Dawn came thin and gray, a blade of light slipping through the narrow window and laying a cold stripe across the stone floor. Eleres rose to it without needing the knock—but the knock came anyway, three soft taps that seemed to start and end inside the wood itself.
Master Orven stood in the doorway, cane set lightly against the jamb. "Up," he said. "Lesson one."
By the time Eleres reached the Shadow Wing common room, the others were assembled: eight cadets, spaced out as if each stood alone in their own circle of air. The room itself looked more like a forgotten archive than a classroom—dust-mottled curtains, scuffed planks, a long table scarred by old knife lines, a shelf with stoppered vials that smelled faintly of crushed mint and oil. No banners, no crest, no bright motto to inspire.
Orven lingered near the center, his weight resting on the polished ebony cane, one eye clouded, the other a hard pale green that missed nothing. He let the room breathe, let the silence grow intentional, and only then spoke.
"This is not a test," he said, voice low and even. "It's a lesson. The first you will learn here. And you will learn it with your whole body."
He tapped the cane once against the floor. The sound was quiet, but it marked the space like a pin on a map. "Lesson one: hide your footsteps. Not soften. Not muffle. Hide. A footstep is not the heel or the toe—it begins in the hips, rides the spine, and ends somewhere between your ribs and your breath. If you think walking is done with your feet, you are already loud."
He turned and gestured with the cane. An assistant, young and tense, carried out four objects and set them at the far side of the room: a small brass bell on a low stool; a shallow tray filled with charcoal dust; a second tray sprinkled with grainy sand; and a long strip of thin rice paper pinned at both ends like a fresh scroll unrolled across the floorboards.
"Tools," Orven said. "The bell does what bells do. The charcoal tells on you—if your foot splashes a wake, you're heavy; if it leaves a crater, you're clumsy; if it leaves nothing, you floated. The sand will take your measure of balance: press evenly, and you waste strength; ride the outer blade, and you fall; ride the inner blade, and you turn without sound. The paper is breath—too fast and you tear it; too slow and you crumple it. Today, you will cross this room four times and learn what you are made of."
He looked to the ceiling, as if considering whether to be generous. He was not. "You will go in silence. You will return in silence. If you make sound, you will learn to hear it."
He pointed at Lysa—cropped hair, poise like a drawn wire. "You. Start."
Lysa didn't nod. She simply shifted her weight until her hips and shoulders lined with the room's grain, then let her foot settle on the first board. She moved like thread through cloth—steady, without catching. Midway, her pace drifted faster by a heartbeat. Orven's cane tapped once, there. Lysa paused, breathed through her ribs, and completed the crossing, leaving only the faintest haze in the charcoal tray.
"Better hands than feet," Orven murmured. "Practice will teach the feet to catch up."
Jarek went next, heavy shouldered, chin scar stark in the dim. He took the bell first. The clapper did not move; his boot did. The plank beneath him complained—not loudly, but like an old man rising from a chair. Orven lifted the cane halfway. Jarek stopped, exhaled, and redistributed his weight—not heel to toe, but hip to hip, spine uncoiling in a slow arc. He made it through the sand with a pattern like a careful tide, then tore the rice paper six paces in. He swore under his breath and Orven's cane snapped the air once, not touching him, but close enough to cut the oath in half.
"Save your curses for the grave you make," the old man said. "Again."
They cycled, each taking the room and the four stations in turn. The hooded cadet in the half-mask drifted as if the floor had been laid to their measure; the gangly boy of sixteen counted his breaths and then lost them like beads slipping from a string; a broad-shouldered woman rode the outer edge of her foot like a dancer and left the sand tray speaking in halves and curves.
Eleres watched them all and watched Orven watching, marking where the cane lifted and where it stayed quiet. He saw how the old man's gaze didn't rest on the feet or the floor—it tracked the lines of the hips, the minute adjustments of the shoulders, the tiny muscles along the ribs that clench when fear quickens the breath. Sound begins where the body lies about itself, Eleres thought, and the thought felt right.
"Eleres," Orven said, without preamble. "Walk."
Eleres stepped forward into the muted light. He did not try to be a ghost—he tried to be inevitable. The old boards had a story in their grain; he laid his foot where the story ran straight and spared the knots. He did not press down; he replaced the space his foot took with breath and gave the weight to his hips, letting it settle there like a coin on a table.
At the bell, he stopped—not at the bell, but before the bell. A thread, fine as hair, was tied to the clapper and led back beneath the stool. It would chime if the air moved wrong, even if fingers were careful. He slid a thin practice blade from his boot, slipped it between tongue and clapper, and lifted the bell with the knife still lodged there. No sound. No sway.
Orven didn't nod. His clouded eye didn't change. But the pale one narrowed faintly. "Once more. Slower."
Eleres crossed the charcoal with barely a smear, turned the inner edge of his foot through the sand tray's corners, and laid his weight across the rice paper like a hand over a sleeping animal. The paper moved—not tearing, not crumpling—just shifting its small breath beneath his foot.
He finished. The room did not clap. The room did not breathe.
Orven tapped the cane once. "Good enough to learn more. Not good enough to live. You will throw away your boots tonight and bring them back with felt stitched under the sole." He flicked the cane toward the shelf. "Pattern is there. If you sew like you walk, it will pass."
