Chapter 1213: Academy opens onward

Several days after the Exhibition pairing went up on the boards, the Academy stopped behaving like a school.

Elara noticed it before they reached the grounds. The corridors had lost their usual hurried traffic, and the students who remained were all walking the same way, unhurried, talking with their hands. Beyond the last archway, the recruitment grounds opened in a wide, noisy sweep of banners. Every society had claimed its own patch of stone or lawn and marked it in its own colors, until the whole field looked like a market that had been taught heraldry.

A senior in a society sash stepped into their path with a stack of flyers. "First-years! No obligation to join, but every obligation to look—" He had moved on before Selphine could decline the sheet already pressed into her hand. A cart of folded targets rolled past, hauled by two students arguing over who had miscounted. To the left, a pair of Magicians’ Block students had chalked a circle onto the flagstones and set a small frost sculpture turning inside it while a Martial student circled it with his blade drawn, hunting for the seam. A ring of onlookers had gathered and would vanish the moment it cracked.

It took her a moment to place what else was strange. For many days or at this point even weeks, Martial black and Magician colors had been sorted into separate halls. Here they stood in the same laughing knots, shoulder to shoulder, trading dares.

Selphine had already begun taking stock. "The banners are not the point," she said, reading each placard as they passed. "Ask which societies have their own facilities. Ask whether the seniors actually attend, or only lend their names. A society that recruits loudly and meets rarely is only a banner."

"The Cartographers," Aurelian said, for the fourth time, and turned decisively left. "They will be near the map thing."

"Which map thing?"

"The large one."

"You have no idea where they are."

"I have a strong general sense of where they are not." He said it with such dignity that a passing senior glanced at him with something like respect.

Elara followed without pushing for a destination of her own, and found that was the odd part. Everywhere else in the Academy, she had walked with a purpose someone had handed her: a class, a lesson, an assignment due. Here nothing was assigned. Nothing asked anything of her but attention.

’Look, then.’

Aurelian led them with tremendous authority directly away from wherever the Cartographers most likely were, and Elara caught herself reading banners instead of watching which way he was going.

Just then, suddenly a shadow arrived before the sound. A patch of cold darkness slid across the flagstones and over their feet, and the wind followed, hard enough to snap every banner on the field in the same direction. Conversations broke off mid-word. Elara looked up.

-FLAP!

Riders were coming down out of the bright sky in a line of five, broad wings held flat, spaced so evenly that the gaps between them looked measured. Dark leather harnesses crossed each mount’s chest, and when one banked, she saw faint mana script running through the stitching and pulsing with every wingbeat. Beyond the edge of the grounds, the Sky-Yard rose in tiers: wide landing terraces, launch lanes, roost towers, and pale wind wards traced across the stone. Handlers in gray coats waited at the terrace edges with tethers and hoods. Above them all, a long balcony overlooked the Yard and the grounds together, where a few figures in fine coats leaned on the rail to watch.

The lead rider peeled away and dropped through a line of suspended rings, each hung at a slightly different angle. At the last one a hand came down and plucked a red ribbon from it without any visible change in speed. The crowd made a sound like a held breath let go.

Elara found she was not watching the ribbon. It was the mounts that held her. They turned before the reins moved. The second rider shifted her weight by a finger’s breadth and eased mana along the harness, and the beast was already banking, as though something other than the leather had told it. Weight, mana, posture. The reins were only a courtesy.

The fifth rider was the youngest of them, and it showed. Waiting at the end of the launch lane for the final pass, he gave his mount its head a breath too soon. The beast surged out of its lane, and the wind ward beneath it guttered and threw a line of pale light across the terrace. Someone on the ground shouted.

Another rider was already there. He came in from above and matched the young beast’s pace without any hurry, one gloved hand raised, low and open, the way one might quiet a room. He said nothing that carried. The mount slowed. The ward steadied. The handlers below reset the lane with the efficiency of people who had done it before, and the whole formation swept around for its last pass as though nothing had happened.

"Lord Alaric Vayne," Aurelian said quietly, watching him. "Captain of the society. He also happens to be the one senior whom both royal circles claim not to mind."

"Apparently, he has declined to commit to either," Selphine said. "Considering the situation, I would say it has made him useful to everyone and owned by no one."

The formation touched down in a long, controlled line, wings folding, wards easing to a hum. Alaric dismounted last. He did not look like a man who had just done anything remarkable. He looked like a man who was used to being obeyed, and had learned that the easiest way to be obeyed was to be right.

Students came to him at once, and Elara watched who came. A knot of first-years whom Elara assumed had spent the morning glancing over their shoulders at one royal circle’s tables walked up to him, and so did a pair who had spent it glancing the other way. He asked each of them the same three things: whether they had ridden, whether they were afraid of heights, what they wanted from the Society. He listened to the answers as though nothing else on the field required his attention.

No one had claimed the Society’s ground, and no one dared seem to. It was the closest thing to neutral territory the field had. Elara filed the name where she filed the things she meant to understand later.

