Chương 5: Journey To Sartheon

We travelled through the night, through the next full day, and arrived at dawn the morning after. The Greymanes didn't need rest. They were a northern breed, built for endurance over speed, and the stories said the old kings used to ride them for weeks across the frozen marches without stopping for more than water.

Ours pulled the carriage at a steady pace that never flagged, and the only times we stopped were at checkpoints along the road, where Gowyn stepped out, presented our documentation to whoever was manning the passage, and climbed back in without a word. Gowyn was polite enough about all of it, but he just wasn't particularly interested in being here, or in me, or in whatever I was experiencing on my side of the carriage. I could tell.

He sat across from me with a book open on his knee, reading by the light of a small mana orb he'd conjured above his shoulder, and he hadn't initiated a conversation since we left the estate. He would have answered if I'd asked him things, because I was his charge and he was Aridis, so duty was duty. But there's a difference between someone who wants to talk to you and someone who will tolerate it, and I'd read enough books about human interaction to recognize which one Gowyn was.

So I kept my mouth shut and watched the world go by. It was better than every single book Nana Serre had ever brought me combined, and it wasn't close. The forests came first. Old ones, dense and enormous, nothing like the tidy rows of cherry trees on the estate grounds. These had trunks so wide they looked like they'd been growing since before the kingdom had a name. Pale blue and green lights drifted through the undergrowth, pulsing rhythmically like breathing, and the whole forest floor moved with it.

Nana's books had called them wispmoss and said they glowed softly. But I found that statement to be flawed. They glowed so strong that I could see every root, every fallen branch, every insect crawling across the bark of the nearest tree, all of it washed in blue and green, switching back and forth with each pulse like the forest had its own heartbeat. I wanted to press my face against the glass forever, but my body had other ideas.

Years of enforced sleeping schedules had done their work thoroughly, and when my usual sleeping hour came around, I was out, which was annoying because the scenery didn't care about my bedtime. But I'd learned a long time ago that fighting the schedule only made me useless the next day, so I pulled my cloak around myself, closed my eyes, and the rocking of the carriage did the rest. I woke at dawn to a completely different landscape, and that became the best part of the whole journey. The forests were gone.

We were moving through open hills, golden-green in the early light, dotted with tall grey wardstones arranged in circles and lines along the ridges. A flock of something passed overhead that weren't birds, exactly, because they had four wings each and left trails of faint silver light behind them as they flew. I sat up straighter and watched them disappear over the hillside, and I reached for the journal I'd been keeping since I was seven.

I opened to a fresh page and wrote down the four-winged birds, the wardstones, the wispmoss, the shape of the hills, the colour of the light. Ah, all of this was so fascinating. We ate at the regular hours. The carriage had been provisioned with travel rations, meat, bread and a single enchanted canteen of water. I was eating while watching a river slide past the window, wide enough that I couldn't see the far bank, and something massive broke the surface near the middle and sank back under without a sound.

River monster! I wrote that down too. We also passed through a market town where the smell of cooking meat came through the carriage walls and made my stomach fold in on itself. I saw a stone bridge that spoke to us in a grinding voice before it let us cross, and Gowyn leaned out of the window and answered it in a language I didn't recognize, and I wrote down what the words sounded like phonetically so I could look them up later. Sometime in the afternoon, the ground on either side of the road became water.

The road itself stayed flat and solid, but everything flanking it was a still, clear sheet no deeper than a few inches, stretching out to the horizon in every direction. The sky was reflected in it so perfectly that it looked like we were travelling across the surface of the sky itself, the clouds beneath us and above us at the same time, the carriage suspended between two identical heavens.

I could see the Greymanes' hooves striking the road ahead and the small ripples their steps sent out across the water, and in the distance, shapes moved beneath the surface, slowly drifting like fish but too large and too graceful to be fish. Spirits. I'd read about them. They were everywhere in the old parts of the world, wherever the barrier between our side and theirs ran thin, and they came in more shapes than anyone had ever managed to catalogue.

The general wisdom was to leave them alone unless you were a summoner seeking a contract for their services, because spirits could be generous or cruel depending on their nature, and you didn't always know which kind you were dealing with until it was too late. The ones out here, though, the riverlands dwellers, were supposed to be harmless. Friendly, even, if you were kind to them. And they were everywhere once I started looking.

