Chương 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! Stolen novel; please report. 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." The plaza clapped again. Eydric made a small pleased sound beside me that I had not heard him make before. Rael took his place in the line, and while I was still watching him walk to it, my mind was still doing the arithmetic, and I was telling myself that ninety was possible but not guaranteed and that I should not, under any circumstances, let myself expect to b—"Howl of House Aridis." I did not move for a full second. I do not mean that as a figure of speech.

A full second passed between Gressil reading out my name and my body registering that my name had been called, and in that second I heard the plaza go quieter than it had been for any of the other names, and then my feet were moving. I walked forward.

The lanterns threw my shadow long across the stone in front of me, shortening as I approached the balcony, and the murmur that had started the morning every time my name was spoken started again now, in hushed overlapping waves behind me and around me, and I kept my eyes on Gressil and my face still and my steps even, the way Instructor Maren had drilled. I stopped at the base of the balcony. Gressil looked down at me. He took longer than he had taken with any of the others.

His eyes moved across my face once, and then down to the scroll, then back up, and when he spoke his voice carried the same flat clarity it had carried for every other name.

"Ninety-six." The plaza quite simply exploded. It was unlike anything what had been done for Circe or Metys or even Rael. A full roaring wall of sound, dozens of voices and dozens of hands, and under it a high cracking whoop from somewhere that sounded exactly like Rael, and I had to keep my face still for another three seconds by sheer force of Maren-drilled discipline while inside my chest something detonated so cleanly I was surprised the front of my tunic did not move with it. Ninety-six!

I bowed once to the balcony, turned, and walked to the line. Rael was there. He did not look at me, because we were both supposed to be at attention, but as I took my place beside him I heard him say, very quietly, out of the corner of his mouth:"Ninety- six, Howl? Ninety-six?"

"Yes."

"How did you even do that?"

"... I… I have no idea…" He almost laughed and went back to attention. From Metys's other side, just past Circe, I heard her voice, quieter even than Rael's and aimed carefully forward.

"Congratulations, Howl."

"You too, Metys." Gressil rolled the scroll halfway closed and rested his hands on the railing again.

"Four candidates at ninety or above. That figure is, like the overall pass rate, one of the highest this academy has recorded in a very long time. Before I present your rewards, I will tell you how your scores were assembled as some of you may have been wondering about it." Everyone listened.

"The written examination accounted for thirty points. Those results were known to you this afternoon. The practical examination accounted for forty, and I will now explain what those forty points measured, because the breakdown has not been given to you until this moment." He looked down at the scroll.

"Thirty points for a flag. A flag in the extraction box was a flag in the box, regardless of how you obtained it. Theft, recovery, discovery, alliance, ambush, all of these were permitted routes, and all of them paid the same. Fifty-eight of you came through with flags in hand, and nine of you reached the threshold through other means, and the faculty notes both paths with equal respect." I could feel the line beside me adjust very slightly.

"Five points for combat performance. The proctors stationed throughout the grounds observed every encounter you engaged in, whether against beasts, against other candidates, or against the hazards of the terrain, and marked you on efficiency, control, and judgement. Efficiency meant finishing an encounter before it cost you more than it should have. Control meant not causing more harm than the situation required. Judgement meant knowing when to fight and when to walk away."

I thought about the boy I had knocked a tooth out of in the ferns and kept my face still.

"Five points for team performance. How you treated the teammates assigned to you, how you coordinated under stress, and whether the team standing at the extraction arch at the end of the day was a team that functioned as one or a team that had merely survived one another's company." Hmm, good thing I came back to my team then…

"That is the forty of the practical. Thirty for a flag, five for combat, five for team." He paused, and his eyes moved down the line of four at the base of the balcony.

"The third assessment, worth the remaining thirty points, was the unspecified one, and I will now tell you what it measured. Thirty points for judgement, spread across the entire day." A small shift moved through the line beside me.

"The decisions you made when the rules had run out and there was nobody left to tell you what to do. The beasts you chose to engage when you could have walked past. The beasts you chose to walk past when you could have engaged. Mercy where mercy served you. Cruelty where cruelty served you. Restraint where restraint bought you something worth more than the fight would have. And the fourth section of the written." A low ripple moved through the columns. Somebody actually said oh no under their breath.

I could not see who.

"The fourth section was never scored against your written examination. It was part of the third assessment. The written was thirty points, and those thirty points were decided entirely by the first three sections. The fourth was a question we put in front of you to see what you would do with a question you could not answer. You could have left it blank and walked out of that hall with full marks intact. The page existed to measure how you would behave when you realized it could not be solved through study.

Whether you recognized the shape of what was being asked of you. Whether you judged the risk of attempting it correctly. And if you decided to attempt it, whether you were ingenious enough to do so without being caught. Several of your peers judged that risk wrong and are no longer standing in this plaza." Oh.

"Every hour of this examination was being watched, and every hour was being counted. Five hours in the hall, fourteen in the grounds. The proctors marked everything you did that you were not asked to do. Those marks became thirty points, and those thirty points are the reason the four candidates at the base of this balcony are standing here." He let the scroll fall half-closed against the railing.

"Let me be plain about what this academy is for. The years ahead of you will be easier if you understand it from tonight. Sartheon does not exist to produce good men. We exist to produce the men and women this kingdom will rely on when something difficult is asked of it. Most of the people leading it now came through these gates, and most of the people leading it a generation from now will come through them too. That is the work. That has always been the work."

There was a sort of solemnity in the silence this time as the old man continued.

