We left the highlands on the third day of Leafdark, when the morning frost painted the meadow white and the peaks behind us wore fresh caps of snow.
I had expected Caelan to simply take us the way he had brought me here, folding space around us and emerging in the capital between one breath and the next. Instead he led me down the mountain path on foot, two horses waiting for us at a stable in the village below that I hadn't known existed. The stable master, a weathered man with grey hair and hands like knotted rope, didn't meet Caelan's eyes when we arrived. He saddled the horses in silence and accepted no payment, and I noticed his wife pulling their children inside and shutting the door before we had even mounted.
"Why aren't we traveling the other way?" I asked as we rode out of the village and onto the road that wound down through the pine forests toward the lowlands. "The way you brought me here."
"Because that method is exhausting for both of us, and because you need to see the kingdom you're being trained to serve." Caelan rode ahead of me, his horse a tall black mare that moved with the same effortless grace as her rider. My own mount was smaller and brown and seemed to regard me with mild skepticism, though she followed the mare without complaint. "You've spent two months in the highlands learning to burn things. Now you need to learn what those things are worth."
The road descended through switchbacks carved into the mountainside, each turn revealing new vistas of the land below. I had never seen Valthern from above, had never understood the scale of it until I watched the forests give way to rolling hills and the hills give way to farmland stretching toward a horizon I couldn't see. Rivers glinted silver in the autumn light, and plumes of smoke rose from villages too distant to distinguish as anything more than dark clusters against the brown and gold of harvested fields.
"How long will the journey take?" I asked.
"Eight days, perhaps nine if the weather turns. The King's Road is well-maintained, but autumn brings rain and mud." He glanced back at me, golden eyes assessing. "Have you ever ridden this far before?"
"I'd never ridden at all before the army. We walked everywhere in my village." The horse shifted beneath me as though sensing my inexperience, and I tightened my grip on the reins. "The march to the border was on foot. Three weeks through terrain worse than this, or so the sergeants claimed."
"Then you're familiar with discomfort. That will serve you well."
We rode in silence for a while, descending through the last of the pine forests and emerging onto a wider road that joined ours from the east. This new road was paved with flat stones worn smooth by generations of traffic, and Caelan turned south onto it without hesitation.
"The King's Road," he said. "It runs from the northern passes all the way to the southern border, with branches connecting every major city in the kingdom. Parts of it are older than the current dynasty, built before the Culling when the world was different. Other parts have been rebuilt and expanded over the centuries. It's the spine of Valthern, the route by which grain and iron and soldiers move from one end of the kingdom to the other."
I looked down at the stones beneath my horse's hooves, imagining the countless feet that had worn them to this smoothness. Merchants and pilgrims and armies, farmers bringing their harvests to market and nobles traveling to court and ordinary people going about their ordinary lives, all of them passing over this same road for hundreds of years.
"My village wasn't on any major road," I said. "The nearest town was half a day's walk, and we went there maybe twice a year for things we couldn't make ourselves."
"Most people live that way. The kingdom is vast, and most of its population is scattered across farms and hamlets that never see anyone more important than a tax collector." Caelan's voice carried something that might have been wistfulness, though it was hard to tell. "The roads connect the places that matter to those who rule. The rest of the kingdom exists in the spaces between."
We passed our first travelers an hour later: a merchant's wagon laden with barrels and pulled by two oxen, the merchant himself walking alongside with a stick to prod them forward. He looked up as we approached, his face settling into the wary neutrality of someone accustomed to assessing strangers for threat. Then his eyes found the insignia on Caelan's coat, the crown wreathed in flames embroidered in gold thread, and his expression collapsed into something closer to terror.
He stepped off the road entirely, pulling his oxen with him, and bowed so deeply that his forehead nearly touched his knees. He didn't look up as we passed, didn't speak, didn't move until we were well past him and the sound of our horses' hooves had faded.
"He was afraid of you," I said.
