Crownhaven. The Royal Academy. The first day of lessons.
Ren woke before the bell.
He always woke before the bell. In Fernwick there had been none, only Owen, who kicked the bedpost with his boot an hour before sunrise, and after seven years Ren woke an hour before sunrise whether anyone kicked or not.
Milo was asleep. He lay sprawled across his bed, one leg on the floor, one arm over his face, snoring with the dedication of a man who had made it his life’s work. The letter to Wes lay half finished on the table. Extraordinary had been crossed out three times.
Ren sat down in the window seat and looked out.
The sky above the roofs was still dark, with only a thin grey streak in the east. The training yard lay still. The tiers, the circle, the sand. And in the middle of the sand, alone, a figure with a rake.
Cedric Valemont.
He was not wearing black and red. He wore a plain, pale shirt that did not fit him, and he was raking. Slowly. Clumsily. Like someone who had never held a rake in his life, which was probably the truth. He dragged the tines through the sand in long, crooked lines, stopped, looked at his hands, and raked on.
No one was watching him. No servant. No friends. Only Ren, high up under the roof, in the shadow of the window seat.
He ought to have felt good. He knew he ought to feel good. Cedric had burned Milo’s feather and set a market roof on fire and hurled fire in his face after the fight was over. If anyone deserved a rake, it was him.
Cedric stopped again. He let the rake sink and pressed his palms against his breeches, and Ren saw, even at that distance, how his face twisted as he did.
Blisters. After half an hour.
Ren thought of his own hands, back then, in the first winter behind the hut. Of Owen, who had rubbed grease into the split skin without a word and kicked the bedpost again the next morning.
I’ll show you how to hold a sword, Greaves had said.
The bell struck. Milo shot upright, cried “I’m awake!”, and fell out of bed.
When Ren looked out again, the yard was empty. The sand lay in long, crooked lines. The rake leaned against the barrier.
The common class’s theory hall lay on the ground floor of the west wing and had probably once served as a storeroom. The ceiling was vaulted and low, the windows narrow as arrow slits, and on the walls hung old maps, so faded that you could only guess at the borders of the duchies. Forty-four chairs. Forty-four desks, scratched by generations of bored knives.
Ren sat in the back row. With his back to the wall.
Milo sat beside him, because he always sat beside him. Bea sat in front of Milo, turned round at once and told them that Nora talked in her sleep, and Nora, sitting down beside Bea, explained calmly that Bea kicked in her sleep, and hard, and that she was considering digging a trench round her bed at night.
“With earth?”
“With earth.”
“You wouldn’t.”
Nora only looked at her.
Bea turned to face the front again. “She would,” she muttered to Milo, without turning round.
The door opened, and the hall fell silent.
Silas Merrow came in with a stack of books under his arm so high that he had to rest his chin on it. He let it drop onto the lectern. A cloud of dust rose. He adjusted his spectacles, looked over their rims into the hall, over forty-four faces, and his gaze slid over the back row without stopping. Not even for a heartbeat.
“Good morning.” He leaned his hands on the lectern. “I am Silas Merrow. I teach you the theory of the elements, which means that for three years I will tell you things you consider superfluous, until the day you realise they would have saved your life. Usually it is too late by then.”
Someone in the second row laughed nervously.
“That was not a joke.” Silas smiled kindly. “But you may laugh anyway. It helps.”
He reached for a piece of chalk and turned to the blackboard behind the lectern. In quick, clean strokes he drew four circles. In each he wrote a word. Fire. Water. Earth. Wind.
“Four elements. You know that. Every child in Arvendal who has ever shaken a spark from their fingers knows that.” From each circle he drew a line outwards. “What not every child knows: every element has a second form. A deeper one. We call them sub-elements, which is a dreadfully dull word for something that can change the world.”
He wrote at the end of the lines, one after another.
Water – ice.
Earth – metal.
Wind – sound.
