Chương 20: Report

"Soooo... this is it, huh?" Rael was leaning against the side of my carriage with his arms folded, grinning while the driver was checking the Greymanes' tack a few paces off. Gowyn stood at a polite distance behind my shoulder, and Sera as well as Rael's shadow were beside him, and beyond them the other carriage lanterns were moving across the staging yard as the rest of the cohort found their rides home.

"It seems to be, yes."

"So what path are you going to take when we start?"

"I haven't thought about it much. I'll use the week to figure it out."

"Shield, probably. You look like the Shield type. Just like Eydric over here." I was about to answer when Eydric slammed an elbow into Rael's side." Ouch. Okay. Okay, let me just— okay." I looked at the two of them. Rael was rubbing his ribs while Eydric had gone back to standing at exactly the same angle as before, as if nothing had happened.

"... Is everything alright?" Rael took a breath and straightened.

"Howl. About the thing. In the forest. The honour thing."

"Oh."

"... I was wrong about it. Not about all of it, I want to be clear, I'm not apologising for all of it, but the part where I told you your honour was a costume you were wearing because people from houses like yours put costumes like that on. That was a call I made too fast, on too little time with you, and it was cheap. Your honour isn't fragile and it isn't a costume. I know that now. I should have waited a day before deciding I had you read. So… aah, I guess what I mean to say is that I'm sorry." Wow.

I did not know what to do with my face. The truth was that I had spent most of the walk back from Morren turning Rael's words over in my head and discovering, slowly, that he had been closer to right than I had wanted him to be. I had been ready for a conversation where I apologised to him, not the other way around, and now he had gotten out in front of it, and I was the one standing in a staging yard in front of a carriage feeling like the worse person.

"Well, I... I'm the one who should be apologising."

"Huh?"

"Yes. I walked out on both of you. I left you in the middle of an exam with one less team member and a plan we hadn't finished arguing about. That was worse than anything you said on that bench." Eydric shrugged.

"You came back." I smiled slightly at that, took a breath and made myself say the rest.

"And for what it's worth. I... did enjoy the thrill of it." Rael's eyebrows went up.

"Not to the point of wanting to mug anyone at an extraction arch if it came down to it, mind you. I want to be clear about that. But the fighting, and the running through the trees, and the pack in the clearing, and the part where there were eleven of them in the bowl and I was mostly sure I wasn't going to make it out. That part. I liked that part more than I knew I was allowed to." Rael spun on his heel and pointed at Eydric with both hands." AHA! SEE? SEE, Vael? I TOLD you!

I said to you, I said—" Gowyn, Sera, Rael's shadow, the driver, and three candidates climbing into a nearby carriage all turned their heads to look at the Solenne at the same time. Rael stopped, cleared his throat, and lowered his hands, putting them very deliberately behind his back.

"I meant, of course, that there is nothing wrong with enjoying the thrill of honest combat, which is a perfectly noble and healthy instinct in a young mage, and that honour and enjoyment are not, in fact, opposing forces, and can coexist quite beautifully in a well-formed character, as I have always maintained." Eydric was looking at the stars now and I was laughing before I had decided to laugh, and for once I did not stop myself from letting it out.

That is, until I noticed that several candidates near the next carriage had turned to look at me, and that more than one of them seemed faintly startled by the sound. The laugh died in my throat. I straightened without meaning to, and I felt my face slide back into the composed Aridis neutrality. I cleared my throat and offered my hand to Rael.

"It was good to meet you. Both of you. I learned a lot today and I enjoyed your company." Rael looked at my hand, frowned, then looked at me.

"Aaaah, come on. Stop that." He took the hand, but instead of shaking it he pulled, and I stumbled forward half a step into him before I understood what was happening, and his other arm was around my shoulders and my face was briefly pressed against the side of his collar.

"This is how friends do it."

"... Oh." He let go and held me at arm's length with both hands on my shoulders, still grinning.

"Me and Eydric have a handshake, too. It's got about four moves in it. We'll teach you if you want. It's very stupid. You'll love it." Friends… I have made… friends.

"Howl? Hello? Howl?" Rael snapped his fingers in front of my face.

"Oh. Oh, uh, yes. I... I would like that very much. Yes." I turned to Eydric and offered my hand again, less certainly this time. He took it, and to my quiet relief, did not yank me forward. He gave it one firm shake.

"See you in a bit."

"Yes." I turned to Sera next, because she was closest. I did not know the protocol for saying goodbye to somebody else's Shadow, so I just gave her a small nod, and she smiled and lifted her hand in a warm small wave.

