Marshal Osk didn't blow a whistle to start the afternoon block; he didn't need one. His voice was a whistle with legs.
"Runes first. Then lungs. Then food. You—" he pointed at my emberling—"you're not a torch, you're a promise. Hold."
I set my palm near the emberling's core and drew the Steady rune again, slower than I wanted, anchoring it with three tiny barbs where cost liked to skitter loose. The little channels inside the spirit's body tugged at my attention like threads through cloth. I breathed. The rune took. The emberling brightened and then settled, heat rolling off it in a ribbon instead of a flare.
Across the field, order came out of chaos the way a river carves its bed—loudly at first, then with purpose. Birds learned not to panic at weights on their ankles. Winged reptiles took to hover rings and found out the air could throw you the same way a wave could. Objects lined up by the gear racks for exercises that made them hum and thrum: Sera's pot trundled in neat circles, keeping water just-off-boil without sputtering. Brann's soldier-ant practiced short bursts, tried to spit a bead of flame between its mandibles, and blew smoke in its own face. Aureline's salamander did not touch the air until she told it to, then touched it like silk.
Osk drifted between us, a tide that kicked you only when you needed the push. "Your bodies are dumb until you teach them," he told a boy trying to sprint before he'd learned to breathe with his spirit. "Your spirits are clever until they think they know you," he told a girl whose bird kept out-guessing her. To me: "Riven, your rune discipline is neat. Don't gild it. You write like a bricklayer. Good. Bricks hold."
When the sun tipped from warm to glaring, Osk clapped once. "Water. Feed. Fifteen minutes."
The Academy didn't leave us to guess. A pair of carts trundled out from the east gate, pushed by apprentices in gray: one stacked with sacks of grain and strips of dried meat and crates of fruit; one with bins of charcoal, bags of iron sand, jars of copper filings, a couple of sloshing skins labeled RIVER (Unfiltered) and another labeled SALT. Beside the carts, a slateboard listed prices and ration tokens. Second-years got enough to keep a newborn familiar growing, not enough to be foolish. More could be had with Academy chits earned by work details or high marks.
"Elementals," Osk barked, "two hands of charcoal each, unless your rune-grammar instructor clears you for iron. Do not lie to me or your spirit."
I queued with the other elementals, canteen in one hand, emberling tucked close like a small, polite stove. The apprentice at the cart slid a sack into my arms. "Two hands," he said. "You can grind it to powder for a faster uptake, but don't breathe the dust. Unless you want to cough black snot for a week."
"Tempting," I said.
He didn't smile. Apprentices rarely did. He had coal tattooed along his wrists in neat bars—a pledge to a craft, to a future familiar of fire or forge.
I crouched in the shade of a rack and snapped a chunk of charcoal between my fingers. The emberling watched with its not-quite eyes, head tilting in that way that meant interest. I rolled a pebble of carbon into the hollow of my hand and held it near the spirit's core. Heat kissed my pulse. The coal went from dull to jeweled-black to dull again as it surrendered itself a grain at a time. The emberling's rind shed a drift of ash as the channels thickened—like threads doubled in a loom.
"Feels like feeding a bird," Sera said, dropping down beside me. She offered the emberling a respectful distance, then uncorked a tiny jar. "My pot likes steam, but it also likes copper. I bought filings with last term's extra credit. Watch." She tipped a pinch of bright metal into the pot's open mouth. A whiff of steam came back smelling faintly of pennies, and the pot rocked with satisfaction.
"Do you…taste it?" I asked. "The way the channelwork changes?"
Sera nodded, face turned a little inward the way it went when she was listening with more than ears. "The lattice hums different. Quieter. Like a drum with the skin tightened."
"Riven," Osk called from across the heap of students, "don't huddle. Let it radiate."
I shifted, let the emberling sit on the stone beside my knee. Heat rolled out in a controlled swell and warmed my calf. It was a small thing to be proud of, so I allowed myself to be proud.
Brann strolled by on his way to the meat cart, ant marching behind him with fussy precision. "Training a candle to be…hot," he observed, like a naturalist doing a kindness to a beetle. "Ambitious."
"I'm training it to be what it is," I said. "What are you training yours to be? A footstool?"
