Chương 34: What We Made

The doors had closed behind Howl as Jahaeser walked him the length of the outer yard toward the carriage. The Greymanes stood in their traces with their heads down, the driver already up on the bench, and Gowyn a few paces off with his hands folded behind his back like always.

"You'll write when you arrive," Jahaeser said.

"Not to me, but to the house. A line to say you're through the gates. The council likes to know."

"Yes, Father."

"The first term is the one that decides how they'll treat you for the other years. Say little. Let them measure you before you show them the ruler. A boy who tells everyone what he is, is a boy they've stopped wondering about." He watched the road.

"You understand me?"

"I do."

"You'll take the Shield path. The council's already settled it, whatever the academy tells you about choosing freely, so don't let some instructor talk you into imagining it's an open question. Crown work is councils and correspondence, and there'll be time enough for that when you're older. Shield first. And always keep the staff on you while you're at it. Russo didn't give a year of his life to a thing so you could pack it away."

"... I'll keep it on me." Gowyn stood a little apart, waiting, and when Jahaeser glanced at him he gave the smallest nod. The estate's business would be handled. It always was. Howl looked at him.

"You'll be with me the whole time?"

"The whole time, Young Lord."

"Cousin," Howl said.

"You're my cousin. I never... we never finished that." Gowyn held his eyes for a moment, then nodded. At the same time, Jahaeser looked at his son. He was tall for sixteen, and the formal black sat well on him now that the attendants had stopped needing to fold him into it. He held the pale stick loosely at his side, already comfortable with it. The eyes really were Jahaeser's, but everything else was the boy's own. He was... softer than Jahaeser had hoped. But it didn't displease him.

He'd spent sixteen years quietly afraid the boy would grow cruel — an Axiom with no ceiling to his power and a taste for using it was not a thing any house could hold the leash on for long. This was the better outcome. A gentle weapon was still a weapon, and it could be pointed, using the right methods. A cruel one pointed itself. Whether that was a flaw or the very thing that would remake the world, Jahaeser genuinely did not know.

His father was betting on the second, but Jahaeser had spent the hour deciding he'd wait and see. The horses suddenly shifted in their traces, taking him out of his thoughts.

"Well," Jahaeser said.

"The academy won't hold the gates past dusk, son of this house or not. What are you waiting for?" Much to Jahaeser's curiosity, the boy didn't move toward the carriage. Instead, he stood where he was, looking at the ground, the pale stick held loose at his side.

"Son?" Jahaeser watched him.

"What is— Oh!" The boy suddenlly stepped in and put his arms around him in a shocking hug. It was tighter than Jahaeser expected, the boy's arms closing around him with a strength nothing in his frame suggested. For one disordered moment, Jahaeser understood in his body what the reports had only ever told him on paper. Jahaeser's own hands came up and stopped in the air above his son's shoulders. He... he did not know what to do with them. That was the plain truth of it.

He could not remember the last time he'd been held, and the boy was still holding him, face turned against his collar, but Jahaeser's hands hung there deciding, half-closing toward the hug until he felt the rest of them. Gowyn, off to the side, the driver up on his bench, the guards ranged behind them at the wall. None of them looking, yet all of them looking. So, he stayed his hands.

Less than a second later, Howl quickly let go and stepped back, his face having gone red to the ears while his eyes went to the ground and stayed there.

"Sorry. That was... sorry." He got a breath.

"It may be a while before we see each other. And today, to be honest, I had mixed feelings about, well. A lot of it. But I'm glad I got to see you at least. That's all. Sorry."

"Don't." Jahaeser waited until the boy's eyes came up, which took a moment.

"When you've made a decision, you don't apologize for it. You made it. Own it, and let it stand. A man who says sorry for the thing he chose to do teaches everyone watching that he can be argued out of it."

"... Yes, Father."

"Now go. You'll be late."

"I know... Thank you, Father. For the staff. And... and for the time."

"Go," Jahaeser said, nodding at the boy. Howl climbed into the carriage while Gowyn followed with a nod to Jahaeser as he passed, and the door shut, then the driver clicked his tongue, and the Greymanes leaned into the traces. The carriage pulled away, and through the window the boy's face turned back, watching him. Jahaeser watched too. He stood in the yard and did not move as Howl kept looking through the glass until the road bent and the wall cut him off and the dust came up where he'd been.