"Safe travels, Young Lord." I nodded to Rael's Shadow next, the young man in the long coat whose name I still did not know. He inclined his head a fraction without speaking, which I took for the goodbye it probably was. Then I climbed into the carriage and settled into the seat I had ridden in on the way here, and Gowyn followed a beat later and took the seat across from me, same as before. The door shut. The driver clicked his tongue somewhere up front, and the Greymanes pulled. The silence came in fast.

It was not a comfortable one. Gowyn had his hands folded on his knees, and I had three conversations lined up in my head that I wanted to start with him but no idea which one came first, and the idea of starting any of them right now, with today's events still humming in my bones, was more than I could manage. I let the silence stretch and told myself I would handle it in a minute.

My eyes closed somewhere between one crunch of the wheels and the next, and I did not notice they had closed until they were already closed, and by then it was too late to do anything about it. This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"Young Lord. Young Lord." I came up out of something warm and slow with a start. The voice was close. I blinked, and the inside of the carriage resolved itself around me, and there was Gowyn across from me, leaning forward slightly with one hand half-raised toward my shoulder, waiting for me to surface the rest of the way. I sat up and felt the wet patch at the corner of my mouth and the slightly damp line down the side of my jaw, and I wiped it on the back of my sleeve before he could pretend not to have noticed.

The air inside the carriage smelled sweet. Not perfume sweet, but something closer to warmed honey and a flower I could not name, faint enough now that I suspected it had been much stronger while I was out.

"We have arrived at the estate, Young Lord."

"What?" I twisted in my seat and pulled the carriage curtain aside. The gates of House Aridis were sitting directly in front of us, thirty feet of black iron and granite rising out of the ground with the gryphon carved above them, the watchtowers on either side lit against a sky that was already the pale grey of early morning. The Greymanes had stopped. The driver was speaking to somebody on the wall.

"... I slept through the whole journey?"

"Yes, Young Lord."

"All of it?"

"The carriage was released with a measure of hollowreath burned into the compartment. It is a recovery smoke. Long enough for the distance, weak enough that you would wake when the driver signalled." I turned back to him very slowly.

"... You drugged me? Without telling me?" Gowyn did not blink.

"The head of the family asked that you be rested by the time you arrived."

"He—" I stopped and ran the sentence I had been about to say through my head once and decided it was not worth finishing out loud.

"Anything else I should know about?"

"When the gates open, you will be taken to your wing to be bathed and perfumed and dressed in formal robes. After that, you will be presented to the Council of Elders to give your report on the entrance trials. The Council has been waiting for your return."

"... I see." I sat back against the seat and ran a hand over my face, it came away smelling faintly of the sweet thing, and I closed my eyes for just a second and let that be the reaction I had instead of the louder reactions that were lining up behind it. A minute. Just the one, then the gates opened and the carriage rolled through, and from the moment my feet touched the gravel on the other side I was no longer in charge of anything that happened next. Four attendants were waiting at my wing.

I was bathed, my hair was washed and combed and tied back, something sweet and a little cold was pressed against the hollow of my throat and the insides of my wrists, and the formal robes came off the wardrobe hooks and went onto my shoulders. I let my face do nothing while it happened. The escort formed up outside my door the moment the attendants left. Eight guards in full Aridis colours, four on each side, then we walked.

The servants paused in the same doorways and the branch family in the eastern pavilion stood up from the same tea table, and one of them started to say something and the other one hushed her, same as before. I kept my eyes forward. I walked like I knew where I was going. The heavy double doors came up at the end of the corridor exactly when I expected them to. The guards split, four to each side. The lead escort stepped forward and knocked twice.

"The Young Lord Howl Aridis, the Axiom of House Aridis, requests an audience with the Council of Elders." There was a pause. Then came the old voice from inside.

"Granted. Let him enter." The doors opened on their own. I walked through the gap in the circle and stopped on the tile that sat a fraction lower than the others, and I knelt, one knee down, head bowed, eyes on the stone.

"Elders of House Aridis. I greet you, and I am honoured by your summons." Then I waited.

"News of your performance at the entrance trials has reached us." My grandfather's voice came from the highest chair, directly ahead. I kept my eyes on the tile.

"Ninety-six points. For a candidate of your station, this council expected one hundred. Nothing less would have been a true reflection of what you are, and of the lineage that carries the name. On that matter, we are disappointed." My jaw tightened before I could stop it. I loosened it, slowly, and kept my eyes where they were.

