Chương 8: Sad

Gressil began, and the plaza fell into a strange rhythm.

"Aaren of House Corven." The boy stepped forward, took his card, and Gressil read the score.

"Seventeen." Damn, nice. Good for him. Aaren walked back to his place with quiet relief.

"Aerin of House Solenne." A tall girl with the same crest as Rael on her collar.

"Twenty-three." Strong. As expected of a Solenne, I supposed. She returned without expression.

"Alba of House Venn."

"Six." The silence afterward was different. Alba stood very still for a second, and then her Shadow stepped forward, took her gently by the elbow, and guided her toward the eastern gate. Alba didn't say anything. Her boots made soft sounds on the stone as she walked, and I watched her go until I realized watching wasn't something I should be doing, and I looked forward again. The names kept coming.

An uneven rhythm built itself up in the plaza, worse than the silence of the exam hall had been, because now there was nothing clever you could do. You either had the number or you didn't. A few more candidates were quietly guided toward the eastern gate, one after another, while others walked back to their places with scores that let them stay. Then, "Beren of House Talse."

"Thirty." Everyone had different variations of shock and surprise. Thirty? Thirty was perfect! Somewhere behind me, I heard a soft gasp, and a murmur started to move through the crowd before Gressil raised his eyes from the paper and the murmur went away. Beren himself just tilted his head, accepted his card, and walked back to his place. If he hadn't expected it, he did a good job of hiding it. The calling continued. Another twenty. A twelve. A nineteen. A nine, gone. A twenty-five.

A second perfect thirty, this one from a red haired girl whose name I didn't catch, and the plaza rippled with a louder murmur this time, because two perfect scores in twenty names seemed to be an unusual thing, and everyone in the plaza seemed to understand that, including me, while my heart rate climbed with each new announcement. I shifted my weight without meaning to.

My hand found the strap of my bag and pressed into the leather as I forced it to let go, and it returned there a moment later without my permission.

"Tomas of House Draeven." My head snapped up. Tomas stepped forward and took the card from Gressil's hand, and Gressil read his score.

"Eight." Tomas didn't react. He stood there for half a second longer than anyone else had, as though waiting for someone to correct the number, and then he turned without a word and walked toward the eastern gate. His Shadow fell in behind him, and they were gone before I could fully understand what I'd just seen. I couldn't move.

I'd spoken to him and was genuinely looking forward to spending more time with him and the others, and now he was walking out of the gate and I would probably never see him again, and I had no framework for what to do with that feeling. The names didn't stop, though. Another twenty-one. Another eighteen. An eleven, barely. A six, gone.

The rhythm was chewing through candidates at a pace that left no room between them to breathe, and my anxiety had become a physical thing, sitting in my throat and pressing against the back of my teeth. I tried to run through my own answers in my head. I couldn't remember them cleanly anymore. I tried to calculate how many people had been called and lost count twice. My palms were damp. Then Gressil called two names at once.

"Erden of House Marren. Faelo of House Jarn." The two of them stepped forward together and stopped side by side in front of the balcony. Gressil lowered the paper and looked at them over his spectacles.

"Your fourth-section answers were identical. Word for word. Both of you have been scored at zero and are permanently disqualified from future examinations." Erden stared at the ground while Faelo turned to look at him with an expression somewhere between rage and terror, but Erden didn't look up, and whatever Faelo wanted to say died in his throat.

Two Shadows stepped forward from the second line and guided them toward the eastern gate, and one of them was already starting to cry, though I couldn't tell from where I stood which one it was. A few names later, someone retched behind me. I didn't turn around, but I heard it clearly: a wet, involuntary sound, followed by a small gasp from the candidate next to him, and then silence. Gressil didn't pause. The calling continued.

When the boy's name was eventually read out, Hans of House Oll, he didn't step forward at first, and then he did, slowly, his Shadow half-supporting him. His score came back at seven, and he walked toward the eastern gate with his head down and the front of his shirt stained. I adjusted my stance and closed my eyes, the tension was becoming unbearable. What if—"Howl of House Aridis." Ah. That's me, that's my name. Oh no. Murmurs started before I'd taken a step.

