They held the assessment in the great hall, because the Crown liked these things done where people could watch.
The assessor had come back with two clerks and a case, and inside the case was a plate of grey stone about the size of a dinner tray, set into a frame with a brass rim. They stood it on a table in the middle of the floor and the whole room arranged itself around it without being told to.
House Clairmont along the east wall. Every soldier, groom, cook and stable hand who could invent a reason to be indoors, and a fair number who had not bothered to invent one.
And along the west wall, the guests.
Four noble families had come for the funeral and had somehow still not left, which told Adrien everything about why they were really here. They had their good coats on. Two of them had brought their sons.
Léon Arquenay stood at the front of that group with his weight on one leg and a cup of somebody else’s wine in his hand.
He was twenty, broad through the shoulders in the way you get from being taught by people who are paid well, and he had the sort of face that arranges itself into politeness the moment an adult looks at it.
"Lady Clairmont." He gave Evelyne a bow that was two degrees too deep. "My father sends his regard. He wanted me to say that whatever the plate says today, our house holds no ill feeling toward yours."
"That’s generous of him."
"It’s only the truth. Nobody chooses what they’re born with." He turned his head toward Adrien and let the smile widen a little. "And nobody blames a man for a thing he can’t help."
’Oh, he’s a dickhead.’
Ariane made a sound behind him like a kettle deciding whether to boil.
"Ignore him," Garrick said, low.
"I’d love to."
Adrien did not answer any of it, which was easier than everybody seemed to expect, and stood where the clerk pointed.
His mother had positioned herself where she could see his face. She had both hands folded in front of her, and she had been holding them like that since breakfast, and every time somebody moved near the door her head went round.
She had not slept again. That made two nights.
’She thinks this is going to break me in front of the entire county.’
The assessor stepped up to the table.
"By the Crown’s authority, and under the standing law of succession, the seat of House Clairmont is assessed today." He said it like a man reading a shipping manifest. "The plate records name, age, Path and talent. What it records is entered into the register and stands as fact. There is no second reading."
He looked up.
"Lord Clairmont. Your hand on the stone."
Adrien walked over and put his palm flat on the plate.
It was cold for about a second and then it was not.
Something went up his arm and through his chest, patting him down like a customs officer, and he felt it reach the core he had built two days ago and stop there, interested.
Light came up out of the brass rim and stood in the air over the table where everybody could see it.
[Name: Adrien Clairmont]
[Age: 18]
Nobody reacted. Everybody knew both of those.
Then the third line came.
[Path: Mage]
The hall made a noise.
Not applause. The noise a room makes when forty people inhale at the same time and half of them start talking to their neighbour about it. Along the east wall somebody said "he’s a mage" out loud in a voice that cracked.
Evelyne’s hands came apart.
’A mage. Not Absolute Magus. Just Mage. Why didn’t it show?’
Adrien kept his face exactly where it was and watched the letters hang there.
’The plate is telling this room what it knows how to say. Maybe that’s why.’
Then the fourth line came, and the hall stopped making any noise at all.
[Talent Detected: 1]
[Talent: Absolute Mana Sense | Rank: SSS]
The assessor’s pen stopped moving.
He had been writing steadily through all of it, the way a man writes when he has done this four hundred times, and his hand came off the paper and stayed off it.
"Read that again," he said to his clerk.
"Sir, it says..."
"I know what it says. Read it again."
"Absolute Mana Sense. Rank SSS."
Along the west wall, one of the visiting lords put his cup down on a side table without looking where he was putting it.
An S rank showed up in a family like this maybe twice in a generation. Double S was a story people told about somebody’s cousin in another province.
Adrien had the number from the borrowed memories: eleven living SSS talents on the continent that anybody could name. Eleven, out of every person alive.
Twelve, as of this afternoon.
His mother had gone completely still with one hand over her mouth, and Ariane was staring at the letters in the air like they had personally insulted her.
Then Léon Arquenay laughed.
He did it loudly and on purpose, into the exact middle of that quiet, and every head in the hall turned.
"Mana Sense." He shook his head with a grin. "Forgive me. Forgive me, truly. Sensing mana."
"Lord Arquenay," the assessor said.