"He was afraid of what I represent." Caelan didn't look back at the merchant. "To him, I'm not a person. I'm a force of nature that wears a human face, a reminder of powers he cannot comprehend and cannot oppose. His grandfather might have seen a Sovereign once in his entire life. His children might never see one at all. But the stories persist, the fear persists, and when he tells his family about today he'll say he saw death itself riding south on a black horse."
I thought about the stories my own grandmother had told, the tales of the Culling that every child in Valthern learned before they could read. Mages who had burned cities and unmade armies, who had decided that ordinary humans were obsolete and tried to wipe them from the world. The Sovereigns were supposed to be different, bound by oaths and controlled by councils, but they were still made of the same impossible power. The merchant's fear made perfect sense once I understood what he was seeing.
"Will people react that way to me?" I asked. "Once I'm trained?"
"Some will. Others will be curious, or resentful, or desperate enough to approach you with petitions and pleas. A few will hate you simply for existing, because your existence reminds them of what magic did to their ancestors." He paused. "You'll learn to live with it. We all do."
The first night we stopped at an inn in a town called Millford, a prosperous settlement built where the King's Road crossed a river wide enough to require a stone bridge. The bridge was guarded by soldiers wearing the crown-and-flame on their surcoats, and they saluted Caelan with a crispness that spoke of genuine respect rather than mere obligation. The innkeeper, a plump woman with flour dusted across her apron, went pale when she saw us enter but recovered quickly enough to offer her best room and anything we might desire from her kitchen.
The common room emptied within minutes of our arrival. The merchants and travelers who had been eating and drinking found sudden pressing business elsewhere, leaving their half-finished meals behind. The innkeeper's daughter, a girl of perhaps thirteen, served us our dinner with trembling hands and wouldn't meet my eyes.
I watched her retreat to the kitchen and thought about what she must have experienced six years ago, when the tester came to her village and every child of seven was brought forward to hold the crystal that revealed what they truly were. I remembered my own testing with painful clarity: the fear in my mother's eyes, the too-tight grip of my father's hand on my shoulder, the cold weight of the crystal in my palm and the overwhelming relief when it did nothing at all. This girl had passed that test the same way I had. She had been allowed to stay with her family, to grow up ordinary, to serve meals to travelers and tremble when Sovereigns walked into her inn.
The difference between us was nothing more than timing. If my spark had woken six years earlier, I would have been taken. If hers had woken six years later, she would be sitting where I sat now.
"Does it bother you?" I asked Caelan after she had gone. "The way they look at us?"
"It used to." He cut into the roasted chicken on his plate with precise, economical movements. "When I was younger, newly trained and still foolish enough to think I might have a normal life, I tried to put people at ease. I smiled and spoke kindly and pretended I was just another traveler. It never worked. They could sense what I was even when I tried to hide it, and the pretense only made them more afraid."
"How can they sense it? I thought magic was invisible unless you were using it."
"It is, mostly. But everyone has some awareness of magical presence, even people with no spark of their own. They feel it as unease, as the sense that something isn't quite right. Sovereigns learn to suppress that presence when necessary, but suppression requires effort and attention, and most of us don't bother when traveling through our own kingdom." He took a sip of the wine the innkeeper had provided, a red so dark it was almost black. "You'll learn to suppress yours eventually. For now, it's faint enough that most people won't notice unless they're paying close attention."
I thought about the merchant on the road, the way he had bowed without being asked. I thought about the innkeeper's pale face and the way the common room had cleared. These people had done nothing wrong, had simply been going about their lives until we appeared and reminded them of everything they had been taught to fear.
"What happens to the families?" I asked. "The ones whose children get taken. I know they never see them again, but after that. How do they live with it?"
Caelan set down his fork and looked at me with an expression I couldn't quite read. "You're thinking about your own parents."
"I'm thinking about everyone's parents. Every child who failed that test had a mother and father who watched them be led away. Every village that lost a child had to keep living with that absence." I pushed the food around my plate, my appetite suddenly gone. "In my village, the baker's son was taken when I was four. I barely remember it, but I remember the way people talked about his family afterward. Like they were cursed. Like producing a magical child made them something less than human."
