Chapter 7. Theoretical Exam

The plaza had split into clusters. Some candidates were already deep in conversation with people they seemed to know, greeting each other while others stood with their Shadows in quiet consultation, heads bowed, voices low.

A few were alone, leaning against pillars or sitting on the stone benches that lined the edge of the plaza, looking at their hands or their shoes or the sky.

I spotted Eydric a little ways off to the left. He’d found company fast, which made sense, given that he was the kind of person who walked up to strangers and started talking, which was apparently a skill you could just have.

He was standing in a loose circle with four or five other candidates, two boys and two girls and someone whose back was turned to me.

I was wondering what they might be talking about when one of them glanced in my direction. Then another. Eydric followed their eyes and saw me looking, so I smiled and waved.

They turned around so fast it was almost coordinated. Eydric said something to the group I couldn’t hear, and they resumed their conversation with a stiffness that hadn’t been there a moment ago, their shoulders angled just slightly away from me.

My hand was still up, so I lowered it.

That was… familiar, actually. The speed of it, the way they’d all looked and then deliberately stopped looking, as if I was something you weren’t supposed to stare at directly. I’d seen that exact reaction before, in a corridor outside my room, from three children who’d rather abandon a ball than knock on my door.

“Gowyn?”

He was standing behind my left shoulder, hands clasped behind his back, watching the crowd. He looked at me, and I realized this was the first time I’d actually asked him anything since we’d left the estate.

“Do you… do you think it would be a good idea for me to go and talk with some of the other candidates? Try to… make friends, maybe?”

I said it carefully, because I could hear how it sounded even as the words left my mouth, asking my Shadow for advice to socialize was probably not the most impressive thing Gowyn had ever witnessed from a member of House Aridis.

Gowyn looked at me for a few seconds, which was the longest he’d looked at me for anything that wasn’t protocol-related since we’d met.

“Socializing would be a good idea, Young Lord,” he said. “However, you should expect some resistance to your approaches. The Aridis name carries a certain—”

“So it’s a good idea, right?”

He paused. Whatever he’d been about to say about the Aridis name and its certain whatever died somewhere between his brain and his mouth. He looked at me again for a while and then…

“… Sure.”

That was all I needed.

I adjusted my bag on my shoulder, took a breath, and walked across the plaza toward the group. Every step felt slightly too loud on the stone. I was so, so anxious .

I stopped a few feet from the circle. They hadn’t noticed me yet, or they were pretending they hadn’t, which was its own kind of message, but I was already here and turning around now would be worse than whatever was about to happen.

“Hello, everyone.”

Six faces turned to me at once. Eydric’s was one of them, and he smiled at me.

“Oh,” one of the girls said. She had dark skin and close-cropped hair and was holding a leather-bound notebook against her chest. “Hello.”

“Hi,” said the boy next to her, a tall, thin kid with freckles.

Nobody said anything after that. The silence sat between us and I could feel the awkwardness pressing against my skin, and I knew they could feel it too because the freckled boy was looking at his shoes and the girl with the notebook had tightened her grip on it and Eydric was watching me with an expression that was now fully unreadable.

I was aware of how this was going. I was very, very aware.

“I’m Howl,” I said anyway, because stopping now would mean I’d walked all the way across a plaza for nothing, and I was House Aridis and we did not falter, even when faltering would have been the socially merciful option. “I met Eydric earlier, and I thought I’d come and introduce myself to the rest of you as well. Since we’ll all be taking the examination together.”

More silence. The boy whose back had been turned to me earlier shifted to face me properly. He was short, compact, with sharp brown eyes and a Solenne crest on his collar, and he was studying me with the polite, measured attention that Bellos had warned me about.

“That’s… very forward of you,” the Solenne boy said, and I genuinely could not tell if that was a compliment or a criticism, so I treated it as both.

“Probably,” I said. “I don’t have a lot of practice with this.”

The girl with the notebook was the first to move. She tucked it under her arm, stepped forward, and held out her hand.

“Metys,” she said. “Metys Ozen. House Ozen.”

I took her hand and shook it, and this time nobody’s face went red and nobody’s knuckles went white, which I was starting to understand was how handshakes were supposed to go.

“It’s nice to meet you, Metys.”

She smiled at me, and after that, the others followed. The freckled boy was Cael, from a minor house in the western provinces whose name I didn’t catch because he mumbled it.

One of the other girls introduced herself as Dessa Vashren, and she had the red-gold hair and squared-off stance I’d been taught to expect from that house.

