I woke to the sound of the sea throwing itself at the cliffs.
The spring thaw had begun its work along the high road, loosening the passes stone by stone. In the courtyard below my window the flag ropes were snapping against their poles, a chorus line to the cold dawn wind. Someone was oiling chain in the stables; the links clacked like teeth. The fortress was awake in the manner of an old wolf—quiet, alert, watching.
On my table lay the letter with the Crown's seal. It had not moved since Father set it there the previous night. It did not need to. Its presence bent the room the way a lodged arrow bends air.
After the morning bell I went to the eastern tower to find Master Helwyn. I did not knock. He preferred apprentices who entered with purpose.
"You slept," he said without looking up from the page. It was not a question.
"Eventually."
"Good." He turned a leaf of brittle vellum with two fingers and blew dust from the margin. "Fear tastes sharper when one is tired. Best not to give it spices."
I took my seat. "It isn't fear."
"No?" He glanced up. "Then say what it is."
"Anger," I said. "And something worse. Expectation."
"At your age," he murmured, "either one is a knife without a sheath." He closed the book and steepled his fingers. "Magister Voren is not the Royal College. The College is a house. Voren is a door that opens where he wills."
"Then he will try to shut it behind me."
"Almost certainly."
We let the wind shoulder the windows a while. The tower stones sang faintly—the deep, barely audible hum I had begun to hear after the Second Channel. When I pressed my palm to the sill I could feel the Wall answer, a distant echo through the old veins of the fortress.
"What do we do?" I asked.
Helwyn's smile was tired and pleased at once. "Ah. The right shape of question. Not 'what can I do'—which invites heroics—or 'what should I do'—which invites surrender. 'What do we do' admits that power has a plural."
He rose, fetched a narrow wooden box from a shelf, and set it in front of me. Inside lay three small rods of different metals, each the length of my palm: one of pale, nearly white steel; one of dull, yellowy iron; one that looked like tarnished silver but was heavier than it had any right to be.
"Conduits," he said. "Old work. Older than the College admits. The last Stormforged we trained here—my teacher's teacher—used them to learn how to separate channels without breaking himself."
I touched the darkest rod. It thrummed against my skin. "You're giving me artifacts the Crown would seize on sight."
"Yes," he said blandly. "So don't let them see. The College confuses possession with permission. Valefen tradition never has."
He showed me how to hold them, where to press them to the skin at the inside of the wrist to catch the river just beneath it. The steel wanted focus; the iron wanted endurance; the tarnished metal—that old, stubborn alloy we called raezhen—wanted balance or it wanted blood. On the raezhen piece he made me swear never to channel lightning through it until I could carry a lighted coal in my mouth without flinching.
"That is… a strange measure," I said.
"It is a lesson," he said, and would say no more.
I practiced until my arms trembled. Each rod taught a different manner of attention; together they demanded a kind of listening I had not yet learned. Wind wanted to run ahead. Lightning wanted to leap. Steel wanted to stand and count.
"Again," Helwyn said, every time I faltered. "Again. We will give Voren a boy who cannot be folded like paper."
When I returned to the yard, Gavyn was waiting with the weighted bracers and a grin he wore for bad days.
"Run," he said.
"I have already—"
"Run with the bracers in the wind that wants to steal your breath and tell me afterward what you have already done." He fastened the leather around my forearms and the world became heavier by degrees.
By the sixth lap the muscles along my ribs were knots. Gavyn kept pace, barely breathing.
"Why does the College want me?" I said between steps.
"They want answers to questions they can't phrase truthfully," he said. "Can you make an army of you. Can we make an army of you. Can we unmake you if we need to."
"And your answer?"
"My answer is the same as the Wall's," he said, and pointed north where the old line cut the world. "I stand."
We ran in silence until my feet were pounding out a rhythm older than my name. When we stopped, Gavyn drew his curved blades and tapped the steel lightly against my wrists.
"You leave in three weeks," he said. "Until then, we sharpen what cannot afford to rust."
"What cannot afford to rust?"
