Chapter 84: Duel with Leon

Chapter 84: Chapter 84: Duel with Leon

The walk back from beneath the tree took longer than it should have, mostly because Theon kept turning the conversation over in his head, trying and failing to make it sound any less complicated than it had a few minutes ago. He was still working through it when he rounded the corner and found Lyra sitting on the low stone wall outside the dormitory, kicking her heels against the stone and humming a tune he didn’t recognize, like she had already grown bored of waiting for him and moved on to entertaining herself instead. The moment she spotted him, she hopped down off the wall and planted herself directly in his path, arms folded, chin tipped up in the way that always meant she had a question ready and intended to get an answer.

"What did she talk about?" Lyra asked.

"It’s nothing," Theon said, stepping past her. "Don’t worry about it."

She fell into step beside him anyway, matching his pace with the kind of stubbornness only a little sister could manage. "She asked you out, didn’t she?"

Theon stopped mid stride. "What?"

Lyra looked up at him, and for a moment there was something in her expression that didn’t belong on an eight year old’s face at all. It was patient. Amused. Entirely too knowing, like someone watching a scene she had already read the ending of and was simply waiting for him to catch up. It smoothed back into an easy, childish grin almost as quickly as it appeared, but not quickly enough that Theon missed it, and not so quickly that he forgot the odd, unsettled feeling of being the older sibling in a conversation and somehow still losing.

He studied her a moment longer than he meant to. "Wait," he said slowly. "Are you sure you’re eight years old?"

"Of course I am." The strange weight in her eyes vanished completely, replaced by a wide, dimpled smile. "I’m also a girl you know. So I would know things like this."

That wasn’t an answer. It wasn’t even an attempt at one. But Theon had learned months ago that pressing Lyra on these moments usually left him more confused than when he’d started, so he did what he always did and let it go.

He exhaled and rubbed the back of his neck. "Don’t worry about it. Let’s not talk about it."

"Fine by me." Lyra was already skipping ahead toward the lecture hall steps, humming the same half remembered tune as before, as though the whole conversation had slipped out of her mind the instant it ended. She paused at the top of the steps just long enough to glance back at him, grinning like she knew something he didn’t, then disappeared inside.

Theon watched the door swing shut behind her and filed the moment away with all the others he still hadn’t figured out what to do with. There were more of those moments than he liked to admit these days.

It had started as small things. A word she shouldn’t have known yet. A calm she shouldn’t have had in moments that called for anything but calm. Each time, he told himself it was nothing, some trick of a clever kid raised around swords and monsters and things older children pretended to understand. Each time, some quiet part of him kept count anyway.

By the time practical lessons began, word of what had happened outside the lecture hall that morning had already made its way around the room, though nobody said so out loud. Clestia had chosen a seat two rows over from where she usually sat, closer to the window and further from him, and every time Theon glanced in her direction he found her already looking somewhere else. He couldn’t remember a room ever feeling this loud while everyone in it stayed completely silent.

He kept his attention fixed on his own desk and told himself it didn’t matter.

It mattered. The lecture hall smelled the same as always, chalk dust and old parchment and the faint metallic tang that clung to the air after a room full of students spent the morning practicing minor spellwork. Nothing about it had changed. It just felt different with her sitting three seats further away than usual, close enough that he could hear the scratch of her quill against parchment and nothing else about her at all.

When the instructor called the class up for the day’s exercises, Clestia busied herself gathering her things with far more care than the task required, tucking a loose curl behind her ear, straightening a stack of parchment that hadn’t needed straightening in the first place. Theon busied himself checking the strap on his training gauntlet, which needed checking even less.

Neither of them said a word to the other.

Whatever she had told him earlier still hung in the space between their desks, quiet and unresolved, trailing them both into the lesson like something neither of them knew how to set down.

Outside, the academy grounds sprawled wide and restless under the late morning sun, and stepping into them felt like stepping into an entirely different world, one with its own noise and rhythm that had nothing to do with quiet classrooms and unfinished conversations. The air smelled of scorched grass and turned earth, the residue of a hundred small spells cast and dismissed since sunrise, and somewhere beneath it all drifted the sharper smell of woodsmoke from the forges near the western fence.

Clusters of students spread across the training fields, sparks of raw magic flaring between cupped palms while instructors called out corrections from the sidelines, adjusting a wrist here, a stance there, occasionally stepping in to smother a spell that had gotten away from its caster. Two upperclassmen from rival houses squared off near the edge of the field, trading insults dressed up as encouragement, each one clearly more interested in outshining the other than in whatever drill they were supposed to be running. Nearby, a group of younger students argued loudly about spirit contracts, one boy puffing his chest out and declaring to anyone who would listen that he was destined to bond the highest ranking spirit in the coming trials, while two girls beside him debated with equal conviction whether a wind spirit or a flame spirit made for the stronger partnership. Smoke curled up from a row of food stalls along the eastern wall, where an older woman ladled something rich and savory into wooden bowls for a line of students who had clearly smelled it from three fields away and abandoned whatever they were doing to come running.

Fragments of conversation drifted past Theon as he walked, most of it about him, none of it meant for his ears. Some of it circled his ranking from last term’s trials. More of it circled the same tired question nobody ever asked him directly and everybody seemed determined to answer for him anyway, about where exactly he had trained before he ever set foot in the academy. A pair of students near the notice board fell silent the moment he got close, then dissolved into whispers again once they assumed he was out of earshot. He let it roll off him the way he had learned to let most things roll off him lately.

