Chương 37: Tour

"What in the world went through Master Achinoa's head?" Bryce had held it in through the whole address and most of the corridor, then out it came at a volume the corridor did not need. Nero found it wiser to remain silent and kept walking. The passage behind the platform was narrow and windowless, a line of mana orbs set into the ceiling at intervals, and the stone carried a voice further than most people realised. Stewards used this corridor, and so did students who had learned which doors were unlocked.

"Six of them, in the same team Rector. Six! Every other group on that list is five, and Seven gets six, and the sixth is the Axiom of House Aridis? Is this not a some sort of joke?"

"It could be adjusted," Dorne said.

"Quietly tonight, before anyone unpacks." Nero let that go by without answering, waiting for the right place and time to warn the professors. Once a year the Great Arbiter Achinoa read the intake and sorted every new student into their group. How he arrived at any of it was his own business. Achinoa had been old when the founding stones were cut. Whatever a spirit of that age saw in a list of teenagers, he had never felt obliged to write down, and nobody had ever been in a position to ask him to.

He appointed the Rector himself and confirmed every professor in this corridor.

"There is precedent for review, is there not?" Dorne went on.

"There is not," Ashara said.

"And you have both misread what the Arbiter is doing anyway. He does not build groups that will be free of trouble; there is no such group. He builds the ones that will have the least of it and grow out of it fastest. That is the whole of his gift, and it is why nobody has overturned him in centuries. If he put the Aridis and Stark boys with those four, then the six of them come out of here better than they went in."

"That is a great deal of faith in a toad spirit."

"It is centuries of results."

"Then explain the record to me." Bryce turned to face her, walking backward a few steps.

"Those four cannot be kept in a group. We have tried four times."

"I know the record."

"Then say it aloud! » Bryce said, as they all kept walking.

"Have you all forgotten? That barbarian child, what was his name again..."

"Ghol." Dorne provided.

"Yes, Ghol! That child put a Gaskow heir in the healers' wing for a year and House Gaskow drafted a grievance petition that would have handed him over for sentencing, and the only reason it never left their academy is that the Rector rode there himself and read an apology to their elders." He glanced at Nero. « You went in person, sir. And that was before the Aridis had anyone here to be offended on behalf of."

"And they have never even been in the same group before," Dorne said.

"That is what nobody in this corridor is saying. One apiece, four separate groups, and each of them ruined the one he was given. Suth spent a full year on his captain until the boy would not speak in front of him; sat where he was told to sit, said what he was told to say, and the disciplinary board could not name a single rule that had been broken. Oss walked off a mission in the second week because he disagreed with an order, and his group finished it two members short.

Malkai got hold of something of his captain's and kept hold of it, and the boy transferred out of an academy he had spent three years trying to enter rather than explain to anyone what it was." She let that sit for a few paces.

"And when they crossed paths on assignments they had no business sharing, they went at each other. Twice in the field, in front of other groups, with proctors present. They were not even placed together and they still could not be in the same valley without it turning into something. So now the Choosing puts all four in one room, and adds the Axiom of House Aridis to it." She snorted.

"I have said since their second year that we should let them fail out. They are talented; that I can admit, but it has never once been worth what it costs. Every time it comes to a head, the academy finds a reason. The Rector rides to Gaskow. The board finds no rule. The Choosing puts them where it puts them and we all nod." She glanced at Nero's back.

"At some point somebody is going to have to explain to me why those four are protected."

"I agree with what she said, sir," Bryce said.

"And now House Aridis has a Shadow in this building who certainly writes home every chance he gets, and when that letter reaches the valley they will want a name to hold responsible. So forgive me if I do not think Master Achinoa weighed the politics before he handed the degenerates another victim?" There it was again, that word. Nero turned at the junction, the passage opening into his own antechamber, and he waited until the door had closed behind the four of them.

"Bryce."

"Sir." Nero crossed to the window, pulled it shut, and set two fingers against the frame until the ward glyph answered him. One learned to be careful in a building full of talented mages; every year some clever child decided the mission schedule was worth a listening spell. Then he turned back to them.