Jahaeser stayed where he was a while longer, still looking at the empty road ahead.

"I see your paternal fibre still runs for the boy after all." Jahaeser didn't bother to turn.

"Brother." Vaerys laughed behind him.

"He's growing up well. Better than any of you dared write down."

"He's become... unpredictable."

"He's become human. That's a different thing, and you'd know it if you weren't so frightened of the word." Jahaeser turned, already tired of an argument he'd had a hundred versions of. And stopped. Vaerys was dressed for travel, and dressed well for it.

"... You're going somewhere?" Vaerys smiled at him.

"I've been turning it over a good while now. And with my son gone off to guard your boy, there's little enough left for me in this house." He looked up at the walls behind them.

"Father's made the place a tomb that hasn't finished burying anyone yet. I find I've an appetite for something with air in it."

"You can't." Jahaeser heard how it sounded but said it anyway.

"There are protocols. A man of your standing doesn't simply put on a cloak and walk out the gate. The council—""Little brother." Vaerys was still smiling.

"I am a First Seal. The council can take its protocols, its opinions and its very great concerns and put them somewhere the sun has never once reached, and if any of them would care to discuss it with me directly, my door is open." Jahaeser went pale. It wasn't the first time he'd heard his brother talk this way. Vaerys had said worse, and said it in front of their father, in rooms where doing so should have cost him something and somehow never had. But he'd always had the sense to keep it behind closed doors.

Here the yard was open and the guards were still close enough to catch every word of it. Which only meant...

"Did something happen," Jahaeser said, "between you and Father?" Vaerys chuckled as he came forward, his hand landing on Jahaeser's shoulder.

"You'll be head of this family one day. Sooner than's comfortable, if the boy's still short of his age when the seat comes open." The hand pressed once.

"So grow some balls, little brother. Oppose the old man. He and those elders still flinch at the sight of that child over a thing he did before he could form a memory of it, and they go on treating him like something they've caged, when he stood in that Pit today and showed every one of them he holds the reins of his own power better than mages three times his age. They saw it, yet they'll go back to their dark little room and fear him anyway, trying to control him." The hand pressed once more, then lifted.

"Keep letting them, and you'll wake one morning to find they've broken the one thing that could have saved this house. And the boy will be strong enough by then to take the rest of the world down with it when he breaks." He walked on.

"Take care of yourself, brother. I'll write when I've somewhere to write from." He lifted one hand without turning.

"And kiss the children for me."

"Vaerys, wait—" But there was only smoke where his brother had been, a coil of it already thinning, and a hahahaha that hung in the air a moment after the shape was gone. A breeze moved through the place and took the last of it, and then Jahaeser was speaking to no one. No sooner had he had a moment to ponder what had just happened that a bird came down out of the pale sky. It settled on his forearm without being asked, a slip of rolled paper bound to its leg, and waited while he worked the knot loose.

He unrolled it. The council was calling an emergency session. No reason given, which was reason enough. He looked at the empty road where his brother had stood a moment ago and thought he could guess at least part of it. Jahaeser let out a long breath and rolled the paper closed.

"Not a word of this," he said to the guards at the wall.

"Any of it. To anyone."

"Yes, my Lord." He walked back toward the estate, a familiar weight settling across his shoulders as he thought of what awaited him.

I pissed near a tree on the side of the road while Gowyn waited in the carriage and the driver looked politely at the sky. I had been holding it in for the better part of two hours because I could not figure out how to ask for a stop without feeling embarrassed about it, and by the time I finally asked, my voice had come out strained enough that the driver had pulled the Greymanes over without a word. We would be at Sartheon in a few hours.

The valley was already starting to look familiar from the first journey, the hills flattening out, the wardstones appearing on the ridges in their circles and lines. I finished, adjusted my robe, climbed back in, and the carriage started again. I pulled out the glyph sheets I had been copying since this morning and went back to the set I had been working on, a mid-tier reinforcement array Instructor Varren had assigned me months ago that I had never quite finished.

The pen moved, the ink dried, and Gowyn still sat across from me with his book open on his knee, reading by the light of the small mana orb he had conjured above his shoulder, same as the first journey. Neither of us spoke.