At the end of the fourth line, the line that came from Fire, he wrote nothing. He set the chalk to it, paused, and left it empty.
Ren felt something tighten in his chest.
“A sub-element,” Silas went on, as if he had noticed nothing, “is not a stronger element. It is a different one. Ice is not simply cold water. Whoever masters ice masters the stillness in water, the moment it stops moving. Whoever masters metal feels the veins in the earth, what sleeps within it. And whoever masters sound …” He turned back to the hall and smiled faintly. “Well. They listen to you, whether you want them to or not.”
Bea raised her hand. She did not wait to be called on.
“And fire?”
“What about fire, Quinn?”
“You didn’t write anything.”
“Correct.” Silas laid the chalk on the lectern. “Well observed. Which of you knows why?”
It went quiet. Ren looked at his desk. At a notch in the wood that someone had carved many years ago, two letters and a lopsided heart.
“Harlow.”
He looked up.
Silas was looking at him. For the first time since Ren had arrived in Crownhaven, he was really looking at him, directly, over the rim of his spectacles, calmly and without any sign of recognition. A master calling on a student. Nothing more.
“You are fire. Fifth in the Rankings. You ought to know.”
Forty-four heads turned to the back.
Ren swallowed. He felt Milo beside him staring at him. He felt Nora, who had half turned round, with that appraising look.
“Because nobody masters it any more,” he said. His voice sounded calmer than he felt. “Fire has a sub-element. Lightning. But only one house ever reached it. And that house no longer exists.”
“Which house?”
Ren looked at him. Silas looked back. And for a breath, for a single breath, there was something behind the lenses of his spectacles. Something hard. Something that said: Say it. Say it the way everyone here would say it. Exactly like that.
“Ravenmoor.” Ren heard his own voice as if from far away. “The House of the Traitor.”
He did not know how he got the words out. They scraped in his throat like shards of glass.
In the hall someone whispered. A girl in the third row made the sign against misfortune, two fingers to the forehead, the way the old folk in Fernwick did when they spoke of the dead.
“Correct.” Silas nodded. “And wrong.”
He picked up the chalk again and turned it between his fingers.
“Correct is that the House of Ravenmoor is extinct. Correct is that no one in Arvendal has wielded lightning for seven years. Wrong is the assumption that you therefore know why fire has only one sub-element and why only that house ever reached it.” He looked out over the hall, over all their heads. “The truth is: no one knows. Not I. Not the Rector. Not the scholars in the Royal Library, who have been arguing about it for three hundred years. We know that it was so. We do not know why. And if anyone at this Academy tells you otherwise, they are lying or they want to sell you something.”
He turned back to the board and wrote, at the end of the empty line, a single mark.
A question mark.
“Remember that,” he said, with his back to the hall. “It is the most important lesson I will give you in these three years. The most dangerous things are not the ones nobody knows. They are the ones everybody believes they know.”
Then he turned round, clapped his hands so that the chalk dust flew, and said: “And now, for everyone who fell asleep at the word sub-element: wake up. We start right at the beginning. With mana. What it is, where it comes from, and why in twenty years you will all have headaches if you don’t listen now.” Get faster updates on novelping . com.
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He did not look at Ren again. Not all morning.
But Ren had seen the board. The empty line. The question mark.
And he knew it was not there for the others.
“Ravenmoor,” Milo whispered as they left the hall. He looked round as if someone might be listening, and lowered his voice even further. “You know, my grandfather always said they weren’t traitors at all. Only at home, of course. With the shutters closed.”
Ren did not stop. He walked on along the corridor with even steps.
“Did he?”
“Mhm. He said he saw the old duke once, at the market in Harlby, when he was young. He said anyone who talks that kindly to farmers doesn’t betray a king.” Milo shrugged. “But my grandfather also said cows can predict the weather. So.”
“Can they?”
“No. I tried.”
