For one week, Aren did nothing at all.
He did not go to the Old Quarry.
He did not wrap his face in bandages.
He did not climb out of his window at midnight or crawl through drains or sell anything to anyone.
He went to Crane’s classes and carried Crane’s ledgers and swept the alchemy wing on his porter shifts, and when his shifts were over, he went to bed like a normal student and lay awake staring at the ceiling.
It was the hardest week he had spent in this life.
Somewhere in the city, men in grey robes were missing a black iron nail.
He did not know who they were or what they looked like.
He did know that the person who had taken it had come out of a cellar on the east bank at dawn, bleeding, a week after the Night of Bells.
If the Choir was looking for that person, they would be looking for someone who was never where he was supposed to be.
So for one week, Aren was exactly where he was supposed to be, all the time.
He spent his evenings with Mira.
He had not planned to.
On the first night, she had come by his room to ask if he wanted to walk down to the docks with her, expecting him to say no, the way he always did now.
He had said yes.
She had looked so surprised that he almost laughed.
They walked down through the lower city in the cold evening air.
They helped her father pull broken planks out of the wreck of his boat at the end of the pier, piling the good wood on one side and the rotten wood on the other.
Her father did not talk much.
He was a big, quiet man with hands like Doran’s, and he looked older than Aren remembered.
But on the third evening, he looked up from the planks and said, “You’re a good lad, Aren.
Always were,” and went back to work, and Mira did not look at either of them for a while.
Afterward, they sat on the edge of the quay and ate fried fish out of paper and watched the river go dark.
Mira told him about her Hearthwarden training, about the instructor who made her hold her dome against falling sandbags until her nose bled.
He told her about Crane’s ledgers and the nervous head librarian.
They argued about whether the cow in Nell’s book would ever do anything.
Mira thought it would turn out to be magic.
Aren thought it would be eaten.
For seven evenings, he was a boy from the lower city sitting by the river with his oldest friend.
It felt like putting on a coat he had forgotten he owned.
On the last evening, Mira bumped his shoulder with hers and said, “This was nice.”
“It was.”
“You should do it more often.
Not work so much.” She smiled at the water.
“I like you better like this.”
He did not tell her that it was only because he was hiding from a cult.
He did not tell her that next week, he would be gone again.
He smiled back, and said nothing, and that was a kind of lie too.
On the seventh day, Doran took out his stitches.
The old butcher bent over the long pink scar with a small pair of scissors and pulled the threads out one by one.
Each one stung a little.
When he was done, he pressed the scar gently along its whole length with two thick fingers, from Aren’s ribs to his hip, and grunted.
“Clean,” he said.
“No rot.
That paste of Mag’s is worth what she charges, for once.” He wiped his hands on his apron.
“Healed doesn’t mean strong, boy.
Take a hard hit there in the next two weeks and it’ll open like a purse.”
“I’ll be careful.”
“You won’t,” Doran said.
“But I said it, so it’s not my fault.”
On the first morning of the new month, Aren went down to the healer house before class.
The nurse met him at the door with a strange look on her face.
She was holding a small grey box, no bigger than her hand, with Nell’s name written on the lid in neat, old-fashioned letters.
“It was on the table in Nell’s room when I came in this morning,” the nurse said.
“The door was locked.
I had the only key.” She held it out to him.
“Is this the medicine?”
Aren opened it.
Grey crystals that smelled faintly of thunder.
Exactly one month’s worth.
“Yes,” he said.
“It’s the medicine.”
The nurse looked at him for a moment longer.
Then she decided not to ask, the way people in the lower city learned to decide not to ask about a lot of things, and went to dissolve the first spoonful in warm water.
That afternoon, he went to the warehouse on the river and paid Rook his first installment.
Two gold crowns and four silver, taken out of his share of the east bank.
Rook counted it without looking up from his book.
When Aren walked back to the Academy, he did the math.
The salt was paid for.
The debt was being paid down.
The east bank was making money.
He had seventeen silver in his pocket, a sword, and a scar.
He was afloat.
Barely.
It was more than he had been a month ago.
“Some of you,” Professor Crane said the next morning, “will never reach Rank D.”
He stood at the front of the basement with his scroll and his bored face, and looked around the room as if he were counting the people he was talking about.
It was a long count.
“For the few who might,” he went on, “you should know what is waiting.
At Rank D, you stop gaining levels.
Levels are for children.
At Rank D, your body begins to change.” He turned a page.
“The old masters called it Tempering.
The skin first.
Then the flesh.
Then the bones, the blood, the marrow, and at the very end, the heart.
Each one is reforged, slowly, by the power of your class.
It is not comfortable.
Some people do not survive it.”
Nobody laughed this time.
“Your class will also give you its second skill when you break through,” Crane said.
