Chapter sixteen
Jessica
By late afternoon, my first day of the new semester has already cost me seven Merit Marks.
So that's going well.
Then the message goes out to every freshman at once, and the whole class feels it hit like a dropped glass:
Mandatory assembly. Great Hall. Now.
"Someone died," Renzo says with total confidence as we funnel into the hall with two hundred other freshmen. "Or got expelled. Somebody definitely got expelled."
"It's a visitor," Sophia counters, up on her toes trying to see the dais. "Someone important. Look how many faculty are up there. You don't get that many professors for bad news."
"You absolutely get that many professors for bad news," Declan says. "That's exactly when you get them. I've got three theories and none of them are good."
"We'll find out soon enough," Torres says, easy, and drops into the seat beside me, and I feel that now-familiar warmth of him being close settle something in my chest. We haven't talked about the almost-kiss.
The Chancellor steps forward, and the hall goes silent.
"Congratulations," he says, without preamble. "You have survived your first semester. Statistically, some of you will not survive the rest of the year."
Great, I think. Love a warm opener.
"You have spent these weeks earning Merit Marks," Falken continues, "and, I suspect, comparing them.
Today we all will compare, publically." A pause.
"Merit Marks are not gold stars. They are not rewards for being clever.
They are the single measure of whether you are on pace to qualify for the First Trial at the end of this year — and whether you will still be a student at Luftis when that day comes.
Today, for the first time, you will all see exactly where you stand.
Relative to the standard. And relative to each other. "
The room goes tight as a wire.
He lifts a hand, and a curtain retracts, revealing a board with names, numbers and columns.
The whole class surges forward in their seats at once, everyone hunting for their own name in the same instant, and the whispering starts immediately — little gasps, muttered curses, someone two rows down going "yes" under their breath, someone else going very, very still.
I find my friends first, because I can't help it. Freya's up near the top third — of course. Declan's solidly mid-pack, exactly where he guessed. Sophia's higher than she feared and grabs my arm with a squeak. Renzo's lower, and his grin flickers. Torres is comfortably placed.
Then I find mine.
And my stomach drops.
I'm not near the bottom. That's the first thing my brain reaches for, the small mercy. I'm not in the danger zone at the very bottom of the board where a cluster of names glows an ominous dull red.
But I'm nowhere near where I thought I'd be.
Nowhere near where I started — I came out of that first week with the most Merit Marks of any of us, three from Jon in a single class, flying.
And now I'm sitting in the lower-middle of the pack, watching names I know are less engaged than me, less curious, less anything than me, sitting comfortably above mine.
I start adding it up before I can stop myself.
Faris. Seven marks in one afternoon for helping Renzo find a treaty, and she's docked me twice more since, two here, three there, always calm, always for something I'd do again.
Combat, where I keep bleeding points I should be earning.
A dozen little moments that didn't feel like they mattered at the time and apparently all did.
The Chancellor's voice cuts through. "For those doing arithmetic," he says dryly, “halfway through the academic year, a student on pace to reach one hundred Merit Marks by the First Trial should currently hold approximately fifty.”
Fifty.
I'm at thirty-seven.
I do the math, fast and quiet. Thirteen behind pace, half the year gone, and every projection I run forward from my current rate lands me short — somewhere in the seventies, nowhere near a hundred.
Short. At the rate I'm going, I don't make it. I don't reach a hundred, I don't qualify for the Trial, and I get sent home.
I keep my face very carefully neutral, and I clap politely when the Chancellor dismisses us, and I do not let a single thing show.
Outside, everyone's comparing before we've cleared the doors.
"Top third," Sophia is saying to Freya, delighted and appalled. "How. How. You never even look stressed."
"I don't skip the boring assignments," Freya says. "The boring ones are worth the most. Nobody does them."
"That's — actually genuinely useful, why did no one tell me that—"
I keep smiling. I ask Renzo how he's doing, and when his grin wobbles I tell him he's got half a year and the exact study trick Freya just handed us, and I watch him steady. I do what I do — I keep everyone else afloat, I keep the group warm, I keep the panic from spreading.
But I go quieter. I can feel myself doing it, the way the running commentary in my head goes flat.
Torres notices. Of course he does.
"You okay?" he asks, low, just for me.
I give him a smile that even I know isn't my best work. "Yeah. I just — need a minute. I'll catch up."
He studies me for a second, and I brace for him to push, because he could. Instead he just nods, lets me go, and quietly steers Sophia's attention elsewhere so nobody watches me leave.
I love him a little bit for that.
I end up in one of the small gardens tucked between the older buildings — a quiet square of hedges and worn paths and an old stone bench going soft green at the edges, the kind of forgotten place I gravitate to on instinct.
I sit down, and I pull out my actual paper notebook, the one where I've been tracking everything since day one, and I do the math again.
Maybe I forgot some. Maybe I added wrong. Maybe there's a class I didn't count.
I go through it line by line. Every mark earned, every mark lost. Jon's classes, the essays, the questions answered, the Faris bloodletting, combat, combat, combat.
The numbers don't change.
And here's the thing that actually stings, sitting alone on a cold bench: it's not the academics. I'm good at the academics. I like them. I read ahead, I stay late, I ask the questions everyone else is embarrassed to ask. On paper I should be near the top with Freya.
Mostly it's combat. It's only ever combat.
