School emptied like a drained cup, students spilling into the city, laughter and stray motes of Aether following them like dust. Some left for the markets and inns, while others headed to the library or a quiet practice room.
Aurelia did none of those. She lay on the grass just past the practice yard, flat against the earth with her palms warm on the turf and the Academy's spires cutting the sky into rune-shaped shadows.
The sky is beautiful...
She closed her eyes and tried honestly to do what Kael had suggested in the smallest way, which was to listen.
Breathe. Do not flare. Do not strike. Breathe like water, not like the sun.
The trick, she found, was patience, an old thing her tutors never emphasized enough. She pressed the heel of her hand against the ground and let the world's hum come to her.
At first, there was only noise: the distant clatter of cloaks, the faint thrum of a spell an older student practiced nearby, the low pulse of the stone runes underfoot.
Beneath it all, like a slow heartbeat, something more remarkable stirred. Threads. Not visual at first, but shapes in thought, a slow tide, a tightening in the chest of the day.
There, she thought, her chest flinched at the admission that she had never let the world speak like that before. She had always answered it, summoned, bent, commanded. Listening was a different muscle.
She inhaled slowly. The Aether came as pressure, like wind on the back of the neck. She felt its leaning: a current running along the line of the avenue, another eddy swirling where the fountain threw its spray.
Each had a cadence, a weakness. Picture them as threads, thin silver lines between stone and sky, and watch how they braid and split.
When she tried to pull one, even the tiniest, it resisted. Hot as molten coin, her Aether flared at the attempt, demanding dominance. The thread flared back, refusing to be forced. She had always known her magic to be roaring and immediate, coaxing was alien and maddening.
So focus on smaller. Not blaze. Bend the angle of the breeze, the tilt of a mote. Make no announcements.
She softened, breathed again, and reached, not with the muscle of heat but with the tip of her mind. A single strand quivered where two currents crossed, she nudged it with nothing more than intent and the lightest fold of will.
For an instant, the thread trembled, then shifted, a bare fraction, a whisper of compliance. It was not force, it was a suggestion.
Aurelia's chest stung with an odd mixture of triumph and shame. The shift was almost nothing, the curl of a dust mote diverted by a fraction, the faint easing of the current's knot. To anyone watching, it would have been invisible. To her, it was the size of a new world.
That's all you gave me, she thought to the empty sky. A sliver. But it moved.
Her hand still tingled where she had pressed the turf. Her Aether pulsed in sympathy, annoyed and impatient, wanting to flare and achieve victory. She had to clamp down on it, let it simmer like a hearth rather than an inferno.
Somewhere behind her, a shadow detached itself from the paths between columns. She didn't look up.
Someone's coming
The presence is quiet as riverbank stone and just as steady.
"You listen with anger," Kael said, the words low, not a reprimand but an observation. He sat down a short distance away, back straight, hands folded over his slate. "Anger makes the world spike away from you. It tightens the thread."
Aurelia's mouth opened onto a retort, "I am not angry..."
But the truth sat like a hot coal against her ribs. She had been enraged. She had been proud, hurt, furious. That triangle of feelings had colored every attempt she'd made since the duel, a constant battle against her own emotions.
She closed her eyes again and forced the anger into a cool, manageable ember. Calm, she mouthed in thought, and tried once more. The following thread she reached for shifted smoothly, not because she pushed harder but because she had stopped pushing at all.
Kael watched her while she worked, a smile on his face, patient. He did not move to touch or to teach. He simply sat, a steady presence, and let her fail and inch forward on her own.
Aurelia felt the shape of a different possibility for the first time since the arena's roar, not a single, consuming mastery but the slow, punishing craft of listening and minor corrections. The idea prickled like a mix of frost and warmth.
When her hand finally felt the subtlest of satisfactions, an eddy bent in a controlled arc that held for a breath, she opened her eyes. Kael's gaze met hers, steady and almost approving.
"You'll need more than resentment," he said softly. "But you have the patience for it, when you let it."
Aurelia let the small triumph sit inside her like a warm stone. For once, the satisfaction wasn't a show for the crowd. It was private and measured.
She turned her face toward Kael, and the armor she usually wore, the cold of a duchess, the mask fell away as if it had never fit.
Her eyes narrowed, not in suspicion this time, but in genuine curiosity. "How did you learn to do this?" she asked. "You weren't trained like the rest of us. No tutors in gilded halls, no private instructors. How did you... see the weave? How did you turn scraps of theory into something that undid me in the arena?"
Kael rubbed the pad of his thumb along the spine of his closed book, a slight motion of habit. "I don't really know," he admitted. "Not in any tidy way. I read anything I could find, old texts, scraps in market stalls, a handful of teachers who weren't much but taught me to hold a rhythm. I watched, practiced until the motions stopped being conscious, then tried to bend pieces together in ways I'd never seen in a lesson."
