Ravenhold Castle, in the east of Arvendal. Six days before the Aptitude Trial.
The apple tree in the castle garden bore fruit that nobody wanted to eat.
The apples were small and green and so sour that the kitchen maids used them only for vinegar, and every year in autumn the gardener said the tree should finally be cut down and something sensible planted. Every year Emilia Winterhall said he should leave it standing. No one knew why. She could not have explained it herself.
She sat beneath it, on this last morning, on the little stone bench someone had built against the trunk long ago, and watched the frost on the leaves melt in the morning sun. Her breath hung in little white clouds before her face. It was cold, so early in the year, up here in the east. She did not mind. Cold had never bothered her.
She was seventeen. Tomorrow she would travel to Crownhaven, to the Academy, and when she came back, in three years, she would be a battle mage. The first Winterhall in two generations with the sub-element ice. Her father had said it last winter in front of half the court, calmly and smoothly, the way he said everything. My daughter will be the best of her year.
It had not been a hope. It had been an instruction.
Emilia raised her hand and let a thin layer of ice creep across the stone bench, fine and branching like the veins of a leaf. She could do that now without thinking. She could freeze water in the air, shape arrows of ice, raise a wall as thick as a castle gate. For seven years she had practised every day, with the best tutors her father’s gold could buy.
And every time she froze something, she thought for a heartbeat of a fountain.
She did not know why. It was silly. It was seven years ago.
But the fountain was really impressive.
Emilia let the ice melt and stood up.
Ravenhold had never been her home. Not really.
She had been ten when they came here, half a year after the name day. Her father had taken over the castle on behalf of the crown, as the documents put it, for the administration of the traitor’s lands until a worthy heir is determined. No worthy heir had ever been determined. The Winterhalls had stayed.
The castle was old and grey and crooked, with towers that looked as if they would lean against each other in the next storm. The servants who had once served the Ravenmoors had nearly all been dismissed in the first weeks. A few had stayed: the old laundress, a stable hand, the gardener. They did not say much. When Emilia passed them, they lowered their heads, but not fast enough to hide the way they looked at her.
As if she were a guest in a house where someone had died.
Her room was in the west tower, on the second floor. On the first evening, when the maid had gone, Emilia had opened the old chest under the window because she was curious. Inside lay wooden soldiers. A whole regiment, brightly painted, with little swords and banners, carefully wrapped in a cloth. Someone had taken them from the windowsill and packed them away, neatly, piece by piece. A boy had played with them. A boy who had slept in this room before it became hers.
Emilia had packed them all away again. All but one. A little horseman with a black cloak and a silver bird on his shield.
She had kept it. For seven years, at the very back of her sewing box, under the reels of thread, where the maid never looked.
She did not know why either.
There were people at the castle gate again.
They came every month, on the first day. Farmers from the villages, traders, a widow with three children. They waited for the duke to present their petitions, as they had once done with the other duke. Every month the steward made them wait until noon, and then he stepped out before the gate and said His Grace was occupied, they should apply to the administration in writing.
Most of them could not write.
Emilia stopped in the shadow of the gate tower and watched. At the very front stood an old man with a bent back and a rope in his hand, at the end of which a grey goat was tugging. She knew him. He had come every month for seven years. He always wanted the same thing: for someone to talk to his neighbour, whose goats kept getting over the fence and eating his cabbages.
No one ever talked to his neighbour.
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Three years ago Emilia had tried it herself, once. She had ridden into the village in secret, found the neighbour and told him, very politely and very firmly, that he should mend his fence, in the duke’s name. The neighbour had stared at her as if she had grown a second head. Then he had mended the fence. Get faster updates on novelping . com.
Her father had found out. He had said nothing. He had only looked at her, over the edge of his letter, at supper. And then said: A Winterhall does not concern herself with goats.
The fence had been broken again by the next spring.
The old man at the gate noticed her. He took off his cap and sketched a bow. Then he said something, more to himself than to her, and perhaps he thought she did not hear it.
“The old duke listened. He listened every month.”
Emilia turned and walked away before he could see her face change.
There was a part of the castle she was not allowed into.
The North Tower. The oldest and thickest of the towers, right at the back, where the castle wall met the rock. Its windows were barred, always had been, the gardener had said, since the old wars. Once it had been a storehouse, for grain and weapons. Now the iron-bound door at the foot of the tower was always locked, and her father wore the key on a chain around his neck.
