The Eastern Training Yard was a circle of pale stone, set into the slope of the central island a quarter-mile from the Great Hall, open to the sky and ringed at its perimeter by twelve sparring rings inlaid into the floor in dark iron. The wiki had described it as *the primary outdoor training facility for first-year Combat Arts,* and the wiki had not bothered to mention the wind.

The wind was the point.

The yard had been built four hundred years ago at the edge of the central island, where the air came up the cliff face below the academy in cold continuous currents, and the wind moved through the yard the way a question moved through a body — constant, low-grade, the kind of pressure that asked a young swordsman, every second they stood in the ring, whether they had compensated for it.

Most of them had not.

I had been at the yard for ten minutes, and I had counted six first-years already overcorrecting for a wind that none of them had named.

I stood at the southern edge of the yard.

I made my face do nothing.

—

The class assembled at the third bell.

Approximately forty first-years from across the four lower tiers — most of them Iron, a handful of Silver, three or four Gold, and four Zenith including myself — gathered in a loose semicircle at the northern edge of the yard, in the small careful spacing of teenagers who had been told to *form up* and had not yet decided how the spacing of the formation would reflect the social geometry of the previous hour’s breakfast.

I took the position on the eastern edge of the Zenith group.

The other three Zenith first-years took positions at the western, northern, and central points of the same group.

We did not stand together.

We did not need to.

Aurel Drakeveil — who was apparently a third-year apprentice instructor, the kind of arrangement the academy used to give upper-tier students teaching credit — stood at the side of the yard with a clipboard, taking attendance with the small neutral efficiency of a man who had decided not to look at me. I noted his presence. I did not look at him either.

Aiden Crest was in the front row of the Iron contingent.

He was standing with his weight evenly distributed, his hands loose at his sides, his eyes fixed on the empty center of the yard with the focused unblinking attention of a boy who had walked into this class with the intention of being noticed. The bloodline-gathering at his shoulders was clearer in daylight than it had been in the Hall. He was glowing. He did not know he was glowing. The Aether in his shoulders was producing a faint subliminal light that everyone in the yard could feel and that none of them could quite see, and the light was the Script’s first compensation — the early awakening of the Starfire bloodline, three months ahead of the wiki’s most generous estimate.

Draven Kaelthar was in the Gold contingent.

He was a foot taller than the next-tallest Gold first-year. He was holding a training spear at the parade-rest of a Northern military house’s combat tradition, and his pale eyes had passed across the Zenith group in a single sweep at the start of attendance and had returned to the empty center of the yard with the small unmistakable verdict of *none of these four are worth thinking about today.*

The verdict was, by the wiki’s account, a courtesy.

The original Cedric had earned the verdict by being the lazy kind of arrogant.

I had earned the verdict by being quiet at breakfast.

This was, for the moment, acceptable.

Instructor Veylan Graves came into the yard at the fourth bell of the third bell-period — the academy’s small internal subdivision of bell-time that the wiki had documented and that the dataminers had wrongly assumed was a translation error — and the conversation in the formation went quiet without anyone signaling it to go quiet.

He was not a tall man.

The wiki had described him as *imposing.* The wiki had been wrong, in the way the wiki was wrong about most people who did not look the way the dataminers expected them to look. Veylan Graves was perhaps five-foot-ten. He was leanly built. He had short iron-gray hair cropped close to a skull that had been broken twice and reset poorly, and a face that the dataminers had not been able to render because the face was the face of a man who had decided forty years ago to live indoors at the surface of his own expression and to let nothing past it.

The scars were not where the wiki had said.

The wiki had said *facial scars,* and the wiki had documented two: one across the left brow, one along the jaw. The two on Veylan’s face were correct. There were thirteen more on his forearms where his training-yard sleeves were rolled to the elbow, and the thirteen were not the scars of an instructor. The thirteen were the scars of a man who had been an adventurer for twenty years before he had been an instructor for the last six, and the thirteen had been earned in places the academy’s wards had never reached.

He stopped at the southern edge of the yard.

He did not introduce himself.

He looked at us for the count of perhaps fifteen seconds — across the entire formation, slowly, the way a man counted a herd before he began to thin it — and he said:

"My name is Veylan Graves. I am the senior instructor of Combat Arts for the first-year cohort. I will be in charge of your physical instruction for the duration of this academic year. There are forty-one of you. There will, by the end of the year, be fewer."

He paused.

"Today is the first day of your Combat Arts education. There will not be instruction. There will be observation. You will, each of you, come into the center ring and perform one technique of your choice. I will watch you. I will write down what I see. I will, on the basis of what I see, assign you to one of four practical sub-cohorts for the rest of the term. The sub-cohorts will not be tier-based. The sub-cohorts will be based on what you can actually do."

He paused again.

"Some of you will be surprised by your sub-cohort assignment. Some of you will be surprised in directions you have been raised not to expect."

His eyes passed over the Zenith group.

They did not linger.

