Chapter 13: Hidden Rank

On Monday morning, Darius Holt’s seat in Class A was empty.

By lunch, the whole Academy had a theory. Some people said he had gone home to his father’s estate in shame, now that Team Four’s story had spread through every dormitory. Some said he had gone hunting in the hills to prove he wasn’t a coward. A second-year girl swore she’d seen him climb into a carriage with a pretty actress from the city theater, and that he would be back in a week with a ring on his finger and a story to tell.

Aren listened to all of it with his head down and his spoon moving mechanically.

He had slept for two hours on Sunday, and in both of those hours he had dreamed about a sword ringing once against rocks, very far down. Both times he had woken with his fists clenched so hard that his nails had cut his palms, and both times he had gone down to the pump and washed his hands again, even though there was nothing on them anymore.

"You’re quiet." Mira dropped heavily onto the bench across from him.

"I’m always quiet."

"No, you’re always annoying. Quiet is new." She pushed a piece of bread toward him. "Eat that. You look like a ghost."

’Funny you should say that.’

He ate it obediently, and it tasted like nothing.

That afternoon, Professor Crane did the weekly crystal check.

Every Monday, the students of Class D lined up in front of a small Awakening Crystal on Crane’s desk, no bigger than a fist, and touched it one at a time. It showed their class, their rank and their level, and Crane wrote the numbers in his book. The nobles in the upper classes did it in private with their instructors. Class D did it in a line, in front of everybody, so everybody could see exactly how little they had grown.

Aren stood in line and tried very hard not to think about the window at the edge of his vision.

[True Class: Zero (EX, Unique).][Rank E: Level 1.]

Two nights ago, he had broken through. He was Rank E now, the same rank as Vivienne Ashgrave and a full rank above every other person in this basement. If the little crystal showed that, it was over. Nobody went from F to E in a week unless a noble family bought them a core, and a commoner who did it would be asked questions until he bled.

’False Face held at the ceremony. It’ll hold now. It has to.’

Fenwick went just before him. The crystal showed Lamplighter, Rank F, Level 2. The class applauded sarcastically, and Fenwick bowed.

Then, finally, it was Aren’s turn.

He put his hand on the crystal. It was cool and smooth under his palm, and for one long second it did nothing at all while his heart climbed into his throat.

Then it glowed its weak, dirty grey.

Class: Servant. Rank F: Level 1.

"No progress, Servant," Crane said, writing it down without looking up. "As expected."

The class laughed. Aren went back to his seat and sat down very carefully, because his legs had gone suddenly soft.

The System was a much better liar than he had realized. He wondered, not for the first time, who had built it.

When class was over and the room had emptied, a new window opened in front of him. He had glimpsed it once already, on the night of his breakthrough, but he had been too tired and shaken to read it properly, so now he read it slowly.

[Investment Board.][Hostile individuals within range:][Vivienne Ashgrave (Primary Anchor): 98%][Rook: 72%][Celia Penrose: 41%][Aldous Penrose: 33%][Fenwick Gale: 12%][Gideon Crane: ??%]

Vivienne at the top, as always. Celia Penrose, the quiet healer from his team, who had been Darius’s friend since childhood. Her brother Aldous, the weak-chinned liar from the trial. Fenwick, who mostly hated him because hating Zero was the most fun you could have in Class D.

Then there was a name he didn’t know at all. Rook. Seventy-two percent. Someone out there hated him almost as much as Vivienne did, and he couldn’t even put a face to the name.

’Who on earth is Rook? What did I do to him?’

And at the very bottom, Crane. The number beside his name wasn’t a number at all, just two question marks flickering slightly, as if the System itself couldn’t make up its mind.

’And why can’t I read him?’

Aren sat in the empty classroom while the laundry tubs sloshed and thumped steadily through the wall.

Vivienne came back to classes on Tuesday, and practically the whole Academy turned out to see her.