The last boy was broad and quiet and said his name was Tomas, and that he was from the Draeven, and then he went back to standing with his arms folded and his mouth closed, which I respected.

The Solenne boy waited until everyone else had finished before he stepped forward. He didn’t offer his hand. He just tilted his head and looked at me with those sharp brown eyes.

“So you’re the Aridis boy,” he said. “The one they call the Axiom.”

“You can call me Howl,” I said, smiling. “That’s my name.”

He smiled back. “What, you don’t like being called the Axiom?”

“I didn’t say that. I just prefer Howl.”

“Interesting.” He folded his arms. “Most people would kill to have a title like that. Heaven-sent, once-in-a-thousand-years, all of that. And you’d rather be called Howl?”

“It is my name,” I said again, because I wasn’t sure what else to say to that, and repeating yourself felt safer than trying to be clever with a Solenne.

“Rael,” Metys said. “He said he doesn’t like it. So just call him Howl.”

“I’m teasing,” Rael said, raising both hands, palms out. “Just teasing. Getting to know our new friend here.” He looked at me. “That is what you want, isn’t it, Howl? To be friends?”

He said it lightly and playfully, and I opened my mouth to say yes, because yes was the truth, but the word caught somewhere in my throat because I suddenly understood what I looked like.

I was begging. That’s what this was. I’d never personally felt something like this before, but I recognized it instantly. This was what it felt like to want something from people who hadn’t offered it, at the cost of your pride. The feeling was so sharp and so specific that it straightened my spine before I’d even decided to straighten it.

“I think it’s wise to familiarize oneself with the other candidates,” I said with the voice Instructor Maren had spent years drilling into me for exactly this kind of moment. “We’ll be sharing the same academy, after all. Building a professional rapport early seems prudent.”

The shift was immediate enough that the others seemed to have noticed.

“Professional rapport,” Rael repeated. “Right.”

“Indeed,” I said, and I held his gaze the way Bellos had taught me to hold an opponent’s during a duel, steady and unhurried, giving nothing away. “I look forward to working with all of you.”

Eydric hadn’t said a word through any of this. He was standing at the edge of the circle with his arms at his sides, watching me.

That whole exchange had been unpleasant. Deeply, thoroughly unpleasant, in a way I hadn’t been prepared for, and I’d been prepared for a lot of things.

Bellos had warned me about the Solenne. He’d told me exactly what to expect, and I’d wanted to give the benefit of the doubt anyway, but Rael had nearly made me look like a fool in front of everyone, and he’d done it while smiling.

“With that being said,” I said, keeping my voice even, “I’ll let you all get back to your conversation. I’m sure we’ll see each other during the examination. Good luck to all of you.”

I turned to leave, and I’d already taken a step when Eydric spoke up.

“You should stay.”

I looked back at him. He’d shifted his weight forward, hands in his pockets now, and he was watching me with an expression that had finally settled into something I could read, or at least thought I could.

“The exam’s starting soon anyway,” he said. “No point wandering off just to wander back. And besides…” He pulled a hand from his pocket and held it out toward me. “I’d like for us to be friends, Howl. If you’re up for it.”

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

I stared at his hand.

This was confusing. Genuinely confusing. Because everything I’d picked up from Eydric just now, all of it had left me with the faintest sense that he did not particularly like me…

Oh well.

I smiled back and took his hand.

“I’d like that, yeah.”

Metys stepped closer and asked me where I’d travelled from, and I told her about the estate in the east, and she told me House Ozen was from the southern coast, and that the journey had taken her three days by ship and another half day by road, and that she’d thrown up twice on the ship and was not interested in discussing it further, which made me laugh, and she laughed too, and it felt easy in a way that the last ten minutes hadn’t.

Rael, to his credit, seemed to soften after that. He uncrossed his arms and asked me if the written exam was the one I was most concerned about, and I said honestly that I wasn’t particularly worried about any of them.

He just raised an eyebrow and said “bold”.

We were talking about the practical assessment, Dessa explaining that her house had been drilling her in combustion forms since she was twelve, when a low grinding sound cut through the plaza and every conversation died at once.

One of the buildings facing the plaza was opening. The entire front wall was sliding apart, two massive stone panels pulling away from each other to reveal a cavernous hall beyond, lit from within by hundreds of mana orbs floating near the ceiling in neat rows.

Through the gap, I could see long tables arranged in lines stretching back into the hall, each one set with a booklet, a pen, and an inkwell.