"The stigma varies by region. In some places, families of magical children are pitied. In others, they're shunned. A few communities celebrate when a child tests positive, believing they've contributed something valuable to the kingdom." He refilled his wine glass from the bottle the innkeeper had left for us. "The truth is that magical potential is random. It follows hereditary patterns to some degree, but it can appear in any family regardless of history. The families who lose children to the testing have done nothing wrong. They simply had the misfortune of being touched by something they can't control."
I thought about my own parents, about the testing I had undergone at seven. The crystal had done nothing when I held it. I had passed, been released back to my parents, returned to my ordinary life. The relief had been overwhelming, though I hadn't fully understood what I was being relieved from.
Now I understood. And I wondered if my parents knew yet that their son had manifested after all, that the relief they had felt ten years ago had only been a postponement.
"Do my parents know what happened to me?" I asked. "That I'm alive, that I'm being trained?"
"The Council sends notification to families when a late manifestation occurs. They would have received word within a few weeks of your awakening." Caelan's voice was carefully neutral. "Whether they understand what that notification means is another question. Most families in similar situations assume their child is effectively dead to them."
The words landed like stones in my chest. I had known this, had understood it on some level since the moment Caelan took my hand on the battlefield. But hearing it spoken aloud made it real in a way it hadn't been before.
"Can I write to them?" I asked. "Let them know I'm all right?"
"You can. Whether you should is a more complicated question." He met my eyes across the table. "Letters from Sovereigns in training are monitored by the Council. Anything you write will be read before it reaches its destination, and anything your parents write in response will be read before it reaches you. Some families find the correspondence comforting despite those limitations. Others find it makes the separation harder to bear."
I thought about my mother, about the way she had called me in from the fields at dusk and the warmth she had shown me even when my father's disappointment was palpable. I thought about my father, about the distance between us that had always felt unbridgeable despite the love I knew he carried somewhere beneath his practical exterior. I didn't know if a monitored letter would help them or hurt them. I didn't know if it would help or hurt me.
"I'll think about it," I said.
"Take your time. The decision doesn't need to be made tonight." He stood from the table and moved toward the door. "Get some sleep. We have a long ride tomorrow, and the terrain grows more populated as we move south."
The second day brought more traffic on the King's Road.
Merchant caravans passed us heading north, their wagons loaded with barrels of salt and bolts of cloth and other goods from the coastal trade routes. Farmers drove cattle and sheep toward market towns, the animals lowing and bleating their complaints at being forced to move faster than they preferred. Soldiers marched in formation, their boots striking the paving stones in unison, and messengers on swift horses galloped past with leather pouches strapped across their chests.
Everyone moved aside when they saw us coming.
I had grown accustomed to the fear in people's eyes, but watching an entire column of soldiers break formation to let us pass was something else entirely. These were armed men, trained for combat, veterans of the same war that had claimed Tam's life. Yet they pressed themselves against the edge of the road and bowed their heads as though we were royalty, and their commander saluted Caelan with a deference that bordered on worship.
"The soldiers know what Sovereigns can do," Caelan said after we had passed. "They've seen us on battlefields, watched us end in minutes what they couldn't end in months. Some of them hate us for it, resent the fact that their courage and sacrifice means nothing compared to what we can accomplish with a gesture. Others are simply grateful that we're on their side."
"Which feeling is more common?"
"It depends on the soldier. The young ones tend toward resentment. They've trained their whole lives to fight, and then they watch a single Sovereign make everything they know obsolete. The veterans are more likely to be grateful. They've seen too many of their friends die to care about wounded pride."
We stopped that night at a larger town, one with proper walls and a garrison and an inn that catered specifically to travelers of importance. The innkeeper here was less afraid than the one in Millford, more accustomed to hosting powerful guests. He showed us to private rooms and offered us dinner in a separate dining hall where we wouldn't disturb the other patrons or be disturbed by them.
