Chapter 19. Back

The second arc was kinder than the first.

The gold and violet and that green I still had no name for came up around me in the same rush, and the roaring in my ears started the same way, but this time the landing came easy. My feet found stone instead of earth, my knees held, and the colours peeled away from the edges of my vision in something that felt almost polite by comparison.

I took a breath and looked around.

The plaza I had left this morning had been reshaped into something else while I wasn’t looking. The stone was the same, the balcony where Gressil had read out the rules was the same, but everything between them had been organized into thirty neat columns of candidates, one per team, each column marked by a tall iron lantern at the front that cast a warm circle of light across the boots of whoever stood nearest to it.

The lanterns ran in two long rows down the length of the plaza, and between the rows the candidates stood at quiet attention, their Shadows a pace behind them.

Most of the columns were full. A few had gaps in them where a candidate hadn’t come back.

I was still taking it in when I found Eydric and Rael.

They were near the front of their column, which was my column, I realized, and they were already looking at me. Rael must have spotted me the second I rematerialized.

He raised a hand in a small greeting and I nodded back. Eydric gave me the barest lift of his chin. Behind the two of them, Sera stood at her quiet polite distance, and beside her, one more Shadow I hadn’t seen before who must have belonged to Rael, a young man with a long coat and a face that gave nothing away.

Someone cleared his throat about eight inches from my left elbow.

“Greetings, Young Lord.”

I almost jumped. I did not quite jump, because that would be embarassing, but it was a near thing, and whatever I managed instead must have shown on my face, because Gowyn’s expression did not move but I got the distinct impression he had clocked it.

He had been standing there the whole time. Possibly since the moment I had come through.

“Oh,” I said, and my voice came out quieter than I wanted it. “Oh, uh, hello, Gowyn.”

“Young Lord.”

“I hope, ah, I hope that me coming through this late wasn’t, I mean, I hope it didn’t cause any—”

“No, Young Lord.”

“Good. Good.”

I pressed my mouth shut before I could say anything else.

The problem was that two conversations ago, this man had told me he was my cousin, and I had been called away by a horn before I could do anything with that information, and I had then spent fourteen hours in a forest trying very hard not to think about him as he was filed away under later. I had been very efficient about it.

Later was now standing eight inches from my left elbow, waiting for me to say something else.

I looked at the side of his face.

“Gowyn.”

“Young Lord?”

“Let’s, ah. Let’s go join the others.”

He inclined his head in that small precise way of his. “After you, Young Lord.”

I wanted to tell him to call me Howl. He was my cousin, after all and by my own count, the two days in the carriage and the morning on this plaza and however many minutes I had just spent walking back through the trees from Morren’s outcrop made him the longest stretch of time I had ever spent in the company of a relative, and I did not want the first thing I said to him with that knowledge in my head to be Young Lord and Shadow and the rest of the house’s polite distance.

But the plaza was not the place. There were twenty-nine other teams in neat columns all around us, half of them almost certainly sneaking glances in the direction of the Axiom of House Aridis coming through the arch at the last possible moment, and whatever I said to Gowyn now was going to be overheard by somebody.

Later, I thought, for the second time tonight.

I walked toward Rael and Eydric, and Gowyn fell in behind me, his boots making almost no sound against the stone.

The redhead was there, and she spotted me first. She was standing in her team’s line two columns over with a thin scabbed cut along the side of her jaw and a patch of dried earth still clinging to the shoulder of her tunic, and her eyes tracked me the whole way across her field of view without her head moving at all.

The girl with the braid was beside her, arms folded, mouth in a flat line. I recognized the set of her shoulders from the moment she had come at me in the ferns.

Between them, half a pace back, stood the boy with the jaw. He had a cloth bound under his chin and up around the crown of his head, and the left side of his face was swollen enough that one of his eyes was down to a slit. When he saw me he did not glare. He just… looked.

Hmm, I wanted to say sorry about the tooth.

I also wanted to say something to the redhead about how the two of them had come at me the way you come at something you mean to put down for good, not the way you come at a candidate in an exam, and that the two of them were lucky I was the one they had jumped and not somebody with less patience and a larger temper. The sentences were lining up in my mouth, but I did not say any of them. I kept walking, I kept my eyes forward, and I let the three of them slide past the edge of my vision.

I was halfway to my column when I noticed Wren.

He was standing alone in what must have been his team’s line, or what was left of it, with his Shadow one pace behind him and no other candidates on either side. The line was just him. He was looking at me, and when my eyes found his, the corner of his mouth lifted in a small smile, and he raised his hand about halfway to his shoulder in a little wave.

I smiled back and waved.

Wren’s face did a complicated thing. The wave froze halfway down. The smile stayed, but the rest of his expression went somewhere between startled and confused, as though a wave was a thing he had not actually expected to get in return and he was now reconsidering whether he had ever meant to offer one.