"Apprentice Drakeveil will call your names. You will come into the center ring. You will perform. You will leave the ring. If your technique requires a partner, you will indicate which classmate you wish to draw, and I will allow it or refuse it. Begin."

Aurel Drakeveil read the first name from the clipboard.

The first name was Aiden Crest.

—

Aiden walked into the ring.

He was holding a training blade that was almost certainly his only personal weapon — a single-edged iron longsword that the academy issued to scholarship students who could not afford their own steel, the kind of blade that nobles trained with for three days before discarding into a forge for melt-down. He set his feet. He glanced once at the Zenith group. He glanced once, in particular, at me.

I made my face do nothing.

He performed.

The technique was a basic two-step thrust-recovery — the kind of movement a village blacksmith with a grudge and a season’s worth of practice could have produced — but Aiden Crest performed it with the half-conscious participation of his bloodline. The Aether at his shoulders flared as he extended the thrust. The blade traveled the wrong line for a basic two-step, because the blade had been pulled, slightly, by the gathering of Starfire in the body it was attached to. The thrust connected with the wooden practice dummy at the far edge of the ring and split the dummy in half — not by skill, not by edge alignment, but by the simple unconscious overflow of an awakening bloodline that had decided, on its own schedule, that the boy who carried it was ready to begin.

The yard went very, very quiet.

The wiki had documented the awakening of Aiden Crest’s Starfire as a *mid-Arc 1 event* — the kind of moment that arrived after three months of training and a near-death experience.

The mid-Arc 1 event had just happened on Day One.

The Script was compensating for me visibly. The Script was compensating for me four months early. The compensation was happening in front of forty-one witnesses, and the witnesses had no idea what they were seeing — they were seeing what looked like a commoner prodigy with sudden raw talent, and they were going to spend the rest of the day talking about it, and Aiden Crest was going to walk out of this yard, in an hour, having earned the kind of reputation that the original Cedric had not earned until late autumn of his first year.

I noted this.

I noted, in particular, that Veylan Graves did not write anything down.

He watched.

He watched Aiden Crest the way a man watched a phenomenon he had not seen before and was not yet certain whether to classify as fortunate or symptomatic. After a count of three, he gestured Aiden out of the ring. Aiden walked back to the Iron contingent. The yard’s conversation resumed at half its previous volume.

Aurel Drakeveil read the next name.

—

The class moved through the formation.

Each first-year stepped into the ring. Each one performed. The performances ranged from competent to embarrassing, and Veylan Graves wrote down a single line on his clipboard for each of them, and his pen never lifted in the way it had not lifted for Aiden Crest. The Iron tier was the largest contingent and took the longest. The Silver tier moved through in eight minutes. The Gold tier produced three competent performances and one — Draven Kaelthar’s — that involved the Northern war-spear’s classic three-strike Frostborn opening, delivered with so much physical force that the practice dummy did not split but *detonated* into a fine spray of wooden splinters, and the splinters were caught by the wind and carried off the cliff at the western edge of the island.

Draven did not look pleased with himself.

Draven looked, by my read, slightly disappointed that the dummy had not lasted longer.

Veylan wrote one line.

He gestured Draven out of the ring.

The four Zenith first-years were called last. Two of them — a pale boy from a Western lesser house and a sharp-featured girl from a Mage Tower–allied lineage — performed neat, well-tutored noble techniques that were exactly the techniques their tutors would have taught them. Veylan wrote one line each. The third Zenith first-year — a heavy-built second cousin of House Kaelthar who had been placed at Zenith by political agreement rather than by talent — performed a slow swordsmanship pattern that even the Iron tier could see was below his rank.

Veylan wrote two lines.

That was the first time the pen had written two.

Then Aurel Drakeveil read my name.

—

I walked into the ring.

I had decided, on the walk between the southern edge of the formation and the iron inlay of the central ring, what I was going to perform. The decision had taken approximately six steps. The decision was: the simplest possible thing.

I had brought a training blade. The standard academy single-edged longsword, weighted to one and a half pounds, balanced six inches above the guard. Nihil was on my hip, sheathed, untouched. He would stay sheathed. Veylan Graves was going to see what I did with the training blade, and that was all he was going to see. 𝒻𝑟𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝑛𝘰𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝘤𝘰𝘮

I set my feet.

I performed the Westmark Opening — first form, no variation, no flourish. The Westmark Opening was a basic four-step swordsmanship pattern from a lesser military tradition that no Zenith first-year would normally have studied, because no Zenith first-year would normally have lowered themselves to study a lesser military tradition. The original Cedric would not have known it. The original Cedric would have known three or four flashier basic patterns from the Valdrake family’s combat archives.

I performed the Westmark Opening because the Westmark Opening was the technique I knew best.