The crowd began drifting toward the center of the field, and Aurelian stopped dead beside a rack of recruitment maps. "That," he said, with the air of a man vindicated, "is a Cartographers’ marker." He bent to examine it. Elara and Selphine walked on a few paces and did not wait.

"It is strange to see everyone mixed like this," Selphine said, watching a Martial student and a Magician argue amiably over a flyer. "Once placement settles, people lose one another. Societies are the one place the Blocks are allowed to stay connected." She adjusted the sheet in her hand. "You still see Lucavion regularly, I assume. Despite the Martial Block."

"We share Magister Selenne’s course. And the lessons continue."

Selphine’s eyes stayed on the crowd rather than on her, which was how Selphine asked for answers she wanted given carefully.

"Do the schedules allow it? His training hours are not kind."

It was offered as mild concern, in the same even voice, and Elara caught on the detail like a sleeve on a nail.

"How do you know his training hours?"

Selphine did not look caught. If anything, she sounded faintly entertained.

"Come on now. He has shared with us, remember?"

Elara did remember. It came back too readily: a crowded table, Aurelian leaning across it, and Lucavion at the center, his answers extracted one sentence at a time.

"I remember everyone forcing him to do so."

"And you greatly benefited from it. You were pretty zealous to make him spill the answers."

Elara looked ahead at nothing in particular and let the silence concede for her.

"Sigh..."

Selphine waited with the patience of someone who had already won the point and could afford to be kind about it.

"So? How does the time fare?"

Elara weighed how much of the truth a crowded field could hold. The answer was true. It left out the shape of the evenings, which was not Selphine’s to ask.

"Some evenings are difficult. We manage."

"Good." Selphine studied a banner she plainly did not care about. "Reilan seems to have vanished into the Martial Block entirely. Do you still speak with him? Or know whether he intends to come today?"

And the question she expected did arrive. Elara kept her face still. ’She really asks directly when she wants something. She went around by way of Lucavion.’

"I still speak with him. We see each other less than before." She paused. "Did you need something from him?"

"Only curiosity. I wondered where the rest of Block 7-A had settled."

It was a reasonable answer with a gap in it, and Selphine knew Elara had seen the gap. Elara let it stand. Selphine had done the same for her more often than either of them mentioned.

A bell sounded from the central platform, twice, and the crowd turned toward it as one. Aurelian caught up, map under his arm and looking pleased with himself. "Did I miss anything?"

"No," Selphine said, and they went on together toward the platform.

The central platform stood at the field’s heart, a low stone dais that had been hidden all morning behind banners and was now bare. At its foot, a girl with a Council armband was clearing the approach. She sent the frost-sculpture duelists off toward the western edge with two words and a sweep of her rod, then drew a pale chalk line across the flagstones and stood on the far side of it until the crowd understood where to stop. No one argued with her. A cart of targets that had been rolling toward the dais reversed course without being told.

"Senior Sera," Selphine said quietly, noting where Elara’s eyes had gone. "She is the one who decides where every demonstration is allowed to happen. Do not stand on the wrong side of a line she has drawn."

"I was not planning to."

"Aurelian was."

"I was going to ask politely," Aurelian said, with the wounded air of someone who had been about to do no such thing.

The Council took the platform in file, and the field began to quiet. It was not an order. Elara watched it happen the way she might have watched frost creep across glass: the seniors nearest the front straightening first, then the sashes behind them, then the whole field, until even the riders on the balcony turned their heads. The last figure to climb the steps did not raise a hand or clear his throat. He simply arrived at the edge of the dais, and the noise rearranged itself around him.

"Senior Elias," Aurelian murmured, and for once said nothing clever after it.

"First-years. Seniors. Those of you who came only for the banners," Elias said. His voice was level and carried without being raised. "Behind me stand the societies of this Academy. Each offers something no lecture can: seniors who have already made the mistakes you are about to make, and facilities the Blocks do not grant by default. That is what a society is, access to experience and to ground that would otherwise stay closed to you.

"It is not free of obligation. A society expects you to attend. Ask how often it meets. Ask what it will cost you in time, in coin, and in effort. Ask what is expected of a member who arrives late or vanishes for a term. A society that cannot answer plainly has not earned your name.

"Whatever you choose, the Council’s safety arrangements govern this field. Demonstrations stay within their lanes. Officers with Council armbands will direct you, and you will follow them. Nothing here is worth an injury.

"And you are not required to choose today. Walk the grounds. Watch. Return a second time. Commit when you understand what you are committing to." He let a moment pass. "The field is open."

The banners went up all at once, a rustle of cloth and a rising din, and the field loosened like a held breath let go. A Council officer pressed a route sheet into Aurelian’s hand as the crowd surged past, and Aurelian unfolded it with immense confidence and held it sideways.

"The Cartographers," he said, "are here."

"That is the legend," Selphine said. "You are holding it upside down."

"I am holding it ambitiously."

Elara took the sheet from him and turned it right way up. Societies ran in rows along its margins, each with a small seal and a line of description, and this time she did not read them the way she had read the banners. She read them looking for something. She could not have said what. Only that the field had stopped being scenery, and one of these seals was going to matter.

"That way," she said, and pointed. Aurelian, for once, followed.