85
Leaving the magister curled into a ball on the arena floor, secured with ropes (actual ones, this time, not magical bindings) for someone to discover in the morning, you make your way back out into the hanging gardens and toward headquarters. All of you are a little worse for wear, cuts and scrapes and swellings making themselves known. Dorian is limping slightly and you’re favoring a wrist you’ll have to ask Ashur to heal at some point.
Ashur, for his part, is once again wearing his mask, but Tarquin has refused to return the hat—payment, he says, for his singed hair.
“You can have the hat back when my hair’s grown back in,” Tarquin says to Ashur.
Ashur chuckles, an indulgence borne as much of weariness as of happiness. “That’s fair,” he says.
You get the feeling a man with hair like his may not be aware of how long hair like Tarquin’s actually takes to grow—but you decide you’ll let that be a problem for another day.