The Headmaster made the announcement in the main courtyard before the morning bell: Lady Vivienne Ashgrave had completed her Trial and reached Rank E, the fastest first-year ever to do so in the history of Highcrest. She didn’t say how. She didn’t need to. By now everyone had heard that Vivienne had walked into the Old Quarry alone under the full moon and walked out with a guardian’s core in her hand.

The students cheered, the older ones loudest of all, and even some of the teachers clapped. Vivienne stood beside the Headmaster in her white uniform with her silver braid over one shoulder and didn’t smile once. She looked at the crowd the way she looked at everything, calmly and from a very long way off.

Aren stood at the back with Class D and clapped like everyone else. His hands wanted to clap much harder than he meant them to, so he made them stop.

Afterward, Crane found him.

"Lady Ashgrave trains with three instructors today. One for swordwork, one for her class, one for the Rank E body. Her equipment goes with her to each of them." He pointed. "That is her sword case. You will carry it."

The sword case was long and heavy, black wood bound in silver, with the Ashgrave crest on the lid. Aren hoisted it onto his shoulder.

"For the whole day, Professor?"

"For as long as she needs a servant." Crane’s thin face showed nothing at all. "You do have the right class for it."

He carried it for nine long hours.

He carried it up the east tower to the private training room, where Vivienne fenced against an old knight with a scarred face and a voice like gravel, and he stood against the wall for two hours and learned more from watching her than from a week of practice in the dark. He carried it down again and across the whole Academy to the observatory, where a quiet woman made Vivienne sit under a glass dome and draw moonlight into her body until her skin glowed silver. He waited outside that dome for three hours. It started raining heavily halfway through, and nobody told him to come in.

He carried it to the last instructor, a big man in the stone hall by the lake who made Vivienne run, jump, lift and fight barehanded until she was gasping. Aren stood in the corner, soaked through, holding the case, and didn’t move.

Vivienne didn’t speak to him even once, or look at him. When she needed her sword, she held out her hand without turning her head, and he put the hilt into it. When she was done, she held it out to the side, and he took it back. If he had been a hook on the wall, she would have treated him exactly the same.

[Vivienne Ashgrave. Hostility: 98%.]

It didn’t budge all day. She wasn’t even thinking about him enough to hate him more.

’Honestly? That’s almost worse!’

At the very end, outside the stone hall, she held out her hand for the case, and he gave it to her. As her fingers closed on the handle, her eyes dropped for one second to his hands.

His knuckles were covered in scabs. Some were from the stone canyons of the Old Quarry, some from the terrace, some from places he didn’t want to think about. He had told anyone who asked that he had fallen down the dormitory stairs.

She looked at them for a heartbeat. Then at his face, wet from the rain. Then she turned and walked off toward the Ashgrave wing without a word.

He stood there after she had gone, not knowing what that look had meant. He told himself firmly that it had meant nothing, that she had looked at his hands the way you notice a crack in a wall. He didn’t entirely believe it.

The sun was setting as he walked back toward the dormitory, his shoulder aching from nine hours of black wood and silver.

He heard the horses long before he reached the main courtyard.

They came in through the great gate two by two, iron shoes ringing on the old stones, twenty of them or more. The riders wore grey steel and long dark cloaks, and every cloak had the same crest stitched on the back in silver thread: a hawk with its wings spread.

Students stopped dead in the courtyard, and teachers came hurrying out onto the steps. At the head of the column rode a broad, grey-bearded man in heavy armor, with a face older and harder than Darius’s but shaped exactly the same. He reined in his horse in the middle of the courtyard and looked slowly around at the students, the teachers and the old towers, like a man looking at a field he intended to burn.

A knight rode up beside him and unrolled a scroll.

"By order of His Grace the Duke of Holt," the knight called, in a voice that carried across the whole courtyard, "every person who had contact with Lord Darius Holt in the last month will be questioned." He looked down at the scroll, then up again. "Beginning with the commoners."

Behind the column of horses, the great gate swung shut.