I knew it best because I had read every manual on it in the academy’s wiki — the wiki had documented twenty-three sword styles in absurd procedural detail, and the Westmark Opening was the third of them, alphabetically — and I had then practiced the Westmark Opening in front of the mirror in my chambers for three weeks before the carriage left the estate, because I had decided, somewhere in those three weeks, that the technique I needed for my first day at the academy was the technique nobody would expect.

I performed it.

Four steps. Two angles. No Aether. No power.

The training blade moved through the four positions of the Westmark Opening with the small precise efficiency of a movement that had been practiced six hundred times in front of a mirror, and the blade did not connect with the practice dummy at the far edge of the ring because the Westmark Opening did not, by design, end at the dummy. It ended at empty air. The technique was a positioning drill, not a strike. The dummy was irrelevant.

I lowered the blade.

I stepped out of the ring.

The yard was silent.

It was not the silence of awe. It was the silence of confusion — forty first-years and one apprentice instructor staring at a Zenith first-year who had just performed a four-hundred-year-old positioning drill from a minor military tradition with no Aether, no flourish, and no apparent point.

Aurel Drakeveil’s pen had stopped on the clipboard.

He did not write anything.

He did not, in fact, appear to know what to write.

Veylan Graves had been writing for every other student. The pen had moved on every name. The pen had written one line, or two lines, or a single short word — and the pen had moved.

The pen did not move now.

Veylan Graves looked at me for the count of perhaps ten seconds.

He did not write.

When he spoke, he did not speak to the class. He spoke to me, in a voice that was meant to be private and that was, in the silence of the yard, entirely public.

"Where," he said, "did you learn the Westmark Opening, Young Master Valdrake."

"From the academy’s archive, Instructor. The third volume of the Eastern Border collection."

"You read it."

"Yes, Instructor."

"You practiced it."

"Yes, Instructor."

"For how long."

"Three weeks, Instructor."

He looked at me.

He did not write.

He said: "Move into Sub-cohort One. Apprentice Drakeveil will inform you of the schedule. Class dismissed."

He turned and walked out of the yard.

The pen on the clipboard had not moved.

—

The class dispersed.

I walked toward the eastern exit of the yard with the small careful pace of a Zenith first-year who had been given a sub-cohort assignment that, by the apprentice’s expression, no one in the class had previously been assigned to. I did not look back. I did not look at Aiden Crest. I did not, in particular, look at Aurel Drakeveil — who had now gathered, in the space of three hours, two separate behavioral anomalies he was going to have to report to his cousin.

At the eastern arch of the yard, a hand caught my sleeve.

It was Veylan Graves.

He had not left the yard. He had circled around the perimeter. He had waited at the eastern arch, in the small narrow shadow of the gatehouse, for the moment I would walk past him.

He did not look at me.

He looked at the air ahead of us.

"The Westmark Opening," he said quietly, "is a positioning drill for soldiers who do not yet have access to Aether circulation. It is the technique a person learns when they need to fight without power. It is taught to commoner recruits in the eastern border regiments. It has not been taught to a Valdrake in three generations."

He paused.

"You performed it as cleanly as any border recruit I trained when I was a captain. You performed it cleaner than my own daughter, who served two years in those regiments before she died. You performed it without Aether because you have not yet developed the Aether to support a more complex form."

A pause.

"I do not know what is wrong with you, Young Master Valdrake. I do not know why a Zenith first-year who arrived at this academy with a registered Adept-rank core walks into my yard as a man who cannot circulate Aether at the level a Warden of my age would expect."

A pause.

"I am not going to ask you."

He turned, fully, and he looked at me — pale-blue eyes set into a face that had been shaped by twenty years of choosing not to ask things — and he made the small precise expression of a man delivering an instruction he did not want delivered.

"I will see you in Sub-cohort One on Wednesday at the second bell. You will arrive an hour early. You will tell no one. You will train with me, privately, before the others arrive. We will not discuss your rank. We will not discuss your bloodline. We will, instead, work on the Westmark Second Form, which you have not read yet, because the Eastern Border collection only goes up to the First Form in the academy’s archive."

A pause.

"The Second Form is in my personal collection."

He let go of my sleeve.

He walked away.

In the corner of my vision, the Ledger pulsed once.

[The Villain’s Ledger]

[Sub-cohort assignment: One. Membership: One.]

[Instructor classification: Veylan Graves, Warden-rank. Disposition: Will not report. Will not investigate. Will assist.]

[Note: He is the third senior figure at this institution to have elected, on his own initiative, to participate in your lie.]

[Note: That is more senior figures than the Script anticipated would notice you in your first four hours.]

[Note: This is good. This is also dangerous.]

[Note: It is dangerous because it means you are being noticed faster than you can build the alliances to survive being noticed.]

The panel closed.

I walked back toward the eastern dormitory.

Ren was waiting at the door of the training yard.

He fell in behind me.

We walked together in silence, and somewhere on the floor above the eastern dormitory, in a small private study, Veylan Graves was opening a personal collection of border-regiment manuals that the academy had never been told he owned.

Hours to Entrance Exam: 69.