The ant clicked its mandibles and flexed its forelegs, a motion that would look threatening on anything larger than a bucket. Brann's smile didn't quite reach his eyes. "Dueling roster posts at sundown," he said. "Maybe you'll get to scorch someone's socks."
Sera watched him go with a look that might have turned him into compost if looks had more runes in them. "He's not wrong about the roster," she said. "Professor Quill likes to put early pairs on stage to make a point."
"What point?"
"That luck looks like talent if you stare from far enough away." She dusted her hands and stood when Osk's call cut the air again. "Come on. Bricks and breath."
We ran. Osk didn't care that some of us would grow into the kinds of mages who would float over battlefields or write formulas by candlelight and never see combat. He believed in the long, stubborn muscles that kept bodies upright for decades. We ran the outer track until our breaths aligned with our familiars' pulses. We did short exploding sprints until my thighs burned and my emberling flared sympathetically like a bellows. We did a steadiness drill that made my shoulders shake and the emberling's heat wander if my hand trembled.
By the time Osk blew the end, the sky had gone the color of steel. The emberling had eaten more charcoal than it could on the first try and still pulled itself back from ash. When I told it to rest, it didn't collapse into my seal; it tucked closer and dimmed to a coal. Small wins, stacked.
"Circle hall," Sera said, snagging my sleeve. "Quill's lecture."
"I'd forgotten I can still think," I said.
"You can if you sit down fast enough."
We poured with the others into the ring-rooms—a set of circular chambers stacked inside one another like the layers of an onion, each with tiered seats, a round chalkboard that could be turned like a wheel, and a smell of chalk dust that never quite left your clothes. Professor Quill had traded his field handkerchief for a cleaner one; his cheeks were still pink with the remains of the afternoon sun. He waited until the last stragglers squabbled into seats and then tapped the chalkboard with his wand.
"Runic Grammar II," he said. "Last year taught you to breathe. This one teaches you to write down what your breath means."
He sketched five runes with the quick ease of someone who'd written them a thousand times: a triangle tucked inside a circle (Element), a forked line like a branch (Type), a backward S (Range), a spiral pinched at the waist (Cost), an open box with one broken corner (Efficiency), a straight bar with notches (Strength).
"Most formulas you'll write this term use some version of these," Quill said. "Every line you add becomes a promise you have to keep with mana. Every promise has a price. You tinker, and sometimes the lattice takes your generosity as an insult." He flashed a grin, brief and wicked as a match. "You will insult your familiars. Often. They will forgive you if you learn."
He flipped the chalkboard. The other side held a diagram of a familiar's lattice: channels thick and hair-thin, nodes like knots where power pooled. "Familiars come with innate formulas—animal tricks, elemental habits, object purposes. Those innates are not iron. If your familiar grows on its own and writes something you dislike, you can rewrite by swapping a base rune. The old formula crumbles to ash. A new one grows in its place, borrowing the ash. Consider what you steal and why."
A hand rose. Aureline's. Quill nodded.
"If I change the Element rune of an innate," she asked, evenly, "will the body make room? Or do I risk snapping channels?"
"You risk cracking them if you call for something the lattice can't remember," Quill said. "Trade like for like until your braid is stronger. Fire spit to lightning spit? Risky. Fire spit to fire shroud? Kinder. Some of you," he glanced sidelong at me, "will think you can brute-force something clever. You can't. Yet."
Laughter scattered and died.
Quill set two small stands on the table in front of him. On one, a shallow bowl held three walnut-sized stones: matte black, shining gray, milk-white. On the other, a flat crystal with a thin etched scale and a needle inside.
"Levels," he said, tapping the crystal. "The Academy measures growth with calibrators like this. They're imprecise, more art than math, but they let us track progress. Familiars move through a hundred grades over a lifetime, though many stay small and simple because their masters never do the work. First-years won't get a number you can brag about. Second-years will. Don't chase the needle. Chase the breath."
He placed his wand on the bowl; the stones warmed and glowed. "These are channel stones. Touch them to a familiar's lattice and you'll feel a tug. Black for thin. Gray for mid. White for thick. We'll use them in lab this week to teach your hands to listen."
Brann's hand went up. "Professor," he said in a tone that wanted to sound respectful and landed at charming, "what about materials? We understand that spirits feed on different things. How early should we push variety?"