He tapped me once at the temple, once at the breastbone. "Thought. Heart. The rest is craft."
---
The departure crept on noiseless feet.
Lady Marris conducted etiquette drills as if we were preparing for a dance with knives. Which, she said, we were. She rehearsed the proper forms of address for every rank of the College hierarchy and then made me practice the incorrect ones, the deliberate slights, the art of the apology that offers nothing while surrendering less.
"The Magisters will try to make you forget you are a Valefen," she said, tapping my shoulder until my posture would have made a sculptor weep. "Their halls are built to stretch time and shrink memory. When you bow, remember who taught you to bend."
Mother visited my chamber each night. She did not speak overlong; she never did. She sat at the foot of my bed with her hands folded and asked about the work of the day, and in the asking she made the work sound like a good thing I had chosen instead of a duty placed into my hands. On the fourth night she brought a length of soft blue cloth embroidered with the wolf and the Wall.
"A travel sash," she said. "Your grandmother wore it when she went to the capital to argue a river back into its old bed."
I fingered the stitchwork. "Did the river listen?"
"No," she said. "But the nobles did. The river did as rivers do; people are more persuadable."
Seraphine declared she would hide under my cloak and go with me. When this plan failed in rehearsal she settled for appointing herself "Watcher of the West Nursery," a title she invented and recited with great seriousness to each servant who entered. She added a second title—"Untangler of Hair"—after the nursemaids proved unequal to the question of knots. She asked me, nearly every evening, what wonders a College was and whether it had gardens and whether one could bring a kite. I promised I would ask.
"It may not have wind," she said gravely, "so take some in your pockets." She stuffed my cloak with scraps of ribbon and old cloth "for catching breezes," and I was not foolish enough to remove them.
The only person who did not pretend was Father. Lord Thalric met me at the armory two mornings before the caravan would depart and walked with me down the long vault where our house's blades slept. He lit no torch. The stones glowed faintly with their own light when his hands touched them.
"We are not sending you," he said at last. "We are escorting you to a place where you will learn how your enemies think."
"Enemies?"
He considered the word. "Not yet. But they test the walls of our sovereignty, one fingertip at a time."
"And if I refuse?"
"The Crown will not accept refusal," he said. "They will accept delay dressed as prudence. They will accept conditions wrapped in courtesy." He paused. "We will give them both."
He stopped before a narrow chest and drew out a scabbarded blade smaller than my training swords—half again the length of my forearm, tapering to a narrow point.
"A court knife," he said. "Legal in every hall. Forgettable until it is not. Kira's people call this length wind's tooth."
He held it out; I took it. It fitted my hand so well it might have been waiting for it.
"We will travel with a complement that appears ceremonial and is not," he continued. "Kerran will command. Kira will go as cultural envoy. Helwyn as tutor. The College may object to Gavyn."
"Then Gavyn will object to the College," said Gavyn from the shadows, because Gavyn was constitutionally incapable of missing a good entrance. Father did not look surprised.
"I will be very polite," Gavyn added. "Until I am not."
Father's mouth twitched. "Try to be polite longer than usual."
"I can do that," Gavyn said. "I will count."
Father rested his hand on my shoulder. "You will spend your strength. Let us spend our craft." His fingers tightened. "And remember: we are not sending you alone."
---
The first sign that the journey would not be simple came the night before we left.
The Mirror summoned me without calling my name. That is the closest description I can find. I was in the nursery with Seraphine asleep against my shoulder when the pendant at my throat warmed, then heated, then pulled, the way iron filings attend a magnet. I slipped Sera to the nursemaid's care and went down the hidden stair with my steps barely touching stone.
The chamber was as it always had been—round, spare, its walls breathing a light that seemed to emerge from the rock itself. The Mirror lay quiet and silver. But everything on the edge of its surface was wrong. The air there grew cold the way a breath grows thin at high altitude. The hairs on my arms rose. The Wolf carving over the southern arch looked across the room and saw something I could not.