"You will be sent to borders, councils and rooms in which the correct choice is hard and the comfortable choice is worse, and the crown will need to know that whichever one of you is standing in that room can tell them apart without flinching. That is what we watched for today." Beside me, Rael let out a breath so small I almost missed it.

"A candidate who shows mercy every time is no more useful to this kingdom than a candidate who shows none. Both will be washed out of this academy within a year if they cannot learn the difference between the situations that call for one and the situations that call for the other. All of you, at some point in your careers, will be asked to do something an ordinary person would refuse. The faculty selected you tonight because we believe you can be trained into the people this kingdom needs you to become.

That is the measure. That has always been the measure. Now you know." In the books Nana had smuggled to me, Sartheon was the place where young heroes went to become young heroes. You studied under wise old masters, you made lifelong friends in the dormitories, you stood on a tower at sunset and made a private vow about the kind of person you wanted to be, and then you went out into the world and kept the vow. That was the shape of it.

That was the shape of every academy in every story I had ever read, and Sartheon had been the brightest of them because it had been real. Nobody had ever told me it was a machine for producing people the crown could point at hard rooms and trust to make the right call in them. Which, when I thought about it for more than a second, made a sort of sense I did not love. I was not exactly disappointed.

The day had been the one of best days of my life by a comfortable margin, and the Sartheon I was actually standing in had turned out to be more interesting than the one I had imagined, just in a different direction. Gressil let the silence stretch exactly long enough for the speech to settle into the plaza, and then he lifted the scroll again.

"Now. Your rewards." Three proctors stepped out from under the balcony, one for each of them at the railing, and walked in a spread toward the line of four. Each one was carrying a narrow wooden case about the length of a forearm, carved simply, with a small latch at the front and a pale ribbon tied around the middle. The proctor who came to me was the same older woman who had pinned my badge to my chest that morning.

She opened the case in front of me without speaking, and inside, cushioned on a strip of dark cloth, was a folded scroll. The paper was heavier than anything I had ever held that was not a book. The seal was a colour I did not have a word for, somewhere between green and gold, with a sigil pressed into the wax that I did not recognize.

"Take it." I took it, and found the paper was warm. I was not making that up. The scroll was warm in my hand in a way that had nothing to do with the air, as if there was something alive inside it that had been waiting. Gressil waited until all four of us had our scrolls, and then he spoke again.

"What you are holding is a spirit contract. Unsigned and unbound. The wax has not been claimed, and the paper is waiting for a name that has not yet been written on it. These are rare, and I am not using that word for effect. The academy commissions once a year from a specific line of practitioners in the western provinces whose work on contract paper has not been surpassed in three centuries, and the four you are holding are four out of the ten that will exist in this kingdom this year. Treat them accordingly."

This was great. This was now my most prized possession that I had earned by myself, and the only one, too, I realized.

"The scroll does not contract you to a spirit. It makes you eligible to contract with one, should a spirit of sufficient rank ever choose to meet you on the terms the paper describes. Most of you will carry your scroll for years before anything happens with it. Some of you will carry it for decades.

A small number of you will carry it for the rest of your lives and die with it still folded, because the spirits who deal in contracts of this grade are not in the habit of making themselves available, and when they do make themselves available, they are not in the habit of choosing." He let that sit.

"If a spirit chooses you, you will not have to guess. And when it happens, you will understand why we gave you this tonight and not something easier. A contract with a spirit of contract-grade rank is the kind of thing that changes a mage's career, and in a small number of historical cases, has changed the direction of the kingdom. You have earned the right to carry one of these. Whether the right becomes a contract is between you and the spirit world, and the academy does not intervene in that conversation." Ding!

The gold text rolled out in front of my eyes. [Quest Complete: Pass the Sartheon Entrance Trials with a score of 90 or higher.] Reward: Spirit Contract (Class A) I almost laughed. I had been wondering all day how the System was going to deliver this one. I dismissed the text with a blink and tucked the scroll carefully into the inside of my tunic, against my ribs, where it kept being warm. Veyra stepped forward at the railing. It was the first time she had spoken since the team assignments that morning.

Her voice was lower than Gressil's and carried in a different way.

"I will not keep you long. You have had a long day and you will have a long week ahead of you." Her eyes moved across the columns, the full length of the plaza, taking in the sixty-seven of us who were still standing in it.

"The faculty expects a great deal of all of you. Not because you passed tonight — candidates have passed before, and the academy has watched a number of them turn into exactly nothing worth remembering — but because of how this cohort passed. You are the strongest group to walk through these gates in nearly two centuries. That is not a compliment, but a debt. The kingdom did not produce a cohort like yours by accident, and it does not produce cohorts like yours for its own amusement.

You have been gathered here because the years ahead are going to ask for people like you, and the academy intends to make sure that when those years ask, you are ready to answer." A beat passed.

"Welcome to Sartheon, students." Bryce, beside her, inclined his head once without speaking and Gressil stepped back to the railing one last time.

"You are dismissed. Return to your Shadows. Transport to your homes has been arranged and will be ready within the hour. Go well, and rest. You have earned it." The plaza did not move for a breath, then it did, all at once. Someone whooped. Someone else answered from across the columns.

Within a second the whole plaza was noise, laughter, shouting and the clatter of boots as candidates collided into each other with their arms out, and a hat went sailing up into the lantern light from somewhere near the front and nobody tried to catch it on the way down. Rael had me by both shoulders." We're Sartheon students!!"

He was shaking me back and forth with both hands, and Eydric was standing behind him grinning the widest I had seen him grin all day, and I could not do anything about any of it because I was smiling too wide to form words. Truly, I could not wait for the years ahead.