Chương 4: Departure

I didn't own much. That was something I hadn't really thought about until I stood in front of my wardrobe trying to decide what to bring. When everything in your life is provided for you, you don't accumulate things the way other people do. I had training clothes, formal robes, and sheets of glyph work in various stages of completion.

According to Sartheon's rules, nothing was prohibited inside the trials aside from outside help; you could bring your own glyph sheets if you wanted, or enchanted relics for different situations. I had no relics. The glyph sheets I did have, and after some thought I picked three of the finished ones out of my stack: a firespear glyph, an ice one, and a wind one with a sticky paper. I rolled them carefully and laid them along the inside seam of my bag.

In went a pen with a weighted handle that Instructor Maren had given me when my calligraphy reached a standard she found acceptable. I'd be back for a week between the trials and the start of term, so spare clothes were not worth packing. That left one thing. The most important one.

The small mirror beside my bed was the right height for me to stand at, and I had spent eight months, on and off, etching a concealment glyph into the back of its frame in a layer thin enough that no one had spotted it on the daily cleanings. I'd been wanting somewhere to keep things since I was eleven. By thirteen I'd had it. I pressed my palm flat to the surface and let a thread of mana into the glyph. The mirror softened under my hand, and my fingers slipped through like a hand into water.

My hand went in to the wrist, then to the elbow, and I felt for the leather and pulled my journal out into the room. The mirror knitted itself back to solid by the time my hand was clear. I tucked the journal into the bag, where the shape of it would not draw attention if anyone happened to look. They came every day, the moment my door closed behind me on my way to a lesson. A pair of them, working quietly, one to check the room and one to watch the corridor. They were very good.

They never moved anything by more than a hair, and what they moved they returned with care. I was not supposed to know they did this, yet I had known since I was nine. The mirror was for the things I did not want them to see, which by now meant the journal, and the journal meant the drawings and notes. The bag was still not full when I closed it, but it sat heavier now. If I'd waited until tomorrow, there would have been a ceremony.

I knew this because House Aridis had a ceremony for everything, and the firstborn son leaving the estate for the first time to attend the most storied academy in the kingdom was not the kind of event that happened without speeches. So the faster I was gone, the better. I cinched the bag shut, set it by the door, sat down on the edge of my bed, and waited for the knock.

The footsteps came just as the last of the daylight was pulling itself off the floor. Two sets, one heavier than the other, stopping outside my door. There was a pause, a murmured exchange I couldn't quite make out, and then the knock.

"Young Lord. It is time." My chest tightened. I stood up from the bed, picked up my bag, slung it over my shoulder, smoothed the front of my robes, and took one breath to settle everything inside me that wanted to sprint through the door and down the corridor and out the nearest gate before anyone could change their mind. Then I slid the door open. A young man stood in the corridor. He was tall, taller than me, with a lean frame that hadn't quite finished filling out, and dark hair that fell past his jaw.

His eyes were grey, Aridis grey, and they were studying me in a way that reminded me of Bellos, except younger. He was perhaps eighteen, maybe nineteen. I'd never seen him before, which meant he was either branch family or someone they'd kept out of my path on purpose. He bowed slightly to me.

"Greetings, young Lord. My name is Gowyn Aridis," he said.

"I have been assigned as your Shadow for the duration of your travel to Sartheon Academy, and, should you pass the entrance examination, for the duration of your time there as well." I had questions.

Quite a few of them, actually, starting with what exactly a Shadow was, whether he'd volunteered or been told, how long he'd known about this, whether he was branch family or main, whether he'd been to Sartheon himself, whether he was a mage, what Seal he held if he was, and about a dozen other things that were lining up behind my teeth, but I swallowed all of them.

"Very well," I said.

"Lead the way, then." We walked in silence. Gowyn led, I followed, and the guards fell in behind us, their boots marking a steady rhythm on the stone. It was a quiet walk through corridors I'd never seen, toward a gate I didn't know existed, and that was exactly what I'd wanted, even if the lack of ceremony felt strange in a house that ceremonied everything. The corridors changed after we passed my wing.

The stone was the same, the same dark grey granite that ran through the whole estate, but the carvings on the walls were different, depicting scenes I didn't recognize. We turned a corner and the ceiling opened up into a vaulted archway lined with hanging lanterns, and beyond it was a garden. I hadn't known there was a garden. It stretched out on either side of a flagstone path, thick with flowering bushes I couldn't name, their petals pale blue and silver in the early evening light.

There were stone benches set between the rows, and a shallow pond off to the left where the water was so still it looked like poured glass, reflecting the first stars of the night back up at themselves. If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. The air smelled different here, wet earth and something sweet, and I wanted to stop and stand in it for a while, but Gowyn kept walking, so I kept walking. A pair of servants passed us on the path.

They stepped aside, pressed their backs to the hedgerow, and bowed their heads.

"Young Lord." I inclined my chin slightly, the way Instructor Maren had drilled into me years ago. You acknowledge, but you do not engage. You do not stop. You do not smile too broadly or linger too long or make anyone feel as though your attention is something they are owed, because your attention, as an Aridis, carries weight, and weight distributed carelessly becomes a liability. She had explained this to me when I was ten, and I'd thought it sounded… lonely.