I knelt and rested my fingers on the pool's lip. "Show me," I breathed. "Show me what wants to be seen."
The surface did not ripple this time. It glazed, like water in sudden frost. Then it did something I had never witnessed. It bulged upward without breaking, as if a hand pressed from beneath. The bulge stretched, tore a line, and opened an eye.
Not a human eye. Not an animal's. An aperture. A lidless, deliberate hole through which a mind looked. There was no color I can name. The feeling behind it was hunger wearing patience as a mask.
Wind screamed in my skull. Lightning cracked behind my teeth. Steel rang along the bones of both forearms. The Tri-Aspect surged without my calling it; I threw myself backward, blades in hand before they were fully drawn.
The eye closed.
Not fled—closed. As one shuts a door to be courteous.
The Mirror returned to silver. The cold bled out of the air. My lungs remembered to be useful. When my hands stopped shaking I slid steel back into sheath and stood.
"You saw it," said a voice from the arch. Father. No startlement, no question. A declaration.
I nodded.
"Describe."
I tried. The words did not want to fit into human sentences. He did not rush me. When I finished he lifted his head the way a stag tests wind.
"Voren arrived at the outer gate an hour ago."
"Now?"
"Now."
"Alone?" I asked, knowing the answer.
"With papers and a polite smile," Father said. "And a small company of the Crown's blue-liveried guards. They say they wish to 'assist with preparations.'"
The timing was too neat to be coincidence. The thing in the Mirror had looked, and the Crown had knocked.
"The College watches the same waters we do," I said.
"They watch," Father agreed. "They do not keep."
He extended his hand. I took it and we left the chamber together.
---
Magister Voren was examining a tapestry when we found him, the way one examines a body for old scars. He turned at our approach and bowed with precise economy.
"Lord Valefen. Young master."
"Magister." Father's tone could have polished a door.
"You travel early," Voren said pleasantly. "Wise. The mountain roads behave in spring as children do at table—agreeable until they are not."
"We would not wish to become indigestion," Father said. "We still have work to finish."
"Of course." Voren's eyes moved over me like a scale measures weight. "I took the liberty of bringing certain materials for the boy's comfort during the journey. A few basic texts on channeling theory—age-appropriate—a set of calibrated lodestones—"
"We have our own," Master Helwyn said smoothly, appearing at Father's elbow like a conjurer's coin. His smile did not reach his eyes. "But I thank you."
Voren's attention flicked to Helwyn with something that might have been disappointment or might have been delight. "Master Helwyn. I had heard you preferred your books to your feet."
"I do not like leaving them," Helwyn said. "But some errands merit a bookmark."
The Magister's smile thickened. "How very loyal of you."
The men bowed to courtesy awhile longer. I listened and learned. Voren praised the Wall in ways that suggested it was a quaint relic. He praised my progress at the Second Channel as if he had assessed it rather than heard rumor. He praised our caution with the kind of warmth one uses for children who have correctly placed fire far from their bed.
When he asked to see the Mirror, Father declined. Politely. Repeatedly. Finally.
"No?" Voren said at last, and let the syllable hang as a blacksmith lets a bar cool.
"No," Father said. "The chamber is consecrated."
"A shame," Voren said lightly, as one might say of weather. "The College does enjoy old stones."
"Some stones enjoy themselves," Father said, "and prefer not to be handled."
Voren bowed. "As you wish."
When he had gone, Gavyn blew out a breath like a man who has been sitting on a spring.
"He knows," Gavyn said.
"He guesses," Father said. "And guesses right enough to be dangerous."
Lady Kira, who had stood silent throughout, finally spoke. "Your southern tides run strange."
"You felt it?" I asked.
"In my teeth," she said. "The way you feel a storm before you smell it."
I told them about the eye. When I reached the place where my words failed, Kira did not ask me to supply better ones. "I have seen a watcher like that once," she said quietly. "In the desert, at a place where the world forgets itself. We built a ring of spears and sang until morning. It went away when the light came, not because we defeated it, but because daylight is a language it dislikes."
