Dinner came quick after Wren had skimmed through the three books Corren had recommended.
He found the usual table without much looking.
Rian was already halfway through a plate, elbows on the table in a way Wren suspected would have earned him a lecture at home, and Adeleine sat across from him with the same unhurried composure she brought to everything, eating like the meal was a scheduled task she’d allotted an appropriate window for.
“There he is,” Rian said, around a mouthful.
“Thought Corren might’ve kept you until midnight.”
“He almost did.” Wren dropped into his seat and immediately regretted how heavy it felt to sit down.
“Sent me to the library after.”
“The library?” Rian’s eyebrows went up.
“The basement one?
With the woman who looks like she’s personally read every book down there twice and disapproved of most of them?”
“That’s the one.”
“She threw me out on my second day,” Rian said cheerfully.
“Something about handling a book like a farmhand.
Which, fine, but she’d already decided that before I touched anything.”
Adeleine set her fork down.
“What did Corren send you for?”
“Three books.” Wren counted them off.
“One on ore types, one on spell composition, one that’s basically a wall of tables about metals.
He wants me starting on them before our next session.”
“He gave you Composition of the Cast?” Adeleine asked.
“You know it?”
“My father had a copy.
Older edition.” Something flickered across her face, gone before Wren could name it.
“It’s not a first-year book.
Not even close.
Cyrrus won’t assign it before the second year, and he assigns everything.”
Rian pointed his fork at her.
“See, this is what I’m saying.
Everyone keeps handing Wren things that aren’t for first-years and then acting normal about it.”
“Corren’s not acting normal about it,” Wren said.
“He offered me a spot on his actual research.
The real one, not the apprentice curriculum.”
That got both of them to stop eating.
“He what,” Rian said.
“Workshop hours with him instead of the standard sessions.
I still go to lectures.” Wren shrugged, a little uncomfortable with how loud that had sounded out loud.
“It’s not — he made it clear it’s because it’d waste his time otherwise.
Not because he likes me.”
“Corren doesn’t like anyone,” Adeleine said.
“That’s not the point.
He doesn’t take first-years onto live research.
He hasn’t in years, from what I’ve heard.
He barely takes third-years.”
“How do you already know that?”
“I asked around,” she said, with no particular embarrassment about it.
“After you told us about the two hours.”
Wren decided not to follow that thread any further, mostly because he wasn’t sure he’d like where it went. This story is hosted at g.com.
“So what’s the research?” Rian asked.
“Actually?
Not the version they read out to us.”
“Metals that behave strangely.
Ones that hold runes differently than they should, or don’t hold them at all.” Wren found himself sitting up a little as he said it, some of the exhaustion burning off.
“There’s a metal called Cold Iron that just — doesn’t work.
At all.
You can’t put a rune in it.
It’s completely inert to spellwork, and that’s exactly why people use it.
Restraints, containment, anywhere you need magic to stop.”
“Huh,” Rian said.
“And there’s Meteoric Iron, which falls out of the sky instead of coming out of the ground and holds Lightning runes better than it has any right to.
Nobody’s explained why yet.” Wren caught himself and stopped.
“Sorry.
That’s probably boring.”
“It’s not boring,” Adeleine said.
“You just said ‘nobody’s explained why yet’ like it was good news.”
“It kind of is?”
“That’s the part I mean.”
Rian snorted.
“Zephyr would love that meteor thing.
He’d probably try to hit himself with one to see what happened.”
“How was that, actually?” Wren asked.
“Today.”
“Better.
Marginally.” Rian rolled his shoulder, wincing slightly in a way that suggested it wasn’t as marginal as he’d like.
“He’s got me doing the same discharge timings, but he actually explained the point of it today instead of just watching me fail at it.
Turns out there’s a gap between deciding to release a spell and the spell actually leaving the circle, and most mages never close it because most mages never measure it.
He’s convinced it’s trainable.”
“Is it?”
“He shaved a fraction off my average by the end of the session, so, apparently.” Rian said it lightly, but there was something underneath it — the same hunger Wren had heard the day they’d signed with their mages.
“It’s still slow.
But it’s less slow than yesterday, which is more than I got out of my first week with a private tutor back home.”
“And Cyrrus?” Wren asked, turning to Adeleine.
“Predictable, as advertised.” She reached for her water.
“We’re mapping resonance between wind pulses and struck tuning crystals.
It’s careful work.
Repetitive.
He’s very good at it.” A pause.
“He also hasn’t asked me a single question about myself since I signed on, which was the entire point of choosing him, so I’d call it a success.”
“That’s a bleak way to describe a mentor,” Rian said.
“It’s an accurate way.” Adeleine set the cup down.
“I’ll learn more from watching what happens to the two of you this year than I will from three months of resonance charts.
That’s not an insult to Cyrrus.
Rian laughed at that, loud enough to draw a look from the next table over and went back to his food.
“Honestly though,” he said, after a minute, “you’ve gotta admit this beats mopping floors.
Whatever else this place is.
Magic’s more fun than cleaning.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Wren said.
“Come on.
Three years of scrubbing versus one week of this?
Not even a—”
“No, I mean I wouldn’t know.” Wren looked up from his plate.
“I don’t remember any of it.”
Rian stopped mid-sentence.
“You don’t remember — what, the cleaning?”
“Any of it.” Wren heard how flat it came out and couldn’t do much about it.
“I’ve got about three weeks.
That’s everything.
Before that there’s nothing — not the three years here, not whatever came before that, not my own family if I had one.
I woke up in a servant’s cot with a wound in my chest and no idea how I got there, and the first thing anybody told me about myself was my own name.”
The table went quiet.
“I assumed you knew,” Wren added.
“The whole tower seems to know everything else about me.”
“They know you drew your own circuit,” Adeleine said carefully.
“Nobody’s said anything about memory.”
“Then I suppose that part’s still mine.”
Rian had put his fork down entirely at some point.
“Wren.
Three weeks.
That’s — you’ve been sitting through lectures on elemental theory and pretending to keep up with people who’ve had this stuff drilled into them since they were six, and you’ve also got no idea who you are?”
“That’s about the size of it.”
“That’s insane.”
“It’s manageable, most days.” Wren pushed food around his plate.
“It’s easier when there’s work.
That’s most of why I like the reading, honestly.
It fills the part of the day where I’d otherwise be sitting there wondering.”
Adeleine watched him for a long moment, and for once didn’t say anything clever about anomalies or interesting problems.
“Does Corren know?” she asked.
“The Tower Master knows.
I assume that means Corren could find out if he wanted to.” Wren shrugged.
“He’s never asked.
I don’t think it’s the part of me he finds interesting.”
“That’s the most Corren thing I’ve ever heard,” Rian muttered.
The conversation loosened up again after that, slowly — Rian steering it back toward Zephyr and his sore shoulder, Adeleine offering dry commentary that didn’t quite land as unkind.
Nobody brought the memory thing up again, which Wren appreciated more than he would have known how to say.
He ate the rest of his dinner properly, for once, and thought about lines and circles and a wall of tables waiting back in his room and found that the wondering had gotten a little quieter than it usually was.