"Crosval is still six days away," Caelan said over dinner. "We'll pass through three more towns of significant size before we reach the capital, and the road will become more crowded as we approach. By the time we arrive, you'll have a better understanding of what Valthern looks like and how its people live."
"What is the capital like?"
"Large. Overwhelming, probably, for someone who grew up in a village. The population is somewhere between three and four hundred thousand, depending on how you count the suburbs and surrounding settlements." He refilled his wine glass from the bottle the innkeeper had left for us. "The palace sits at the center of the city, overlooking the river. The Council meets there, and the King holds court, and the Sovereigns who are assigned to the capital maintain residences within the palace walls. When we arrive, I'll introduce you to the other Sovereigns and present you to the Council for evaluation."
The thought of meeting other Sovereigns made my stomach clench with anxiety. Caelan had told me about them in general terms during my training, described their powers and their personalities and their positions within the kingdom's hierarchy. But descriptions were one thing and reality was another, and the prospect of standing before people like Seraph and Corvin and Yara felt more daunting than anything I had faced in the training meadow.
"What will the evaluation involve?"
"Questions, mostly. The Council will want to know about your background, your awakening, your training so far. They'll assess your control and your potential, decide how to classify you within the existing categories." He met my eyes across the table. "They'll also decide whether you're ready for active service or whether you need more training before you can be deployed."
"What happens if they decide I'm ready?"
"Then they'll assign you duties. Probably minor ones at first, routine patrols or guard assignments that don't require the full extent of your abilities. They'll want to see how you perform in real situations before they trust you with anything significant."
I thought about what real situations might mean, about the war still raging on the eastern border and the enemy soldiers who might fall to my fire the way the mice and rabbits had fallen in Caelan's meadow. The progression seemed inevitable now, a path I had been walking since the moment my spark awakened on that battlefield.
"And if they decide I need more training?"
"Then you return to the highlands with me and we continue your education." Caelan set down his glass and studied me with an expression of unusual intensity. "The Council's decision isn't final, Edrin. I have standing with them, earned through years of service and demonstrated loyalty. If I believe you're not ready, I'll argue that case regardless of what they want. Your development is my responsibility, and I won't let political pressure compromise it."
The words should have been reassuring. Instead they made me wonder what kind of political pressure might be brought to bear, what forces within the kingdom might want me deployed before I was prepared, what purposes I might be asked to serve that had nothing to do with my own wellbeing or growth.
"Thank you," I said, because it seemed like the appropriate response.
"Don't thank me yet. The Council is composed of practical people, and practical people make practical decisions. If they believe the kingdom needs you in the field, they'll push for that regardless of my objections." He stood from the table and moved toward the door. "Rest well. Tomorrow we enter the heartland proper, and the road becomes more interesting."
The heartland was everything Caelan had promised and more.
I had never seen so much cultivated land, field after field of stubble where the autumn harvest had been gathered, orchards heavy with apples waiting to be picked, pastures dotted with sheep and cattle grazing on the last good grass before winter. The villages here were larger than anything in the highlands, proper settlements with stone buildings and market squares and churches whose bells rang to mark the hours. People stopped their work to watch us pass, and children who had been playing in the lanes were called inside by their mothers.
The river appeared on our third day in the heartland, a broad expanse of water that the road followed for mile after mile. Barges floated past us heading downstream, their decks piled high with barrels and crates, their crews calling greetings to one another in a dialect I could barely understand. Smaller boats carried passengers between the villages that dotted both banks, and fishermen cast their nets from the shallows, pulling in catches that would feed their families through the coming winter.
"The Great River," Caelan said when I asked about it. "It rises in the mountains near the Kaervost border and flows all the way to the southern sea. Most of Valthern's commerce moves along its length. Cheaper than overland transport, faster too, as long as you're heading downstream."
I watched a barge drift past, its deck loaded with barrels that might have held grain or ale or something else entirely. The bargemen moved about their work with practiced ease, and I wondered what they thought of us riding along the bank, whether they even noticed the Sovereigns passing or whether we were just another unremarkable part of the landscape.
