Chương 7: Theoretical Exam

The plaza had split into clusters. Some candidates were already deep in conversation with people they seemed to know, greeting each other while others stood with their Shadows in quiet consultation, heads bowed, voices low. A few were alone, leaning against pillars or sitting on the stone benches that lined the edge of the plaza, looking at their hands or their shoes or the sky. I spotted Eydric a little ways off to the left.

He'd found company fast, which made sense, given that he was the kind of person who walked up to strangers and started talking, which was apparently a skill you could just have. He was standing in a loose circle with four or five other candidates, two boys and two girls and someone whose back was turned to me. I was wondering what they might be talking about when one of them glanced in my direction. Then another. Eydric followed their eyes and saw me looking, so I smiled and waved.

They turned around so fast it was almost coordinated. Eydric said something to the group I couldn't hear, and they resumed their conversation with a stiffness that hadn't been there a moment ago, their shoulders angled just slightly away from me. My hand was still up, so I lowered it. That was... familiar, actually. The speed of it, the way they'd all looked and then deliberately stopped looking, as if I was something you weren't supposed to stare at directly.

I'd seen that exact reaction before, in a corridor outside my room, from three children who'd rather abandon a ball than knock on my door.

"Gowyn?" He was standing behind my left shoulder, hands clasped behind his back, watching the crowd. He looked at me, and I realized this was the first time I'd actually asked him anything since we'd left the estate.

"Do you… do you think it would be a good idea for me to go and talk with some of the other candidates? Try to... make friends, maybe?" I said it carefully, because I could hear how it sounded even as the words left my mouth, asking my Shadow for advice to socialize was probably not the most impressive thing Gowyn had ever witnessed from a member of House Aridis. Gowyn looked at me for a few seconds, which was the longest he'd looked at me for anything that wasn't protocol-related since we'd met.

"Socializing would be a good idea, Young Lord," he said.

"However, you should expect some resistance to your approaches. The Aridis name carries a certain—""So it's a good idea, right?" He paused. Whatever he'd been about to say about the Aridis name and its certain whatever died somewhere between his brain and his mouth. He looked at me again for a while and then...

"... Sure." That was all I needed. I adjusted my bag on my shoulder, took a breath, and walked across the plaza toward the group. Every step felt slightly too loud on the stone. I was so, so anxious. I stopped a few feet from the circle. They hadn't noticed me yet, or they were pretending they hadn't, which was its own kind of message, but I was already here and turning around now would be worse than whatever was about to happen.

"Hello, everyone." Six faces turned to me at once. Eydric's was one of them, and he smiled at me.

"Oh," one of the girls said. She had dark skin and close-cropped hair and was holding a leather-bound notebook against her chest.

"Hello."

"Hi," said the boy next to her, a tall, thin kid with freckles. Nobody said anything after that. The silence sat between us and I could feel the awkwardness pressing against my skin, and I knew they could feel it too because the freckled boy was looking at his shoes and the girl with the notebook had tightened her grip on it and Eydric was watching me with an expression that was now fully unreadable. I was aware of how this was going. I was very, very aware.

"I'm Howl," I said anyway, because stopping now would mean I'd walked all the way across a plaza for nothing, and I was House Aridis and we did not falter, even when faltering would have been the socially merciful option.

"I met Eydric earlier, and I thought I'd come and introduce myself to the rest of you as well. Since we'll all be taking the examination together." More silence. The boy whose back had been turned to me earlier shifted to face me properly. He was short, compact, with sharp brown eyes and a Solenne crest on his collar, and he was studying me with the polite, measured attention that Bellos had warned me about.

"That's... very forward of you," the Solenne boy said, and I genuinely could not tell if that was a compliment or a criticism, so I treated it as both.

"Probably," I said.

"I don't have a lot of practice with this." The girl with the notebook was the first to move. She tucked it under her arm, stepped forward, and held out her hand.

"Metys," she said.

"Metys Ozen. House Ozen." I took her hand and shook it, and this time nobody's face went red and nobody's knuckles went white, which I was starting to understand was how handshakes were supposed to go.

"It's nice to meet you, Metys." She smiled at me, and after that, the others followed. The freckled boy was Cael, from a minor house in the western provinces whose name I didn't catch because he mumbled it. One of the other girls introduced herself as Dessa Vashren, and she had the red-gold hair and squared-off stance I'd been taught to expect from that house.

The last boy was broad and quiet and said his name was Tomas, and that he was from the Draeven, and then he went back to standing with his arms folded and his mouth closed, which I respected. The Solenne boy waited until everyone else had finished before he stepped forward. He didn't offer his hand. He just tilted his head and looked at me with those sharp brown eyes.