He motioned to the assistant, who brought out a small metronome—a brass pendulum with a steady, uncharitable tick. Orven set it on the stool where the bell had stood, wound it, and let the arm swing. Tick. Tick. Tick.
"Your breath lies to you," he said. "The metronome does not. Walk to it. Match it. Then fall out of phase. Then return without stumbling. If you can mislead your own lungs, you can mislead another's ears."
They worked until the gray of morning sharpened into the clear light of mid-day. Sweat darkened tunics. The floor took its toll—a complaint from a plank here, a treacherous squeak there. Orven never raised his voice. He did not praise. He corrected with the cane: a tap at the hip; a line drawn in the air to show a shoulder rolled a degree too far; a brief, cutting phrase, "Your breath is louder than your feet," or "You turned with your eyes, not your body." The corrections felt like nicks left by a careful blade: small, precise, impossible to ignore.
At the short bell for mid-day rations, Orven dismissed them with a flick of his cane. "Eat. Then come back and learn to lose the weight of your own shadow."
Eleres stepped out into the colonnade where the long arcade opened the academy to sun and noise. Across the courtyard, the Commanders' Hall kept its own rhythm: Cadets stood clustered around a war table littered with carved troops and pennants. Cedric leaned in, pointing once, twice, then drew his hand back as his instructor swept a flank around a river cut into the map. Eleres couldn't hear the words, but he could read the set of Cedric's jaw: decisions were being made, and he meant to be good at making them.
Farther still, the clangor of steel marked the Knightly yard. Taron was in a circle of three, the instructor calling rotations with brisk snaps. The farmer's son moved with unlearned strength and a quickening discipline; when his partner overcommitted, Taron's shield snapped down and his blade kissed the man's gorget with a thunk that drew a barked "hold" and a half-smile from the master-at-arms.
Eleres watched a moment longer, not with envy but with a quiet acknowledgment. Their paths were lit by fire and banners. His ran through a hall of shade and dust. Different halls. Same academy. Same war, delayed.
He returned to the Shadow Wing before the others, slipping back into the dim. Orven was exactly where he had left him, though the stool had moved three inches and the rice paper had been replaced. The metronome still ticked. Orven did not look up.
"Footsteps," the old man said, as if continuing a conversation. "They are not something you remove. They are something you misplace. You give the ear a lie to follow." He gestured with the cane, and the assistant carried out a string of small bronze chimes, hanging them at irregular intervals from the ceiling beams. "Afternoon lesson: you will cross with the room speaking against you. Dust in the boards. Chimes above. If anything sounds, you stop and find what you did to cause it. Then you remove what caused it. If you break a chime, you buy another. If you can't afford it, you owe me a week."
The others filed in, the quiet of people who were learning to listen to themselves. Lysa met Eleres's eye and gave him half a nod, professional and unadorned. The hooded cadet said nothing at all. Jarek exhaled once, settled his shoulders, and looked more like a boulder trying to remember how to float.
"Eleres," Orven said. "First again. The room knows you now. Lie to it."
Eleres stepped into the lattice of chimes and boards. He let the metronome's tick settle along his ribs, then moved on the between-beats, breathing when the chimes shifted in the draft. The charcoal tray hissed faintly under a too-fast foot, and he stopped, counted three ticks, and tried again with less eagerness and more patience. He learned that the chimes sang when he thought about them, and fell quiet when he thought about the spaces between them instead.
By the time the sun dragged a pale angle across the high windows, he'd crossed the room a dozen times. Some passes were clean. Some weren't. Orven had not killed him with kindness. But as the final bell for the day murmured through the corridor, the old man's cane tapped once in a way that, in another life, might have been approval.
"Lesson one is a year long," Orven said. "You'll think you've learned it by next week. You'll be wrong. Put felt on your boots. Tear the felt off. Learn to walk in rain. Learn to walk on gravel. Learn to walk when your leg is asleep. And learn to walk when it's not your footsteps you need to hide, but your heartbeat."
He turned away, then paused—just enough to let the room wonder if he would say more. He did. "You fought an instructor and lived," he said, that pale eye on Eleres. "That does not make you loud. Do not confuse the sound others make about you with the one you choose to make." A beat. "Dismissed."
They drifted out in singles and pairs, shadows unspooling back into the academy's veins. Eleres lingered to coil the metronome's spring and still its arm. The room exhaled when the ticking stopped.
Outside, twilight began its blue wash over the stones. Across the courtyard, lamps pricked into being along the Commanders' Hall. In the Knight yard, the last bout ended with a clatter and a laugh. In the east wing where no banners hung, Eleres pinned the black dagger badge over his heart, felt its cold press through cloth, and thought of the floorboard that had complained and the chime that had sung and the paper that had breathed beneath his step.
He was not yet perfect. He was not yet silent. But he was learning to misplace himself.
Tomorrow, Orven had said, they would learn to strike.
He closed the door to his cell-like room, sat on the narrow bed, and began stitching felt to the undersides of his boots by the light of a single candle. Each pass of the needle was small and exacting, the thread pulled just so, the knot buried where it could not snag.
When he finished, he set the boots aside, blew out the candle, and listened.
The academy breathed around him—faint, distant, alive.
He matched its rhythm with his own, and in the dark, he practiced the sound he did not make.