To be honest, I had wanted to know more about him, but the drug he used on me still left me resentful, and even despite that, every attempt I had made in the hours since we had left the estate to start something resembling a conversation had been met with the same clipped, closing answers that made it clear the topic, whichever topic it happened to be, was finished. How was your week, Gowyn? Uneventful, Young Lord. Did you stay at the estate the whole time? Yes, Young Lord. Was the weather— Fine, Young Lord.

It was like trying to have a conversation with a locked door that occasionally confirmed it was, in fact, locked. Still, we were going to be at the academy together for at least a year. He would be my Shadow for the duration of the first term, possibly longer, and spending that time in a carriage-shaped silence felt like a waste. Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

I noticed he had been reading since we left the estate though, and he seemed to like reading a lot, which was a point we had in common, I supposed. So I set my glyph sheet down on the seat beside me.

"What are you reading?" Gowyn looked up from the page. For a second I thought he was going to give me another Young Lord and go back to reading, but he held my gaze longer than he usually held it, as if he was deciding something about me that he had not yet decided.

"It is a historical account of the first Axiom. Durhain's early campaigns, before he unified the eastern provinces."

"Oh." I sat up a little.

"We covered Durhain extensively in the curriculum. Instructor Varren had me on the historical accounts for the better part of a year, though they were mostly dry. Dates, treaties, troop movements. Nana's books had better versions of him, honestly. There was one where the author had taken the siege of Ashenmoor and written it from the perspective of a soldier trapped in the lower city, and you got to see the whole thing from below while Durhain held the gate alone for three days with a staff and a half-broken ward.

The historical texts just list it as a tactical decision. The novel made you understand why he stayed. He could have left with the bannermen. He had the rank. He stayed because someone had to hold the gate, and he decided it was going to be him." I realized I had been talking for a while, and Gowyn was watching me with an expression I had not seen on him before. It wasn't warm, exactly, but not the locked door either.

"... What about you? What do you like about him?" Gowyn seemed to consider the question for a moment, which was already more than he had given any of my previous attempts at conversation.

"His ideology, I suppose. The framework he built for the house before any of the campaigns began. Most people remember Durhain for the battles, the unification, the map. But the structure he put in place before any of that, the charter of obligations between the main line and the branches, the rotation of command, the principle that no Aridis holds a seat they have not earned through demonstrated service, that was the work that outlasted the wars." …

Huh, it was the longest sentence I had heard Gowyn speak in the entire time I had known him, and it was about governance, which was not exactly the bonding material I had been hoping for, but I took it. If I could not make him a friend — and I was starting to accept that friendship was not a thing Gowyn was built to offer quickly — I could at least make him not an enemy, which was one of the first things ever taught to me about strategy. We talked about Durhain for the rest of the road.

Gowyn answered my questions about the early campaigns, and occasionally offered a detail I had not encountered in either the curriculum texts or Nana's novels. He did not, however, laugh. I tried twice. The first joke landed in the space between us and died there without ceremony. The second one, which I had thought was reasonably funny, produced a silence so complete that I could hear the Greymanes' hooves individually on the road surface.

After that I stopped trying and kept the conversation where Gowyn seemed to want it, which was somewhere between a lecture and a debrief, with no detours into anything resembling warmth. Very boring, but it was better than the locked door. I would take it. The valley opened up around us as the road widened, and I recognised the shape of the hills from the first journey, the wardstones on the ridges, the purple and white wildflowers carpeting the slopes. But the road this time was different.

There were more carriages, dozens of them, bearing house crests I recognised and plenty I did not, merging from side roads into a procession that thickened with every mile. Guards on horseback rode alongside some of the larger ones, house colours snapping from pennants mounted on the carriage roofs. Foot traffic had appeared too: attendants, Shadows, supply carts loaded with trunks and equipment.

At the first checkpoint, a pair of Sartheon officials in dark robes stopped the line, checking documentation and waving carriages through one at a time while a squad of academy guards stood watch on either side of the road with their hands on their weapons. The carriage slowed at the second checkpoint. Gowyn stepped out, handled the documentation with the officials, climbed back in, and we moved again.

The procession crawled forward for another twenty minutes before the road curved around the final hillside and the valley opened wide. I gasped. I really did not mean to. The sound came out of me before I had registered what I was looking at, and I was already pushing the carriage door open before the driver had fully brought the Greymanes to a stop, because I needed to be standing outside with nothing between my eyes and what was in front of them to make sure my eyes were not lying to me.