And it's not that I'm weak, or slow, or uncoordinated. Years of hauling myself up mountains gave me legs that could kick through a wall and a body that learns movement fast. I understand the techniques. I can drill them clean. I get it, all of it.
Right up until someone throws a strike toward my head.
Then, for one single humiliating instant, my whole body just — stops.
Flinches. Freezes. That one split second where I should be slipping or blocking or moving, and instead there's a flash of the arena, the fist I never saw, the sand rushing up, waking up under a light with a stranger's voice — and by the time my body remembers it's allowed to move, I've already taken the hit, or frozen long enough to lose the exchange, and there go the marks.
I'm gun-shy. That's the word for it, and I've been avoiding it for weeks, and sitting here alone I finally just admit it to myself.
I got hit once, badly, and now a part of me won't stop bracing for it. And I hate that. I hate that a single bad second on day one is still costing me, over and over, weeks later. I hate that it's the one thing between me and the number I need.
"You're doing the math wrong."
I nearly come off the bench.
I whip around, and Luke is standing at the edge of the garden — dark hair, green eyes, hands in his pockets, watching me with that unreadable calm — and I have absolutely no idea how long he's been there, because I didn't hear a single footstep.
"I didn't hear you," I say, pressing a hand to my racing heart.
"I've been here a minute." He says it without apology.
I narrow my eyes. "Are you following me?"
His expression doesn't flicker. "I saw you leave the assembly."
Which isn't quite an answer, and isn't quite not one, and I decide I don't have the energy to interrogate it. I gesture at the empty end of the bench.
He crosses and sits — not too close, a careful, deliberate distance — and for a moment neither of us says anything.
It's oddly not awkward. And I notice, the way I've noticed before and haven't examined, that the low restless hum I've carried around for weeks eases a little with him sitting there. I don't understand it.
His eyes drop to the notebook in my lap.
"You think your problem is Merit Marks," he says.
I sigh. "Isn't it? I'm thirteen behind pace. I did the math four times."
"No." He says it flatly. "It's combat."
I look away, at the hedges, at anything.
"You hesitate," Luke says.
I let out a soft, humorless laugh. "I got knocked unconscious on my first day."
"I noticed."
I give him a sideways look. "Yeah. I'm aware you noticed.
You were there." I turn my notebook over in my hands.
"I know what I'm supposed to do. I've drilled every block, every slip, every counter.
I could recite them. And then someone swings at my head and my body just — quits on me.
One second. That's all it takes. And that one second keeps costing me points I can't afford to lose.
" I shake my head. "It's the stupidest thing. It's one second."
I expect him to say something princely and useless. Just get over it. Push through. The kind of thing people who've never frozen in their lives say to people who have.
Instead Luke says, quietly, "That's normal."
I look up, surprised. "It is?"
“The first bad hit stays with you,” he says, his flat delivery softened by an unexpected gentleness, like he’s speaking from experience.
"Everybody who's ever been genuinely hurt in a fight carries the next one differently.
Your body's not betraying you. It's trying to protect you — it just hasn't learned yet that flinching gets you hit more.
" He shrugs. "It stays with you. But it doesn't stay forever. Not if you retrain it."
I stare at him. Because that's — that's actually the first thing anyone has said about combat that doesn't make me feel broken.
He glances toward the far end of campus, where the low bulk of the combat arena sits against the mountains.
"I can help," he says.
I blink. "With combat?"
"With the hesitation." He looks back at me. "We fix that, your combat marks stop bleeding. You stop bleeding marks, your math changes. It's not as far off as you think."
I study him — this reserved, impossible-to-read prince who carried me to the medical wing, who somehow keeps turning up, who is now offering to spend his time fixing the one thing I can't fix myself.
"Why?" I ask. "You don't even know me. Why would you do that?"
Luke answers without a second's hesitation, like the answer was already sitting there waiting.
"Because you're better than your score."
I don't have anything to say to that.
Because no one has looked at my ranking that way.
Every professor who's glanced at me lately sees a number in the lower-middle and files me accordingly — Faris certainly does.
And here's a boy the entire academy stands up for, looking at the exact same number, and seeing something underneath it that's worth his time.
He stands. "Tomorrow. After classes. The arena. Every day."
I let out a startled laugh. "Every day?"
"If you're serious about the hundred." He looks at me, steady. "Are you?"
And the thing is — I am. I didn't fall down a mountain and cross a continent and watch a man turn into a wolf and stare down Celeste Faris to wash out over one bad second I can actually fix.
I stand up too, and I offer him my hand. "Deal."
Luke looks at my hand.
Just for a moment—the briefest flicker crosses his face, too fast for me to read, like he’s bracing himself. Then he takes it.
And it's a handshake. A perfectly normal handshake — warm, firm, his hand around mine — except that same steadying warmth flows up my arm the way it did in the dining hall, quiet and right, there and gone.
Nothing dramatic. Nothing strange. Just a handshake that lasts exactly as long as a handshake should, and then he lets go first.
"I'll see you tomorrow," he says.
And he walks away across the courtyard, and I watch him go and I still do not understand why one of the three most important students at this academy keeps turning up to help a scholarship girl.
But I've stopped needing to understand everything today.
I sit back down and open my notebook, and I flip past all the columns and the failed arithmetic to a clean page, and at the top I write one word — ARENA — and under it, every day, and I underline it twice.
Then I close the notebook, and I go find my friends, and for the first time since that board lit up over the Great Hall, I'm not thinking about how far behind I am.
I'm thinking about tomorrow.