"So you're the Aridis boy," he said.

"The one they call the Axiom."

"You can call me Howl," I said, smiling.

"That's my name." He smiled back.

"What, you don't like being called the Axiom?"

"I didn't say that. I just prefer Howl."

"Interesting." He folded his arms.

"Most people would kill to have a title like that. Heaven-sent, once-in-a-thousand-years, all of that. And you'd rather be called Howl?"

"It is my name," I said again, because I wasn't sure what else to say to that, and repeating yourself felt safer than trying to be clever with a Solenne.

"Rael," Metys said.

"He said he doesn't like it. So just call him Howl."

"I'm teasing," Rael said, raising both hands, palms out.

"Just teasing. Getting to know our new friend here." He looked at me.

"That is what you want, isn't it, Howl? To be friends?" He said it lightly and playfully, and I opened my mouth to say yes, because yes was the truth, but the word caught somewhere in my throat because I suddenly understood what I looked like. I was begging. That's what this was. I'd never personally felt something like this before, but I recognized it instantly. This was what it felt like to want something from people who hadn't offered it, at the cost of your pride.

The feeling was so sharp and so specific that it straightened my spine before I'd even decided to straighten it.

"I think it's wise to familiarize oneself with the other candidates," I said with the voice Instructor Maren had spent years drilling into me for exactly this kind of moment.

"We'll be sharing the same academy, after all. Building a professional rapport early seems prudent." The shift was immediate enough that the others seemed to have noticed.

"Professional rapport," Rael repeated.

"Right."

"Indeed," I said, and I held his gaze the way Bellos had taught me to hold an opponent's during a duel, steady and unhurried, giving nothing away.

"I look forward to working with all of you." Eydric hadn't said a word through any of this. He was standing at the edge of the circle with his arms at his sides, watching me. That whole exchange had been unpleasant. Deeply, thoroughly unpleasant, in a way I hadn't been prepared for, and I'd been prepared for a lot of things. Bellos had warned me about the Solenne.

He'd told me exactly what to expect, and I'd wanted to give the benefit of the doubt anyway, but Rael had nearly made me look like a fool in front of everyone, and he'd done it while smiling.

"With that being said," I said, keeping my voice even, "I'll let you all get back to your conversation. I'm sure we'll see each other during the examination. Good luck to all of you." I turned to leave, and I'd already taken a step when Eydric spoke up.

"You should stay." I looked back at him. He'd shifted his weight forward, hands in his pockets now, and he was watching me with an expression that had finally settled into something I could read, or at least thought I could.

"The exam's starting soon anyway," he said.

"No point wandering off just to wander back. And besides..." He pulled a hand from his pocket and held it out toward me.

"I'd like for us to be friends, Howl. If you're up for it." Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there. I stared at his hand. This was confusing. Genuinely confusing. Because everything I'd picked up from Eydric just now, all of it had left me with the faintest sense that he did not particularly like me… Oh well. I smiled back and took his hand.

"I'd like that, yeah." Metys stepped closer and asked me where I'd travelled from, and I told her about the estate in the east, and she told me House Ozen was from the southern coast, and that the journey had taken her three days by ship and another half day by road, and that she'd thrown up twice on the ship and was not interested in discussing it further, which made me laugh, and she laughed too, and it felt easy in a way that the last ten minutes hadn't. Rael, to his credit, seemed to soften after that.

He uncrossed his arms and asked me if the written exam was the one I was most concerned about, and I said honestly that I wasn't particularly worried about any of them. He just raised an eyebrow and said "bold". We were talking about the practical assessment, Dessa explaining that her house had been drilling her in combustion forms since she was twelve, when a low grinding sound cut through the plaza and every conversation died at once. One of the buildings facing the plaza was opening.

The entire front wall was sliding apart, two massive stone panels pulling away from each other to reveal a cavernous hall beyond, lit from within by hundreds of mana orbs floating near the ceiling in neat rows. Through the gap, I could see long tables arranged in lines stretching back into the hall, each one set with a booklet, a pen, and an inkwell. A man stepped out of the opening and stood at the threshold.

He was middle-aged, clean-shaven, wearing the same dark robes with golden trim as Gressil, and he held a clipboard in one hand and a mana-amplified speaking stone in the other.

"Candidates," he said, his voice filling the plaza.

"The written examination will now commence. Leave your belongings with your Shadows and follow me in an orderly fashion. You will be assigned seating upon entry. No talking once you cross the threshold." The plaza shifted. All around me, candidates were handing bags to their Shadows, adjusting their clothes, taking last breaths. I swung my bag off my shoulder and held it out to Gowyn, who took it without a word. Metys tucked her notebook into her Shadow's hands with visible reluctance. Eydric cracked his neck.