Only he went in. He and two or three men he had brought from Winterhall who spoke to no one. And the man with the scar.
He was not often at Ravenhold. A few times a year, perhaps. He always came at night, and he always left before dawn, and in seven years he had hardly changed. Tall, dressed in dark clothes, a scar across his nose. Emilia had never heard him speak. She did not even know his name. When she asked her father, he said the man was a messenger of the crown.
Emilia had never asked further.
But she remembered a courtyard in the moonlight. A wet, torn surcoat with a silver raven on it, which this man had handed to her father three nights after the name day. And how her father had afterwards looked up at her window.
She had never forgotten it. Never.
Once, in the second winter, she had woken in the night. She did not know from what. It had been quiet in the castle, no wind, no sound. She had gone to the window, and from there she could see the North Tower, black against the starry sky.
Behind one of the barred windows, right at the top, something had flared.
Only briefly. A single heartbeat. A light, but not candlelight, not yellow and warm. It had been white. White and bluish, so glaring that for a moment it had blinded her. And through the closed window of her room she had smelled something. Sharp and clean and strange.
Like the air after a thunderstorm.
The next morning she had asked the gardener whether there had been a storm in the night. He had looked at her for a long time. Then he had said: No, young mistress. It was a clear night. And had gone off with his wheelbarrow, faster than usual.
She had never seen the light again. She had probably only imagined it. A dream. A child who thought too much.
That, at least, was what she told herself. For five years now.
Her father called her into his study in the evening.
He sat behind the desk that had once belonged to another duke. The candles were burning. A letter lay before him, as always. In seven years Duke Gerald Winterhall had gained hardly a single grey hair, and his face was as smooth and motionless as it had been at the banquet, as if time had not dared to touch it.
Her mother stood at the window, upright as a broomstick.
“Sit down.”
Emilia sat down.
“You will leave tomorrow at sunrise. The carriage is ready. Two guards will accompany you as far as Crownhaven. There you will live in the upper-class residence, as is fitting.” Her father did not look up from his letter. “Princess Rosalind is entering the same year. You will be on good terms with her.”
“Yes, Father.”
“The crown prince is in his second year. You will be courteous to him. No more.” Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
“Yes, Father.”
“You will pass the trial as the best. You will hold first place in the Rankings in your first year. You will not associate with commoners.” He laid the letter aside and for the first time raised his eyes. They were pale and cool as water under ice. “And you will not forget who you are.”
“I’m a Winterhall,” said Emilia.
“And?”
She hesitated for only the tiniest moment.
“I don’t need help.”
Her father nodded. Satisfied, as far as one could tell with him. At the window her mother did not move.
Emilia sat there, hands folded in her lap, and looked at the chain around her father’s neck. At the iron key that hung from it, half hidden under his collar.
Ask him, she thought. Ask him what’s in the North Tower. Ask him who the man with the scar is. Ask him why he looked up at my window that night.
She did not ask.
“May I go, Father?”
“Go.”
They left at first light.
The carriage rolled over the drawbridge, through the gate where no petitioners stood any more, and down the winding road into the valley. Emilia sat at the window, wrapped in a white travelling cloak, and looked back.
Ravenhold lay grey and crooked on its rock, in the early mist, its towers leaning against each other like old men. She saw the west tower, where her room was. The garden with the apple tree, whose crown just showed above the wall.
And the North Tower. Black and thick and silent, with its barred windows.
She looked up at the topmost window. As she had done a thousand times in the last five years, without admitting it to herself.
It was dark. Of course it was dark.
But for a heartbeat, just as the carriage rounded the bend and the tower vanished behind the trees, Emilia thought she saw a hand. A hand closing around one of the bars.
Then the trees were in the way, and the tower was gone.
Emilia leaned back into the cushions. Her heart was beating fast. She laid her hand on the little pouch at her belt in which she kept her needles and threads. Inside it, at the very bottom, she felt the outline of a small wooden horseman with a silver bird on his shield.
You imagined it, she told herself. Just like the light. Just like everything else.
She closed her eyes.
The carriage rolled west, towards Crownhaven, on a different road from a young man from Eastreach who at that same hour, far to the south, was walking behind a wool wagon with his hand on his sword, listening to a boy in a battered green hat talk about a cow.
Neither of them knew of the other.
Not yet.