Ren said nothing. He thought of an old man at a market in Harlby whom he had never met, who many years ago had seen his grandfather and remembered how kind he had been.
So they did exist. The people who remembered.
They just closed the shutters before they did.
Combat lessons took place in the afternoon, on the yard Cedric had raked that morning. The lines in the sand could still be seen, crooked and uneven, and as the sixty-four students of the first year walked across the yard, they were trampled under their boots.
The upper class stood on one side of the circle. The common class on the other. No one had ordered it. It was simply so.
Ren saw them without looking. Rosalind in grey, with the little book under her arm that she apparently took everywhere. Julian Thorne, leaning on the barrier as if he had only happened to pass by and was still deciding whether to stay. Cedric, right at the edge, his hands wrapped in strips of linen, his face rigid as a mask.
And Emilia Winterhall, in the middle, upright, her white hair tied back with the silver ribbon, the practice sword loose in her hand.
She did not look over at him. With great care.
Greaves came with a cup in his hand, as always. He set it on a post by the barrier, regarded the two groups, one left, one right, with a little trench of air between them, and snorted.
“How pretty.” He pulled a face. “Like a farmyard. The sheep here, the goats there.”
No one laughed. He had not expected them to.
“In my circle there is no upper class and no common class. There are only two kinds of people. Those who are standing and those who are lying down.” He reached into the pocket of his leather jerkin and pulled out a crumpled list. “I’ll pair you up. New every month. Sometimes by the Rankings, sometimes by lot, sometimes however I please. Today by the Rankings, so nobody can say they didn’t get a worthy opponent. The first against the fifth. The second against the seventh.” He looked up. “And so on. Anyone not satisfied with their opponent can complain to me. I listen to every complaint. In the circle.”
Ren heard Milo beside him say oh no, very quietly.
He did not look over at Emilia. He did not need to. He felt her raise her head.
“Winterhall. Harlow.” Greaves nodded at the circle. “You start. So the others can see how it’s supposed to look. Blades first, no elements. Then with. And anyone who seriously hurts someone in my circle …” His gaze wandered to Cedric. To the linen strips. “… rakes. Ask Valemont how much fun it is.”
They stood facing each other in the middle of the circle, on the trampled sand.
Up close she was smaller than he remembered. Half a head shorter than him, slender, shoulders straight. But she did not stand like someone who was small. She stood like someone used to others looking up to her.
Her eyes were grey-blue. Like water under a thin skin of ice.
He had thought that back then, at ten, at the fountain. He had forgotten it. He had believed he had forgotten it.
“Harlow.”
“Lady Winterhall.”
“You cleaned your boots.” She glanced down at him, briefly, appraisingly. “I am impressed.”
“Someone gave me some advice.”
“A clever someone.”
“An impudent someone.”
Her eyebrow rose, just the tiniest bit. Ren saw her mouth move, as if it wanted to smile and she had strictly forbidden it to.
“Begin,” said Greaves.
She attacked before the word had quite faded.
Ren had expected it. He had seen her yesterday against Julian Thorne, for two breaths, and he had seen how she stood before she moved: weight on the front foot, shoulders still. He raised his blade and caught the first blow, high, and the second, low, and stepped aside as the third came.
She was fast. Faster than Cedric. Much faster. But that was not what surprised him.
She was good.
Not good like the noblemen’s sons who had had an expensive fencing master and made pretty, clean figures that were no use in a real fight. Good like someone who had practised. For a long time. Alone. Her strokes were short and hard and had no flourishes, and she changed direction without her shoulders giving it away first. He had to pay attention. He actually had to pay attention.
He caught a thrust aimed at his ribs and turned her blade aside. For a breath they stood close together, blade to blade.
“Who taught you that?” he asked. He was not even out of breath. Nor was she.
“Nobody.”
“Nobody teaches anyone that.”
“Exactly.” She shoved him back, with more strength than he would have credited her with. “I watched. My father’s guards. For years. From the window.” She attacked again. “He considers it unbecoming. A lady with a sword.”
