Chương 2: Summons

The doors opened on their own, swinging inward slowly and without sound. Inside, the chamber was dark as always. There were no windows, torches, or 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. The seven of them sat in an open half-circle of high-backed chairs, 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. Following protocol, you kneel the moment you reach the centre, then you greet the council and you neither raise your head nor speak further unless someone in this room speaks to you first.

"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, the weight of their attention pressing 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. 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. Stolen story; please report.

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. The doors swung open as I reached them, in the same movement as before, and I stepped through without looking back.

The guards were waiting in the corridor and fell into formation around me the moment I cleared the threshold, four on each side, and we walked back the way we'd come. The servants were still watching. The branch family members in the eastern pavilion were still standing around their tea table, and they bowed as I passed.

I kept my eyes forward and my face still, and I walked like I knew where I was going, and I did not let any part of me show what was happening inside my chest, which was something close to detonation. We reached my wing. The lead guard opened the door to my quarters and stepped aside as I walked in. The door slid shut behind me, and I heard their boots retreat down the corridor, getting fainter and fainter until they were gone. I stood there for about two seconds.

Then I grabbed the letter off my desk and held it over my head with both hands.

"YES!" I shouted and jumped, then jumped again and spun around and nearly knocked over my inkwell and didn't care. I was laughing. I hadn't heard myself laugh in so long that the sound startled me, and that made me laugh harder, and I pressed the letter against my face and fell back onto my bed and kicked my legs in the air like I was nine years old and not the Axiom, the pride and treasure of House Aridis, the once-in-a-thousand-years prodigy.

"Finally," I said to the ceiling.

"I am finally free!" I lay there on my back with the letter on my chest, breathing hard, grinning at nothing, and I was so happy I didn't know what to do with my arms. Oh, right! I'd had a list for years. I never wrote it down, because writing things down in this house meant someone would find it during an inspection and take it away, but I kept it in my head, adding to it every time Nana Serre brought me a new book, and then continuing to add to it from memory long after she was gone. Things I wanted to eat.

That was the longest section. In one of Nana's books, the hero had stopped at a roadside inn after three days of travel and ordered something called a honey cake, and the way the author described it, the warmth and the sweetness and the way the glaze cracked under his teeth, I'd read that paragraph four times and my mouth had watered so badly I had to drink a full cup of water before I could keep going. I wanted to try a honey cake.

I wanted to try sugar in general, actually, since the closest I'd ever come was smelling something with cinnamon in it from two floors away when I was eight. I wanted to eat fruit that wasn't portioned, and try wine, because every hero in every story drank wine at some point, usually at a tavern, and I wanted to know what a tavern looked like from the inside. Oh, and street food!

Anything sold from a cart by someone who cooked it right there in front of you and handed it to you wrapped in paper, because that sounded like the most incredible thing in the world and I could not explain to anyone why. And friends. I thought about that one carefully. I knew what friendship looked like in books, but what about real life? I had a whole list.

Years of it, built up one book at a time, refined and reorganized in my head during the long hours between training sessions when I had nothing to do but lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling and imagine a version of my life where I got to do things. I was still lying there, halfway through mentally debating whether harbour fish or honey cake should come first on the list, when there was another knock at my door.

"Yes?"

"Young Lord, Instructor Bellos has requested your presence in the eastern training hall. He wishes to conduct a final assessment before your departure." Of course he did. I closed my eyes and let out a long breath through my nose. Even tonight, even with Sartheon waiting for me at the end of it, there was still a schedule and I was still inside it.

"... I will be there shortly." After a while, I sat up, smoothed down the front of my robes, and crossed the room. I slid the door open and stepped out into the corridor, and then I looked down, because someone gasped. There were three of them, crouched against the wall just to the right of my door. The closest one had his hand around the red ball, mid-reach, and he was staring up at me with his mouth half open and his whole body frozen.

He had dark hair, cut short above his ears, light grey eyes, and a jaw that was starting to square out the way boys' jaws do when they're not quite done growing. He looked like me. Not exactly, but close enough that if you saw us standing next to each other you wouldn't need to be told we were related. The same brow, the same colouring, the same sharp line along the bridge of the nose that I saw in my own mirror every morning. I smiled at him. I didn't plan it. It just happened.

"You must be Rowan." His eyes went wide. Behind him, pressed against the wall with her knees drawn up and her hands gripping the hem of her dress, was a younger girl with silver hair that fell past her shoulders and caught the light from the corridor lanterns in a way that made it look almost white. She didn't look like the others. She didn't look like me.

She had softer features, a rounder face, and lighter eyes, and I thought this must be Calla, the one Nana said looked like our mother, and I realized I was looking at the closest thing to my mother's face I had ever seen. Next to her was the smallest one, a boy of five with the same dark Aridis hair and grey eyes as Rowan, clutching the back of Calla's dress with one hand and watching me from behind her shoulder. Dorin, I assumed.

"I'm Howl," I said.

"I'm your—" They suddenly ran. All three of them at once, like a flock of birds startled off a branch. Rowan scrambled to his feet and pulled Calla by the arm while Calla pulled Dorin and they were gone down the corridor in a clatter of bare feet and rustling fabric before I could finish the sentence. The red ball rolled out of Rowan's hand as he bolted and wobbled to a stop against the far wall. I stood there in the doorway and watched the corridor settle back into silence.

I could still hear them faintly getting farther away, and then a door shut somewhere and they were gone.... I'd wanted to say more. I'd wanted to say a lot of things, actually, but I hadn't planned any of them, and they probably wouldn't have come out right anyway.

So I picked up the ball and set it down gently by the wall where they'd been sitting, and I looked at it for a moment, then I turned and walked toward the eastern training hall, because that was what the schedule said, and today, at least, I only had to follow it one more time.