In the five days before the Awakening Ceremony, the whole first-year class went a little mad.
Aren had seen this before, in another life.
It looked exactly like a market before a big announcement.
Nobody knew what was coming, so everybody bought something to feel better.
Students paid a gold crown for “lucky” focus stones that were just polished river rocks.
They bought special candles, special teas, special prayers from priests who did not seem very special.
A rumor went around that sleeping with a silver coin under your pillow made your class one rank higher, and by the next morning there was not a single silver coin left in the student shop.
Aren had three silver coins and no use for luck.
So he spent them.
He went down to the lower city on his first free afternoon and bought a sack of cheap quartz chips from a stone cutter who used them to fill gaps in walls.
He spent an evening polishing them on the dormitory steps until they shone.
The next morning, he sold them by the east garden as “lower city river stones, the same kind they used in the old days.” He never said they were lucky.
He let the buyers say it for him.
By the end of the second day, he had two gold crowns and four silver in his pocket, and the stone cutter had asked him if he wanted to buy more.
It was not forty crowns.
But it was another week at the healer house, and he walked down the hill that night and paid it himself.
Then he went to the bursar’s office and took the only job they offered to students who had lost their scholarships, which was night porter in the alchemy wing.
It paid six silver a week to carry crates, sweep floors, and stay out of the way.
The alchemy wing was busier than usual that week, because of the tonics.
Every first-year drank a Clearwater tonic on the morning of the Awakening.
It was an old tradition.
The tonic calmed the mind and opened the body, and the Academy’s alchemists brewed one for each student by name.
The vials were kept in a locked cabinet in the back storeroom, sorted in rows, each one labeled in neat handwriting.
A good tonic did not change your class.
But a bad one could make your body fight the crystal, and a fighting body awakened weaker.
On the fourth night, Aren was sweeping the corridor outside that storeroom when he heard voices.
He stopped.
The voices came from behind a half-open door, low and quick.
One of them belonged to Pell, the alchemist’s assistant, a nervous young man who always smelled of burnt herbs.
The other voice was older and smoother.
When Aren leaned his broom against the wall and moved closer, he saw a man in a dark coat with a small silver hawk stitched on the collar.
The hawk was the crest of House Holt.
“It won’t hurt her,” the man in the coat was saying.
“Dullroot just slows the body a little.
She’ll feel tired.
That’s all.”
“If anyone tests the vial…” Pell started.
“Nobody tests the vials.
Nobody has tested the vials in fifty years.” The man in the coat put a small purse on the table.
It clinked.
“Lord Darius is very generous to people who help him.”
Pell looked at the purse for a long time.
Then he picked it up.
“Why does it matter?” Pell asked.
“Holt and Ashgrave.
They’re practically engaged already.”
“Practically isn’t enough.” The man in the coat lowered his voice, but the storeroom had stone walls, and stone carried sound.
“If she awakens an S-rank class, her family will look higher than House Holt.
They’ll look at princes.
If she comes out an A, or a B, she’ll need allies.
She’ll need a husband who can protect her standing.
Lord Darius intends to be that husband.”
Aren stepped back from the door before either of them turned around.
He picked up his broom and kept sweeping, slowly, all the way to the end of the corridor.
His heart was beating harder than he liked.
So that was Darius Holt.
He wanted the girl, so he would break her first, then offer to hold the pieces.
Aren found that it made him angry, which surprised him.
It was not his problem.
Vivienne Ashgrave had framed him for theft, cost him his scholarship, and smiled while it happened.
If her awakening went wrong, a part of him wanted to stand in the Great Hall and watch it go wrong.
But the rest of him was doing the math.
Her awakening was the single biggest growth event in her life.
An S-rank awakening was worth more than a hundred mornings of mana practice.
If the System paid him when she grew because of him, then protecting this awakening was the largest investment he could possibly make.
And if he did nothing, Darius would cripple her the night before it happened.
In his old life, Aren had made a lot of money by watching other men commit fraud.
He had made even more by being the only one who knew about it.
He waited two hours, until the alchemy wing was dark and Pell had gone home with his purse.
The storeroom cabinet was locked, but the night porter carried the spare keys for the supply closets, and one of them was old enough to fit the cabinet.
Aren pushed it hard and turned it slowly.
The lock clicked open.
The vials stood in neat rows in the lamplight.
Ashgrave, Vivienne sat at the front of the first row, as he had known it would.