I felt a small unhelpful second guess go through me. Maybe I had read the whole thing wrong. Maybe Wren had not been waving at me but just raising his hand to scratch his ear?

Ugh, I decided I would live with it, and I kept walking.

Rael was watching me approach with one eyebrow up.

“What,” he said, when I was close enough that he could say it without raising his voice, “were you doing out there?”

“I made a friend.”

Both of them looked at me.

“I went to say goodbye.”

Eydric seemed surprised, while Rael opened his mouth, already shaping a question I could see forming behind his eyes, something along the lines of how did you—

BRRRRROOOOOOOHHHH

The horn rolled across the plaza in three long notes the way it had that morning, and by the time the last note faded every head in every column had already turned to face the balcony.

The doors above us opened, and Gressil stepped through.

Veyra came out behind him, then Bryce, and the three of them took their positions at the railing in the same order they had stood in this morning. Gressil rested his hands on the stone. The lanterns along the plaza threw his shadow long across the balcony behind him, and the white of his beard caught the amplification enchantment’s faint shimmer when he leaned forward.

“Candidates.”

The plaza was already silent. It got quieter anyway.

“If you are standing in this plaza, you have passed the entrance trials of Sartheon Academy. On behalf of the Rector, the Governing Council, and the faculty of this institution, I welcome you. You have earned your place here. Stand proud of it.”

A small sound moved through the columns. It wasn’t quite a cheer, more like the exhale of all of us who had been holding the same breath without realizing it.

“This year’s cohort began at one hundred and twelve, and ends at sixty-seven.”

He stopped talking for a second.

“This is the most successful entrance trial Sartheon has conducted in nearly two centuries. You are, by the only measure this academy has ever cared about, the strongest group of candidates to walk through these gates in the living memory of every member of the faculty standing on this balcony with me tonight. Look at the candidates to your left. Look at the candidates to your right. Remember their faces. You will be building the next decade of this kingdom alongside them.”

I looked left. Eydric was already looking at me. I looked right. Rael was looking too. Neither of them said anything, they just smiled and that was it.

Somebody two columns over started to clap and stopped after one note, unsure whether it was allowed. Gressil let the half-clap die on its own without acknowledging it, but I could have sworn he smiled a bit.

He cleared his throat, and the plaza came back to attention.

“You will return to your homes at first light. You will have one week in which to settle whatever affairs your families require of you, say whatever goodbyes are yours to say, and prepare yourselves for the work ahead. At the end of that week, a summons will arrive at your doors, and you will present yourselves at the gates of the main academy as students of Sartheon.”

Rael let out a very small breath beside me.

“Before you depart, however, there is one more matter to address.”

Gressil lifted a scroll from inside his robes and let it fall open along the railing in front of him.

“Every candidate standing in this plaza tonight has worked for this. Some of you have worked for it harder than I have any right to ask of people your age. But a small number of you, through some combination of preparation, decision-making, and the particular kind of nerve this academy values above most other things, have scored ninety points or higher on the entrance trials. Those candidates will be recognized individually.”

My stomach dropped about an inch inside me, but I kept my face still.

“When your name is called, you will step forward from your column and approach the balcony. Your score will be read aloud. You will then stand in a line at the base of the balcony and wait for your reward, which will be presented at the conclusion of the readings.”

He lifted the scroll closer.

“Circe of House Marrow.”

I looked across the columns, curious to see who it was.

Oh! Redhead!

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

She stepped out of her column two rows down from mine, walked the length of the plaza with her chin level and the dried earth still on her shoulder. Gressil looked down at her over the rims of his spectacles.

“Ninety-two.”

The plaza suddenly clapped and I could see Circe’s mouth twitching once before she got it back under control, and she walked to the marked spot at the base of the balcony and turned to face the columns and stood there at attention while the applause tailed off as the next name came.

“Metys of House Ozen.”

My head snapped up.

Metys stepped out of her column near the far end of the plaza, and I had not seen her since before the practical began this morning, and I had been trying very hard not to think about the gaps in some of the columns and what those gaps meant, but there she was, walking toward the balcony with her notebook tucked under one arm and her hair slightly less tidy than it had been this morning as well as a small smile she was absolutely failing to suppress.

“Ninety.”

I clapped before I thought about it. Half the plaza did.

She took her place in the line beside Circe and caught my eye across the distance and gave me the tiniest nod, the same one she had given me before the team assignments, and I nodded back while my hands had gone damp against my thighs, and I pressed them flat and willed them to stop.

Thirty on the written. A flag was worth thirty. That put me at sixty guaranteed, with the rest of the practical and the unspecified test to account for the remaining points. Sixty to ninety was a long way.

“Rael of House Solenne.”

“Yes!” Rael said, under his breath, on a single sharp exhale.

He walked forward with his shoulders a fraction looser than they had been a minute ago, and he stopped at the base of the balcony, and Gressil looked down at him.

“Ninety-five.”