"When your familiar asks for it," Quill said. "You can force-feed iron to a river-otter. It will not thank you. Elementals—fire, wind, sand—will tolerate stubborn diets better than beasts and objects will. It doesn't mean you should be stupid."
He turned to the chalkboard, wrote a simple practice chain: Element: Fire / Type: Thread / Range: Arm's length / Cost: Low / Efficiency: High / Strength: Gentle. "We begin with heat thread. A steady, sustained line of warmth useful for cooking, softening wax, drying clothes, keeping a hand alive on a mountain. Riven," Quill said without looking up, "you'll start us."
I slid my palm toward the emberling's core. The room leaned in with the quiet you feel before a glass drops. Sera's pot thrummed beside her, a sympathetic audience of one. I traced the element rune—Fire—then Type: a thread, a line that wants to hold instead of leap; Range: arm's length; Cost: low, because my channels and my spirit's were still learning to carry; Efficiency: higher, so the heat didn't wander; Strength: gentle. I felt the little tremor near one node where the eighth channel lay hair-thin, and I shaped my binding lines to skirt it, not load it.
"Heat thread," I whispered, and the emberling obliged.
A thin line of warmth unfurled from its core and lay over my knuckles like sunlit water. No flare. No ash. The emberling's rind didn't flake. My shoulders loosened a fraction.
"Good," Quill said, as if we had not all held our breath for the second of it. "Now move it. A formula that can't move is a parlor trick."
I tilted my hand; the thread followed, obedient as a ribbon in a still room. Sera tilted her pot; the thread settled along its lip. Steam rose. Someone in the back applauded before they realized it was a small thing to clap for; more joined because sometimes relief wants noise.
"Now for the unkindness," Quill said mildly, and drew a sharp diagonal through my neat stack of runes. The line crossed the Efficiency rune, nipped the edge of Range. "Perturbation. Imagine the world jostles you. You make a mistake. What fails first?"
I felt it the moment the chalk nicked the diagram: a wobble at the base of the thread where Efficiency anchored. The heat line bulged and wanted to clump. I breathed and fed a whisper more cost into the binding. The emberling tolerated it, channels holding like wire warmed just enough to bend.
"Good," Quill said again. "Some of you will try to patch failure with power. That works exactly until it doesn't. We're building bones."
He moved us on. "Gather," he said, drawing a rune like cupped hands. "Bind," a loop that latched. "Contain," a box with vents. We wrote them on slate and in air and, when our familiars allowed, into the first harmless corners of their lattice. Aureline's salamander learned to hold a fire-glob a hair's breadth longer than it had come knowing. Brann's ant stopped trying to spit and learned to warm its mandibles evenly so they could cut a rope without charring it. Sera's pot learned a new patience, keeping a simmer steady while Quill tapped the chalkboard until my teeth ached.
By the time the sun skidded toward the west and the ring-room lamps woke, my head felt like hands had kneaded it. The emberling tucked close in my shirtfront as if it had discovered pockets and loyalty at the same time.
We spilled back into the main hall to find a crowd knotted around the notice board like fish around a dropped crust. Sera and I edged to the side where the crush thinned.
"Dueling roster," she said. "Told you."
Crownspire called them "paired demonstrations," as if that made them less like duels and more like polite conversations. The idea wasn't to break each other's spirits or bones; it was to show control under pressure, to learn how formulas held when anything moved. The names were chalked neat in two columns: Blue A versus Blue D, Blue B versus Blue F, Blue C versus—
"Blue C versus Blue H," Sera read. "Pair three: Riven—"
I braced.
"—and Tallow," she finished. "Against Calder and Neri."
Brann and his ant. Neri was a quiet girl with a wind-wisp that shed mist when nervous and a knack for writing tidy runes. Together they'd be quick and sharp. Together Sera and I would look like a kettle and a coal going for a walk.
Someone behind us groaned. Someone in front whistled low. Aureline, farther down the board, read her own name—paired with a boy from Blue G, matched against a pair I didn't recognize—and did not change expression.
"You don't have to—" I started.
Sera pinched my sleeve hard enough to make me bite the word. "I'm not made of porcelain," she said, voice flat. "My gran didn't teach me to simmer to avoid a boil."
"Right," I said, chastened and relieved. "We'll plan. We have…two days?"
