The old practice yard was empty at midnight, the way it always was.
The round scar where the iron post had stood was still there, a circle of bare stone in the weeds.
Aren stood beside it with a stick in his hand, because he did not trust himself with a sword yet, and tried to remember exactly how Vivienne Ashgrave moved.
He had watched her use her technique three times.
Once against the wolves, once against the second pack, once against Gravemaw.
He had been carrying packs or lying in the moss each time, but he had been watching, the way he used to watch the charts in his old life: not the big movements, but the small ones underneath.
The way she turned her wrist before she swept her blade down.
The way she breathed out, slowly, just before the crescents appeared.
The way her weight shifted to her back foot, as if she were pulling the moonlight toward her instead of pushing it out.
He tried it.
Wrist, breath, weight.
Nothing happened.
He tried it again, and again, twenty times, fifty times, until his arm ached and his ribs started to complain.
The stick swished through the cold air and did nothing at all.
He was beginning to think the System had given him something he would never be able to touch.
On the sixtieth try, something left the end of the stick.
It was very small, a thin curve of light no longer than his finger, like the edge of a fingernail.
It was silver, exactly the color of the blades that had filled the clearing in the Training Rift.
It drifted forward, slow and lazy, and touched the bare stone where the iron post had once stood.
It did not bounce off.
It did not leave a thin white mark.
It sank into the stone without a sound, and kept going.
Aren stared.
Where the little crescent had touched, there was now a cut in the ground, as long as his arm and so deep he could not see the bottom of it in the dark.
The edges were perfectly smooth.
It looked like someone had pressed a hot knife into butter.
He had seen Vivienne throw a hundred of those blades at Gravemaw, and every one of them had barely scratched its plates.
He had made one, by accident, smaller than his finger and as slow as a falling leaf, and it had cut through solid rock like it was not there.
A grade C technique, and the same technique three grades higher.
He had read the numbers in the System’s window.
He had not truly understood them until now.
He dropped the stick and stood very still, breathing hard, and looked up at the dark windows of the dormitory.
Nobody was there.
Nobody had seen.
But his heart was hammering anyway.
If anyone in this Academy saw a silver crescent appear in the hand of the Servant from Class D, it would take them about one second to understand where it had come from.
And if they saw what it could do, they would not stop asking questions until they had cut him open to find the answer.
[Crescent Moon Blade (Grade S).
Mastery: 0% → 2%.]
[Warning: Host cannot control output at current mastery.]
Two percent, after an hour, and he could not even choose how strong it would be.
Every percent would have to be earned in the dark, alone, far from anyone, where nobody could ever see the light.
He kicked loose dirt and weeds over the cut in the stone until it was hidden.
Then he went to the far corner of the yard, away from the dormitory walls, picked up the stick, and kept going until the bells rang for dawn.
“Look who’s back,” said a boy named Fenwick, who had an F-grade Lamplighter class and a voice like a squeaky door.
“The great hero of the Training Rift.
I heard you slept through the whole thing.”
“I heard he fainted before the monster even came out,” said someone else.
“I heard Lady Ashgrave had to step over him.”
They laughed.
Aren laughed too, a little, rubbing the back of his neck as if he was embarrassed, and took his seat in the back corner.
It was the safest thing to do.
People who laughed at him were people who were not looking at him closely.
Across the room, Mira glared at Fenwick until he found something interesting to look at on his desk.
Professor Crane came in exactly on time, as he always did.
He put his scroll on the desk, looked around the room, and began the lesson on the basic ranks of the Awakened.
He spoke in the same thin, bored voice as always.
“Every Awakened begins at Rank F,” Crane said.
“Your class decides how high you may climb.
It does not decide how fast.
You gain levels by absorbing the cores of monsters.
At Level 10, your class will show you its Trial.
Common classes ask for simple things.
A stronger core, usually.” He looked around the room without much hope.
“Rare classes ask for rarer things.
Some of you will never see Level 10.
Those who do will learn what their class demands, and most of them will not like the answer.”
Aren wrote it all down carefully, as if he were hearing it for the first time.
He did not look at the blue window floating at the edge of his vision, where Level 4 sat waiting.
At the end of the lesson, Crane collected his scroll and walked to the door.
He stopped there for a moment, as if he had forgotten something.
“Servant,” he said, without turning around.
“The library needs those old ledgers moved again.
Third floor.
After lunch.”
“Yes, Professor.”
Crane left.
Aren sat there for a while after the others had gone, wondering if that had meant anything at all.
The third floor of the library was empty except for her.
Vivienne Ashgrave sat at the same table by the window where he had seen her before.
The alchemy ledger was gone.
In its place were three thick books on Rift monsters, and a map of the Training Rift with a small circle drawn in ink near the clearing by the stream.