One of them, a wispy thing that looked like a floating scarf with two dark eyes, drifted alongside the carriage for a few minutes, keeping pace just outside my window. I held very still and watched it, and it watched me back, and then it lost interest and floated off into the trees. I drew as many of them as I could in the journal. Gowyn didn't look up for any of them, though. I suspected he'd made this journey before.

I slept again that night at the usual time, and when I woke, it was just before dawn, and the air inside the carriage was different. Buzzing with mana so dense I could feel it prickling against my skin. We'd crossed into Sartheon's territory while I was asleep. Gowyn's book was closed on his knee, and he was looking out the window. The road had widened. Other carriages with different crests were joining from side roads, and we moved in a slow procession through a valley carpeted in purple and white wildflowers.

I could see passengers in other carriages leaning out of their windows, looking ahead. Then the valley curved around a hillside, and I saw it. Towers against the dawn sky, more than I could count, lit from within by lights that weren't fire, rising out of the landscape like they'd grown there. Sartheon Academy. I closed my journal, sat up straight, and felt every hour of sleep I'd gotten settle into my bones like fuel.

I was so excited that my hands were shaking slightly against the leather cover of the journal in my lap, but Gowyn was sitting right there, so I kept my face still, my breathing even and looked out the window the way an Aridis was supposed to look at things. This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it. The carriage rolled on toward the gates.

"Young Lord." I looked at Gowyn, who had straightened in his seat, his book tucked away somewhere I hadn't seen him put it, and his hands were resting on his knees.

"We will be arriving at the gates of Sartheon Academy within the quarter hour. From this point, I would advise you to prepare yourself accordingly." My heart was hammering. I could feel it in my throat, in the tips of my fingers, in the soles of my feet against the carriage floor, so I just nodded, because I didn't trust my voice to come out at the right pitch. The procession had thickened around us.

Carriages bearing house crests I recognized and plenty I didn't were merging from side roads and falling into a long, slow line that stretched ahead of us along the valley road. Behind us, more were arriving, the sound of hooves and wheels on stone blending into a low, continuous murmur that filled the morning air.

I could see banners mounted on some of them, bright colours snapping in the breeze, and through the windows of the nearest carriage, a girl about my age with red hair was adjusting her collar while an older woman fussed over her from the opposite seat. We moved forward in the line for another ten minutes or so before Gowyn leaned toward the window, assessed whatever he saw, and turned back to me.

"From here, we continue on foot." The driver brought the Greymanes to a stop. Gowyn opened the carriage door and stepped out first, then held it for me, and I picked up my bag, slung it over my shoulder, and climbed down onto the road. The air hit me immediately, thick with mana, warm on my skin even in the early morning cool. The road beneath my boots was old stone, worn smooth by what must have been centuries of feet, and it was wide enough for four carriages to pass side by side.

All around me, other passengers were climbing out of their own carriages, stretching, adjusting their clothes, looking ahead with the same barely contained expression I was trying very hard to keep off my own face. I looked up. Sartheon was larger than I'd been able to tell from the valley. The towers rose high enough that the tallest ones caught light the ground hadn't received yet, their upper floors glowing amber while everything below was still washed in the blue-grey of early dawn.

There were dozens of them, connected by covered bridges, walkways and arching stone passages that linked one structure to the next in a sprawling web of architecture that didn't seem to follow any particular plan, as if the academy had been built one piece at a time over centuries by people who each had their own idea of where the next building should go. And then I noticed that as I was once told by Nana, the buildings weren't touching the ground.

If you looked carefully, you could see a gap beneath each structure, a thin band of open air between the base of the stonework and the earth below, about three or four feet of empty space where foundation should have been. The towers, the halls, the walkways, all of it hung suspended just above the surface. These were the Hovering Grounds of Sartheon. That was the formal name.

I'd read about it in Instructor Varren's history texts, and in at least two of Nana's adventure books, and in every account I'd encountered, the word "hovering" had conjured an image of an academy drifting high above the clouds, a fortress in the sky, unreachable and mythical. I'd spent years imagining it that way, and to be honest… this might have been the first time the real thing had let me down after all the reading and imagining. It was still impressive, technically.

An entire academy, suspended permanently in the air by what had to be an incomprehensible amount of sustained magic. But it was like, three feet… I decided to be impressed anyway, because I was at Sartheon and I was determined to enjoy every part of it. Around me, other students were assembling on the road. Some were alone, some accompanied by family members or attendants, some flanked by guards bearing house colours.

