The open country below ran for an hour before the terrain started to change.

Roads appearing below us, running toward a center point that the train was also running toward. Then a wall, long and continuous, enclosing an area large enough to be its own small city.

Then the academy appeared over a rise.

Lina made a sound.

I understood it.

From the train window the full scale of it was visible in a way the avenue approach had not allowed the main structure running further. The grounds spread outward from the building in every direction. The outer wall enclosing all of it like a boundary between the academy and everything.

And the towers.

From here they were visible in their full context for the first time. The southern tower’s heat shimmer rises above the roofline. The northern tower’s frost catches the light. The eastern tower with its circling presences. The western tower throwing its wrong shadow across the grounds.

The train began to descend.

Lina had both hands on the glass.

"Sylph," she said quietly.

I looked at her.

"She is excited. I can feel it."

I looked back at the towers.

"Which one."

"The eastern one." A pause. "She keeps pulling toward it."

I filed that.

The train settled onto the lower track and the academy wall rose on our left as we approached the station built directly into it.

The doors opened.

We stepped out onto the platform.

The wall above us. The towers above the wall. The sky above the towers, very ordinary, very large.

Lina stood beside me and looked up.

"It is bigger than I expected."

"Everything here is bigger than expected."

She looked at me.

"You keep saying that."

"It keeps being true."

She looked back at the wall. Then her hand found my sleeve the way it always found my sleeve without looking, without deciding, just there.

Sebastian appeared beside me. He held out two masks without explanation: a fox mask, dark with minimal detail, and a plain half-face with no markings.

"As requested, Young Master."

I took the fox mask. Held out the plain one to Lina.

She turned it over in her hands.

"Why."

"The guild hall runs a potential evaluation. Results go on public record the moment they are registered. I would prefer to choose when our names become known here."

She looked at the fox on mine.

"Why does yours have a fox."

"I did not ask for specifications."

She looked at hers for another moment. Then she put it on.

"Okay."

She looked at Sebastian. Sebastian looked at the middle distance. She put her mask on and we walked through the entrance.

We walked away from the academy station toward the city.

The guild hall was twelve minutes on foot.

***

The Dreamers sat on a street two blocks from the main avenue, set slightly back from the buildings on either side.

Premium guild. One of four in the capital. I had read about it twice in the novel and both times it was mentioned when the author wanted you to understand that something mattered without explaining why yet.

I looked at the sign.

Then the memory arrived.

Not mine. Kael’s surfacing. A guild hall on a different corner in a different city. Dark stone. A sign he had not been able to read yet because he had been seven years old and his father had been holding his hand and moving too fast for reading. The smell of the place. The sound of it. The particular feeling of being very small in a doorway of something very large.

I stood on the street and let it finish.

Then I filed it and kept walking.

Lina had been watching me.

"What was that."

"...Nothing!"

***

The hall was large and running at normal capacity. Evaluators at their stations, candidates in the queue.

There are maybe thirty people ahead of us.

Sebastian crossed to the reception desk.

I watched him. The receptionist looked up. Sebastian placed something on the desk without a word.

The receptionist looked at it.

Looked at Sebastian.

Looked at it again.

His hand went under the desk.

The tone that followed was loud. Designed to carry to the right people without disturbing everyone else. But the room changed immediately. Two evaluators along the side walls straightened. A door at the back opened and three people in senior guild colors came through. Then the guild master appeared from a different door entirely.

He moved faster and reached the reception desk in time that meant he had been close and had come the moment the tone sounded. He looked at what was on the desk. Then at Sebastian. Then across the hall at me.

From behind the fox mask I looked back.

Whatever he saw was enough. He turned to the three seniors and said something I couldn’t hear. They moved two toward the main entrance, one toward the evaluation floor, the queue of candidates being redirected with the smooth efficiency of a drill run.

The hall had gone from ordinary to silence.

He crossed toward us.

"Follow me."

***

The room was past two corridors and a staircase, in a section of the building the public areas gave no indication existed. He closed the door. Lina beside me, Sebastian slightly apart, hands clasped.

The guild master looked at Sebastian for a long moment.

"I was told you left the capital."

"I did."

"Three years ago."

"Yes."

"And yet here you are."

"Circumstances changed."

The guild master looked around.

"They are with me," Sebastian said. "Both of them."

That settled it.

"Full assessment," I said. "Both of us. Results registered under tokens we provide. No names attached until we choose to attach them."

A pause. Then the guild master nodded.

"I will conduct them personally. No other evaluators."

"Acceptable."

He went through the door ahead of us.

I looked at Sebastian.

"What did you show him."

A brief pause.

"My credentials."

"Which credentials."

Sebastian was quiet.

"An S rank classification Issued by the empire’s assassination guild fourteen years ago. Never revoked."

Silence.

"S rank,"

"Yes."

"And the title."

"The Cursed One. Assigned after the third contract. I did not choose it."

Lina was looking at Sebastian with the careful attention

"You have been my butler. For two months"

"The Young Duke required assistance."

"An S rank assassin called The Cursed One."

"I assisted where assistance was required," Sebastian said, to the middle distance. "The task does not diminish the title. Or the other way around."

"Does my father know what you are."

"Your father assigned me."

Was my father paranoid enough to assign an S-Rank assassin to a son he claimed not to care about.

"He sent you to watch someone he hadn’t decided about yet," I said.

Sebastian looked at me directly.

"He sent me to watch someone he expected to remain predictable, That is no longer the situation."

"Is that a problem."

"Not for me."

I held his gaze for a moment, then turned toward the door.

Three paces behind, as always.