urgency of the last two days sharpening every word. "My friend Baris. His body will heal on the surface, but the mages say his channels are ruined underneath it."
Renwick studied him for a long moment before answering, the specific, unhurried scrutiny of a man who measured every question by what it cost the person asking it. "Before I tell you what I know," he said, "answer me something first. Where is your line, Corren? Not the line you'd claim under pressure, for the sake of sounding brave. The actual one. A surgeon who doesn't know his own limit in advance kills the very patient he meant to save, because he finds out where the line was only after he's already crossed it."
"I don't know exactly where it is," Corren admitted, and found, somewhat to his own surprise, that the honest answer came easier than a confident lie would have. "I know I'll go further than is comfortable. I don't yet know if I'll go further than is wise."
Renwick's mouth twitched, something close to approval, suggesting that was, in fact, closer to the right answer than false certainty would have been. "An honest man," he said. "Good. I distrust the ones who claim they know their limits before they've ever been tested." He moved to one of his shelves, retrieving a thick, well-worn text, and spent the better part of the next hour walking Corren through the intricate architecture of muscle, bone, and the mana pathways threading invisibly between them, the same delicate, load-bearing structure a body relied on to channel any magic at all. The verdict, when it finally came, landed as heavily as Corren had feared. "Even fully healed on the surface, your friend will be left considerably weaker than he was. His pathways are too badly scarred to carry magic efficiently ever again, not without intervention far beyond ordinary healing."
"Is there intervention beyond ordinary healing?"
Renwick's mouth curved, not quite a smile. "There is a clan skilled in true regeneration, capable of rebuilding damaged tissue down to the pathway itself rather than merely closing a wound over it. I have spent decades attempting to acquire even a fragment of their technique, without success." He paused, and something almost like envy flickered across his composed features before he mastered it. "You're in luck, if luck is the word for it. Headmaster Voss himself is of Clan Vaelora. If anyone in this Academy can help your friend properly, it's him."
Corren left the alchemy study already moving toward Voss's office and made it only halfway there before Master Doss intercepted him in the corridor, breathless with a genuine warmth Corren hadn't often seen on the old blademaster's face.
"There you are." Doss clasped a hand briefly to Corren's shoulder. "I've been looking for you since the exhibition. Congratulations again. Forty minutes against Torvent. I've trained plenty of talented students in my time, and I've never seen one earn a win that thoroughly."
Corren managed a distracted smile, his mind already several steps ahead toward the conversation waiting for him at the Headmaster's door. "Thank you, Master Doss. Truly. I couldn't have done it without the Patience Form."
Doss's expression sobered as he noticed the distraction. "Where are you headed in such a hurry?"
"To see Headmaster Voss. About Baris."
Something careful crossed Doss's face, and he lowered his voice before continuing, glancing once down the empty corridor as though the walls themselves might be listening. "Be wary of how deeply you let yourself get tangled with men like Voss and Renwick," he said. "They're decent enough teachers. That doesn't mean they don't have their own designs running underneath it. Renwick wants knowledge no one alive is supposed to have, immortality chief among his ambitions, if the rumors carry any truth at all. Voss wants to be the King's Champion, or failing that, closer to the throne than a Headmaster's post was ever meant to bring him. Neither of those wants is evil, exactly. Neither of them is free, either."