We passed through a second archway into a wider courtyard, and the estate opened up around me in a way I hadn't been prepared for. I'd known the estate was large. I'd seen pieces of it from my window, the rooftops and walls stretching out toward the treeline. But knowing something is large from three floors up is different from walking through it at ground level and realizing it just keeps going.

There were buildings I'd never seen, low stone halls with tiled roofs and open sides, supply sheds, a stable I could smell before I saw it, and a smithy with its forge still glowing orange in the fading light, the heat of it reaching me from twenty feet away. Gowyn led me down a gravel path that curved around the eastern edge of the courtyard, past a row of cherry trees whose branches hung so low they brushed my shoulder as I passed, and then the path opened onto a training ground.

Not my training ground, the one sealed room in my wing with its single row of windows and its weapon racks and its floor I'd memorized scratch by scratch. No, this was an open field, wide enough to hold fifty people, bordered by wooden fences and lit by mana lanterns on tall iron poles. There were people in it. Dozens of them, young men and the rarer women in Aridis training blacks, sparring in pairs and groups, running drills, practising glyph work on straw targets set up along the far fence.

Some of them were my age. Some were younger. Children of the house, children of the branch families, children of the bannermen sworn to Aridis, all training together in the open air under the evening sky while instructors I'd never met walked between them and called out corrections. They noticed us. Or they noticed me, specifically, because the sparring stopped first, one pair freezing mid-exchange, and then the pair next to them, and then the next, and within a few seconds the entire field had gone still.

Every head turned, every back straightened, the instructors stopped mid-sentence, then they bowed. All of them at once, heads down, fists pressed to their chests in the martial salute.

"Young Lord!" The words came from everywhere at once, dozens of voices layered on top of each other, and I walked past them with my chin level and my eyes forward, acknowledging the salute with a small nod the way I'd been taught, and I didn't let my face show what I was actually thinking, which was that there had been an entire world on the other side of my door for sixteen years, full of people and noise and cherry trees and ponds and the smell of a forge, and nobody had ever let me see it.

It irritated me a little. We passed two more training grounds after that. The same thing happened at each one. Silence, stillness, the salute, the murmured greeting, and then Gowyn leading me onward while the sound of resumed training rose up behind us. Gowyn didn't comment on any of it. He just walked and I followed him The path narrowed as we left the last training ground behind, funnelling between two high stone walls that grew taller with every step until I had to tilt my head back to see the top of them.

Mana lanterns lined the walls at intervals. I was looking at them when the walls ended, and I saw the gates. I stopped walking. I couldn't help it. Gowyn took another two steps before he noticed I wasn't moving anymore, and he glanced back at me, but I was looking up. The gates of House Aridis rose out of the ground like the bones of some sort of giant.

They were iron and stone, black metal banded across granite slabs that must have been thirty feet tall, set into a wall that curved away on either side into the darkness. The Aridis crest was carved into the stone above the arch, a gryphon rearing on its hind legs with its wings spread wide, and the scale of it was so large that the gryphon's outstretched wingtip alone was taller than I was.

Watchtowers flanked the gate on both sides, their tops bristling with the silhouettes of guards against the night sky, and there were more guards on the wall itself, stationed at intervals along the battlements with their hands on their weapons and their cloaks snapping in the evening wind. This was the front door of House Aridis. Gowyn stepped forward and raised his right hand, palm out, fingers spread. A glyph bloomed in the air in front of him, pale blue, intricate, rotating slowly as it expanded.

He pressed his palm into the centre of it and the glyph shattered into light that raced along the seams of the gate, tracing every joint and hinge in bright veins of mana until the entire structure was glowing. So he is a mage. The gates groaned in a deep sound that I felt in my chest as much as I heard it, and the two halves began to swing outward just enough to open a gap wide enough for a carriage to pass through.

The wind that came through the gap carried a smell of grass and wet earth as I breathed it in and held it. So this was what freedom smelled like? I also caught whiffs of what might have been some wild animal feces mixed in, but I did not mind at all. The whole experience was… refreshing. The guards on the walls moved. Every one of them, on both towers and along the battlements, turned to face me.

They drew their swords in a single coordinated motion and held them upright against their chests, blades flat against their shoulders, and they spoke together.

"Rise unbowed, return unbroken." It rolled across the courtyard and echoed off the stone walls, dozens of voices blending into one, and it caught me off guard badly enough that I almost flinched. But I steadied myself. I gave them a nod, and I held it for a beat longer than I normally would have, because even if I couldn't say anything back, I wanted them to know I'd heard it. Then I walked through the gates. On the other side, a carriage was waiting on the gravel road.

It was black, clean-lined, drawn by two heavy draft Greymane horses with dark coats and silver tack that gleamed under the mana lanterns. The driver sat up on the bench with the reins loose in his hands, an older man. He climbed down when he saw me, landed heavily on the gravel, and bowed.

"Young Lord. It is an honour." Gowyn moved ahead of me, opened the carriage door, and stepped to the side with a slight tilt of his head. This… this was it! I was really leaving. I didn't even want to look back and climbed into the carriage. Gowyn climbed in after me, the door shut, the driver clicked his tongue, the horses pulled, and the wheels crunched over gravel, and we moved. Off to adventure I go!