22. Chapter 22 The Hallway
Corvath appeared when they got back to the building and trotted ahead of them, tail up, heading for the northwest wing to meet Ollie for another pass at the sealed sections in the passage network.
He'd been talking about it since breakfast, the sealed masonry and the corroded pipe joints, and the otter's surprisingly effective teeth.
Tesslyn walked on Lucien's right with her bag on one shoulder.
Liora walked on his left with her sleeve pushed above the elbow, the angular mark on her forearm showing she was his.
Between classes, the hallway near Renvaya's classroom ran full, students moving in both directions with bags and half-finished conversations.
"MARGRAVE! I’VE BEEN LOOKING FOR YOU!”
The shout came from behind and carried the length of the corridor. Every student in the hallway turned. Lucien looked back. Tesslyn and Liora stopped beside him.
Valt Krenning came around the far bend at a walk that was almost running, his face flushed and his jaw set. He was alone. No friends flanking him, no snake across his shoulders. He wore his uniform and the Krenning crest and nothing else, his pale blue eyes locked on Lucien from thirty feet away.
"Your putrid animal was in my room!" Valt's voice bounced off stone. "Your animal pissed on my pillow!"
Lucien didn't move. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"Don't lie to me." Valt closed the distance to fifteen feet and kept coming.
Students pressed against the walls to clear him a path.
"Cat piss. Center of the pillow. Soaked through the pillowcase, soaked through the down, and my room smells like an alley behind a fish market.
Your cat has been running around this building like it owns the place and you're going to stand there and deny it. "
Corvath had stopped walking. He sat beside Lucien's boot with his tail wrapped around his front paws, his posture straight, his chin up. He looked ahead at nothing in particular, entirely unbothered by the accusation. “Hasn’t this buffoon realized that confrontations with you are not fruitful? Is he really this dumb?” Corvath asked through the bond.
"There are other cats on campus," Lucien said. "Several of them."
"Don't give me that. Your cat talks. Your cat sits in lectures. Your cat follows you down every corridor in the building." Valt stopped eight feet away, breathing hard, his voice pitched for the benefit of every student in earshot. "No stray did this. It was your familiar and you know it."
Corvath's silence held. His expression was perfectly, completely blank. If anything, he looked bored.
"My roommate thought it was funny," Valt said. His voice shook between rage and humiliation. "He asked me if I'd pissed the bed. Half the corridor smelled it by morning. I had to throw the pillow away."
"I’m sorry for your loss," Lucien said.
"Don't patronize me, Margrave."
"I'm not patronizing you. I'm telling you I don't know how a cat got into your room. Do you have proof, or just a pillow?"
The last thread of the Krenning composure broke. Valt's face twisted and the words came out raw and aimed, louder than anything before.
"Proof? I have a pillow that reeks of your disgusting animal and a building full of people who've seen that thing waddle around for six weeks like it is a student.
" He jabbed a finger at Corvath. "It doesn't belong here.
It's a stray with a party trick. A fat, broken alley cat that talks because something went wrong with it, bonded to an affinity-null nobody from a family that embarrasses itself every time the name comes up. "
The hallway went quiet.
"That thing isn't a real familiar," Valt said.
His voice filled the corridor. "A real familiar has value.
Ashavir was bred from a line that goes back eight generations.
Your cat was probably born under a porch.
It's a pest. And if it comes near my room again, I'll deal with it the way I deal with pests. "
Students who had been pretending not to listen stopped pretending.
A girl near the wall took a step back. A boy halfway down the corridor set his bag on the floor.
Two students at the far turn had stopped walking and were watching with the posture of people who wanted to leave and couldn't make their feet agree.
Corvath sat through all of it. His tail hadn't moved. His ears hadn't flattened. He'd sat through worse from better men and found none of it worth answering.
A door opened on the left side of the corridor.
Renvaya stepped out of her classroom. The shouting had reached her through the wall.
Her amber eyes found the scene in less than a second: Valt standing eight feet from Lucien, face flushed, the corridor packed with frozen students.
She crossed the space in three strides and put herself between them.
"Mr. Krenning." Her voice carried clean authority. "Step back."
"He sent his cat into my room! Without my permission, I might add!”
