CHAPTER 21: PREPARATIONS FOR FIRST EVALUATION

Voices collected at the arch. Not Gareth this time. Not Marcus. A different kind of crowd. Nobles in a neat wedge with the smell of expensive soap and mean assumptions. Aldric Voss at the point because he didn’t know how to be anywhere else. Seraphine beside him like winter had discovered posture.

"Valcrey," Aldric said, mouth already in a smirk. "Practicing hand signals for the dog and the bird? Or do they read your mind."

"Neither," I said. "They listen."

He laughed. "For now." He reached into his coat and tapped a folded sheet with the back of a knuckle. "Heard a charming rumor. Necromancy corrupts the user’s core if overexerted during a blackout. Very sad. Dangerous. Might require oversight."

Seraphine didn’t look at me. "We wouldn’t want the academy to be embarrassed," she said, in the tone people use when they mean a person instead of a place.

"Rumors," I said. "You’re good at those."

"Truth and rumor are cousins," she said lightly. "In the right light, they look the same."

"Not to people who turn on lights," I said.

Aldric’s smirk flinched down to nothing and back to full in a blink. "Careful," he said. Lightning can live in a voice when the owner likes the sound of it. "You’ll need friends after tomorrow. Your old ones got bored."

I looked at the cluster of boys behind him with their perfect cuffs and their fearless mouths. "They were never old," I said. "Just loud."

Seraphine’s eyes slid to mine then, not deep, not long, a glance like a knife test. "First practical evaluation," she said. "Try not to mistake sympathy for mercy."

"I won’t," I said.

"Good," she said, and she and her weather moved on.

The whispers didn’t move on. They stuck to the air like cobweb.

’Corruption,’ they said. ’Blackout. Oversight.’ Someone had seeded the words the way you seed a field and then pretended the wind had brought the crop.

I set the sabre down and walked to the far side of the yard before I said anything my sister would have to explain later. The Compass cleared its throat. "Complaint committees exist," it said. "It is very exciting. Paper and rules and people who enjoy both."

’If they come,’ I thought, ’we’ll talk to them like they are people and not weather.’

"Correct," the Compass said. "Also—eat."

I found the commoner side of the dining hall by the sound of talk layered on top of talk. Lyra had moved her notebooks to the end of the table near the window. People stood without crowding because they respected line and time. She answered questions in order. Her voice was soft enough to make others lean forward and thus become quieter without being told.

Gareth came in from the far arch with a smear of dust on his sleeve and a look that said he’d kept a promise on the way. He tapped the table lightly twice to get a pause and then bent toward Lyra’s ear to ask his question. She wrote something on a corner of paper, pressed it into his palm, and nodded once. He looked relieved like a man who had been given a map after two days of guessing.

When he turned and saw me watching, he didn’t stiffen. He only gave a small nod, the same one he’d given in the yard. Allies aren’t vows. Sometimes they are just a line on a day that would’ve gone worse without it.

I took a tray. Bread, stew, an apple that had fallen down a flight of stairs before it found the bowl. I ate faster than taste deserves and left before my name could become a project near the doorway. The halls carried sound into each other: chalk, boots, laughter, the soft thud of someone learning how to fall without making it a story.

Ariadne crossed my path in the corridor that veers behind the west tower. She didn’t stop. She didn’t speak. She didn’t need to. She glanced once at the dust on my sleeve and the red scrape near my wrist where the sabre guard had been unkind. The eyelid didn’t blink slower or faster. But some part of me that had made a mess of her days decided the smallest muscle in her jaw meant something anyway.

’Earn it,’ I told myself. ’Don’t write poetry where a ledger is.’

Night pulled the academy’s windows long. I found the quiet between the bell that says sleep and the bell that says work. I repaired a strap that had decided it lived to fail. I oiled a blade that tasted of dirt and nicked pride. I whispered ’shade’ and ’out’ at Marrow and Hollow until they moved without rattling and then sent them to the shadow under the bed with a pat that made no noise.

My eyes closed and opened in the same breath. The kind of sleep men do when the morning is a person, not a time.

Dawn came with a clean bite. The ward outside the arena hummed like a line drawn straight. Names lit the board. I didn’t look away from mine when the nobles laughed. Laughing is a habit people use to convince themselves that noise is victory.

On the walk to the prep room, I passed Lyra at the end of a hallway made of people. She stood with her notebooks neatly stacked and three quills tucked behind one ear like a joke she told herself. The commoners asked and asked. She answered and answered. She swayed a little when the bodies threatened to crush her, but she did not move. A shy girl at the head of a river that would not stop.

She saw me and the smallest relief lit her eyes like a match in a cavern. Not because I was a savior. Because I was a body that made other bodies remember they had edges. I cut a path between the swells without touching anyone and gave her a moment of air. She mouthed thanks and kept working. A boy with shaking hands stopped shaking because she told him how to hold a pen like it was a friend, not a tool that would mock you.

The prep room smelled like leather and oil and boys who suddenly wished they had not been so loud at dinner.

Marcus stood alone counting breath. Aldric stood with three leashed smiles and a rumor folded in his cuff. Cael stood with his hands loose and his eyes turned inward like he could already see the ring and had found the places where he’d stand.

Pierce’s voice gave the floor its spine. "Rounds begin. If you’re not brave, be disciplined. If you’re not disciplined, be lucky. If you’re not lucky, find a chair and clap for those who are."

We filed out.

I rolled my shoulders once. My hands didn’t shake. The leash in my chest hummed like a line that had been tuned. My thoughts said what they had to.

’Don’t chase speed. Don’t trade power. Own the beat. Make the ring small. Make the decisions smaller.’

The ward sang.

Round One began.