They were not lying to me. The buildings I had seen during the entrance trials, the towers and halls connected by covered bridges and arching stone passages, the ones that had been hovering a disappointing three feet above the ground… they were no longer three feet above the ground. The lower structures sat at perhaps fifty feet now, their bases clear of the treetops below them, and above those, higher, the taller towers rose into the morning sky at heights that made my neck hurt to follow.

The highest of them caught sunlight the valley floor had not yet received, the same way they had during the trials, except now the gap between the light and the ground was not a matter of a few stories but of what looked like half a mile of open air. Walkways and bridges connected them at every level, some enclosed, some open to the wind, and the whole sprawling web of it hung against the sky as if the sky had agreed to hold it there. It looked exactly like the books. Exactly.

This was the Sartheon I had imagined when I was nine years old, the academy above the clouds.

"Whoa..."

"Impressive, isn't it?" I turned to the familiar voice, already smiling.

"Eydric." He was standing a few paces away beside his own carriage, his travelling cloak slung over one shoulder, looking cleaner and more rested than the last time I had seen him. He smiled back and walked over, and we shook hands, a normal handshake this time, firm and brief, no clenched jaw, no white knuckles, no reddening face.

"How've you been, Aridis?"

"Good. Better than good, actually. It's been a while."

"A while?" He chuckled at that.

"Sure." Sera was beside him, her hands clasped in front of her, and she gave me a warm nod when I caught her eye.

"Hello, Sera."

"Young Lord. It's good to see you again." I looked back at the road behind us. Carriages were still arriving in a steady stream, far more than had been here during the trials, and the staging area at the base of the valley was already packed with people, trunks, equipment, Shadows sorting luggage, house guards forming up in neat lines along the roadside.

"There are so many more people than during the exams."

"Well, obviously." Rael's voice came from somewhere to my left, and I turned to find him leaning against a stone bollard at the edge of the road with his arms folded, looking as if he had been standing there for a while and had been waiting for exactly this moment to speak. A true villain move.

"The trials were just us, Howl. Sixty-seven new students out of a hundred and twelve candidates. The academy itself is home to about two thousand, spread across four year groups, all of whom are also arriving today for the start of the new term. Did you think we were the whole school?"

"I— no, I just—""He thought we were the whole school." Rael said, turning to the others, and laughing.

"I did not think we were the whole school." He grinned at me, but I wasn't angry. This… felt familiar and comfortable. Friends were really better than whatever I had at home.

"Hello, Rael."

"Hello, Howl. You look different. Did you get taller?" Eydric stepped closer, frowning slightly, and looked at me with his head tilted.

"Hold on. Stand straight." I did so, and Eydric stood straight across from me, squaring his shoulders, and his frown deepened.

"You were smaller than me at the trials. I am sure of it. We were about level, maybe I had half an inch on you. Now you are..." He held his hand flat between the tops of our heads.

"That is not half an inch, Howl."

"I trained quite hard this week."

"You grew an inch in a week?" Rael pushed himself off the bollard.

"This is genuinely unfair. He has the looks, the name, the mana reserves, the highest score in the cohort, and now he is getting taller? What is next, Aridis? Are you going to sprout wings by the second term? Shall the rest of us simply accept our place beneath the Axiom in all things, including the physical?"

"Rael—""No, I want this noted. This is an injustice. Eydric, back me up." Eydric looked at Rael, then back at me, and shrugged.

"He is taller. I cannot argue with taller." Rael held the offended face for another second before it cracked, and Eydric was already smiling, and I stood there between the two of them for a beat longer than I should have before I understood they were not serious. They were teasing me. This was what friends did, I supposed, and I was going to have to get used to recognising it faster, because the half-second where I had genuinely worried that my height was making them feel lesser about themselves was not satisfying.

I laughed with them, a little late, and made a quiet note to stop assuming every observation aimed at me was a grievance. I would hate for either of them to feel they had to measure themselves against me. That was the last thing I wanted from this. I was halfway through asking Rael whether he had already chosen his path — Shield or Crown — when something moved near my feet. Not near my feet exactly.

Lower than that, closer to the ground, a blur of colour shot between my boots and was gone before I had finished looking down. I tracked it on instinct, my eyes following the movement through the crowd, and for a second I lost it in the shuffle of legs and luggage and the hems of travelling cloaks. Then I found it again. It was small. About the size of a cat, but shaped wrong, with too many limbs and a head that sat too far forward on its body.

