Page 41 of Legacy Found

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.