The fourth day brought us to a city called Thornbridge, built where a tributary joined the Great River at a crossing wide enough to require a stone bridge of impressive size. The city was larger than any settlement I had ever seen, its walls enclosing what must have been twenty thousand people or more. Guards at the gate recognized Caelan's insignia and waved us through without question, and the streets beyond were crowded enough that I had to guide my horse carefully to avoid stepping on anyone.
"Thornbridge controls the junction," Caelan explained as we navigated the crowded streets. "Grain and timber move downstream to the capital and the southern markets. Salt and manufactured goods move upstream to the interior. The city grew wealthy by taxing everything that passes through."
I watched the river traffic as we crossed the bridge, barges and boats jostling for position at the docks below. Laborers loaded and unloaded goods while merchants argued over prices and officials collected tariffs. The noise was overwhelming after the relative quiet of the road, a constant din of voices and animals and machinery that seemed to press against me from all sides.
"It's like a living thing," I said. "The whole city, I mean. Everything moving, everyone doing something."
"Cities are organisms in their own way. They consume resources and produce waste and grow or shrink depending on the conditions around them." Caelan guided his horse around a cart that had stopped in the middle of the street. "The capital is this multiplied by twenty. You'll see for yourself in a few days."
We stopped in Thornbridge only long enough to change horses and eat a meal, then continued south along the river road. The traffic here was heavier than anything we had encountered, a constant stream of wagons and travelers and animals moving in both directions. Some of them recognized what Caelan was and gave us space; others were too preoccupied with their own business to notice us at all.
The fifth and sixth days passed in a blur of similar scenery: prosperous farmland, busy towns, the ever-present river carrying its burden of commerce toward the sea. I began to understand what Caelan had meant about learning what things were worth. Every field we passed represented food that would feed families through the winter. Every barge we saw carried goods that people needed to live. Every village and town was full of people going about their lives, building homes and raising children and trying to make sense of a world that contained both ordinary struggles and extraordinary powers.
I had been training to destroy things. Now I was seeing what those things looked like before they were destroyed, and the weight of that knowledge settled into my chest alongside the spark that burned there constantly.
On the seventh day, we crested a hill and I saw the capital for the first time.
Crosval spread across the valley below like something from a story, its walls tracing a rough circle around a city that seemed to go on forever. The Great River cut through its center, spanned by bridges I could barely distinguish at this distance. Towers and spires rose above the general mass of buildings, their peaks catching the afternoon light. And at the heart of it all, on a promontory overlooking the river, sat the palace: a complex of white stone buildings surrounded by walls of its own, beautiful and imposing and unmistakably the seat of power for the entire kingdom.
"Creator's blessing," I breathed, and the words came out as barely a whisper.
Caelan reined in his horse beside mine and let me look for a long moment.
"That is what you're being trained to protect," he said quietly. "Not the walls or the buildings or even the palace itself. The people who live there, the lives they're trying to build, the futures they're hoping for. Three hundred thousand souls who depend on people like us to keep the darkness at bay."
I stared at the city below, trying to comprehend the scale of it. In my village, I had known everyone by name. Here there were more people than I could count in a lifetime, more lives than I could possibly understand, more potential for both joy and suffering than my mind could hold.
"I don't know if I can protect all of that," I said.
"You can't. No single person can, not even the most powerful Sovereign who ever lived." Caelan nudged his horse forward, beginning the descent toward the city gates. "But you can protect some of it. You can do your part, whatever that turns out to be. And if everyone does their part, then perhaps the whole will be enough."
I followed him down the hill, toward the city and the Council and whatever waited for me in the capital of Valthern. The weight of what I was becoming pressed down on my shoulders with every step, but beneath that weight I felt something else stirring: a sense of purpose I hadn't known I was looking for, a reason to be more than just a miller's son who had stumbled into magic by accident.
The gates of Crosval opened before us, and I rode into the city.