It moved through the crowd at ankle height, weaving between boots without touching any of them, and nobody reacted to it because nobody could see it. A spirit. I watched it dart between two trunks stacked beside a carriage, pause for a half-second with its head cocked, then scramble up the side of a leather travelling case that belonged to a tall boy I did not recognise. The boy was talking to someone a few paces away with his back turned.

The spirit's small fingers found the clasp of the case, worked it open deftly, reached inside, and pulled out something that glinted briefly in the morning light, a medallion, or a brooch, something metal on a short chain. It stuffed the thing under one of its arms, let out a high chittering laugh that I heard clearlyl, then dropped off the case and bolted back through the crowd. I followed it with my eyes.

It crossed the staging area in a few seconds, dodging feet and wheel spokes, until it reached another student's luggage: a smaller trunk sitting unattended near a stone bollard. The spirit climbed up, popped the clasp with the same quick fingers, dropped the medallion inside, shut the lid, and vanished under the bollard with another laugh. I stood there, watching the empty space where it had been. [Spirit Sight: Level 1 (2%) > Level 1 (4%)]"Howl?" I blinked as Eydric was looking at me with his head tilted.

"What were you looking at?"

"At— at that." I pointed toward the tall boy whose case the spirit had opened.

"That student over there. Do you know him?" Rael followed my finger and his expression shifted into something between recognition and mild distaste.

"Aaah. Kyren Vashren. Second year now. You have not heard of Kyren Vashren?"

"No."

"He placed first in his cohort's entrance trials last year. Scored eighty-five, five points short of the spirit contract tier, which apparently he has not stopped being angry about since. Duelled three upperclassmen in his first term and won all three. Broke a boy's arm in the second term during a sparring exercise that was supposed to end at first contact." Rael's mouth did a small grimace.

"He also attacked his own Shadow on the third day of his first year. In front of the faculty. The Shadow was reassigned, and Kyren was disciplined, but his family intervened before the academy could expel him. The Vashren are generous donors to the Sartheon endowment, as it happens."

"You seem to know a lot about him."

"Yes. Sadly, our families dine together twice a year. The Solenne and the Vashren have trade agreements that predate my grandfather. I have been seated across from Kyren Vashren at four separate formal dinners, and I have spent each of those four dinners finding reasons to be at the other end of the table."

"So he is—""Trouble. Yes. The entertaining kind if you are watching from a distance, the painful kind if you are not." I was about to say something else when I saw the person Kyren had been speaking to point at his case. The clasp was still slightly open from where the spirit had worked it loose, and Kyren turned toward it mid-sentence, walked over, crouched down, and flipped the lid up. He went still. His hands moved through the contents once, then again faster, then a third time with urgency.

He stood up so fast the case fell onto its side, scattering a few smaller items across the gravel.

"What is going on over there?" Eydric said beside me, craning his neck.

"That does not look good," Rael murmured. Kyren's hands were moving. A glyph formed between his fingers, quick and sharp, a tracking spell of some kind, and the mana left his palm in a thin bright thread that shot outward across the staging area, splitting into a dozen smaller threads that fanned out through the crowd. All of them faded within a few seconds, all but one.

It went taut, pulled hard to the left, and buried itself in the side of a smaller trunk sitting unattended near a stone bollard about thirty paces away. The trunk started trembling. Light poured out of the seams, the keyhole, the small gap under the lid, bright enough that three people standing nearby stepped back from it. Kyren saw it.

His face went from pale to red in about two seconds, and he crossed the staging area in long hard strides toward the trunk and toward the boy who had just arrived beside it, a younger student, probably first-year because I vaguely remembered seeing him at the trials, and he was staring down at his own shaking luggage with his mouth open and no understanding on his face. Kyren did not say a word.

He closed the distance, set his feet, and punched the boy across the jaw so hard the sound carried across half the staging area. The boy went down. Kyren followed him, grabbing the front of his robe with one hand and hitting him again with the other, screaming into his face." Thief! You think you can take from a Vashren and walk, you lowborn rat—" The boy's hands came up to shield his face but Kyren batted them aside and hit him a third time, and the crowd around them had frozen.

Rael and Eydric were both watching now.

"He is going to kill that boy," Eydric said quietly.