"You are not wrong to be worried. None of us can look at the Aridis boy and see an ordinary first-year, and I include myself in that." Bryce's shoulders came down half an inch.

"Then you see it, sir. That is all I—""But." He stopped.

"That word you keep using for those four. Degenerates, was it?" Bryce blinked.

"... Yes?"

"What a horrible thing to say about children." At that, the atmosphere in the room got suddenly heavy.

"... Rector, it is only shorthand."

"It is a verdict. You have been calling them a verdict for years and then expressing surprise that they keep behaving like one." He sat on the edge of the desk.

"And each of those four was admitted under Master Achinoa's own hand, after they all ranked first in their respective entry examination, with great results." None of the professors who had been so eager to badmouth them could find words to reply, so Nero continued.

"Whatever the Arbiter saw in them, he saw it four separate times."

"... With respect, sir, they have been a problem in every group they were part of, and with the Axiom we cannot risk something we will regret later. Understand what those four would be shaping. If that boy leaves here cruel, or violent, or simply careless with people, the other great houses will see it, and they will stop believing House Aridis can be trusted with what it is raising. Centuries of peace rests on that trust.

The moment it goes, they turn on Aridis, Aridis and its allies answer, and we are the academy that made it happen." He paused.

"And if the boy is bullied instead, well. I do not think House Aridis will prove as lenient as House Gaskow. I just think these boys are too violent."

"Then it is our work to find out why, not to give it a name and shelve it." He looked at each of them.

"We are their professors. Our role is to guide them. If we cannot manage that with four difficult boys, the failure is ours before it is theirs, and we do not get to point at the wreckage afterward and call it proof. We will have made it." Nobody spoke.

"Their names are Ghol, Oss, Suth and Malkai. Use them here, use them in the corridor, and correct any student you hear doing otherwise. If that is difficult, come and tell me, and we will discuss which of us is better suited to teaching them."

"... Yes, Rector," Bryce said.

"Yes, Rector," said Dorne.

"Thank you." Nero returned.

"Now. Your concern, Bryce, since it deserves an answer rather than a reprimand." Bryce straightened slightly.

"I sat with Master Achinoa for the better part of an evening over this list. I raised every objection you raised here, and a few you have not thought of yet. The Arbiter has never placed those four together before, because until now there was no arrangement that would have held them."

"And now?"

"Now there is the Aridis boy. Achinoa's word, not mine: he is the only piece that makes the arrangement stand. And the Stark boy steadies what the Aridis boy would not think to steady." Nero shrugged very slightly.

"Six of them together teach one another the things each of them is missing. That is the whole of his reasoning; they will make each other grow in a way no other could." Dorne shifted her weight.

"Then let us at least watch it, sir. The first months. From the moment they are in the same room, not after the first incident reaches a board."

"I would want nothing else." Nero smiled and turned toward the window.

"Fortunately, their assigned professor is standing right there." Ashara did not look particularly ambushed.

"I intend to go to their room tonight, once I have finished with the registry," she said.

"Before the selection, if I can manage it. After, if I cannot."

"Then the matter is in hand." He picked up the first of the day's papers.

"Curriculum reviews in three days. Bryce, the examination schedule." They soon filed out, and the antechamber was his own again. Nero pulled open the left drawer, where the correspondence had been accumulating since spring. Great houses like Kaelith, Draeven, Vashren, two Marrow letters in the same month, all of them asking the same thing: some consideration, Rector, should the groups still be under arrangement, and might their son be placed alongside the Aridis boy. Nero laughed despite himself at the irony.

Every great house in the kingdom had angled for that placement, and the Arbiter had given the boy to four houseless orphans and the son of a minor house. The things that would be said in the months to come might prove unpredictably comical. The Crown's reaction especially. And House Aridis's. He closed the drawer without reading any of them. A new wind was blowing through Sartheon. A wind of change, of upheaval, great events. « Haha…" Nero chuckled, noticing his poetic nature was resurfacing.

He also found he very much wanted to see what the child would do.