"Tomorrow to train," she said, "then show day. Marshal Osk will run us until we forget our names, and Professor Quill will mark us down for cleverness that snaps. Eat. Sleep. Don't stare at the ceiling."
"I'm constitutionally incapable of not staring at ceilings."
"Try."
We split at the main gate. Sera lived in the dormitory cluster above the lower gardens; I caught the tram down the hill and walked the last two streets home because the light was good and my legs hadn't yet remembered that they were tired.
My mother had left the door unlatched; Lark glowed the kind of green that feels like water. The house smelled of stew and damp clay. I set the emberling on the hearthstone and it sighed like a satisfied cat and sank an inch into the old brick as if greeting a cousin.
"How did it go?" my mother asked, coming from the back with flour on her forearms. She didn't pretend not to know. She looked at my face and got most of it in a blink. "Good," she said, and meant the attempt, not the shine. "Eat first. Words after."
We ate at the small table by the window. The stew tasted like thyme and patience. Lark reached a petal toward the bowl and withdrew because it was polite. The emberling warmed the room to a summer kitchen, and for a handful of breaths I could almost pretend my life did not now include a roster board that paired me against someone who collected smirks the way some people collected charms.
I told my mother what mattered: the ash and the return, the thread that held, the way the emberling leaned into runes when I asked them kindly and balked when I tried to hurry.
She nodded. "Spirits aren't children," she said. "They don't want coddling. But they prefer to be understood before they're ordered."
"Marshal Osk said I write like a bricklayer."
"Your grandfather was a bricklayer." She smiled into her bowl. "Bricks don't make poetry, but they keep rain out of the bed. Your father used to say—" She stopped, breathed out through her nose, and set the spoon down. "He used to say the world forgives honest work. Keep breathing. Keep writing. Keep lifting heavy things."
After supper, I cleaned the bowls and then did exactly that: lifted the heavy things. We didn't own weights; we owned a cellar with bad stairs, crates of potatoes, a box of books too heavy to move, and a cask of vinegar that sloshed like a river when I tried to pretend it was a bell. I carried them up and down until my back sang. Lark glowed the way plants do when they approve of sweat. The emberling watched from the hearth, heat pulsing in time with my breath as if our hearts were learning to share a drum.
When the moon pushed a hand over the rooftops, I took out my slate and sketched runes until the chalk wore down to a pearl: Gather. Bind. Contain. Steady. I drew the first lines of a new idea—nothing that would carry in a duel, but something that might make our pair harder to shake: a "Latch" rune that would let my heat thread hook to Sera's pot and stay there, no matter how we moved. It would cost more. It would need me to accept that I could not be clever and fast at the same time. I could accept that.
I crawled into bed with the emberling tucked in the crook of my knees. It kept the sheets warm. I dreamt of runes running away from me down a long corridor and of Osk building the corridor brick by brick behind them until I had no choice but to walk straight and stop trying to cut corners.
Morning came with bells and a damp chill that made the emberling burrow like a coal in ash. Crownspire's flags hung soft, not busy. The dueling field—"demonstration green," the sign insisted—had been swept and chalked overnight into lanes with polite fences between them, the kind designed to prevent only the least determined accidents.
Osk met us at the gate with his hands behind his back and the air of a man who enjoyed watching people discover new kinds of tired. "Pairs," he said. "You have one hour. No more. Show me one thing that will not embarrass you."
Sera and I found a patch of shade. She set the pot on the grass and steadied it with a brick. I coaxed the emberling to hover half an inch off the rim. Its heat bled into the clay in a way that made the pot purr. I drew the latch rune above us—a hook nested into the Steady line—and felt it complain at the cost I asked of it.
"I can take some of it," Sera said, reading my face. "Bind one thread to me. My channels aren't yours, but the pot's lattice is wide. It can carry."
"Try."
We adjusted. The rune settled, a stubborn cat agreeing to sit in a new spot. The heat line latched. I tried to move away as if I were rushing to new cover; the line tugged at my chest; the pot's weight tugged back, not heavy, simply real. We pivoted, side-stepped, reversed. The thread held. The pot kept just-off-boil. The emberling didn't flake. When I asked for more heat and then less, it changed without lurching.
