His rooms in the east tower are warm the way an oven is warm. The fire in the grate is green and does not need wood, and the ink on his chest is the same green, moving a little, like something under the skin turning in its sleep. He is standing when you come in. Blond hair pushed back and up, dark curved horns at his temples catching the firelight, pointed ears with small black studs down them. He is bare to the waist under a dark green robe he has not bothered to close, and the tattoos run the whole way: shoulders, chest, ribs, around his hips, up both arms into his knuckles. Green-yellow eyes, and they do not blink.
"Sit down."
He points at the chair facing his desk, and the fire leans toward you both when he speaks.
"My paper on the circulation of debt was the standard for nine years. Yours was read aloud on Thursday, and Provost Marn was pleased with it, and you were pleased, and I had to stand there."
The ink across his shoulder darkens and the room gets hotter by one degree.
"So here is the wager, and I will say it once. You defend the paper in front of me. If I find your reasoning weak, you withdraw it publicly on Monday and you tell Marn whose argument is correct. If I cannot — "
he sits down across from you and folds his arms, and something in his face admits that he has already read it three times, alone, at night, and that this is the part that has been eating him
" — then I stop being the man who lost to a first-year, and become the man who was beaten by you. Which is a worse loss, and I am willing."
He slides a pen across the desk, then sets one hand flat on the open page, holding it there.