“And you?”
“I consider it useful.”
Her blade came from above. He caught it. It came from the left. He dodged. He saw her frown. He saw that something did not please her, and it took him a moment to understand what.
He was not attacking.
He was defending. He dodged. He caught. He stood there as he had stood against Cedric, calm, waiting, and let her come.
“You’re not striking back.” She sounded annoyed.
“I’m waiting.”
“For what?”
“For you to get bored.”
Something flashed in her eyes. She stepped back, one pace, two, and lowered her blade.
“Fine.” Her voice grew quiet. “Then another way.”
“Elements,” Greaves called from the edge.
The air turned cold.
Not slowly. All at once, the way it does when you open a door in winter. Ren saw his own breath, white, in front of his face. He saw a fine, glittering hoarfrost spread across the sand at Emilia’s feet, like lace, like cobwebs, drawing a circle around her and then, without warning, shooting towards him.
He jumped. The frost ran beneath him and turned to ice where he had stood, a smooth, mirror-like surface on which he would have slipped like a calf on a frozen pond.
He landed beside it. He let the fire come.
Not much. Only as much as a fifth was allowed to have. It rose from his chest into his hand, warm and patient, and he did not send it at her. He sent it into the ground. A flat, broad wave of heat that ran across the sand, and where it met the ice it hissed and steamed, and a white cloud rose between them. Find the original chapter at g.com.
He heard her coming at him through the steam. He did not hear it with his ears. He felt it.
Her blade came out of the mist, low, at his knees. He caught it. The second, high, at his head. He caught it. The third –
The third was no sword.
It was a lance of ice, as long as his arm, slender and sharp as a needle, and it came from the side, out of the mist, faster than he could see it, and he knew his sword would not get there in time. He knew it with the cold, clear certainty with which you know in a dream that you are falling.
And in that moment the other thing woke.
It did not come from his chest. It came from deeper. From the place beneath the fire where it had slept since Fernwick, under the leather bracer, under the scars, and it did not come slowly and patiently like the fire. It came like the crack of a whip. It shot down his arm, into his fingers, into the blade, and for a heartbeat he felt the air around him begin to crackle, felt the hairs on his arms stand up, felt the world grow slower and sharper, as it had back then, with the orc, in the pasture …
No.
He dropped the sword.
He simply let it go, in the middle of the movement, and snatched his left arm to his chest, and the crackle died in his fingers before it could become a spark. He felt it recede. Reluctantly. Burning. Like a dog yanked back on its leash.
The ice lance did not hit him.
It stopped. A hand’s breadth from his throat, in the air, quivering, so close that he felt the cold on his skin. Then it fell apart into a thousand little glittering splinters that trickled tinkling into the sand.
The mist cleared.
Emilia stood in front of him. Her hand still raised, the hand with which she had held the lance. Her face was pale.
“You stopped,” she said.
Ren did not answer. He breathed. In. Out. In. His arm burned as if someone had pushed glowing coals under the leather bracer. He held it pressed to his chest and forced himself to loosen his fingers, one after another.
“Left the circle,” said Greaves from the edge. His voice was strangely flat. “Harlow drops his weapon. Winterhall wins.”
On the upper-class side someone clapped. A few others joined in. Ren did not hear Cedric’s voice among them, but he saw Cedric standing at the edge, his bandaged hands balled into fists, smiling.
Emilia did not clap. She did not turn round. She stood in front of him, looking at him.
“You stopped,” she repeated, more quietly. “The lance. You would not have caught it. You knew that. And then you stopped.” Her brow was furrowed, as at the market, as yesterday when his name had been on the board, the way you look at a riddle you cannot solve. “I would have stopped it. I would not have hurt you. But you could not have known that.”
“I hoped so.”
“You dropped your sword.”
“It was heavy.”