Near the far wall, a teacher marched a red faced student toward the punishment yard, lecturing him the entire way about the dangers of casting unsanctioned spells inside the dormitory halls. The student trailed behind with his shoulders hunched and his eyes fixed on the ground, clearly regretting whatever decision had landed him there. Closer to the center of the grounds, the dueling section rang with the clash of practice blades, upperclassmen pacing the ropeline and calling out scores while younger students traded blows under their watchful eyes, chasing points and bruises in equal measure. A cluster of onlookers had already gathered along the edge of it, calling out encouragement to whichever fighter they’d apparently wagered on that morning.

The notice board itself stood three students deep, everyone craning for a look at the newest postings pinned across its surface: an announcement for the coming inter house tournament, a schedule for the third year spirit binding trials, a warning about the punishment yard’s newly expanded hours, and a hand lettered flyer someone had already half torn down advertising a betting pool on who would place first in the dueling rankings by the end of term. Teachers wove between the clusters with lesson sheets tucked under their arms, calling out reminders that the next session was about to begin, mostly ignored by students too busy arguing, eating, or gossiping to notice.

It was loud and chaotic. It was, in its own way, the most alive the academy had felt to him all day, and Theon found himself slowing his steps just to take it in.

"Everyone, pick your peers," the tutor called, clapping twice to settle the noise. "It’s time for a little training."

Around him, the field dissolved into its usual scramble of students grabbing at friends before someone else could, a few of the slower ones left standing awkwardly in the middle until the tutor started pairing them off by hand. Theon hadn’t even decided who to look for when Leon crossed the field toward him, training blade already slung over one shoulder, as though he had made the decision before the tutor finished the sentence.

"I want you to be my training partner," Leon said.

Theon blinked. "Why?"

"It will be a good lesson for me." Leon said it plainly, evenly, like the answer explained itself and needed nothing more added to it. There was nothing in his tone that gave anything away, and yet something about the stillness in his posture, too deliberate, too composed for a simple training request, made the whole thing feel less like a passing choice and more like something he had been waiting for the chance to do.

Theon didn’t have a reason to refuse, so he didn’t look for one. He shrugged and fell into step beside him. "All right. Go easy on me."

"I should be the one telling you that," Leon said.

There was a faint edge underneath the words, subtle enough that Theon almost let it pass without noticing, and light enough that he told himself he probably had. Leon had never sought him out before, not for pairing exercises, not for anything that didn’t involve the two of them standing on opposite sides of a classroom. Theon couldn’t have said why that struck him as strange. It just did, the same way a held breath felt strange in a room where nobody had said anything worth holding it for.

An attendant handed each of them a bronze training blade, dulled at the edge but heavy enough to sting on impact, and waved them toward an open stretch of packed dirt at the edge of the dueling section. A small crowd gathered along the ropeline almost immediately, drawn by nothing more than the sight of two familiar names squaring off against each other.

The instructor raised a hand between them. "Start!"

Leon didn’t wait. He closed the distance in three fast strides, blade angled to catch Theon across the ribs before Theon had even finished raising his guard.

Theon knew the opening the instant he saw it. Captain Voss had drilled this exact overcommitted lunge into him during his second month of training, the same bait meant to draw out a clumsy block from an opponent who hadn’t learned better yet, and his body reacted before his mind had fully caught up to what was happening. He turned his shoulder into the gap, let the blade whistle past the space where his ribs had been a breath earlier, and was already moving before Leon realized the strike had missed its mark.

Two steps carried him around Leon’s flank.

A third put him behind him entirely.

The whole exchange took less time than it had taken the crowd along the ropeline to finish gasping at the opening strike. The flat of Theon’s blade settled against Leon’s back before Leon had even finished turning to find him.

Leon went rigid.

"Stop!" the instructor called, striding forward to pull them apart. "Winner, Theon Nivaris!"

A ripple of noise moved through the crowd along the ropeline, some of it impressed, some of it already muttering about how quickly the match had ended, one voice near the back loudly insisting he’d blinked and missed the whole thing. Leon lowered his blade slowly and turned to face him, something unreadable settling into his expression.

"You were holding back, weren’t you?" Leon asked.

"What?" Theon shook his head, a short laugh escaping him despite himself. "No. But you were holding back right."

Leon didn’t answer right away. He studied Theon the way a person studies a puzzle they had assumed was simple right up until the moment it clearly wasn’t, turning the pieces over in his mind without saying a word.

*He moves like someone who trained under a blade meant to kill him, not one meant to teach him,* Leon thought. Nobody dodged an opening strike that clean after a few months of academy drills. Nobody redirected an exchange that fast without years of somebody actually trying to put them in the ground first.

Of course, he thought, the realization clicking into place like a lock finally finding its key. It has to be him. *He’s the one after all.*

The thought settled over him with none of the excitement he might have expected from finally solving something he had wondered about for weeks. It sat heavier than that. Colder. The kind of certainty that came with its own set of new questions trailing behind it, none of which he intended to ask out loud, not yet, not standing in the middle of a training field with half the academy watching.

He said nothing more. He simply nodded once, retrieved his fallen stance, and turned back toward the ropeline without another word, leaving the question hanging unanswered in the space between them. The easy rivalry from a few minutes earlier folded itself away somewhere neither of them mentioned again, and for the rest of the session, Leon watched Theon with the quiet, careful attention of someone rebuilding a theory from the ground up.

Theon noticed none of it. He handed his blade back to the attendant, rolled the stiffness out of his shoulder, and went looking for Lyra and already thinking about lunch and nothing else. Somewhere behind him, a rumor about a boy from nowhere had just quietly stopped being a rumor, and he walked off the field without the faintest idea that anything about the match had changed at all.