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 -- 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 -- 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 -- 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 -- 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 -- I didn't see her until after -- 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.