The liquid inside was clear.
It looked exactly like every other vial in the cabinet.
He uncorked it and smelled it.
Under the clean, cold scent of Clearwater, there was something faint and bitter, like old roots.
He did not know how to brew a tonic.
But he knew how a cabinet like this was sorted.
At the very back of the bottom shelf were the spare vials, brewed without names for students who broke theirs.
He took one, checked that it smelled clean, and copied the label from the Ashgrave vial onto a blank card with a pencil from his pocket.
He tried to match the alchemist’s neat handwriting.
It was not perfect, but it was close, and nobody would look closely at a label on the most stressful morning of the year.
He put the clean vial in the front of the first row.
He put the tampered vial in his coat pocket.
He could have poured it into the drain.
That would have been the safe choice.
But in his old life, he had learned to never throw away proof.
Proof was leverage if it was played well and at the right time.
He was locking the cabinet when he heard footsteps in the corridor.
They were slow, even footsteps, the steps of someone who was not in any hurry because they owned the building.
Aren knew them.
He had heard them on the platform of the Great Hall five days ago.
Professor Crane did late rounds sometimes, when he could not sleep.
Aren blew out his lamp and stepped behind the tall shelves of glassware at the back of the room.
There was barely enough space.
A bottle shifted against his shoulder and he caught it before it fell, his hand shaking.
The door opened.
Lamplight spilled across the floor.
Crane stood in the doorway for a long moment, looking at the room.
If Crane found him here, in the middle of the night, beside the cabinet of tonics, with a vial labeled Ashgrave in his pocket, there would be no trial this time.
There would not even be a speech.
The thief from the lower city would be caught in the act, and everyone would say they had always known.
Crane walked to the cabinet.
He tried the lock.
It held.
Then he turned, glanced once toward the shelves where Aren stood frozen in the dark, and walked out again.
The door closed.
The footsteps faded down the corridor.
Aren stayed behind the shelves until he had counted to five hundred.
Then he left the alchemy wing by the servants’ stairs, with his lamp still unlit and the bitter vial pressed against his ribs.
[Investment recorded.]
[Type: Risk taken on behalf of Anchor.]
[Return pending.
Stored returns: 2.]
He sat on his mattress afterward with the window open, letting the cold air dry the sweat on his neck.
Two stored returns, he thought.
A pendant and a vial.
He had no idea what either was worth, and no way to find out before the ceremony.
He’d held worse positions.
Never one this personal.
On the morning of the Awakening Ceremony, the order of names was posted on the great doors of the hall.
Aren found Mira standing in front of the list with her arms crossed.
They had not spoken since the afternoon behind the library.
She glanced at him when he stopped beside her, then looked back at the doors.
She did not leave.
With Mira, that meant something.
“You look tired,” she said.
“I took a job.
Night porter.”
“Of course you did.” She was quiet for a moment.
“The nurse said you paid this week yourself.”
“I did.”
“With what?”
“River stones.”
Mira turned her head and gave him a long look, the one she had been giving him since they were eight years old, the one that meant I don’t understand you, and I’m not done being angry, but fine.
Then she pointed at the list.
“Look where they put you.”
The list was long.
The heirs of the great houses were at the top, the way they always were.
The minor nobles came after them, then the merchant families, then the scholarship students in a short row at the very bottom.
Mira’s name was third from the end.
Aren’s name was not at the bottom.
It was second.
Right under the very first name on the list, written in the same official hand, as if it had always belonged there.
1.
Vivienne Ashgrave
2.
Aren (no family name)
“That’s not how they do it,” Mira said.
“Commoners always go last.
Always.”
A clerk was standing by the doors with a stack of papers under his arm.
Mira turned to him.
“Why is he second?”
The clerk looked uncomfortable.
“It was a special request.”
“From who?”
He lowered his voice.
“Lady Ashgrave asked that the accused follow her.
She said the Academy should see the difference between the two of them.
Side by side.”
Mira said something under her breath that their old neighbors in the lower city would have been proud of.
Aren did not say anything.
He looked past the doors, up toward the gallery where the heirs were already taking their seats.
Vivienne was there, in her white uniform, with the silver pendant on its chain around her wrist.
She was not talking to anyone.
She was looking down at the list on the doors, and then her eyes moved to him.
She didn’t smile this time.
She just watched him, carefully, like she’d been looking forward to this moment all morning.
Somewhere inside the hall, the bells began to ring.