"Does the College know?" Gavyn said.
"The College will say there are no such places," Helwyn answered. "And then they will file a report about one using a code word."
"Which one?"
"'Anomaly.'" He made the word a kind of curse.
Father tapped the table. A quiet sound, like a nail considering a beam. "We leave at first light," he said. "Everything we meant to finish tomorrow we finish tonight."
---
We did not sleep. Not truly. The fortress moved like a ship preparing to leave harbor. Bundles were wrapped and labeled; stores were counted; the smiths worked until their hammers blurred. I went where I was pointed. I felt like a thread being woven through many hands.
In the last hour before dawn, Mother found me in the chapel by the north wall. I had not entered it since I was small. It was a room carved straight into the rock, no ornament but the curve of the ceiling and the light cupped in its hollows. The Wall's hum was loudest here. If I pressed my ear to the stone I could feel it thrumming through my skull. It sounded like courage borrowing a heartbeat.
Mother did not sit. She stood beside me, and for a while we were simply two people listening.
"When your father first took command here," she said at length, "the Crown sent men to advise him how to do it. Men with beautiful boots and hands that blistered when they wrote too long."
"I've met their descendants," I murmured.
She smiled. "Yes. He thanked them. Then he did what the Wall told him." She looked at me. "You will do the same at the College."
"What if the Wall is quiet?"
"Then you will be," she said. "Anyone can shout. Few can listen."
She drew something from her sleeve: a ring on a narrow chain, simple iron chased with three lines around the band.
"It was mine when I was a girl," she said. "It is unlovely. This is why it is useful." She looped it over my head beside the pendant. The ring settled against my collarbone with a modest weight.
"What does it do?"
"It reminds," she said. "When your thoughts start running in frantic circles, touch it and ask three questions. Who do I serve? What am I protecting? What can be mended later and what cannot."
I closed my hand around the ring. It was cool. "Who taught you this?"
"My mother," she said. "And the Wall."
---
The road out of Valefen runs along the cliff before it descends toward the passes. We set out in a long, careful line: scouts before, the baggage wagons in the middle, our household guard marching in flanking columns that looked ceremonial from a distance and were not at all at close range. Father rode with Sir Kerran at the front until the first switchback; there he reined in and let the caravan unroll beneath him like a banner.
Seraphine stood on the wall-walk with the nursemaids, bundled into a blue cloak so large she resembled a bell with a face. She was not crying. She held her chin high the way Mother did when she was angry. She did not wave.
I touched the ring at my throat. Who do I serve. What am I protecting. What cannot be mended later. Then I lifted my hand and made the sign we used when sound was too small—the flat palm over the heart, outward, twice. I will return. Twice means swear.
She returned it. She is two years old; she understands swearing better than many grown men.
Kira rode at my right, Gavyn at my left, Helwyn in the second wagon with three trunks and an expression that said he had already found the College's catalogue of errors and begun taking notes. The morning wind climbed the cliff to meet us; the ribbons Seraphine had stuffed into my cloak flickered and snapped like small pennants. I let them.
We had not gone five miles when the first sign of trouble presented itself.
The road bent around a spur of rock and narrowed to the length of one wagon. The cliff tumbled immediately to our left; to our right the slope reared into gorse and low stone. Sir Kerran signaled halt—one fist up, the motion of a man swatting a single bold fly—and rode ahead with two of the vanguard to test the bend.
He did not round it. He stopped. He turned his head in that way a man turns when he wishes to warn without provoking.
"Rocks," Gerran grunted. "Fell across the road or were helped."
Kira's nostrils flared. "Do you smell that?"
I did: a thin, cold scent like ash left too long in snow.
Voren, who had been riding back with the blue-liveried escort, brought his horse forward with a show of concern. "Is there a problem?"
"Only the usual," Gavyn said pleasantly. "Road, gravity, and men with bad timing."
We dismounted. Kerran sent three to scout the slope, three to test the cliff below the debris. I touched the stone. The Wall's hum was distant here, but the road's bones spoke: the rocks had fallen recently. Hours, not days.