I was standing by the carriage, adjusting my bag on my shoulder and trying to figure out which direction we were supposed to walk, when I heard a voice.

"Is that the Aridis crest?" I turned. A boy about my age was walking toward me from the carriage behind ours, looking at the crest on our door. He was stocky, broad in the chest, with straw-coloured hair cropped close to his skull and a jaw that looked like it had been designed for the specific purpose of being clenched. He wore a dark green travelling cloak over a fitted tunic, and there was a crest on his breast I didn't immediately recognize, though the silver stag on the green field rang a faint bell.

Behind him, a few paces back, walked who I assumed to be his Shadow, a wiry young woman with her hair pulled back tight, who exchanged a small nod with Gowyn as the boy approached. Gowyn returned it, and the two of them settled into position behind their respective charges.

"It is," I said, and I couldn't help the small smile that came with it, because this was it, this was actually happening, someone my own age was walking up to me and starting a conversation, unprompted, in the open air, and I hadn't even had to figure out how to initiate it myself.

"Thought so. We don't see many of you out and about." He stopped a few feet away and looked me over, openly, starting at my boots and working his way up.

"You lot tend to keep to yourselves, don't you? Locked up in that territory of yours. I've heard people say the Aridis haven't sent a candidate to Sartheon in a generation."

"Uh, yes," I said.

"We've been... focused inward for a while."

"Focused inward." He smiled at that.

"That's one way to put it. My father says the Aridis forgot there was a world outside their walls. No offence meant, obviously."

"None taken," I said, and I meant it, because he was probably right. I had literally forgotten there was a world outside the walls, on account of never having been allowed to see it.

"I'm trying to correct that, starting today." He seemed to consider me for a moment, his head tilting slightly.

"I also heard there was a boy in House Aridis they were calling the Axiom. Once-in-a-thousand-years, heaven-sent prodigy, all of that. That wouldn't happen to be you, would it?"

"It is," I said.

"But you can call me Howl." I extended my hand, because that was what people did in Nana's books when they met someone new, and the boy took it, and he squeezed. He really squeezed. His grip clamped down around my fingers with deliberate pressure while his forearm tensed, the tendons standing out beneath his skin, and his jaw did the thing it was designed for.

His face started going a shade of red that climbed steadily from his neck to his ears, and his smile stayed fixed in place while his knuckles went white around my hand. I looked at him with genuine concern.

"Are you alright?" He frowned.

"You've gone quite red," I said, because he had, and I was starting to worry that the journey might have disagreed with him, or that he was maybe coming down with something. Travelling for days could do that to a person, I assumed.

"Do you need water? We have a canteen in the carriage, I could—""I-I'm fine," he said, releasing my hand. He subtly flexed his fingers at his side.

"Strong grip you've got."

"Oh," I said.

"Thank you. I told you my name, but I don't think I caught yours?"

"Eydric," he said, after a pause that lasted just a beat longer than I expected.

"Eydric Vael. House Vael."

"It's good to meet you, Eydric." This was my first conversation with someone my own age, and it was going well, I thought. He'd come up to me voluntarily, he'd been forthcoming with information about my house's reputation, which was useful, and he'd complimented my grip. I made a mental note to write this down in the journal later.

"Will you be taking the examination as well?"

"That is why I'm here, yes," he said, and there was something in his voice I couldn't identify, a tightness maybe, but I attributed it to nerves, because I was nervous too, even if I wasn't showing it.

"Well, I hope we both do well," I said.

"And I hope we can talk more later. I've never really had the chance to speak with someone from another house before. Or someone my age, actually. Or, well, anyone, really, outside of my instructors." I paused.

"That sounded stranger than I meant it to." Eydric Vael looked at me for a long moment with an expression I couldn't categorize. Then he opened his mouth, but before he could say whatever he was going to say, a horn sounded from somewhere above us, rolling across the valley and bouncing off the towers of the academy. Every head on the road turned upward. The horn sounded again, three long blasts, and the crowd of candidates and their Shadows began to move, drawn forward toward the gates.

"That's the summons," Gowyn said from behind me, his first voluntary contribution to anything in two days.

"We should go." I turned back to Eydric, who was already being guided forward by his own Shadow, and I gave him a small wave, which, in retrospect, might have been a little much, but I didn't know the protocol for ending a first conversation, and waving seemed safe. He didn't wave back, but I figured he was probably just focused on the horn.