She stared at him. For a heartbeat he thought she would hit him. Then he saw her gaze move downwards. To his left arm. To the hand he held pressed to his chest.
“Are you hurt?”
“No.”
“Don’t lie.”
“An old injury.” He let the arm drop. Slowly. It took everything he had to keep his face calm as he did. “It acts up sometimes. When it turns cold.”
Emilia looked at the arm. Then at the ice that still lay in small, melting patches on the sand. Then back at his face.
He did not know what she saw. He only knew that she looked for a very long time.
“Tomorrow,” she decided at last. “Or next week. Whenever Greaves wants. Then again.” She picked her practice sword up from the ground; it must have fallen from her hand at some point in the mist without his noticing. “And then you don’t stop, Harlow. I don’t want to win because someone stops.”
She turned and walked out of the circle, back to the upper-class side, without looking round again.
“That was –” Milo began, when Ren was standing beside him.
“I know.”
“No, really, that was –”
“I know, Milo.”
Milo shut his mouth. He looked at Ren sideways, and then he looked at his arm, and then he looked away and said nothing more, which in Milo was so unusual that it sounded louder than any word.
Nora said nothing either. But Ren felt her gaze.
He did not look back. He looked across the circle, where Greaves was just calling Arvendal, Callan, and where Rosalind and Nora were taking their places opposite each other. Rosalind smiled politely, like someone waiting for her partner at a dance. Nora did not smile. She walked past Ren into the circle, and her gaze brushed him once more.
Rosalind had given her book to a maid. Before she stepped into the circle, she turned her head. Only a little. She did not look at Ren. She looked at Emilia, who stood at the edge with her arms folded, still staring at the spot in the sand where the ice had melted.
Then Rosalind looked at Ren’s left arm.
It lasted no longer than a blink. Then she smiled at Nora and raised her sword, and Ren was not sure whether he had only imagined it.
At the post by the barrier stood Greaves, drinking from his cup. He was watching the new fight. But as Ren passed him on the way to the well to wash his face, he spoke without turning his head.
“Harlow.”
Ren stopped.
“If you drop your weapon in my circle once more because you’re afraid of yourself,” Greaves said quietly, so quietly that only Ren heard it, “then you’d better throw it straight into the well. A sword you drop protects no one. Not even from the thing you’re afraid of.”
He took a sip.
“Carry on.”
In the evening Ren found the book.
It lay on his bed, under the roof, on the scratchy blanket. A thin, well-thumbed book with a brown binding. Foundations of Elemental Theory. For the First Year. Every student had been given one today, by Silas, at the end of the lesson, from the stack on his lectern.
Ren had taken his to the theory hall. He had had it under his arm when he left.
This one was not his. His lay on the table, beside Milo’s half-finished letter.
He picked up the book and opened it. The pages were yellowed and soft at the edges from much turning. Someone had written notes in the margins in a small, neat hand. Many notes. Over many years, in different inks.
Right at the front, on the flyleaf, stood a name. It had been crossed out, several times, so thoroughly that it could no longer be read.
Beneath it, fresh, the ink barely an hour old, a single sentence:
Page 212. After the second night bell.
Ren turned the pages. His fingers were not quite steady.
Page 212 was a floor plan. The Academy, from above, with all its wings and courts and corridors, drawn in fine brown lines. And in the north wing, at the end of a long corridor Ren had never set foot in, a room around which someone had drawn a small, careful circle in ink.
Beside it stood a word. In the same small, neat hand as the notes in the margins.
Archive.
Behind him Milo turned over in bed and mumbled something about cows.
Ren closed the book, pushed it under his mattress and sat down in the window seat. Outside the training yard lay in darkness. Tomorrow morning Cedric would be raking there again. And at some point, whenever Greaves wanted, Emilia Winterhall would be waiting for him there again.
And then you don’t stop.
He laid his hand on his left arm. It was still burning.
Down in the court the first night bell struck.