I walked without direction for a while after that.
The story of Rose and Arven had settled into me in a way that needed space — not to be thought about directly, just to exist somewhere and find its own level. So I walked. Through the corridor, out a side door, into the mansion grounds where the afternoon light was going long and golden across the stone paths.
No more Keltherions.
The thought arrived again, the same way it kept arriving. Quiet. Certain.
"Felix."
I stopped.
Arven was coming from the direction of the east wing, unhurried, the particular purposefulness of a man who has already decided where he's going and simply needs to collect what he needs along the way.
"There you are," he said. "I've been looking for you."
"I was just walking."
"Good. Walk this way." He turned without waiting. "Training hall."
"Dad, I already did sword work this morning—"
"Then you can watch and learn." A beat. "Or you can spar me and I'll see how much nine years actually did."
I considered arguing. Looked at his posture. Didn't argue.
"Fine," I said.
The training hall was built for the household knights — large, practical, the kind of space that had been used enough to stop caring about appearances. The floor was worn smooth in the patterns of repeated footwork. The walls held racks of practice weapons, some newer than others.
About a dozen knights were mid-session when we arrived. The sound of wooden swords and controlled breathing and the occasional grunt of impact.
I registered all of that.
And then my attention snagged on the far corner and stopped there.
Stella.
She had a wooden sword. She was swinging it — not the easy, exploratory swings of someone learning, but the driven repetition of someone trying to force progress through sheer volume of effort. The same arc, again and again, her whole body behind it.
I watched her hands.
I hadn't noticed before. From a distance, across a dinner table, in a corridor — I hadn't been close enough to see. But now, in the training hall light, the detail was clear.
Blisters. Both hands. Old ones layered beneath newer ones, the skin gone rough and cracked in the way of someone who doesn't stop when they should.
She didn't look like she intended to stop now either.
I crossed the hall.
"Hey," I said, stopping a few feet away. "Don't push past your limit."
She didn't look at me.
She kept swinging.
"Hey." I stepped closer. "Stop — you're hurting yourself. Look at your hands—"
She kept going.
I watched the arc of the next swing, tracked the angle, and moved.
One motion. Clean.
The wooden sword split at the midpoint, both halves dropping to the floor before anyone in the room had fully registered what had happened.
Crimson Death. Back at my hip before she turned.
Stella turned.
And she was furious.
Not the quiet, practiced composure from dinner. Something underneath that — real and immediate and aimed directly at me.
"What is your problem?"
The hall had gone quiet. Every knight in the room was looking at me with the specific expression of someone watching another person commit a social crime they can't quite name.
"I was just trying to—"
"What? Show off? Demonstrate how impressive you are?" Her voice cracked at the edges. Her jaw stayed set. "What exactly were you trying to accomplish?"
I opened my mouth.
Closed it.
There were tears at the corners of her eyes. Not falling — held back by the same discipline that kept her posture straight and her voice level. But present. And the sight of them landed somewhere in my chest in a way that felt distinctly like having misjudged something important.
The knights began to close in slowly. Not threatening — protective. The way people move around someone who belongs to them.
"Stella, are you alright?" one said.
"Hey—" Another, looking at me now. "Haven't seen you in the training hall before."
I looked around for Arven.
Arven was nowhere in the hall.
Of course he wasn't.
I found out later — significantly later — that at the precise moment I had cut Stella's training sword in half, Arven had been seated in the garden with Rose feeding him grapes and Kelly attempting to climb his arm.
He had timed this, I was fairly certain, on purpose.
"You think you're strong?" A broader knight stepped forward. The particular confidence of someone comfortable in his own domain. "Fight, then. If you can."
I looked at him.
"What did you say?"
"You heard me. Know your place, kid."
Something settled in me — not anger exactly. Closer to the specific calm of a decision made without much deliberation.
"Fine," I said. "I'll fight all of you."
A beat of silence.
"Without this." I set Crimson Death against the wall. Picked up a wooden sword from the nearest rack. Felt the weight of it — lighter than I was used to, the balance wrong in the particular way of practice weapons. "Who's first?"
The broad-shouldered knight stepped forward.
We both took stance.
Mine: one hand forward, sword at my side, feet spread and slightly bent. The stance Atherion had drilled into me until it stopped feeling like a choice and started feeling like simply where my body went.
All-Seeing Eyes.