Rael straightened his collar, and Tomas was already walking toward the building.

"Good luck," Metys said to the group.

"You too," I said. We walked toward the hall.

Five hours later, we were standing in rows on the plaza again, and my hand was still cramping from the writing. The written examination had been divided into four sections, one per hour, each delivered by a proctor who collected the previous booklet before distributing the next.

There were no breaks, nor talking, nor leaving your seat for any reason, and two candidates had been escorted out within the first twenty minutes for attempting to communicate with each other using mana pulses under the table, which the examiners had detected immediately and without sympathy. The first hour was theory. Schools of magic, their classifications, their known interactions, their historical development.

I filled in every answer without pausing because Instructor Varren had drilled this material into me so relentlessly that I could have answered these questions while asleep, and in fact probably had, given some of the dreams I'd had after particularly long study sessions. The second hour was applied calculation. Mana conversion ratios, potion formulas, elemental resistance coefficients, structural load thresholds for barrier spells.

It was dense and technical, and I could hear pens stopping around me as candidates hit problems they hadn't trained for. Someone three rows back started breathing very quickly and had to be given water by a proctor. I worked through it methodically, the way Instructor Maren had taught me, one problem at a time, checking each answer before moving to the next. The third hour was history and law.

The founding of the great houses, the treaties that governed mana use in populated areas, the structure of the King's Council, the Spirit Accords and their amendments. I knew most of it. Some of it I knew because of Varren, some because Nana's books had made history feel like stories worth remembering, and there was one question about the Second Ley War that I only knew the answer to because a hero in one of Nana's adventure novels had fought in it and the author had been meticulous about dates.

The fourth hour was the strange one. The booklet contained a single sheet with ten questions on it, and I couldn't answer a single one of them from memory. They weren't on any curriculum I'd ever studied. The topics were obscure, hyper-specific, and in two cases seemed to reference texts I was fairly confident didn't exist. I sat there staring at the first question for nearly a full minute, my pen motionless, while the silence in the hall pressed in around me. Then I thought about it properly. Ten questions.

No candidate in this room could answer them through study alone, because the material simply wasn't taught anywhere. No supplementary sheet, no reference text, no hint from the proctors. Just ten questions and an hour to fill in the answers. Which meant they didn't want us to know the answers, but rather see how we'd find them. I'd read about something like this in one of Nana's books.

The academy in the story had given its candidates an exam with questions beyond their training, and the real test had been whether the candidates could gather intelligence under pressure without getting caught. I'd thought it was fiction, a plot device to make the protagonist look clever, and here I was sitting in a real examination hall realizing that Nana's adventure novels had been more real than I thought. So I looked around. The proctors were watching us, but they were watching in a specific way.

They weren't scanning for anyone who was struggling. They were scanning for anyone who was being obvious. Two candidates had already been removed in the first hour for cheating, and the message there had been clear: don't get caught. But they hadn't said don't cheat. They'd said don't communicate. The distinction, I was starting to realize, mattered. I noticed things. A girl four rows ahead had a small reflective pin on her collar that was angled toward the booklet of the candidate in front of her.

A boy near the wall was tapping his pen against his desk in a pattern that was too regular to be nervous fidgeting, and the boy next to him was writing in bursts that matched the rhythm. One of the Kaelith candidates hadn't moved at all for several minutes, her eyes half-closed, and I suspected she was using a sensory technique to read the answers off someone else's page from across the room. Everyone who'd figured it out was cheating. They were just being clever about it.

Then the boy with the pen tapping got caught. One of the proctors crossed the hall in four quick strides, placed a hand flat on his desk, and said, "Candidate, stand." The boy's face drained of colour so fast it was like watching a candle go out. He stood, his pen still in his hand, and the proctor took his booklet off the desk, folded it in half, and said, loud enough for the entire hall to hear, "Cheating during the Entrance Trials results in permanent disqualification.

You will not be permitted to reattempt the examination. Ever."

"I wasn't," the boy said, and his voice cracked on the second word.

"I wasn't cheating, sir, I was just—I was tapping because I was nervous, I always do that when I'm nervous, ask anyone, ask my Shadow, she'll tell you I—""Leave the hall."

"Please." His pen clattered onto the desk.

"Please, sir, my family sent me here, I've been training for years, you can't just—"" Leave. The hall." The boy's breathing hitched, his eyes darted sideways, and whatever loyalty or agreement had existed between him and the boy next to him died right there in that fraction of a second.