“And for the first time, your strength can be measured.
Six numbers.
Strength, agility, endurance, perception, essence, and will.
The alchemist-engineers of the Free Cities built a device to read them.
It is very rare and very expensive.
The Academy owns one.
It is kept in the Headmaster’s tower, and you will not see it unless you earn the right to stand in front of it.”
He rolled up his scroll.
Then he stopped, and said one more thing, without looking at anyone in particular.
“Those who buy their road,” he said, “will find the gate narrower.”
He left.
The basement was quiet for a moment.
Then Fenwick said, very softly, “He means the nobles,” and everyone in Class D understood exactly what he meant.
Aren heard the rest in the corridors that afternoon, the way you heard everything at Highcrest.
Vivienne Ashgrave was already at Rank E, Level 7.
Three weeks after her Trial.
Her family’s merchants were bringing her a fresh E-rank core every few days, the best ones from the Free Cities, cleaned and polished and sent up the hill in a locked box.
Her instructors worked with her from dawn to midnight.
People said she would reach Level 10 before the end of the season, which would make her the fastest student in a hundred years.
Aren was at Level 2.
He had nearly died three times for those two levels.
He thought about that, and then he thought about what Crane had said.
Those who buy their road will find the gate narrower.
Every core that came up the hill in a locked box was making Vivienne stronger.
And every one of them was making her next Trial harder.
She had to know.
Her instructors would have told her.
He wondered what kind of person heard that warning and kept opening the boxes anyway.
The kind, he supposed, who had a father like the Duke of Ashgrave.
The monthly evaluation was held in the great training yard on the last day of the week.
Every student in Class D fought one student from Class A, one at a time, in a circle of white sand, while the rest of the Academy watched from the stands.
It was not meant to be fair.
It was meant to show the commoners where they stood.
Crane read the pairings from his scroll.
When he reached the end of the list, he paused, the way he had paused at the Awakening Ceremony.
“Servant,” he read.
“Against Silver Moon Empress.”
The stands erupted.
Aren walked into the circle of sand.
His left side was aching already, under his shirt, along the long pink scar.
Two weeks, Doran had said.
It had been eight days.
He could not refuse.
A Servant did not refuse a fight with the heir of House Ashgrave.
He could not win.
And he could not take a single hard hit on his left side, or it would open in front of a thousand people, and somebody would ask what had cut a Servant from his ribs to his hip.
Vivienne walked into the circle from the other side.
She did not look at him.
She drew her practice sword, and the instructor dropped his hand.
She came at him like falling water.
He did not try to block.
He did not try to dodge, not really.
He fell.
He let [Street Fighter’s Instinct] show him where each blow was going before it left her shoulder, and he fell away from it, clumsily, like a frightened boy tripping over his own feet.
A cut at his chest, and he stumbled backward and sat down hard in the sand.
A sweep at his legs, and he rolled sideways in a cloud of dust, arms flailing.
A thrust at his left side, and he twisted at the very last moment, and took it on the meat of his right shoulder instead, and cried out louder than it hurt.
The stands were roaring with laughter.
It lasted less than a minute.
At the end of it, he was on his back in the sand with her practice sword resting on his throat, covered in dust, his shoulder throbbing, his scar intact.
It was the hardest fight he had ever fought.
But he had been watching her the whole time.
Not her sword.
Her breath.
And he had seen it, every time.
Just before each strike that would have carried a silver crescent in a real fight, she held her breath for half a second too long.
Not long enough to matter in a duel.
Long enough to matter in a body.
It was a knot, somewhere deep inside her, where the power of her class caught and stuck before it came out.
He had seen that kind of thing before, in companies that had grown too fast on borrowed money, with something rotten at the center that nobody wanted to look at.
They always held, until the moment they had to bear real weight.
When she reaches her next gate, he thought, lying in the sand, that knot is going to stop her cold.
Vivienne lifted her sword from his throat and walked out of the circle without a word.
[Vivienne Ashgrave.
Hostility: 98%.]
Crane passed him on the way out of the yard.
He did not stop walking.
“You fall very well, Servant,” he said.
That was all.
Aren stood in the dust and watched him go, and could not tell if it had been a compliment or a warning.
That night, he went down to Old Mag’s for the first time in a week, with one E-rank core in his pocket to sell.
The prices were coming back up, slowly, the way he had known they would.
She gave him seventy-five silver for it, half again what it had been worth the morning after the Night of Bells.
He was at the door when she caught his sleeve.
“Stone-seller,” she said quietly.
Her one eye was serious.
“Men in grey robes were at the old dye house this morning.
On the east bank.
Asking the children questions.” She let go of his sleeve.
“They wanted to know if anyone saw who came out of the cellar at dawn.”