"I heard you from inside my classroom. Everyone on this floor heard you." She didn't raise her voice. "Step back. Now."
Valt didn't step back. His chest heaved, his hands were open at his sides, and his gaze burned past Renvaya toward Lucien and the cat sitting beside his boot.
Renvaya looked at Lucien. "Mr. Margrave, take your familiar and go."
Lucien met her eyes. He was about to answer when the air shifted behind her.
The spell left Valt's hand before anyone in the corridor noticed the channeling, a compressed bolt of wind mana aimed low, not at Lucien but at Corvath. It crossed eight feet of open corridor while Renvaya was still turning and Lucien's attention was on her face.
Corvath hit the stone wall with a crack that carried the length of the hallway. He fell to the floor and lay still.
Nobody moved. Students stood frozen in a twenty-foot stretch of corridor, none of them breathing, all of them watching a black cat on the stone floor against the far wall.
A girl dropped her books. The sound of them hitting the floor was the loudest thing in the hallway until Renvaya's hand came up.
Magic enveloped Valt's body in a shell of visible arcane restraint.
His arms locked against his sides and his legs froze.
The mana in his channels went dead. He could still breathe and talk, but his body was restrained.
Lucien crossed to the far wall.
Tesslyn was already running.
She dropped her bag where she stood and covered the distance in a sprint that scattered loose pages across the stone. She fell to her knees beside Corvath and touched him, finding the damage by feel.
His left hind leg was bent where no joint existed. The lower portion was angled wrong between the knee and the ankle; the bone had broken cleanly. He was conscious. His gold eyes were open and his breathing was fast and shallow, his fur standing in a hard ridge along his spine.
Tesslyn put her right hand over the break. Her left hand rested on Corvath's side, holding him still, her fingers spread across the fur. She closed her eyes.
Her hand glowed green-white. The light held steady and precise, matching the healing construct she'd built in Kess's ring in Week 2 and the permeable lattice Gallen had taught in Wards class.
But she hadn't built a construct this time.
The mana moved through her fingers and into the fracture as raw channeling, finding the break with the sureness of energy that knew exactly where it belonged.
The bone popped back together.
Corvath yelped. The sound was high and sharp.
The glow intensified for two seconds and then began to fade, the green-white dimming as the mana finished its work.
Tesslyn kept her hand in place until the light was gone, her breathing controlled, her green eyes locked on the leg beneath her fingers.
She ran her thumb along the line where the break had been.
The fur was damp with sweat but the bone was straight.
She lifted him with both hands, one under his chest and one under his hindquarters, and brought him against her chest. She held him there with his head resting against her collarbone and his leg hanging straight, whole, the bone set.
"Are you all right?" She kept her voice low.
"Yes," Corvath said. "That was most painful."
"I’m sure it was. Do you feel pain anywhere else?"
“My head is rattled a bit, but I’ll be fine. Thank you.”
Liora stood where the bolt had been fired. Her hands were over her mouth, her gold eyes wide above her fingers. She hadn't moved.
Lucien stood from where he'd knelt beside Corvath during the healing. He looked across the corridor at Valt, frozen in the restraint with his arms pinned and his breathing hard through his nose.
His eyes went crimson.
The color flooded his irises, drowning the brown, sustained and full.
Red light bled from his pupils outward and held.
It wasn't the brief flicker from the dining hall the day before, the half-second pulse he'd suppressed before most of the room caught it.
This was open and steady, crimson burning behind his eyes in a corridor full of witnesses with a clear line to his face.
The hallway went dead. Students along the walls pressed back. A girl near the entrance covered her mouth. A boy at the far turn left without looking back.
Renvaya saw it. She'd seen it before, in this same corridor, when his hand closed around a snake's throat and burned a permanent mark into its scales.
A wall of arcane energy materialized between Lucien and Valt, translucent and humming, placed precisely in the gap where violence would have traveled.
"Lucien." The words came out controlled and sharp. "Do not do anything. Back away. Look at me."
He looked at her. His hands were at his sides, fingers curled, the tendons in his forearms standing tight. The crimson held for three more seconds. Then it thinned at the edges, the red draining from his irises until the brown returned. He breathed through his nose once. His fingers opened.
He stepped back.