Chapter 2. Summons

The doors opened on their own, swinging inward slowly and without sound, as though the wood itself had been taught to move quietly in the presence of the people who sat behind it.

The chamber was dark, the same as it always was. There were no windows, nor torches, nor lanterns on the walls. The only light came from orbs of pale mana that hovered above the heads of the elders, one for each of them, casting just enough glow to outline the shape of a shoulder, the edge of a jaw, the curve of a hand resting on an armrest, but never enough to show a face.

The elders of House Aridis sat in silhouette, featureless and still, and even after all the times I’d stood in this room, the effect still worked on me. You were not speaking to people here, but to the house itself.

They sat in an open half-circle of high-backed chairs, seven of them, with a gap at the centre where the two ends of the arc didn’t meet. I walked through the gap and stopped in the middle of the circle, on the single tile that had been set slightly lower than the others so you’d feel the change under your feet.

I knelt. One knee down, head bowed, eyes on the tile. You kneel the moment you reach the centre. You greet the council. You do not raise your head. You do not speak unless someone in this room speaks to you first. You stay on that tile with your face pointed at the floor and you wait for permission to exist, which, when I thought about it, was not so different from how I’d spent the rest of my life.

“Elders of House Aridis,” I said to the floor. “I greet you, and I am honoured by your summons.”

I couldn’t see any of their faces, but I could feel them looking at me, and the weight of their attention pressed down on the back of my neck the same way it always did.

The elder seated directly in front of me, at the highest point of the arc, was my grandfather. Oserys Aridis, head of the house. Nana Serre had described him as old, sharp and patient.

To his right sat my father. Jahaeser Aridis, second son of the family head, who had been nobody’s idea of an heir until the day I was born and the elders decided that the man who had produced the Axiom deserved a higher seat than the man who hadn’t. They removed my uncle from the succession and installed my father in his place, all within the same year they’d spent celebrating my birth.

When Nana Serre told me my father had wept when the elders confirmed what I was, I think she meant it as a tender detail, proof that he’d loved me from the first moment, but to be honest, I wondered whether a man who’d just been handed the future of the house over his older brother might have had a few other reasons to cry.

“You have received an invitation from Sartheon Academy.”

The voice came from directly ahead, from the highest chair. That was my grandfather, without a doubt.

“The house is pleased.” He continued. “I walked those halls myself, as did my father before me, and his father before him. But your father’s generation did not. You will correct that.”

He let that sit for a moment, and I kept my eyes on the tile.

“You will depart tomorrow evening. A retinue will accompany you to the academy grounds, where you will present yourself for the entrance examination. You will pass it with the highest score, and will conduct yourself in a manner befitting your name and station, and you will remind every house in attendance why the name Aridis is spoken the way it is spoken.”

There was another pause. I could hear someone shift in their chair to my left, a faint creak of wood, but no one else in the room made a sound.

“You will not disappoint this house, Howl.”

Oh. That was the first time I’d heard my grandfather say my name, this seemed really important to them, huh?

The silence stretched.

I could feel it pressing against the walls of the chamber, filling up the dark spaces between the orbs of light, and I knew I was supposed to say something, some form of acknowledgement, some variation of yes, Elder, I understand, Elder, it would be my honour, Elder, but the words wouldn’t come because my mind was still stuck on tomorrow evening and I couldn’t get past it.

Tomorrow evening meant tonight in my room. Tonight in my room meant another meal I didn’t choose, another set of hours measured out by someone else’s schedule, another night lying in bed staring at the ceiling while the letter sat on my desk and Sartheon existed somewhere out there in the world, waiting for me, and I was here, in this house, where I had been for every single night of my life.

“Have you heard what I have said?”

“Yes, Elder.”

“Then you may speak, if you have something to say.”

I swallowed. The tile under my knee was cold and smooth, and I pressed my weight into it because it gave me something to focus on that wasn’t the seven silhouettes watching me from their chairs.

“I would ask,” I said as my voice came out quieter than I wanted it to, “if it would be permitted for me to depart this evening, instead.”

Nobody answered me then. The chamber was so quiet I could hear the faint hum of the mana orbs above the elders’ heads, a sound I had never noticed before, or maybe had never been still enough to hear.

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I kept my eyes on the floor and felt the back of my neck prickle, immediately wishing I could pull the words back into my mouth and swallow them.

The silence went on for what felt like a very long time.

“Very well,” my grandfather said. “You will depart this evening.”

Oh, that actually went well.

“Prepare him,” he said, and he was no longer speaking to me.

“Thank you, Elder. I will not fail you.”

I stood, bowed once to the centre of the arc, and turned and walked back through the gap in the circle toward the doors. I didn’t rush. I kept my steps even, my shoulders straight and my eyes forward.