He looked up, and his voice had no boast, only a plain accounting of the truth. "The first time I did something that felt right, I didn't understand it. I showed it in the market once, and people gasped. I didn't know why they were surprised. To me, it felt like fixing a knot no one else bothered with. Shouldn't that be basic? Find the slack, fold it. But nobody else tended to that slack. They were busy making storms."
Aurelia felt a thin, sharp laugh rise that she checked with effort. Basic, she thought. Basic. The word slid between her teeth with a metallic taste.
In the Academy, the nobles had been taught spectacle, ribbons of fire, grand constructs. Precision like Kael's would had been called mechanical, secondary, unromantic.
"So you... invented patchwork from scraps and practice," she said slowly. "You taught yourself to listen where others shouted."
He nodded. "If that's how it looks. I tried a lot and discarded most of it. I kept and refined the bits that worked. It was never about proving them wrong," he added quietly. "It was about making sense. Then someone important saw me, an emissary they claimed to be visiting the city, and he offered a scholarship. That was the beginning."
Aurelia let that sink in. Scholarship. The word carried awkward pride, an official recognition of something raw and unpolished.
It should have annoyed her, the idea that a commoner had been plucked up like a stray colt and given access to the same halls that had always been hers. Instead, something like humility nudged at her ribs.
"You were... discovered," she said, the sentence small and almost disbelieving.
"Yes." Kael's gaze dropped to his hands for a moment. "I got lucky in the way opportunities sometimes fall to those who keep making things. But mostly I kept working. That's why their surprise felt strange, they'd been trained to look for spectacle. They hadn't been trained to listen."
Aurelia considered this, the sun warm on her face and the Academy bustling beyond the grass. Listen, she echoed inwardly, tasting the word as if it were new.
She thought of her own lessons, polished, honed, sometimes hollow, and felt the first true, sharp edge of something that had been missing: craft without show, work without applause.
She found she had no arsenal of scorn to fling at him, no small retort that would feel clever. Instead, something steadier rose: a grudging respect, edged with the slight, weird ache of being outpaced in a field she had thought hers by birthright.
"You surprised me," she said finally, quieter than she meant. "Not with the trick itself, but with how you... think. How you build. It's not just skill. It's making new rules."
Kael's smile was a little wry this time. "I didn't make them on purpose," he said. "I only did what I needed to do the thing. It looks like the rules now are because it worked enough times."
Aurelia watched him, the honest way he spoke settling in the open air between them. He didn't want to be surprised.
He tried to understand. The thought made her chest ache in an unfamiliar way, less the hot burn of wounded pride and more an ache like a bruise. It was a feeling she didn't yet have a name for.
"Teach yourself, they said," she murmured, and the words were not mockery but something like praise folded into wonder. "And you did."
Kael's answer was only a slight nod, but the nod carried weight. Around them, the Academy turned, students laughing, instructors calling, Aether notes drifting like restless thoughts, and for a single ordinary moment, Aurelia wanted nothing more than to keep listening beside him.
Kael folded his hands in his lap and watched her with that calm, unreadable patience. After a long moment, he tilted his head and asked plainly, "Are you still... mad at me? For what I did in the arena."
Aurelia let out a breath that was half laugh, half bitter.
Mad? Of course I am. How could I not be? The moment of still clung to me like a shadow, dark and suffocating.
That was supposed to be my glory, my moment to prove myself, and he had plunged it into chaos.
Pain pulsed at the back of her mind, a reminder of his reckless disregard, and she felt the heat of anger rise within her, swirling with the confusion of emotions she couldn't quite untangle.
But as she took a slow breath, she focused on the air filling her lungs, calming herself. The anger receded, replaced by resolution, and she squared her shoulders before speaking.
The word carried new weight. "Yes," she said finally, each syllable careful. "I am. I'm a Caelistra. Our name is everything, honor, expectation, doors that open because of the crest on my sleeve. Losing to a commoner tarnishes that. It's not just vanity, it's a consequence. People will talk. Houses will whisper. My family will not be pleased."
She met his eyes then, and the steel in her voice tempered. "But—" she added, softer, "I'm also grateful. You made me see a part of Aether I'd never bothered to learn. That matters. It changes... how I can become better. So yes, I'm angry. But I'm not blind to what you gave me."
Kael's expression didn't change much, whatever small surprise he'd once shown had passed.
He considered her words as if turning a stone in his hand, then asked, quiet and almost guiltless, "Would you have preferred I lose on purpose? That I... let you win?"
Aurelia blinked at the bluntness of the question. Heat flared in her chest momentarily at the thought, an imagined public victory that would still feel hollow.
She shook her head before letting the fantasy settle into anything kinder. "No," she said firmly. "That would have been worse."
Her voice steadied with a reason that felt stubborn and true. "If you'd thrown the duel, it wouldn't have been a private mercy. The Academy's instructors are not blind. They watch for the subtle signs, spare aether readings, patterns of breath, odd fluxes in the arena. Skilled teachers would have detected the manufacture the instant it happened. It would've made me look both weak and deceitful. Worse still, it would have robbed me of the lesson."