"Ambush?" I said.
"Or test," Kira murmured. "If they wanted blood the bend is good. If they wanted measure, a blockage is better."
"Measure of what?"
"Of how we solve problems," Helwyn said dryly, stumping up with a walking stick he absolutely did not need. "The College loves an experiment."
"Voren?" I asked.
"Too clumsy for his taste," Gavyn said. "But he'd watch another man's clumsy work for the footnote."
"Could be brigands," Kerran offered. "Spring pushes them from the valleys."
"Brigands do not smell like ash in snow," Kira said.
Kerran grunted. "Your nose has earned my obedience. What do you suggest?"
"Fast work," she said. "Before whoever is watching learns more."
We set to it. The largest stones were levered aside with poles and curses. I channeled just enough wind to make the dust rise where we wanted rather than in men's eyes. Gavyn stood with his back to mine while I worked, which was unnecessary and exactly right. Helwyn arranged a little clock of sun-and-shadow to mark how long we took. Kira watched the slope. Her hand never left her knife.
We cleared a path wide enough for one wagon, then two. The ash-smell thinned. No arrow flew. No blade flashed. Whoever wanted to know how we would behave had gathered their data and lost interest or retreated.
We moved again. Noon came; the passes accepted us the way a sleeping bear accepts a fly—tolerant, with the understanding that tolerance is conditional. The air was colder under the mountain's brow. Sound changed there. Hooves clicked differently. Men spoke more softly without knowing they did.
At the mouth of the highest pass, where the road becomes a ledge and the ledge remembers old winters, I felt the pendant heat and the ring cool at once.
"Stop," I said.
Gavyn froze. Kira's blades were in her hands before my word finished.
"What?" Kerran snapped.
"Listen," I said.
We did. The wind was wrong. It did not flow; it vibrated. It made a sound very close to laughter.
"Not weather," Kira breathed.
"Veil-thin," I said. "Like the Mirror just before the eye."
The slope above us shifted. Not rock. Not snow. A… fold, as if a piece of the mountain had decided to try a different shape. The horses stamped and rolled their eyes; our men cursed softly; Voren's escort drew blades in the brave, useless way of men who have been trained for orderly wars.
"Back," Kerran ordered. "Slow."
The fold thickened. It was not a creature. It was the idea of a creature. The air rippled. The road narrowed without losing a single stone. That is the best I can write it. Space grew less interested in being useful.
There are techniques for such things. I had read them. I had practiced none. The Stormforged Path does not teach a boy to mend the world at its edges in his ninth year. It teaches him to survive until he is older.
So I chose something I could do. I breathed, and I drew, and I called the wind.
Not to strike. To sing.
Lady Kira says the Wind Tribes do not believe in silence. They believe in the right sound at the right time. I sang the simplest pattern I knew—the one the wolves use when they call their mates along the coast, the one the sailors whistle when fog eats the shore. It was not a melody for glory. It was a rope.
The Tri-Aspect rose without hurry. Lightning made the notes bright; steel upheld them; wind carried them out and back again. I sang until my throat burned. The air steadied by degrees. The fold loosened as a knot loosens when the hand that tied it remembers what hands are for.
"Walk," Gavyn said, very low.
We walked. The caravan did not run. We walked like men do at funerals when the living must rehearse the act of not falling.
When we reached safer ground, the mountain exhaled. The wind returned to its ruder habits. The horses remembered what they were. Men remembered jokes.
Voren rode up beside me with a gaze like a pin. "Adaptable," he said. "Most impressive."
I did not answer. My mouth was full of the taste of iron and snow. I wanted to spit. I did not.
"Where did you learn that tune?" he asked, as if I had hummed a tavern song.
"In a nursery," I said. "With my sister."
"Charming," he said, and smiled the way snakes remember their teeth.