At the same moment... The rest of the day went quite fast. We collected our uniforms from the quartermaster's office, which was a low-ceilinged room on the ground level of the second tower staffed not by men but by three jorōgumo, which I had read about but never seen. They were about four feet tall at the shoulder, with six arms each and a lower body that moved on multiple legs in a way I tried very hard not to stare at.

Their upper halves were vaguely human in shape, though the skin had a faint grey-blue sheen to it, and their faces were narrow, expressive and older than anything else in the room. All six of their arms were working at the same time. One pair measured, another cut, and the third stitched. They did all of it simultaneously without looking at what any of the hands were doing, which meant they could hold a conversation with you while producing a fully fitted uniform in about ninety seconds.

"Arms up, young lord, arms up, there we go."

"You are jorōgumo," I said, unable to help myself.

"And you are observant," said the one measuring me without slowing down.

"Most students just stare and say nothing. Or scream. We had a screamer last year."

"Where are you from? The texts I read said your people lived in the deep forests east of the Greymarch, but those were old texts, and I was never sure if—" The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

"Oh, he reads!" The one cutting fabric laughed.

"Yes, child, the Greymarch colonies originally, though our family has been at Sartheon for four generations now. The rector before the rector before this one hired our grandmother."

"Your grandmother?"

"She made robes for the faculty. We make robes for the students. It is, as you can imagine, a step down in prestige and a step up in volume." The third one, who had been stitching in silence, looked up at me with dark, round eyes.

"You are the Aridis boy, aren't you?"

"I am. My name is Howl."

"Howl." She repeated.

"We will remember that. Most students here do not give us their first name. They give us their house and expect us to bow. You are either very polite or very strange."

"Probably both," I said, and all three of them laughed at the same time. The uniforms were dark grey with silver trim at the collar and cuffs, fitted close amd practical. I liked them more than I had expected to. They were not Aridis black, and that was part of why. Path selection was next. The eastern registry hall was a smaller room off the main corridor, with two desks set up on opposite sides, one marked SHIELD, the other CROWN, each manned by an older student with a ledger and a pen.

The two paths led to the same career — the military and political leadership of the kingdom — but they shaped you differently on the way there. Shield students trained for field command. They led from the front, fought with their units, and learned to make decisions at the speed the battlefield demanded. The best of them, after years of service and rank, eventually became what the kingdom called Golden Generals: field commanders with the authority to wage war in the Crown's name.

Crown students trained for strategic command. They planned campaigns, managed logistics, advised councils, and learned to make decisions at the speed the kingdom demanded. Their version of a Golden General sat in a war room rather than on a horse, but the rank was the same and the authority was equal.

Both paths shared core classes, and teams were often composed of mixes, but the emphasis shaped everything: a Shield student's combat performance carried more weight in assessments, while a Crown student's tactical planning did. The council of Aridis Elders had instructed me to choose Shield, which suited me fine, because Crown sounded like spending four years in rooms. So I went to Shield without hesitating. Eydric was already in line ahead of me, which did not surprise either of us.

When I reached the desk the older student looked up, saw my face, wrote my name down, and handed me a small iron pin shaped like a shield that I was meant to wear on my collar from now on. Rael went to Crown. I watched him cross the hall and join the other line. He caught my eye on the way and shrugged with one shoulder and a half-smile. I was not surprised. He was a Solenne, and they were reputed for choosing Crown.

The paths shared enough practicals that we would still see each other daily, so it was not a separation so much as a sorting, but I noticed it all the same. After that, the tour. A group of older students led us through the grounds in a loose procession, and the grounds were enormous. Sartheon was not a building; it was a city suspended in the air at varying heights, connected by bridges and stairways and in one case a long glass-walled corridor that passed through the interior of a waterfall without getting wet.

There were training halls at three different altitudes, a library that occupied an entire tower, a dining hall large enough to seat every student in the academy at once, an armoury, a medical wing, two separate courtyards for sparring, a greenhouse full of plants I had never seen, and a wing devoted entirely to spirit studies that I made a quiet note to come back to when I had time. We were crossing one of the open bridges between the third and fourth towers when something passed overhead.

