A month passed faster than Wren expected it to.
The days folded into a rhythm not so different from the one he’d had as a servant, which he found either reassuring or bleak depending on how much sleep he’d gotten.
Lectures in the morning.
Corren’s workshop in the afternoon.
Reading until the lantern burned low, most nights, and occasionally past that.
He finished Grains and Veins in nine days and started it again from the beginning three days later, because the second pass told him things the first one hadn’t.
Baseline Properties he never finished, and eventually stopped trying to — Corren had been right that it worked better as a reference than a read, and Wren had gotten into the habit of hauling it down to the workshop rather than back to his room, since that was where he actually needed it.
On the Composition of the Cast he read cover to cover twice, and then a third time with his notebook open beside it, filling forty pages with diagrams he pulled apart line by line until he understood why each one sat where it did.
Corren, for his part, taught the way he did everything else: efficiently, without warmth, and with a complete disinterest in whether Wren was enjoying himself.
He’d hand over a sample and a question and leave Wren alone with both for three hours, then spend ten minutes tearing the resulting notes apart with a precision that would have felt cruel from anyone who seemed to be enjoying it.
He never once mentioned the willpower test.
He never asked about the servant years, or the memory, or any of it.
What he asked about was Wren’s methodology, relentlessly, and by the end of the second week Wren had stopped noticing how strange that was and started being grateful for it.
By the end of the month he could hold an identification circle for eleven minutes without a crystal, and forty with one.
He could name a dozen ores by sight and another dozen by the way they resisted a rune.
He’d learned to recognize which of his own failures came from bad runework and which came from asking a metal to do something it had never been willing to do for anybody.
He’d also learned, without anyone telling him directly, that the ache in his chest never quite went away anymore.
It faded.
It dulled.
It didn’t leave.
He wrote that down too, in the back of his notebook, on a page he didn’t show Corren.
Rian’s Lightning training got worse before it got better, then better in a way that made him unbearable for about four days.
He’d taken to announcing his discharge times at dinner like scores.
“Point-oh-nine,” he said one evening, dropping into his seat with the particular energy of a man who’d been waiting all afternoon to say it.
“Down from point-one-four.
Zephyr didn’t even insult me about it.”
“He didn’t say anything?” Wren asked.
“He said ‘acceptable.’ From Zephyr that’s practically a parade.” Rian was already reaching for the bread.
“Ask me what the tower average is for a first-year.”
“What’s the tower average for a first-year?”
“I have no idea, I just wanted to be asked.” This chapter is updated first at g.com.
Adeleine, across the table, hadn’t looked up from the small notebook she’d taken to carrying.
“Point-one-one.”
Rian’s face did something complicated.
“How do you know that.”
“I asked the archivist for Zephyr’s published figures.
They’re public.” She turned a page.
“You’re ahead of the average.
Not by as much as you think.”
“See, that’s the thing about you,” Rian said.
“You never let anybody have anything.”
“I let you have the accurate version.
That’s more than most people get.”
Wren had gotten used to this by now — the two of them circling each other like it was a sport with rules only they understood.
He’d also noticed, over the month, that Adeleine’s little notebook had gotten steadily thicker, and that she’d stopped bothering to hide it when he sat down.
He hadn’t asked what was in it.
He suspected he already knew.
The summons came on a Thursday, six weeks after he’d first been called up that tower.
Wren was in the workshop when it arrived, elbow-deep in a comparative test that had been going badly for two straight hours, when the door opened and the same servant girl who brought his meals stepped through, bowed to Corren, and held out a folded note.
Corren read it without expression, then handed it across.
Apprentice Wren.
My office.
This evening, after your workshop hours conclude.
No signature.
It didn’t need one.
Wren read it twice, and became aware that his hands had gone cold somewhere around the second pass.
“Do you know what this is about?” he asked.
“No.” Corren was already turning back to his own work.
“I’d assume you do.”
“I don’t.”
“Then you’ll find out in a few hours, and speculating won’t improve the outcome.” He said it without unkindness, which somehow made it worse.
“Finish your test.
Wren finished the test.
It took another hour and the results were, predictably, useless — his hands weren’t steady and his attention was somewhere nine floors up — and Corren looked over the pages afterward with the same flat scrutiny he applied to everything.
“This is worse than your work from last Tuesday.”
“I know.”
“Do it again tomorrow.” Corren set the pages down.
“And Wren.”
Wren stopped at the door.
“Whatever he asks you,” Corren said, without looking up, “answer it accurately.
He’s not a man who responds well to being managed, and you’re not good enough at it yet to try.”
Yet.
Wren turned that word over the entire way up the stairs.
The ninth floor looked exactly as it had six weeks ago, which struck him as unreasonable.
He’d gone from a servant with three days of memory to an apprentice on live research in that time, and the hallway hadn’t so much as changed a candle.
He knocked twice, the way Sebastian had.
“Enter.”
The Tower Master sat behind the same desk, reading the same way he’d been reading the first time — head down, unhurried, entirely unbothered by the fact that someone was standing in his doorway waiting.
Wren waited.
He’d learned that much, at least.
Eventually, the man set the paper down.
“Six weeks,” he said.
“Metal affinity, A-minus.
Fifty-eight seconds on a willpower test that stops most apprentices at fifteen.
An advanced identification circle drawn from a first-viewing diagram, successfully cast the same evening.
Two unsupported hours on a spell that should exhaust an apprentice inside of five minutes.” He folded his hands.
“And Corren, who has refused every apprentice offered to him for the last four years, requesting you specifically for live research.”
Wren said nothing.
It didn’t seem like the kind of list that wanted interrupting.
“When you stood in this office last, I told you there were three possible explanations for what you’d done to yourself, and that I disliked the third.” The Tower Master’s eyes came up, and there was nothing clinical in them this time at all.
“Six weeks of data has been extremely unkind to the first two.”
The room felt very quiet.
“Sit down, Wren,” he said.
“We’re going to have a considerably longer conversation than the last one.”