"I apologise, Elder. I will endeavour to do better." This was not new. Every council I could remember had started in some version of this shape. I had come in at seven with a report on a glyph set I had mastered three months ahead of schedule, and my grandfather had told me the schedule was for ordinary students, and an Axiom was not an ordinary student, and that I would do better next quarter.

I had come in at ten with a report on a combat form Instructor Bellos had passed me on three tries earlier than expected, and my grandfather had told me the previous Axiom had passed it on one. I had come in at thirteen with a mana reserves measurement that had broken a century-old record for my age bracket, and my grandfather had told me the record was a house record and Axioms did not measure themselves against houses.

There had always been someone who had done it before me, and that someone had always done it better, and the standard had always been waiting somewhere slightly above where I had landed. I knelt on the tile and let the old familiar weight settle into the back of my neck, and I did not move.

"Nevertheless." I waited.

"You finished second to none in your cohort. No other candidate scored higher than you. In this, the council, and the house, commend you."

"Thank you, Elder." In any other year of my life, the council, and the house, commend you would have been the thing I carried back to my room and held against my chest for a week. Praises from my grandfather had always been rare, and rare enough that I had collected them in my head and taken them out on bad nights and turned them over.

But I had spent yesterday afternoon sitting in moss in front of an old spirit who had told me I was good company and that he had enjoyed our afternoon more than he could properly tell me, and the memory of that voice was still sitting somewhere near the front of my head, and by comparison the thing my grandfather had just said felt… thin. I kept my face still, because the alternative was showing him I had noticed.

"Report."

"Yes, Elder." I took a breath while still kneeled, then told them everything. Not word for word, but I gave them the full shape of the day. They asked questions in the spaces. About the other houses, mostly. I gave them Circe of House Marrow's name without being asked, because I suspected they would ask eventually. I gave them Eydric and Metys's name too, and Tomás's, and a handful of others I had crossed paths with during the day. They were particularly interested in Rael.

"Gowyn's report indicates the Solenne boy addressed you by the word friend." I hesitated for a beat that was probably longer than I wanted it to be.

"... Yes, Elder. That is true."

"Howl. Attend to what I am about to say, because it matters more than anything you will be taught at that academy."

"Yes, Elder."

"Friendship is a word children use when they lack the vocabulary for what is actually happening between two people. You are not a child. You have not been a child since the elders of this house confirmed what you are, and the kingdom has not been a place that afforded Axioms the luxury of children's words. A boy of your station has three kinds of people in his life. Family. Allies. Enemies. These are the only three. Learn to tell them apart early, and the years ahead will be clearer for it." This bothered me a lot.

"The Solenne boy is not your family. Whether he is an ally or an enemy is a question you will answer over time, and the answer may change more than once before you have finished answering it. What he is not, and what no one outside of this house will ever be, is your friend. Because friends, as the word is used in the common tongue, are people one spends oneself on without calculation. You cannot afford to spend yourself on anyone without calculation. You have been spent on, Howl.

This house has spent sixteen years on you. Every meal you have eaten, every instructor who has stood in your training hall, every glyph you have copied, all of it was a cost paid by this house, against the return it expects to earn from what you become. That return is not yours to squander on friends." I never asked for any of this, was what I wanted to say, but I kept my mouth closed and instead let jaw clench.

"Use them, Howl. The Solenne. The Vael. The girl from Ozen, the ones whose names I will not bother to remember unless they rise high enough to be worth the space in my head. Cultivate them. Learn what they want. Give them small things you can afford to give, so that when the day comes that you need large things from them, they will remember the small things and feel owed. This is how every house of any weight has ever functioned, and it is how you will function. Do you understand?"

"Yes, Elder. I understand."

"Say it back to me."

"... There is no such thing as a friend. There is family, allies, enemies, and the second is to be cultivated for use."

"Good." I heard them talk among each other in hushed voices for a moment before my grandfather addressed me again.

"The council has deliberated on the result of your examination. Although you did not achieve the score this house had expected of you, your performance was strong enough that we have decided to recognize it with a single concession. You may name one thing. A family heirloom. A weapon from the vaults. A text from the restricted archive. A privilege within the house that is not ordinarily afforded to a boy of your age. If your request is reasonable, the council will grant it." I did not answer immediately.

There were things I could have asked for. I thought of the texts in the restricted archive Instructor Varren had hinted at twice and then changed the subject, or a blade from the vaults. I thought of the books Nana Serre had read me when I was small, which were almost certainly still in a storage room somewhere in this estate because this house did not throw things away. But none of those were the thing I wanted. I took a deep breath, and kept my eyes on the tile.

"May I see my parents and my siblings?"