Aurelia paused, then let something like honesty slip out. "I would have preferred to lose to a better student than to a staged result. At least then the shame would have been honest, and the work to undo it would be mine."
Kael's mouth curved, not quite a smile. "I didn't think you would want that," he said. "You learn more from a clean defeat than a staged victory."
Aurelia tasted the truth in that, bitter and clear. Pride still coiled in her chest, but beneath it a quieter thing, perhaps acceptance or the first stirrings of something like respect.
She folded her hands on her lap and let the afternoon light make patterns across the grass.
"Keep your humility," she told him, more softly than intended. "And keep being... whatever it is you are. But don't think this frees you from consequences. You won't be spared questions or curiosity because you're modest now."
"Nor would I want to be," Kael replied. His voice held no boast, only resolve. "I'll answer for what I am. I did not win to humiliate you. I did what I could do."
The grievance would not vanish with words. The name still mattered. Yet beside the anger sat a new, begrudging acknowledgment, she had been bested fairly, and from that fairness a more complex truth had been given.
Aurelia let the last slight shift of Aether settle between her fingers and turned her face to the sky.
"This failure might be a useful mistake," she said aloud, surprising herself with its casualness.
Kael looked at her, quirked an eyebrow. "Useful?"
She sat up, folding her knees. "Yes." Her voice went careful and diplomatic, the voice she used in council when a father's decree needed softening. "In court, power is preserved by more than force. Blood, alliances, and contracts tie it."
She paused, watching him read the phrase on her face like a ledger. "Sometimes houses arrange marriages to secure peace or land or influence. A match with the royal family... can secure a dukedom for generations."
Kael's expression was blank for a moment, then curious. "There are other candidates. Why would it be you?"
She snorted, "There are always many candidates. But I am a Caelistra, trained and routed as a prodigy. My name opens doors others can only dream of. A house worth bargaining with will pick the child who is both politically useful and publicly admirable. That is me."
"Would you want that?" he asked plainly.
Aurelia's mouth tightened. The question was blunt and invasive, yet somehow, in its own way, merciful. "No," she said. "I do not want to be a piece moved across a chessboard." The words came out sharper than she'd intended. "Nor do I like Lucien."
Kael blinked. "Why not?" His voice was neutral, but his gaze sharpened with genuine interest.
She hesitated, the memory easy and unwanted. "When we were children—" she began, then stopped, searching for its shape. "He was always performing. Even then. Smiles were measured, tears arrived on cue, and jokes were timed for laughter. Sorrow tuned to a chambered echo. I remember watching him at a festival once, everyone else was laughing at something simple, and his laugh was louder than it should have been. It felt... staged. As if he were a mask that needed polishing every hour."
Kael considered her words. "Do you think he hides because he feels vulnerable? Or because he enjoys the control?" he asked softly.
Aurelia's eyes narrowed. "I don't know." Her voice had a brittle edge now, the kind that came when she tried to parse motives she disliked. "Either way, it's unsettling. Whether he's afraid or manipulative, or simply bored and playing at people, the result is the same, I don't know the man behind the smile. I don't trust someone who keeps his heart so carefully folded."
Kael listened, the kind of attention that didn't interrupt or judge. After a moment, he said, "That could be survival. Being visible as a prince makes you a target. Perhaps his performance is the armor he has learned to wear."
Aurelia made a slight sound that was almost a laugh. "That's one explanation. Another is that he simply enjoys his own performances. Either way—"
She let the sentence dangle. She was not a child who fancied wild theories, she was someone who knew how alliances were sown and harvested. "Either way, I would not willingly be entrapped."
Kael's brow creased. "So your defeat helped?"
She shrugged, trying on a smile that didn't reach her eyes. "It might lower me on the list. Not everyone wants a sharp-tongued duchess who lost to a commoner." She sounded almost amused at the image, and the tension in her shoulders eased for a second. "So... thank you, Kael. For making the world complicated for those who would write me into a cage."
He looked surprised, then a hint of amusement tugged at the corner of his mouth. "You're welcome," he said openly.
It was a small gesture, but to Aurelia, it felt profoundly significant. That smile, so genuine, was the most sincere thing she had ever seen from him. Heat rushed to her cheeks before she could stop it.
Why did it affect her this way? He was a commoner, her rival, yet those thoughts felt weak against the power of that moment.
His smile cost him nothing, yet it offered something invaluable, igniting a spark of intrigue she couldn't ignore.
Kael's gaze met hers for a moment longer than required, then he turned back to the practice yards where other students were training. "Don't thank me for the loss," he said with a teasing undertone. "Thank me for what it taught you."
Aurelia opened her mouth to retort, to reinforce her stature as a duchess. Instead, she found herself responding more honestly than usual. "I will."
She didn't express the deeper feelings swirling inside her, gratitude that felt less like a debt and more like an unexpected opportunity.
But she sensed it, the awkward emergence of something new between them, a mix of rivalry, appreciation, and an unfamiliar sensation that she wasn't ready to confront.