"Aridis?"

"Did he say Aridis?"

"That's his name?" The whispering rippled through the plaza in every direction, and I felt a hundred pairs of eyes pivot toward me at once. I straightened my back, let my face do nothing, and walked forward through a silence that had sharpened itself around me. Gressil watched me come. I stopped in front of him. He looked at me over the rims of his spectacles for a moment, and I could see him tracking my face, my posture, the set of my shoulders… then he handed me the card.

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version. I took it, but did not look at it.

"Thirty," Gressil said. YES! OH GOD, YES! The plaza exhaled as one. All of them releasing a breath I hadn't realized they'd been holding, and then a beat of silence, and then the whispering started again, faster and sharper, layered with fresh weight. I bowed slightly, turned, and walked back to my place with the card in my hand and my face doing nothing as I did not let any part of me show what I was actually feeling. The rest of my group passed.

Metys Ozen got a thirty, which she received with a small, stunned smile. Rael Solenne got a thirty as well, accepted it without surprise, and walked back to his place. Eydric Vael got a twenty-five, which was better than most. Cael got a seventeen. Dessa Vashren got a twenty-two. None of them were sent to the eastern gate, and I was more relieved about that than I'd been about my own score, which was a feeling I had not expected to have this morning.

Gressil rolled the paper back into its scroll and looked out over what was left of us.

"The practical examination will commence following a one-hour recess. Details will be provided at that time. You are dismissed until then." He turned and walked back into the building with Veyra and Bryce behind him, and the stone panels ground shut, and the second they sealed, the plaza erupted. A boy two rows behind me actually shouted and someone else was laughing while Metys had both hands pressed over her face and was saying "oh my god oh my god oh my god" into her palms.

Rael was simply smiling and even Eydric exhaled loud enough for me to hear it from where I stood. Around the plaza there were hugs happening, and people clapping each other on the back, and candidates collapsing onto benches with their heads in their hands.

I kept my face level, my posture correct, my breathing even, exactly as I'd been taught, and inside my chest there was a small, uncontrollable thing that kept trying to climb up into my throat and turn itself into a sound, but I was not going to let it, because I was House Aridis and we did not falter and we also did not, sadly, whoop. I was still standing in my spot when a boy came up to me.

He was maybe a year older, with a narrow face and a house crest I didn't recognize embroidered on his collar in green thread. He stopped about three feet away and looked at me.

"Excuse me?"

"Yes?"

"Are you the Axiom?"

"My name is Howl," I said.

"Howl Aridis. It's nice to meet you." I held out my hand. He shook it, but he was already talking over the handshake, his grip loose and distracted while his eyes examined my face.

"Is it true you've been training since you were four? My uncle serves in the eastern garrison and he said the Aridis started you on glyph work before you could read."

"I started reading quite early, actually. What's your name?"

"And your mana reserves," he said.

"They say you've never run dry. Not once. In any session. Is that true?"

"... I don't think I caught your name."

"Oh. Varen. Varen Hess, House Hess." He said it quickly.

"But is it true? About the reserves?"

"It's nice to meet you, Varen." He seemed a bit confused and was about to answer when a blonde haired girl appeared at his shoulder.

"Is this him?" she asked Varen, as though I weren't standing right there.

"Yeah." She turned to me.

"I scored twenty-six on the written, and you scored thirty." I waited for the rest of the sentence, but it didn't come. She just looked at me.

"Well… yes?" I said, because I couldn't figure out what else she wanted.

"My mother told me the Axiom would probably test highest. She's been saying that since I was twelve. Every time I brought home marks she'd say, 'that's very good, Lenne, but the Axiom would have done better.' Every single time." I truly wasn't sure how to answer this, it felt sad, so I thought it appropriate to have empathy.

"I'm sorry to hear that," I said.

"That sounds—""No, it's fine. I just wanted to see for myself." She looked me up and down.