Her silver hair was tied back in a simple braid, and she wore the plain white uniform of the Academy instead of her armor.
She looked tired.
There was a thin new scar on her forearm where the healer had closed her cut.
Aren put the stack of ledgers on the shelf and turned to leave.
“You,” she said.
He stopped.
She had not looked up from her map.
“You were on my team,” she said.
“You were thrown into the trees on the east side of the clearing.
You were found there, twenty paces from the edge.” She tapped the small circle on her map with one finger.
“The man I saw came from the east side of the clearing.”
Aren said nothing.
He stood very still, the way he had learned to stand in front of angry investors.
“Did you see him?” Vivienne asked.
Now she looked up.
Her grey eyes were cold and clear, and they went straight to his face and stayed there.
He had thought about this question all night.
He had decided that the best lie was the one closest to the truth.
“I saw the inside of my own eyelids, my lady,” he said.
“A tree hit me in the face.
Then another tree hit me in the ribs.
I think a third one hit me somewhere else, but I wasn’t really paying attention by then.”
She did not smile.
“You’re making jokes.”
“I’m a servant with a combat aptitude of zero.
Jokes are most of what I have.”
“You’re not afraid of me,” she said.
She said it slowly, the way someone reads out a strange result in an experiment.
Aren realized she had been thinking about it since the morning in the east garden, when he had handed back her pendant and smiled.
“Should I be?” he asked.
“Everyone else is.” She closed her map.
“Every commoner in this Academy steps out of my way in the hall.
Half of the nobles do too.
After what I did to you at the trial, you should be terrified of me.
You should look at the floor when I walk past.
You should have left this Academy the day your scholarship was taken.” She stood up.
She was almost as tall as he was.
“Why haven’t you?”
“I don’t have anywhere better to go.”
“Then find somewhere.” Her voice was very quiet.
“Go back to the lower city.
Take your sister and leave Highcrest.
Find a quiet job somewhere far away, and live a small, quiet life.” She looked at him.
“It would be better.
For both of us.”
Something in the way she said both of us did not fit.
It did not sound like a threat.
For one strange second, it sounded like a request.
Then it was gone, and she was the heir of House Ashgrave again, picking up her books.
“You’re very kind to worry about me, my lady,” Aren said.
Her eyes went hard.
“I am not worried about you.”
“Of course not.”
[Vivienne Ashgrave.
Hostility: 97% → 98%.]
She walked past him toward the stairs without another word.
He listened to her footsteps go down, slow and even, until they were gone.
He was halfway down the stairs himself when he heard her voice again, from the landing below.
She was talking to someone.
A man’s voice answered, older and very polite.
Aren stopped on the step and leaned back against the wall where the curve of the staircase hid him.
“You reached Level 9 in a single fight, my lady,” the man said.
“You will reach Level 10 within the week.
Your father has already prepared for your Trial.”
“Prepared how, Corwin?”
“A Rank E beast, captured alive in the eastern hills.
It will be brought to the Ashgrave estate and released in the courtyard on the night of the full moon.
Our knights will stand at the walls.
You will face it alone, exactly as your class requires, and nothing can go wrong.”
“No,” Vivienne said.
“My lady…”
“My Trial says defeat alone an enemy of higher rank, beneath the moon.” Her voice was sharp.
“It does not say defeat a chained animal in my father’s garden while forty knights watch.” There was a pause.
“They are saying a ghost with a rag over his face saved my life.
Half the Academy believes I could not have killed that monster by myself.
If my father arranges my Trial too, they will say every step I have ever taken was carried by someone else.”
“It is only rumors, my lady.”
“Then I will end them.
The Old Quarry Rift, outside the north gate.
It is rated E.
Its guardian is Rank E.” Another pause.
“The moon will be full on Saturday night.”
The man’s voice changed.
“The Old Quarry is a real Rift, my lady.
Not a training ground.
Students are forbidden to enter it without an escort, and your father would never…”
“My father does not need to know until it is done.”
“Then at least take knights to wait at the entrance.”
“Alone, Corwin.
That is the whole point.”
Footsteps, quick and light, going down.
Then heavier ones, slower, following her.
Aren stayed against the wall of the empty staircase.
A real Rift, full of monsters that would not wait politely for her to reach the guardian.
A girl who was strong and proud and very tired, who had almost died four days ago, and who would walk in alone because her own class demanded it.
If anyone helped her in the fight, her Trial would fail.
If nobody helped her before it, she might not live long enough to reach the fight at all.
He could not stand beside her.
He could only clear the road.
He started to smile on the cold stone stairs, the smile he used to wear on the trading floor when the whole market was moving one way and he had just seen the opening nobody else had noticed.
Saturday night.
Full moon.
He would need a new rag.