---
We camped early. No one argued. The men built two rings of fires—one for warmth, one for light. Kira set watchers where the rock had tried to be otherwise. Helwyn drew strike-afterimages in the dust with a stick and muttered the pieces of a theorem. Kerran strode the perimeter like a clock's pendulum. Gavyn handed me water and did not speak until I drank.
"You used too much," he said.
"Not as much as I wanted."
"Good." He leaned his shoulder against mine. "I am learning to be polite."
"I noticed," I said.
He grinned. "Do not grow too proud of me. I will spoil it tomorrow."
"Please do," I said, and the weariness made us both laugh.
Father came just after full dark. He sat opposite the fire and watched the flames as if they were a letter from an old friend.
"The Wall felt you," he said.
"It felt… something," I said.
"It felt you," he repeated. "It knows your voice now. That matters."
I remembered the dream of the Wall glowing like a heart. I remembered the figures at my back, one of them Seraphine with light in her hands she had not yet earned. I did not tell him. Some visions require privacy to ripen.
"We could turn back," he said.
"You would, if I asked?"
"Yes," he said simply.
I touched the ring. Who do I serve. What am I protecting. What cannot be mended later.
"I think the College wanted to see whether I would choose spectacle or subtlety," I said. "Today I chose a rope instead of a hammer. Tomorrow I may need the hammer. If I go to them now, I choose the hammer when I must. If I do not go, they will come here with both."
Father nodded. "Then we go."
We sat a while longer, not talking. Gavyn snored. Kira, somewhere in the dark, sang a thin desert song that made the stars listen. In the second ring of fires Helwyn argued with a pinecone. Voren in his fine tent did whatever snakes do to prepare for morning.
I slept at last with the ring cold against my throat and the pendant warm. The Wall's hum threaded my dreams, and for once there were no eyes in them.
---
The capital announced itself long before we saw it. The road smoothed. The mile-markers appeared with the Crown's sigil on them—well cut, well polished, checked monthly by men paid to love order. The air tasted of river and iron and ambition. The last hill leveled and the city opened like a book read by too many hands.
The Royal College crowned the far rise: a cluster of pale towers stitched together by covered walks, a lattice of stone and glass that shone with all the obvious metaphors—light, reason, elevation. It was, I admit, beautiful. I am not immune to beauty even when I distrusted its author.
At the gate we were received with all courtesies. Not pomp—pomp is loud and insecure. This was a smoother thing. A woman in dark robes and a chain of office that said administrator bowed to Father and said words that meant honor and welcome and protocol. She bowed to me and said prodigy without saying it. She bowed to Helwyn and said colleague with a firmness that made me like her. She bowed to Kira and did not know the correct sequence; Kira saved her with a half-smile and a little desert grace. She bowed to Gavyn and Gavyn bowed so perfectly she could not tell if he mocked her. She bowed to Voren and did not meet his eyes.
"Accommodations have been prepared," she said. "Magister Voren will brief the boy's tutors this evening." She did not ask if I had them. She did not say the word parents. That omission was not discourtesy. It was an announcement of jurisdiction.
We were escorted through a garden of white gravel and hornbeams clipped into groves, down corridors whose stones had been made to forget the history of their quarrying, up a stair that made even Kerran look small. We were shown to rooms that smelled like fresh linen and restraint.
A bell chimed somewhere in the distance. Everything here had measured sounds. Even the fountains spoke softly as if confiding secrets to the parched.
I unpacked my satchel and set Seraphine's wooden wolf on the desk where the light fell across it. The carving looked very small against the clean white of the College stone.
"Are you ready?" Father asked from the door.
"No," I said. "Yes." I straightened the sash Mother had given me, felt the ring and the pendant settle against my chest, and followed him down the corridor toward the hall where Magister Voren and his cohort waited.
As we walked I kept one hand in my pocket around a scrap of ribbon. I could feel in it the little weight of salt air from home, the sound of my sister's laughter when the wind took a kite, the hum of the Wall as it promised to remember my voice.
The College doors opened without a sound. Light fell across polished floor and the precise smile of a man who had been patient a very long time.
I stepped over the threshold and into the next part of my education.