"I’m not being unkind. I’m being useful." He raised his cup toward the light in the air. "My hounds can smell a boar at four hundred paces. I don’t hand them a house for it. That’s a scout’s trick. It’s what you give the man who walks in front of the column, and you give it to him because he’s expendable."
Two of the visiting sons laughed with him. One of the fathers did not, and looked at his shoes.
"So congratulations, Lord Clairmont. SSS." Léon spread his hands. "You’ll be the best in the world at knowing exactly what’s about to kill you."
The laugh went around the west wall and came back.
Adrien stood with his palm still on the stone and said nothing at all.
’So it read one.’
He turned it over while the noise happened around him.
’One out of three, and it got the Path wrong on top of that. Not wrong exactly. It gave the nearest thing it had.’
The memories were clear on this. SSS talents existed. Rare, famous, gossiped about, but this kingdom had records of them going back centuries, and the plate obviously knew how to write those letters.
Unique Paths had no records at all. Not one, anywhere in eighteen years of a noble education.
’So the plate has never had to describe one. It found a mage-shaped thing and wrote Mage, because Mage is the closest word it owns.’
He took his hand off the stone.
’And the two it missed are the two that would have emptied this room.’
’Which suits me.’
He looked at Léon Arquenay laughing into his cup, and at the visiting lords already deciding what they were going to say about this over dinner, and at every person along that west wall who had come here to watch a boy fail and was now going home with a story about a useless talent instead.
’Let them keep that version. It buys me time to grow, and I need every day of it, because this house still has enemies and none of them have gone anywhere.’
"Enough." The assessor’s voice cut across the hall, and it turned out he could raise it after all. "This is a Crown proceeding, my lord, and you will conduct yourself accordingly or you will conduct yourself outside."
Léon inclined his head with the smile still on.
The assessor finished writing. Then he did something nobody expected, which was to fold the page, set it aside, and copy the whole entry out a second time on fresh paper.
"One for the county register," he said, to nobody in particular. "One for the capital."
He turned and gave Adrien a bow. Small, and correct, and about four inches deeper than the one he had given anybody else in that hall.
"House Clairmont holds its seat. Recorded and standing."
The east wall went off like a dropped crate.
The soldiers started it, because soldiers always start it, and then the grooms joined in and then the kitchen, and somebody at the back was banging the flat of his hand against a shield. They had a lord again. Two days ago they had a boy in a bed and a name in the mud, and now they had a lord who had woken up, and if the nobles wanted to laugh about which talent he had woken, the nobles could laugh on their own land.
Adrien watched the west wall gather itself and leave.
They went politely. They said the right things to his mother on the way past. And every one of them left resigned, because they had all come here to watch a house fall over and the house had inconveniently stayed up.
Léon Arquenay was last out. He stopped level with Adrien and lowered his voice to something almost friendly.
"Enjoy today."
"I intend to."
"Do. It’s the one you get." He tipped what was left of the wine back and put the cup down on the table beside the plate. "Nobody’s afraid of a man who can feel things."
Then he went, and the doors closed, and the hall belonged to the Clairmonts again.
Evelyne got to him before he had turned all the way round and took his face in both hands.
"You woke it." She was not crying, which took visible work. "When? How? You were in bed, I put you in that bed myself, and..."
"Two nights ago. In the training hall."
"Two nights ago, and you said nothing?"
"I said I’d wake it. You had enough to carry without holding my hand about it too."
His mother made a sound somewhere between a laugh and something else and pulled his head down against her shoulder, which hurt his neck and which he allowed.
Over her shoulder, Ariane had her arms folded again, and her jaw was doing something complicated.
"SSS," she said.
"Apparently."
"You could have told me." Her arms came tighter. "I’ve been sick about this for two days. Actually sick. I couldn’t eat yesterday and I told everyone it was the smoke from the kitchen."
"Sorry."
"You’re not."
"I’m a bit sorry. But just a bit."
She looked at him for a while, and whatever she had been holding since the funeral came off her shoulders, and she was fifteen again for about a second and a half before she got it back under control.
"Fine," Ariane said. "Fine. You’re a mage. Congratulations, my lord, the house is saved, everybody go back to work."
"Ariane."
"What?"
Adrien picked Léon Arquenay’s abandoned cup off the table and turned it upside down on the wood.
"Teach me a spell."
...
AN: Add the novel to collections and send support if like it ;)