"It was him!" He pointed at the other boy, who until that moment had been keeping his head down and his mouth shut.

"He asked me to do it! Before the section started, he leaned over and asked me to tap the answers out for him, I didn't want to but he—""That's a lie!" The other boy was on his feet now, his chair scraping back against the stone.

"I never asked you to do anything, you started tapping on your own!"

"You told me you'd share your answers from the second section if I helped you with the fourth!"

"I never said that!" They were shouting at each other across the narrow gap between their desks, with the entire hall watching, a hundred candidates frozen mid-breath, and the proctor stood between them with his arms folded, waiting for them to finish, which they did when they realized that nothing they said was going to change anything, and that every word out of their mouths was making it worse.

"Both of you," the proctor said.

"Permanently disqualified. Leave the hall." They left. One of them was crying while the other looked like he was going to be sick. The door closed behind them, and the hall was so quiet I could hear the mana orbs humming above our heads. Four more were removed over the next thirty minutes, and nobody argued after that.

I was less certain of my previous conclusion now, but I still closed my eyes and very carefully extended my mana sense outward, keeping the output so low it would barely register on the proctors' detection glyphs.

I could feel the mana signatures of every candidate in the hall, each one distinct, and I could feel the faint residual traces left on their booklets by the act of writing, because ink pressed into paper by a channelling hand left an imprint that could be read if you were sensitive enough, careful enough and had the kind of reserves that let you maintain a passive scan for an extended period without it costing you anything. It cost me almost nothing.

I gathered what I needed with my eyes closed, mapped out the six nearest candidates who'd already filled in their sheets, cross-referenced their answers against each other to filter out the wrong ones, and committed the results to memory. Then I opened my eyes, and there was a proctor standing directly in front of my desk. My heart slammed into my ribs so hard I felt it in my teeth.

I nearly gasped, but managed to stay composed, and instead I just looked up at the proctor with what I hoped was the mildly confused expression of a student who'd been concentrating very hard on his paper and was wondering why someone was standing over him. The proctor looked at me with my pen still in my hand. My booklet was in front of me with three answers already written from before I'd closed my eyes. I calmly went back to writing.

Rephrasing the next answer in my own words as though I'd been working it out in my head this whole time, which was technically true, just not in the way it would have appeared. The proctor stood there for what felt like an eternity, then moved on to the next row. I did not close my eyes again after that. I didn't need to. I had all ten answers memorized, and I wrote them down one at a time at a pace slow enough to look natural.

I finished with twelve minutes to spare, which I spent pretending to review my work while counting the mana orbs on the ceiling. There were three hundred and forty-seven. That had been five hours ago. Four for the exam, and one since we'd been told to stand in the plaza and wait. The waiting was worse than the exam. Candidates stood in loose rows, same as before, their Shadows behind them, and the tension in the air was thick as every single one of us was nervous. I was fairly sure I'd answered everything well.

The theory was easy, the calculations were manageable, the history was solid, and the fourth section... well, I'd done what I thought they wanted me to do. But "fairly sure" and "sure" were two different feelings, and the gap between them was large enough to fit a lot of anxiety into, and mine was currently filling it enthusiastically. What if I'd misread a question? What if my method on the fourth section had been detected and they'd marked me down for it?

What if there was a standard of presentation or formatting that Sartheon expected and the Aridis curriculum hadn't covered because we hadn't sent anyone here in two generations? What if I failed the written exam and had to go home and kneel on that tile and— Oh, the building opened again, the stone panels grinding apart, and Alderman Gressil walked out onto the plaza. Veyra Tull was behind him, holding a sheaf of papers, and Bryce was behind her, carrying his clipboard. The plaza went silent instantly.

Gressil reached the front, turned to face us, and held up a single sheet of paper.

"The written examination has been scored," he said.

"Before I read the results, I will clarify one point." He lowered the paper slightly.

"The written examination is worth thirty of your total one hundred points. The minimum total score required for admission is eighty. This means that any candidate who has scored below ten on the written examination cannot mathematically achieve the required total, even with perfect marks on the remaining assessments." He paused, letting the arithmetic settle into a hundred and some brains at once.

"Those candidates will be asked to leave the grounds immediately. They may reattempt the Entrance Trials next year." This was no fun at all, actually. Not even a little bit.

"I will now read the names and scores," Gressil said, and he raised the paper again.

"When your name is called, you will step forward and receive your score. If your score is below ten, you will be directed to the eastern gate, where transport has been arranged." He adjusted his spectacles.

"Let us begin."