"You're shorter than I expected." I was above average height for my age. I knew this because I was measured quarterly and the results were recorded in a book I wasn't supposed to have seen.

"My name is Howl," I said again.

"Not the Axiom. Just Howl." The girl and Varen stared at each other, as if to confirm to each other that I had said something strange. A third candidate drifted over, then a fourth, and within a few minutes I had a semicircle of faces in front of me, all of them curious, and most of them a little resentful about it. I kept smiling. I introduced myself as Howl to each of them. I asked their names, where they were from and I kept trying to turn it into an actual conversation, but nobody was interested in that.

"My father restructured our entire training programme because of you," said a boy with broad shoulders and a Draeven crest, one of the three Tomas had come with.

"I've been doing double sessions since I was ten. Double. He said if House Aridis was raising a weapon, we needed to be ready for what came after."

"I'm not a weapon," I said.

"I'm just—""Is it true Bellos trained you? The Copy Mage? My instructor studied under a man who sparred with Bellos once and couldn't use his right arm for a month."

"He was my combat instructor, yes. Listen, I'd really like it if you called me—""My uncle said the Axiom trained under a First Seal," someone behind him said to someone else, not to me.

"For six years. Six!"

"How many schools can you cast in?" The girl from earlier asked. She'd stayed, arms folded now.

"They say you're proficient in all of them. Every major discipline. Is that accurate?"

"I've studied broadly, yes."

"Broadly." She turned to the Draeven boy.

"Broadly, he says." The Draeven boy exhaled through his nose. A girl with a Kaelith crest on her sleeve hadn't said a word since she'd arrived. She stood at the edge of the group with her hands clasped in front of her, watching me, and every few seconds her gaze would flick to someone else in the circle and then back to me. She was collecting. I looked at her and she looked back at me with mild, pleasant interest, and then her eyes moved on to the next person. My smile was still there.

I could feel it on my face, held in place by years of training, but the warmth behind it had gone out, and I was reasonably sure that at least a few of them could tell, and that none of them cared.

"My name is Howl," I said, for what might have been the seventh or eighth time. I'd lost count.

"I'd appreciate it if you used it."

"Of course," said Varen, and then immediately turned to the boy beside him and said, "Did you hear what the Axiom scored on the written?" I stopped correcting them after that. A stocky girl from a house in the northern provinces asked me if it was true that the Axiom's birth had been celebrated for a full year. I said yes. She asked if the elders had really removed my uncle from the succession because of me. I said I didn't know the details. She asked if I felt responsible for that.

I told her it happened before I could walk. She nodded, and I could see her deciding how she felt about me in real time, weighing my answer against whatever story she'd already built in her head, and I understood then that it didn't matter what I said. She'd come with her conclusions already formed. They all had, I thought, and it deeply saddened me. I answered three more questions, giving exactly what was asked and nothing more. The circle had grown to maybe fifteen people and I couldn't see past them anymore.

"Let him through." Eydric's voice carried over the overlapping questions without effort. He shouldered his way between two candidates who stepped apart without argument. He stopped beside me and looked at the circle.

"He answered your questions," Eydric said.

"That's enough. Give him some air." Varen started to say something, but Eydric looked at him, and Varen stopped. The circle loosened. A few of them drifted away immediately, their curiosity satisfied or their nerve lost, and the rest followed within a few seconds, peeling off in twos and threes until it was just me, Eydric and the empty space where the people had been standing. Eydric glanced at me.

"You alright?"

"Fine," I said.

"Thank you."

"You don't have to answer every question people throw at you, you know? You're allowed to walk away."

"I know." I did know. I just hadn't done it, because a part of me had kept hoping that one of them would use my name. That someone in that circle, anyone, would look at me and say Howl instead of Axiom, and ask me a question that wasn't about my mana reserves or my training or what their father had told them about me when they were children. But nobody had. Eydric was watching me with that unreadable expression again, the one I'd been trying to decode since the approach road. He put his hands in his pockets.

"Come on," he said.

"Metys saved us a spot on the benches. You should sit down before the practical starts." I followed him across the plaza.