"Whoa..." Three shapes were cutting across the sky above the bridge. The first two were fast, long serpentine bodies with four wings folded tight, moving at a speed that made them blur at the edges. The third hung higher up, circling in a wide lazy arc. Skeins, the serpents of the skies… I had read about them a lot. Nana's books even had illustrations of them and the curriculum texts had anatomical diagrams, but none of them had prepared me for the real thing. They were bigger than I had expected.

Twelve, maybe fifteen feet from jaw to tail, lean and angled in a way that made them look like they had been designed rather than born. Six limbs tucked against the body, each one ending in long curved claws that caught the light when the animal banked. The scales on the nearest one were dark green, almost black, and when it rolled into a turn I could see the underside flash pale silver before the wings corrected and it was gone. The circling one slowed.

It turned its head downward, toward the bridge, toward us, and for a second I was looking directly into a pair of wide, forward-set eyes that were looking directly back at me. The gaze held for a beat longer than felt accidental, and then the Skein banked away and climbed and was a shape against the sun again.

"The Coil," Rael said beside me, his eyes fixed upward and unblinking.

"We are playing the Coil before we graduate, all three of us. I am not asking."

"Didn't your uncle break his collarbone twice playing it?" Eydric said, grinning.

"And his left arm once, and lost his forward teeth, but he told me it was the finest thing he ever did with his life." Rael grabbed both of us by the shoulder.

"Listen. The open tournament is held every four years. The next one falls in our second year, which means we have enough time to make the trials if we start early. Sartheon picks its team through internal selection, any student with a Skein and basic competitive ability can enter, and if we make the cut, it counts for points. Real points, not the scraps you get from classroom assessments."

"How many points?" Eydric asked.

"Enough that the last Sartheon team to make the tournament final had their year's advancement secured before the third term even started. It is the single largest point opportunity in the academy outside of a sanctioned mission."

"We still need Skeins," Eydric said.

"Three of them. And they choose the rider."

"The academy keeps twelve in the upper roost," Rael said.

"Twelve Skeins, and most students graduate without ever being picked by one. But most students are not us."

"That is incredibly arrogant, Rael."

"You think? Hah! I'd say it is simply confident. There is a difference." I looked up at the sky again while they were arguing. The two fast ones had disappeared behind one of the higher towers, but the circling one was still there, high up, tracing its slow arc against the blue.

"I want to do it," I said. Both of them turned to me.

"I want to do the Coil. The missions. All of it." Rael's face split into a grin so wide it changed the shape of his whole head. Just like a villain.

"That is what I wanted to hear, Aridis." Even Eydric was nodding.

"One year," he said.

"That is not a lot of time." « Heh," Rael shrugged.

"It is enough for us." The tour ended in the late afternoon. We stood at a junction where three corridors split off toward different residential wings, and the moment I had been putting off since the group lists were posted arrived without asking whether I was ready for it.

"Well," Rael said.

"This is where we part ways for the evening."

"It would seem so."

"Try not to do anything heroic before breakfast, Howl. You have had enough excitement for one day."

"I will do my best." Eydric gripped my shoulder once, briefly.

"Good luck with your room."

"... Thank you?" And just like that, they went left and I went right. Gowyn fell in behind me without a word, and we walked until we arrived at our destination. Gowyn stopped at the door.

"You are not coming in?"

"The room is yours, Young Lord. Shadows are housed separately. I will return at dawn and wait for you outside. Unless you would prefer I remain posted here through the night." For about half a second, I considered saying yes, purely because the image of Gowyn standing at attention in a corridor for eight hours as payback for the hollowreath had a certain appeal to it. But I thought better of it.

"Are you not curious what my room looks like?"

"Not particularly, no."

"... Oh."

"Good night, Young Lord."

"Good night, Gowyn. Thank you." He bowed slightly and walked back down the corridor, then I was alone in front of the door. It was round, heavy, made from the same dark wood as most of the academy's doors but wider. A brass number seven had been set into the centre of it and I stared at it for a moment.

"... Hello. My name is Howl. Howl Aridis. Nice to meet you all." I repeated it again and again until I got the tone and cadence the way I wanted, then I took a long breath, pushed the door open, and stepped inside. The room was large and circular, lit by mana orbs set into the walls at intervals. Six beds were arranged in a ring along the curved wall, each with a trunk at the foot and a small wooden desk beside it. One section near the window was still empty, which I assumed was mine.

