CHAPTER 14: WEIGHT OF A NAME (1)

Morning came thin and pale, the kind of light that makes a room look honest. Dust floated in the beam from the tall window. The academy’s bells had not yet started their first proper song; the tower breathed in that quiet way old buildings do when most of their inhabitants are still dreaming of being different people.

I dressed without hurry. Clean white shirt. Dark gray trousers. Academy-blue coat that fit like expectation. The ring with the Valcrey crest sat cool on my finger. I spun it once and let it settle, the two towers and river crest pressing a half-moon into my skin. The sabre slid into its frog with a sound small enough to pass for politeness.

Marrow and Hollow stayed tucked in Shade. The leash hummed faintly when I checked them, a soft line from my sternum to where the room kept its darker corners. I liked the silence. It felt like permission.

I stepped into the corridor.

Stone swallowed sound. A pair of first-years turned the corner, saw me, and re-arranged their faces the way people do when they’ve prepared a look for you in advance. Respect on the surface, a flinch underneath. They nodded too deeply, then made a point of being elsewhere.

I walked past a warden polishing his vambrace. He didn’t look at me, didn’t not look at me, the exact neutral that says a man has been told to observe and record, not to judge. A third-year with a duelist’s ribbon on his shoulder paused in a doorway, measured me the way a carpenter measures a board—length, straightness, how likely it is to split—and then went back to lacing his boot.

Distance followed me like a well-trained dog.

In the staircase a knot of boys I recognized as my own former shadows waited for me to descend. When I reached them, they stepped aside quickly, too quickly, offering the kind of corridor space you give a man who used to demand it. Two of them started to smile with the reflex they’d learned from the old Armand and then caught themselves, as if smiling might get them pulled into a scene they were no longer sure they wanted to be in.

One of them—Farris, if the lingering memory served—found his courage. "My lord," he said. "We were heading to breakfast if you’d like—"

"I won’t need you," I said, not unkindly.

He blinked. The word landed light and then heavy, like a tossed stone that finds water after. He nodded and stepped back into the safety of his friends.

I kept moving.

By the time I reached the ground floor the academy’s hum had thickened. Boots. Voices. The soft bark of a proctor calling a name. The morning smells—ink, bread, steel oil, chalk—knit themselves together into the thing this place calls itself. As I crossed the east hall, conversations folded around me the way grass folds around a boot. No one called out. No one stopped me. No one walked with me.

’No one cared about him,’ I thought, and the word him didn’t refer to me, not entirely. ’They cared about the name.’

The shape of that truth sat clean in my chest. The old Armand had been close to one person only, and even that closeness had been a kind of leash. Seraphine’s gaze had been approval and instruction, praise and direction. Everyone else clustered where the shade of a dukedom fell. If I lost the crest on my ring, the cluster would dissolve the way fog melts when the sun decides it is time.

’All right,’ I told myself. ’Then build something that isn’t fog.’

The Compass cleared its throat in my head, a polite theater cough. "Observation: you are currently experiencing the difference between reputation and regard. The first sticks to your coat. The second sits in people’s hands."

’I noticed,’ I thought.

"Recommendation: start with actions that do not require applause. They are surprisingly hard to counterfeit."

’I planned to,’ I thought. ’After breakfast.’

Breakfast was a long room with windows tall enough to make even a noble feel small. The tables ran in regimented lines, benches scarred with years of knives. Food came out of the kitchen on deep plates: bread still warm, porridge that tried its best, eggs that had been eggs in another life and were now duty. I stood for a beat at the threshold and felt the hall notice me. Heads tipped. Some lowered. Two conversations tried to pretend they hadn’t been about me.

I took a tray and moved through the line like a person who had always stood in lines. The server set bread on my plate; his eyes did not quite meet mine. When I thanked him, he startled as if I had dropped something heavy on the table between us.

At the far end of the room a group of second-years shifted to give me space. The old Armand would have taken it and then asked why no one had risen fast enough. I took a seat at an empty table against the wall where the window threw a rectangle of light. The food tasted like food. I ate like a man who hadn’t learned to be precious.

The solitude felt less like exile than I expected. It felt like air.

I finished and cleaned my tray and left it where the boy from the kitchen had told us to leave them last term. He didn’t notice the courtesy, not with his head down and the stack high, but noticing wasn’t the point. The Compass hummed in my skull the way a pleased teacher hums when a student writes his name at the top of the page.

"Ethics and Accords," it said. "First session is third bell. Saintess Liora expects attendees who can sit without fidgeting and listen without interrupting. I am deeply excited to see how you do."

’I can sit,’ I thought. ’I can listen.’

"And then some practice," it added. "Anchor Step. Timing drills. Quiet work with the leash until keeping two without fuzz is as boring as tying your boots."

’And stronger,’ I thought. The word had weight. ’We need stronger.’

"Two lanes," the Compass said. "Power and people. They braid. Ignore either and the rope frays."

I left the hall and stepped into the day properly. The main courtyard spread its clean stone out like a clean shirt. Students crossed in lines and clumps, blues flashing once and then going dull in the sun. The dueling greens at the far side already had a pair of second-years trading honest blows and dishonest feints. From the tower behind me came the sound of an instructor’s chalk clicking rhythmically against slate.

Ariadne swept across the courtyard with her sworn beside her. She kept to the edge of the flow the way a knife keeps to a sheath: straight, sensible, controlled. Her hair was braided high and tight. The line of her mouth could have cut leather. She glanced past me as if I were part of the wall.

The old ache—his, not mine—stirred hard. He’d loved her attention, even the angry kind. He had demanded it like air and then resented her for breathing. He’d used her in public because it was easier than admitting that he wanted to be more like her in private.

I didn’t follow. Not then. Not with a courtyard full of eyes and a history that liked to write itself loud. This conversation would be a quiet room conversation. It deserved walls.

’Later,’ I told myself. ’But today.’