The cafeteria was as busy as it had been the past few days.
Wren quickly found his spot next to Rian and Adeleine, ready for some decompression after the day he’d had.
“So, how did everyone else’s mage slavery go today?” Rian asked cheerfully, shoveling food onto his plate as he said it.
“Fine,” Adeleine said, unwrapping a piece of bread with the same measured calm she seemed to bring to everything.
“Cyrrus had us cataloguing resonance frequencies for the first hour, then let us try matching a wind pulse to a tuning crystal.
Mine matched on the second attempt.” She said it plainly, without any real pride in her voice, the way someone might report the weather.
“He seemed satisfied.
Didn’t say much else.”
“Sounds thrilling,” Rian said.
“It wasn’t.” She took a bite, unbothered by the jab.
“Cyrrus is careful, methodical, exactly the kind of mage my family’s been sending its children to for three generations.
I could probably pass his entire curriculum without him ever once being surprised by me.” A pause, something faintly dry creeping into her tone.
“Which is precisely why I signed with him.
Predictable people ask fewer questions.
Gives me more time to actually pay attention to things that interest me.”
“Like us,” Rian said, grinning.
“Like the two of you,” she agreed, without a trace of embarrassment about it.
“Cyrrus’s research will still be sitting there next week.
Whatever’s happening with either of you might not be.”
“That’s a little unsettling, coming from someone I’m eating dinner across from,” Wren said.
“Good,” Adeleine said, entirely unbothered.
“Unsettling means you’re paying attention too.”
“Well, my day was a disaster, if anyone’s curious,” Rian said, before Wren could decide whether that was actually meant to be reassuring.
“You seem awfully cheerful for a disaster,” Wren said.
“That’s because I’ve decided to find it funny instead of humiliating.” Rian’s grin didn’t quite reach the rest of his face.
“Zephyr’s whole research angle is measuring the gap between a spell’s cast time and its actual discharge — the lag between when a mage decides to release something and when it physically leaves the circle.
Doesn’t care one bit that I’m a Kaiser.
Had me casting the same basic bolt over and over, timing every single attempt down to fractions of a second, until he was satisfied I understood exactly how slow I actually was.”
“The tedious part was fine.
The disastrous part was finding out my best time today was still nearly triple what he considers baseline for someone with my affinity grade.” Rian rubbed at his temple, the humor in his voice thinning out toward something more honestly frustrated.
“Apparently knowing you’re fast on paper means nothing if your body hasn’t learned to actually be fast yet.
Man’s going to run me into the ground before he teaches me a single new spell.”
“For what it’s worth,” Wren said, “at least you know exactly what you’re bad at.
I’m still not sure what half of what happened to me today actually means.”
“What happened?” Adeleine asked, setting down her bread with the particular attentiveness she seemed to reserve for anything she considered actually interesting.
“Corren gave us all a raw sample to identify.
Told us to draft a spell to figure out what it’s made of, said to come back once we had something worth showing him.” Wren shrugged, like it wasn’t much of anything.
“I spent a few hours in my room copying the diagram he gave us.
Got it working by the seventh try.”
Rian blinked at him.
“Wait.
The actual identification spell?
The one he gave you today?”
“Yeah.”
“Wren.” Rian set his fork down entirely.
“That’s not a first-week spell.
That’s not even a first-month spell.
Half the senior apprentices I’ve talked to still can’t get a clean read off theirs without Corren correcting their circle by hand.”
“I mean, it wasn’t perfect,” Wren said, suddenly a little less sure of himself than he’d been a second ago.
“It worked, though.
Showed me the metal wasn’t uniform — some kind of second material woven through the grain.”
Adeleine had gone very still.
“You drafted, drew, and successfully cast an advanced identification circle, alone, in one evening,” she said slowly, like she was double-checking each word before committing to the sentence.
“On your first attempt at anything Corren’s actually taught you.”
“Seventh attempt in one evening,” Rian said.
“Wren, I’ve been drawing circles since I could walk, and there are diagrams in Corren’s workshop I still wouldn’t touch without supervision.”
“Wait.” Adeleine held up a hand, something working behind her eyes.
“If this spell’s genuinely that far above a new apprentice’s level, why would Corren give everyone a week for it?
That’s not enough time to learn something that advanced from scratch — not for anyone who isn’t apparently you.”
“Because he’s not actually expecting a clean result,” Rian said, catching on.
“A week’s plenty of time to get a rough read — half a circle holding together just long enough to catch a flicker of something before it collapses.
That’s probably all he’s grading on.
Whether you got anything at all, not whether you got it perfectly on your first real try.”
“Which means,” Adeleine said, turning back toward Wren, “what you did tonight wasn’t just fast.
It was the kind of result Corren probably expects from apprentices who’ve had months, not hours.”
Wren looked between the two of them, the easy warmth of a moment ago replaced by something a little more careful, a little more assessing — the exact same look he’d gotten from half the room after his willpower test.
“It’s probably nothing,” he said, mostly because he didn’t know what else to say.
“Sure,” Adeleine said, in a tone that made it very clear she didn’t believe that for a second.
“Nothing at all.”
Nobody said much else about it after that.
Rian went back to his food with a little less energy than he’d started the meal with, and Adeleine kept glancing over at Wren every so often between bites, the way someone might glance at a puzzle they’d already half-solved but weren’t ready to say out loud.
Wren ate the rest of his meal in relative quiet, letting the conversation drift back toward easier things — Rian complaining about his sore legs, Adeleine offering dry, unhelpful commentary about how he probably deserved it.
He let himself laugh along where it made sense to and tried not to think too hard about the look that kept crossing both their faces whenever they thought he wasn’t paying attention.
Eventually, he pushed his chair back and stood.
“Heading back to work?” Rian asked, already knowing the answer before Wren gave it.
“Might as well.
Corren said come back once I’ve got something worth showing him.” Wren shrugged, tucking his notebook under one arm.
“Figure I should see how far I can actually push it before he decides I’m done for the week.”
“Course you do,” Rian said, shaking his head, though the grin had come back, at least a little.
“Don’t stay up too late being terrifying.”
“No promises,” Wren said, and left the two of them to finish their meal without him.