Three years passed the way training years do — slowly in the living of them, and all at once in memory.
Kaelen was twelve now.
Taller.
Steadier.
The cold root inside him still rose sometimes, late at night or in a crowded room, but it came up smaller each time, easier to shape into something he could carry instead of something that carried him.
Wren was sixteen, and had stopped being merely good at statecraft somewhere along the way — she was, by Master Hale’s own grudging admission, better read on precedent law than he was.
The letter that changed everything arrived under royal seal, addressed to Corwin personally, in a hand Kaelen recognized immediately.
The King hadn’t forgotten him.
“Aurelian Academy,” Corwin said, reading it aloud at the supper table.
“Crown-founded.
Crown-protected.
Every noble house of consequence sends its children through those gates by fourteen, and His Majesty is personally extending the invitation three years early.” He set the letter down and looked at his son for a long moment.
“He’s not being generous, Kaelen.
He’s being clever.
The Guild has no authority inside those walls.
None.
Whatever’s happening in you stays under crown protection the moment you cross that gate — and the Guild knows it.”
“So he’s protecting me,” Kaelen said slowly, “by making sure nobody else gets to.”
“And it’s a good one.
I don’t love handing my son to the capital.
I love the Guild’s patience even less.”
The parchment beneath the seal was blunter than the letter’s opening flourishes suggested — both children accepted, sponsorship royal, attendance not optional.
It read less like an invitation than a summons dressed up in courtesy, and everyone at the table understood the difference perfectly well.
Leaving Ashgrave was harder than either of them expected.
Bram gave Kaelen one final pass in the yard the morning they left — no lecture, no ceremony, just a hard nod and a grip on the shoulder that said everything Bram Ostley had never learned to say out loud.
Yvaine handed him a small, battered journal instead of tea, told him to write down every mistake the academy’s mages made about affinity theory so she could laugh about it later, and hugged him with an awkwardness that made clear she didn’t do it often.
Finn was the hardest goodbye.
“They didn’t even ask a blacksmith’s son,” Finn said, kicking at the courtyard dirt, trying and failing to sound like it didn’t matter.
“S’fine.
Somebody’s got to keep the forge running while you’re off learning to be important.”
“You’re not staying a blacksmith’s son forever,” Kaelen said.
“I mean that.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Finn shoved him, hard, the way he always did when he meant something he wasn’t going to say plainly.
Try not to fall over in front of the whole capital.”
I’ll come back for you, Kaelen thought, watching Finn shrink behind the carriage window.
Whatever this academy turns me into, that part doesn’t change.
Aurelian Academy rose out of the hills north of the capital like something built by people who had never once worried about running out of stone — spires in pale granite, a lake carved improbably into the courtyard’s center, banners from every noble house in Virellon snapping over a gate wide enough to march an army through.
“Well,” Wren said, staring up at it from the carriage window with an expression that mixed dread and delight in roughly equal measure.
“That’s a lot of building for two people who already know how to hold a sword and read a ledger.”
They weren’t given long to admire it.
A steward in Academy blue met their carriage at the gate, checked their names against a list, and delivered the words every new student at Aurelian received on arrival, whether they wanted them or not.
“Orientation and Placement Trials begin at dawn tomorrow,” the steward said.
“Rank determines your house, your instructors, and your dormitory for the year.
I’d advise sleeping well tonight, Lord Veyland.
Lady Veyland.” A brief, professional smile.
“Aurelian doesn’t sort its students gently.”
Kaelen looked past the steward, toward the academy’s lit windows and the hundreds of unfamiliar weathers already humming behind them — new, layered, entirely unlike anything Ashgrave had ever prepared him to read all at once.
Tomorrow, he thought, I find out exactly how much of that old lesson with Yvaine actually held.
Somewhere in one of those windows, though he had no way of knowing it yet, a girl in deep green was reading the same enrollment list the steward carried — and had just found a name on it she’d been quietly hoping to see for three years.