Tomás was the first person I recognised. He was sitting on his bed on the far side of the room, and seeing him sent a wave of relief through me that I was not expecting. Tomás Stark. Tonic Tomás, who, for some reason, was sweating profusely despite the room not being hot, and his hands were gripping the edge of his mattress firmly as if in distress. His eyes found mine the moment I walked in, and the look in them seemed to say he was very, very glad that someone else had finally walked through the door.

As for the others… The one on the bed nearest the far wall had a goatee and tattoos running up both arms and across the side of his neck. He was tall, already fully grown into an adult frame, and he was lying on his back with one leg crossed over the other, drinking from a flask that smelled faintly of something I was fairly sure students were not supposed to have in their rooms. I had read about people with markings like his. The Rothvar, the nomadic clans of the western steppes.

They called themselves the Free Peoples. Everyone else called them barbarians, which they hated. He was watching me over the rim of his flask without moving anything except his eyes. The one beside him was sharpening what looked like… a sword. It was an enormous slab of dark metal longer and wider than the boy carrying it, propped between his knees with the flat resting against his shoulder. He was not small himself, but the weapon made him look like a child holding a door.

He looked up at me when I entered and did not look away. The third was sitting cross-legged on his bed with his eyes half-closed and his hands folded in his lap, and he was the only one smiling. He was also enormous. Taller and broader than the Rothvar, with a shaved head and a calm, open face that did not match the size of the body it was sitting on. He seemed to be praying, or meditating. Then he opened his eyes when I came in and kept staring.

The fourth was sitting at his desk with his back mostly to the door, and… he was opening a rat. The poor creature was pinned to a small wooden board, and the boy's fingers were inside it, doing something I chose not to identify. He had turned his head just enough to look at me when the door opened, and he was still looking, his fingers still inside the rat. They were all silent. All of them watching me, standing in the doorway, and it became a bit awkward, so...

"Hel—""Ah, for fuck's sake, come in and close the door." The Rothvar had not moved from his bed, but his voice filled the room without effort.

"We have been waiting for you for an hour to decide who is going to be king of the room. So close the door, drop your bag, and let us fight." …How straightforward. Ding! [Quest Issued] Objective: Become King of the Room. Reward: Captaincy of Group 7, New Path (more opportunities for adventure) Failure: No reward. A new… path? The System had handed me plenty of rewards before: skills, ranks, items, things that did things, but it had never given me a direction. What was the meaning of this?

"H-Howl…" I glanced at Tomás. He was shaking his head, very slightly and quickly, definitely trying to communicate do not do this without being seen communicating it. The four of them were now getting up. The boy with the sword stood first, resting the massive blade across his shoulder with one arm as if it weighed nothing.

"Let us do this quickly. I still need to polish my sword." The large one, the one who had been praying, slowly rose next, unfolding himself to his full height, which was considerable.

"Patience is the companion of wisdom, brother. There is no need to rush what—""Stop sermoning people like you are better than them," the Rothvar said, swinging his legs off the bed.

"You do it every time you open your mouth and it makes me want to break your teeth." The rat boy was now at the basin in the corner, washing his hands methodically, and he let out a long, tired sigh.

"To think I have fallen so low as to share a room with you people..."

"What did you say, freak?!"

"I said what I said, barbarian."

"The fuck did you say?! Call me barbarian again and I will—""Enough." The sword boy cut in, flat.

"Fight first. Kill each other after." This felt like an unreasonable and quite irresponsible thing to agree to, but the quest text was still hovering at the edge of my vision, with its line about a New Path, and the excitement of it was climbing up through my chest.

"Yes," I ended up saying.

"Let's go." The room suddenly went quiet. All five of them were now looking at me.

"Are you… smiling?" the Rothvar asked me. I touched the corner of my mouth and found that indeed, I was.

"Oh. Yes, I suppose I am." [You are using Greater Focus]"Shall we?" I added, heart beating faster by the second.