Chapter 4. Departure

I didn’t own much.

That was something I hadn’t really thought about until I stood in front of my wardrobe trying to decide what to bring. When everything in your life is provided for you, you don’t accumulate things the way other people do. I had training clothes, formal robes, and sheets of glyph work in various stages of completion.

According to Sartheon’s rules, nothing was prohibited inside the trials aside from outside help; you could bring your own glyph sheets if you wanted, or enchanted relics for different situations.

I had no relics. The glyph sheets I did have, and after some thought I picked three of the finished ones out of my stack: a firespear glyph, an ice one, and a wind one with a sticky paper. I rolled them carefully and laid them along the inside seam of my bag.

In went a pen with a weighted handle that Instructor Maren had given me when my calligraphy reached a standard she found acceptable. I’d be back for a week between the trials and the start of term, so spare clothes were not worth packing. That left one thing. The most important one.

The small mirror beside my bed was the right height for me to stand at, and I had spent eight months, on and off, etching a concealment glyph into the back of its frame in a layer thin enough that no one had spotted it on the daily cleanings. I’d been wanting somewhere to keep things since I was eleven. By thirteen I’d had it.

I pressed my palm flat to the surface and let a thread of mana into the glyph.

The mirror softened under my hand, and my fingers slipped through like a hand into water. My hand went in to the wrist, then to the elbow, and I felt for the leather and pulled my journal out into the room. The mirror knitted itself back to solid by the time my hand was clear.

I tucked the journal into the bag, where the shape of it would not draw attention if anyone happened to look. They came every day, the moment my door closed behind me on my way to a lesson. A pair of them, working quietly, one to check the room and one to watch the corridor.

They were very good. They never moved anything by more than a hair, and what they moved they returned with care. I was not supposed to know they did this, yet I had known since I was nine. The mirror was for the things I did not want them to see, which by now meant the journal, and the journal meant the drawings and notes.

The bag was still not full when I closed it, but it sat heavier now.

If I’d waited until tomorrow, there would have been a ceremony. I knew this because House Aridis had a ceremony for everything, and the firstborn son leaving the estate for the first time to attend the most storied academy in the kingdom was not the kind of event that happened without speeches.

So the faster I was gone, the better. I cinched the bag shut, set it by the door, sat down on the edge of my bed, and waited for the knock.

***

The footsteps came just as the last of the daylight was pulling itself off the floor. Two sets, one heavier than the other, stopping outside my door. There was a pause, a murmured exchange I couldn’t quite make out, and then the knock.

“Young Lord. It is time.”

My chest tightened. I stood up from the bed, picked up my bag, slung it over my shoulder, smoothed the front of my robes, and took one breath to settle everything inside me that wanted to sprint through the door and down the corridor and out the nearest gate before anyone could change their mind. Then I slid the door open.

A young man stood in the corridor. He was tall, taller than me, with a lean frame that hadn’t quite finished filling out, and dark hair that fell past his jaw. His eyes were grey, Aridis grey, and they were studying me in a way that reminded me of Bellos, except younger.

He was perhaps eighteen, maybe nineteen. I’d never seen him before, which meant he was either branch family or someone they’d kept out of my path on purpose.

He bowed slightly to me.

“Greetings, young Lord. My name is Gowyn Aridis,” he said. “I have been assigned as your Shadow for the duration of your travel to Sartheon Academy, and, should you pass the entrance examination, for the duration of your time there as well.”

I had questions. Quite a few of them, actually, starting with what exactly a Shadow was, whether he’d volunteered or been told, how long he’d known about this, whether he was branch family or main, whether he’d been to Sartheon himself, whether he was a mage, what Seal he held if he was, and about a dozen other things that were lining up behind my teeth, but I swallowed all of them.

“Very well,” I said. “Lead the way, then.”

We walked in silence. Gowyn led, I followed, and the guards fell in behind us, their boots marking a steady rhythm on the stone. It was a quiet walk through corridors I’d never seen, toward a gate I didn’t know existed, and that was exactly what I’d wanted, even if the lack of ceremony felt strange in a house that ceremonied everything.

The corridors changed after we passed my wing. The stone was the same, the same dark grey granite that ran through the whole estate, but the carvings on the walls were different, depicting scenes I didn’t recognize. We turned a corner and the ceiling opened up into a vaulted archway lined with hanging lanterns, and beyond it was a garden.

I hadn’t known there was a garden.

It stretched out on either side of a flagstone path, thick with flowering bushes I couldn’t name, their petals pale blue and silver in the early evening light. There were stone benches set between the rows, and a shallow pond off to the left where the water was so still it looked like poured glass, reflecting the first stars of the night back up at themselves.

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The air smelled different here, wet earth and something sweet, and I wanted to stop and stand in it for a while, but Gowyn kept walking, so I kept walking.

A pair of servants passed us on the path. They stepped aside, pressed their backs to the hedgerow, and bowed their heads.

“Young Lord.”

I inclined my chin slightly, the way Instructor Maren had drilled into me years ago. You acknowledge, but you do not engage. You do not stop. You do not smile too broadly or linger too long or make anyone feel as though your attention is something they are owed, because your attention, as an Aridis, carries weight, and weight distributed carelessly becomes a liability.

She had explained this to me when I was ten, and I’d thought it sounded… lonely.

We passed through a second archway into a wider courtyard, and the estate opened up around me in a way I hadn’t been prepared for.