The activation came without pain this time — or rather, the pain was there but familiar enough to ignore. The red bled into my vision and the knight's body became legible: weight distribution, muscle tension, the slight coil in his right shoulder that telegraphed what was coming.
Overhead. Hard. Straight down.
I let it come most of the way.
Then I stepped inside it, caught the force on a parry that redirected rather than blocked, and in the same motion swung for his neck — pulled at the last instant to a controlled tap with the flat.
He stopped. Blinked.
I stepped back.
"Next," I said.
No one moved immediately.
Then — from the entrance, unhurried, with the air of someone arriving precisely when they intended to — a young man with red hair swept to one side came through the door.
"What's going on here?"
The knights straightened instantly. "Deputy Commander Armin, sir."
Armin looked at the scene — the unconscious knight, the two halves of a wooden sword on the floor, Stella in the corner, me standing in the middle of it all with a practice sword. He processed this with the particular patience of someone who has walked into strange situations before and learned not to react to them immediately.
"Someone want to explain?"
"The kid used a speed buff," one of the knights offered. "During the spar. We thought it was cheating."
Armin looked at me.
"Is that true?"
"I didn't cast anything," I said. "I don't need to."
A murmur moved through the room.
Armin studied me for a moment. "All right," he said, with the easy authority of someone who has earned the right to make quick decisions. "Let's find out. Spare with me."
The murmur shifted in pitch.
I set my stance.
He moved first — not the explosive lunge I'd expected. A horizontal strike, fast and controlled, aimed at my midsection. I stepped back, felt the air from it, measured the speed.
He's strong. Faster than anyone in the hall.
He came again immediately — and this time I felt it before it happened. The micro-shift of his weight, the specific way his foot loaded. He was going to his left, then circling to my back.
I'd seen this exact pattern.
I let him start the motion, then reversed my grip mid-movement and stabbed backward.
He blocked it.
We separated.
He lowered his sword.
And then he laughed — genuine, surprised, the laugh of someone who has just been shown something they weren't expecting.
"You read my back-approach," he said. "How?"
"My dad uses the same trick when we spar," I said.
Something shifted in his expression. "Your dad."
"Arven Grimior," I said. "He goes by Roswal now."
The silence that fell had a different quality than the ones before it.
I watched it move across the room — the recognition, the recalculation, the specific dawning horror of people who had just finished saying things like know your place, kid to the son of someone they apparently had considerable opinions about.
They lined up without being asked.
Bowed. In unison.
"We sincerely apologize, Lord Felix."
"Don't," I said. "It's fine. And don't bow — it's uncomfortable for everyone." I paused. "Why were you so upset about Stella? What actually happened?"
Before I could finish the question, a knight behind me said, quietly and with the energy of someone delivering information they consider important: "You made Ms. Stella cry."
"I wasn't trying to—"
"She doesn't like being interrupted during training," Armin said. He said it evenly, without accusation. "She never has."
"I didn't know." I glanced toward the corner where Stella had been standing. She was gone now — had left during the spar, apparently. "Why is it that important to her?"
Armin was quiet for a moment.
"Stella doesn't have mana," he said. "You know that already. But she also has no chi — no sword sense. Nothing that most people rely on to make sword work come naturally." He set his practice weapon down on the rack. "Every tutor she's had has eventually said the same thing. That she has no talent for it. That she should find something else." A pause. "Your grandfather ran out of ideas. Most of us stopped suggesting options."
"And she still trains."
"Every day. Longer than anyone else in this hall." He looked toward the door she'd left through. "She lost her parents. She's never told any of us how. But whatever happened — she decided she was going to be able to protect herself, even without the things most people protect themselves with." He paused again. "When you cut her sword, to her it probably felt like one more person telling her she should stop."
I set my practice sword back on the rack.
"Where would she go?"
"River near the dark forest, most likely. When she needs to be alone, that's where she goes."
I started toward the door.
"Your sword's still here," one of the knights called after me.
I raised my left hand without turning.
Crimson Death lifted from the wall, crossed the hall, and settled into my grip as I walked through the door.
The sun was low when I reached the river.
The forest behind it had gone dark at the edges, the trees holding onto the last of the light in the way trees do — reluctantly, in pieces. The river itself caught the orange and gold of the sky and threw it back in slow, shifting patterns. A flock of birds moved across the open air above the water, silhouetted and unhurried.