Across the green, Brann and Neri practiced a clever exchange trick: the ant cutting a line; the wind-wisp catching the severed cord in a soft sling before anyone could call it a drop. Aureline worked footwork with her salamander, learning to move as if the wings were already hers. Osk paced between pairs like a crow reading a field for shiny things.
The hour slid quick and mean. By the time Osk called "Enough," my shirt stuck to my back and the emberling's glow had settled into a focused fox-fire that made my hands look tan.
We crowded at the edge of the green while Professor Quill and two other instructors took seats at a table under a canvas awning. Quill had his lens; Osk had a cup of something that steamed like anger.
"Pair three," Quill called after two competent exhibitions that made no one gasp and no one clap early. "Riven and Tallow. Calder and Neri."
We walked out together—the kettle and the coal—and faced Brann and Neri across the chalk.
"First exchange," Quill said. "Control under motion. Begin."
Neri started: a neat gust that would have slapped a less careful heat line sideways. I felt the push hit the latch rune and roll along it like rain off a good roof. Sera shifted her stance and the pot didn't slop. The emberling brightened, eager without leaping.
"Second exchange," Quill said. "Task under pressure. You, cut the banner—" He nodded at Brann. "—you, keep a boil—" to Sera and me "—and you, keep anything from touching the ground," to Neri.
Brann's ant reared, mandibles glowing as it warmed them even. I found the heat thread's breath and fed it a steady pulse. Sera tipped in a handful of barley as if daring the pot to falter. Neri's wisp swelled like a pillow.
The ant cut. The banner—ragged, light—fluttered loose. Neri's wind caught it. The pot rolled a bubble and kept its temper. My chest pulled and released, pulled and released, as the latch took some of my breath and gave some back.
"Third exchange," Quill said, and the wicked match-strike smile showed like a flash of tooth. "Perturbation. Marshal?"
Osk did not throw a rock or shout; he simply walked behind us and kicked the leg of the awning pole—once, sharp. The canvas snapped. Sound jumped. Every familiar on the green flinched.
The emberling flared—and held. The pot burped and recovered. My hands stayed steady because I had spent an evening lifting things that didn't want to be lifted, and the part of me that shook at noise had already had its say.
Across from us, the ant's mandibles over-brightened; the cut came a fraction late; the wisp lunged and gathered the slack like a fisherman catching a net. Brann's jaw tightened. Neri's eyes narrowed, not at us but at her own formula, already editing in her head.
"Enough," Quill said, and if his voice was pleased, he kept it out of his notes. He looked at me, then at Sera, then at the little coal maintaining its humble miracle. "Bones," he said. "Before bolts."
We walked back to the line. Brann passed us with his smile on like armor. "Enjoy your kitchen tricks," he murmured. "I'll see you when we're asked to light something that bites."
"Bring a rope," Sera said without looking at him. "We'll teach you how not to burn it."
Aureline, waiting for her turn, watched us with that unreadable composure of hers. When I met her eye, she tipped her chin the slightest bit—a nod, or the ghost of one. The salamander's wing brushed her shoulder like a cloak.
When the exhibitions ended and the awning was folded and the chalk began to blur back into grass, Osk waved me over with two fingers.
"You wrote a latch." His tone said: I know; I watched you; I am deciding how much of a compliment to give.
"Yes, Marshal."
"Not fancy. Not pretty. Useful." He let that sit, the kind of praise that felt heavier than words. "Next time, you add a cut. Not for rope. For air." He jerked his chin toward Neri's lane. "Surgical. Half a hand of wind will make fools of many flames."
"Yes, Marshal."
He squinted. "Eat iron tomorrow. Not much. Sand. See if your eighth channel stops whining."
I bowed my head because my mouth didn't trust itself not to grin.
The emberling, having been good for a whole hour, chose that moment to collapse into ash and zip back into my seal with a sound like a snapped thread.
"That," Osk said dryly, "is your cue to lie down."
I did not lie down. I walked home because the night wind had teeth and my spirit had eaten enough heat to lend me a little. My mother had left a note on the table with a list of herbs she wanted from the markets and a postscript that read: Lark wants to meet your fire when you are ready to supervise them being polite to each other.
I touched the seal over my heart and felt the ember core answer, warm through bone.
"Bones before bolts," I told the quiet kitchen, and the kitchen, being a sensible object full of spirits older than me, agreed.