5

It's nothing, Ryska told herself and pressed her hand over the cut until the sting of it dulled into something she could ignore. A blade, a shallow one at that, was the least of what the world had already tried to take from her, she wrapped her arms around herself until the sting dulled enough to ignore.

Rhovyn spotted her from across the ground, she's frightened or tensed, he realized and he took a step, but what would you say to her? His mind asked, his feet stopped and he sat back with Erynae and Bram.

"I was looki..." Faelen's voice cut off as she rounded the corner and saw her wound. "How did you get injured?" She dropped down beside her.

"Accident."

"An accident?" Faelen's brows drew together. "Let's go find a healer."

"No." Ryska didn't move her arm. "I'll go after the results are announced."

Faelen wanted to argue that, but she didn't press seeing her face. "Did you eat?"

Ryska said nothing, she was still standing at the edge of the Solari, still somewhere in Viana with a fortnight of borrowed brown eyes behind her.

Faelen took the silence for the answer it was and pushed herself back to her feet. "Stay here," she brushed grass from her knees and said before walking. "I'm bringing something."

The results were announced at the evening bell, the Grand Court filled with the sound of twelve hundred people discovering what they would and would not be permitted to become. Cordaelae stood once more upon the platform to announce the names of five hundred students.

Rhovyn and Erynae heard their names upon Solmaere’s list and clasped hands at once.

“Papa would be proud,” Rhovyn exclaimed in delight.

“My father will be delighted that I am to be made a knight, and more delighted still that I shall not be at home for the next three years,” Erynae said with a laugh.

Bram, when the Vaerhold list was read with his name in it, very nearly fell upon Rhovyn in his excitement. Rhovyn patted his shoulders with amusement of his silliness and waited eagerly for the Draconian girl’s name when Aelthara’s list was announced, only to realize that he did not in fact know it.

He tried to find her, but unlike the hours before the examination, the students no longer stood in colored clusters. Disappointed, he left the hall with Erynae and Bram once the announcements were over and they stepped out into a world already sinking into the shadows of night.

The sun had fallen beneath the horizon, the university cressets sprang to life as they had done for four centuries, one by one along the edge of the court. The great cresset above the Great Clock burned brighter and more golden than the rest and its light caught her scales.

Ryska looked up toward it, and the light traced down along the fine amber lines beneath her skin. It shifted with every breath she took, fragmented and reformed along the lines, brightened as she inhaled, faded soft again as she let it go, it moved with the rhythm of her.

Rhovyn had carried a hazy image of her in his mind all day and somehow, she matched it. He stared, caught entirely in it, unaware that across the court, someone else's eyes had found her too, just as fixed, just as far from noticing him back.

Valere's breath caught somewhere between his throat and his chest, he stood still for the space of thirty seconds and stared at someone that surpassed his notion of what the world could contain, he needed to be certain that his eyes were not deceiving him.

Her scales caught the firelight and held it like veins of molten gold traced beneath skin rather than upon it. He could not tell where flesh ended and scale began, the pattern didn't sit atop her, it seemed to run through her, alive with its own slow pulse.

Valere realized that he had stopped breathing altogether. Thirty seconds or maybe longer, he had lost count somewhere around the moment he stopped believing his own eyes and started simply looking.

The edges of the courtyard began to blur, the crowd started thinning, then the torchlit walls dimmed, one shadow started bleeding into the next, until the shapes of others blurred to nothing. The murmur of voices dropped away last, fading the way a room fades when sleep finally takes it and through all of it, she stayed. The gold beneath her skin was the last color left burning in a world gone to grey and silent until there was nothing around her at all, only her, and him crossing the empty distance toward the one woman that hadn't faded.

Ryska saw him approach her; she was fifteen paces from him, and she held his gaze till he cleared all of them.

What does this human bring, she thought as she watched him close the distance without breaking stride. Another jab? A sneer, dressed up as politeness? The same tired prejudice wearing a new face? Or perhaps a compliment about her beauty, the kind men offered when they wanted something and thought flattery was the cheapest price to pay for it.

She'd catalogued them all by now. She waited to see which one he'd chosen.

“It is a blade-cut,” he stopped near her and pointed towards her injured arm.

That is all? she thought and something gave a soft knock at her chest. No prejudice? No hollow praise but only... a wound and nothing more asked of me for it.

His eyes returned from her wound back to her face; she kept staring in confusion as if she couldn't quite work out what to do with a look that held nothing but concern.

“It was an accident,” she answered after a moment and covered her wound with her hand, as much to shield it from his gaze as to hide the fact that she didn't know what to do with a stranger looking at her like that, like the wound mattered more than what she was.

"It did not come from an accident," Valere reached towards her arm but stopped short of touching her.

“It does not matter," she turned slightly to the left to keep wound out of his sight.

He didn't touch me, she thought. Most men she met throughout two months reached first and asked permission after, if they asked at all but he'd stopped himself before she'd even had the chance to pull away.

“A blade laid upon an Aethoria student in Aldaene?" Valere asked as he wondered what must've happened to her. "It matters very much," he added.

“Four names without bands are not the information worth having," she said and thought that nothing could be done, if anything it would make people say she'd started being trouble the moment she arrived.

He looked at her a moment, thought something but thought better of it. "The university healer shall see to your arm, come...”

“I do not need...”

"Let someone tend to it," he cut her off gently and pointed across the grounds to his left, where Merrath Academy's spires rose black against the night sky, only a handful of windows were still lit at this hour. "The healer's there," he said.

Ryska followed the line of his hand, the university grounds had gone quiet with the late hour, torchlight lined the walking paths in place of the sun throwing long shadows between the academy buildings. Few students were still out this late, most windows were dark, the rare lit one only marked where someone burned oil past a sensible hour.

A small smile crept onto her face at sight of Merrath, the kind that belonged to a memory she hadn't quite decided to share yet.