Stella was sitting on the bank.
Her back was to me. Her shoulders were set in that practiced way — straight, composed, the posture she defaulted to when she was being watched or expected. But I could see, from this angle, the slight unevenness in her breathing.
Her tears caught the light when she didn't know I was looking.
I stepped forward.
"Hey."
"Go away," she said. Flat. No particular heat in it. Just a statement of preference.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't mean to stop you. I saw your hands and I thought—"
"You thought what?" She didn't turn around. "That I didn't know what I was doing to myself?"
"...Yeah. Probably."
"I know exactly what I'm doing to myself." A pause. "I just don't care."
I sat down on the bank, a few feet away, close enough to talk and far enough to not be imposing.
"Why?" I asked.
"Why do you care?" she said. "We're not family. We don't know each other. You've been here a week."
"We live in the same house," I said. "That's something."
"That's nothing." Her voice was steady. Almost convincing. "I'm just someone your grandfather took in. I'm not family. I'm a charity case with no mana, no chi, no sword sense, and apparently no talent for anything that matters." She finally turned — and her expression was controlled, but her eyes weren't. "Every tutor said so. Your grandfather eventually agreed. I can see it when he looks at me now — there's no plan anymore. He's just waiting for me to figure out I should give up."
I looked at her hands in her lap. The blisters. The roughened skin.
"You're not giving up," I said.
"That's not the same as having a future."
"Sometimes it is," I said.
She looked at me — properly, for the first time since we'd been in the same room together. Like she was deciding whether I was worth the energy of being angry at.
"You're good at everything," she said. "I've heard about you since before you arrived. Mr. Arven and Aunt Rose — every conversation eventually comes back to Felix. Felix did this. Felix learned that. Felix is a genius." Her jaw tightened. "You can't tell me what it's like to have nothing to work with."
"I'm not growing in magic," I said.
She blinked.
"What?"
"My magic rank hasn't moved. I don't know why. I train every morning. I run the exercises Lucien taught me. Nothing's changing." I looked at the river. "I'm not telling you this so you feel sorry for me. I'm telling you because genius is a word people use for things they don't want to look at closely. I'm not a genius. I work hard. So do you." I paused. "The difference between us right now is that I've had good teachers. That's all it is."
The river moved. The birds had gone wherever birds go when the light runs out. The last orange was leaving the sky, replaced by something softer.
"I'll teach you," I said. "Whatever I can. I don't know how to work without mana or chi — but I know how to read a body, and I know how to find the rhythm in a fight, and I know some things about making do with what you have." I looked at her. "If you want."
Stella was quiet for a long moment.
Then she said, "I won't be easy to teach."
"I'm not easy to teach either," I said. "Atherion tried to kill me for nine years."
Something moved at the corner of her mouth. Not quite a smile. But close.
"That's the vampire prince," she said. "I heard about that too."
"He threw me off a cliff once," I said. "To see if I'd figure out how to land."
"Did you?"
"Eventually."
She looked at her hands. Then at me.
"Okay," she said. "Teach me."
I nodded. Stood. Extended a hand to pull her up.
Then I activated the All-Seeing Eyes — not for combat, just to look. To see what was actually there, beneath the surface of the girl who had no mana and no chi and no sword sense and had been training every day anyway despite all of it.
I found it almost immediately.
Small. Tucked behind her right ear, hidden beneath her hair where no casual examination would reach. A mark — not visible to normal sight, barely even to mine. But unmistakable once seen.
A curse mark.
Old. Precise. The kind of thing that didn't appear by accident.
"Stella," I said. "I need you to hold still."
She went tense. "What—"
"There's a curse mark behind your ear." I kept my voice level. "Right there — under your hair. Hidden."
She went very still.
"That's not possible," she said quietly. "Your grandfather checked. He told me there was nothing."
"It's small," I said. "Deliberately placed where hair covers it. Whoever put it there knew what they were doing." I stepped back. "We need to go back and tell the others."
She reached up — touched the spot behind her ear with two fingers. Her face did something complicated that she didn't let stay long.
"If it's been there this whole time," she said slowly. "Then everything — the mana. The chi. The sword sense—"
"Might not be you at all," I said.
The river kept moving. The sky had gone dark blue at the edges.
She stood.
Didn't say anything else.
But when we walked back toward the mansion, she walked beside me instead of separately — and that felt like something, even if neither of us said so.