Chapter 23: Worth Protecting.
POV: Darrow Tanner.
Darrow lay on his bunk with his hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling with the loose, unbothered ease of someone who had nowhere better to be—which was, technically, not true, he had to meet Rowan Vale in a few hours, but unfortunately it was also exactly the impression he’d spent years learning to cultivate.
He slowly let his mind run it’s course, sifting through the events of the day in case he had missed anything important today.
Nobody in that yard today had looked at him twice after his match.
That had been the point.
Vale had called it ’good instincts, untrained’, and he’d let that stand, because good instincts, untrained was a considerably safer thing to be known as than what he actually was, which was someone who’d spent every fight since the age of nine doing careful, deliberate math in the half-second before it mattered.
He’d let Vale win by a margin.
Not obviously, of course. Nothing so clumsy as visibly holding back, which any decent instructor would have clocked in a heartbeat. No, it was just enough to give in the right places, just enough hesitation dressed up as inexperience, so that the actual shape of what he could do stayed folded up small and unremarkable.
It was easier that way in Darrow’s own opinion.
A commoner who showed up too sharp too early got watched, got questioned, got measured against expectations he had no interest in living up to on someone else’s schedule.
He was good at being underestimated. Had been, for longer than he liked thinking about on nights like this.
The room was quiet, his roommate—some minor noble’s forgotten second son who talked exclusively about tournament rankings, whose name he couldn’t bother remembering—already asleep across the room, and Darrow let the easy, half-lidded mask slip now that there was nobody left to perform it for.
It always felt strange, doing that.
It was like taking off a shoe that had molded itself so precisely to his foot he’d half-forgotten it wasn’t the actual shape of him anymore.
Five names, he thought, turning it over the way he turned over most things. Slowly, from every angle, looking for the load-bearing piece nobody else had noticed yet.
A relic. A bloodline. Two crowns. And good ol’ me.
He knew exactly why Vale had included him, even if she hadn’t said it outright.
He’d known since the letter arrived at the orphanage two years ago, dense with a formality that had made the administrator read it three times before believing it, a personal request from a war hero nobody at that institution had ever expected to hear from, let alone about one of their own.
I’ve watched him for six months, Vale had written, according to the administrator, who’d shown him the letter once and then never again.
He is the most talented person in that building, and none of you have noticed, because he has made very sure of it.
Darrow hadn’t known how she’d been watching. Hadn’t even asked why. Some questions weren’t worth the answer they’d cost you, and he’d learned that lesson considerably earlier than most people learned anything at all.
A month later, he had started living secretly in the capital under Vale’s tutorship, waiting quietly until this year, where he could finally enroll into Lucenhall.
It had been too easy for him to get a seat in this academy, even when Vale refused to help him in that regard. All it had taken was building up a few connections with the right people, impressing a couple of bored teachers, and quickly coming up with a small fortune to pay the administrators to secure a spot at the most prestigious academy in the country.
Quite the feat, especially for someone of his status.
His family—what there had been of it—had died the way most poor families died when the wrong lord decided a border dispute was worth more than the villages sitting on it.
He’d been seven. He remembered enough of it to know he didn’t want to remember more, and he’d spent the years since building something out of the wreckage that had very little room left in it for softness, whatever softness he still let people see now, carefully, selectively, like a costume he put on for rooms that needed it.
And Elian Valcourt needed it, he’d decided, within about ten minutes of meeting him.
Not because Elian was weak—Darrow didn’t waste his energy underestimating people twice, and he’d clocked the accidental dodge in the east yard for exactly what it was, a real instinct, that of latent genius, hiding under a mountain of nerves—but because Elian was the kind of person who’d clearly never had to learn what Darrow had learned.
And somehow, something in Darrow, some old, buried piece of the boy who used to have a family, found that worth protecting rather than exploiting.
He had been quietly exploring his options of getting closer to the boy this whole evening, coming up with countless plans on how he could achieve that goal.
This was new information about himself, honestly. He filed it away carefully, storing it for later use.
Then he went back to what his earlier topic.
Everyone in that yard is carrying something, Vale had said. A relic. A bloodline. A crown.
She hadn’t said what he was carrying, out loud, in front of the others.
He appreciated that, in the same quiet, calculating way he appreciated most kindnesses—not trusting them exactly, but noting the debt, filing it somewhere he could call on later if it ever mattered. Vale’s mountain of debt already large enough Darrow doubted he could stop paying it this lifetime.
He closed his eyes, let the mask settle back over his face out of habit even though nobody was awake to see it, and made himself breathe slow the way he’d taught himself to at nine years old, in a burned village, with nobody left to teach him anything else.
Diabolical genius, he thought about what Vale had said to him after their first training session, almost amused, if amusement was still a thing that reached all the way down to wherever he actually kept his feelings these days.
She has no idea how right she is.