Sword of Fate

There was a wall in the Academy’s second-floor corridor that nobody looked at.

Kael had noticed this in his first week. The corridor ran between the main training hall and the west classrooms, and students used it constantly — hundreds of passes a day, boots on stone, the particular sound of people moving between one obligation and another. But the wall on the south side, the one that caught the morning light from the high windows, had something on it that nobody seemed to see.

A list.

Carved into the stone, old enough that the edges had smoothed, the lettering the style of two hundred years ago. Names. Forty-three of them, organized by year, each followed by a short notation that required some knowledge of the Academy’s old ranking system to understand.

Kael had read every name on his third day.

He’d returned to it twice since.

Today he was standing in front of it again, on the way to his morning class, with five minutes to spare.

"You keep looking at that," Sable said.

He turned. She was three paces behind him, apparently having come from the same direction, apparently having been watching him look at the wall without announcing herself. This was, he was realizing, a thing Sable did. She moved quietly and she waited to see what you were doing before she said anything. Not in the way that Eiran did it — Eiran’s watchfulness was trained, professional, the practiced quality of someone who had been taught to observe. Sable’s was more instinctive. The watchfulness of someone who had spent a lot of time in situations where knowing what was happening before you announced yourself was useful.

"Do you know what this is?" he asked.

She stepped up beside him. Read for a moment. "Names."

"The first forty-three students who completed the Dungeon Hunter Program." He looked at the list. "Before they stopped carving the names. Before the program officially became something else." He paused. "Most people who pass this wall every day don’t know it exists."

Sable was quiet for a moment, reading. "Why do you keep looking at it?"

He thought about how to answer this honestly. "Because these people knew they were going to do something difficult," he said, "and they did it anyway. And then they put their names on a wall." He paused. "I find that interesting."

"The names or the wall?"

"The decision that it was worth marking."

She read the list again. The oldest entries were the most worn — the names at the top barely legible, the stone remembering them more as shapes than letters. The newer entries were cleaner but still not new. Nobody had added a name in decades.

"Are you going to end up on a wall?" she said. Not mockingly. She was still looking at the list.

"I don’t know yet."

"That’s your answer to a lot of questions."

"Yes."

She glanced at him. "Does it bother you?"

"No." He looked at the last name on the list — the most recent, twenty years old, the carving still distinct. "I prefer honest uncertainty to false confidence."

Sable was quiet for a moment. Then she turned and continued down the corridor. He fell into step beside her.

"There’s a festival," she said. "Next week. The Academy winter thing. I heard the second-years talking about it."

"The Aether Symposium," Kael said. "It’s an annual event. Student-run demonstrations of form work and Aether technique. Some competitive elements. Mostly an excuse for the Academy to open its gates to families and wealthy benefactors."

"Are you doing anything for it?"

"I haven’t decided."

"Lira?"

"She’ll be in the library."

Sable made a sound that was almost a laugh. One of those sounds that wasn’t quite committed to being a laugh but had the right shape for it. "Lira would be in the library if the building was on fire."

Kael thought about this. It was probably accurate. "She’d document it first," he said. "Observe the fire. Take notes. Then consider whether leaving was the most efficient response."

Sable actually laughed. Brief, unguarded, the real version. She seemed slightly surprised by it herself — the expression of someone whose own reaction had caught them off guard.

It was the first time he’d heard her laugh properly.

It lasted maybe two seconds. Then it was gone, and she was Sable again, the careful composed version. But those two seconds had happened.

Kael filed this away with the care he brought to things that mattered.

— ◆ —

The morning class was Advanced Form Theory, taught by a second-year instructor named Carell who had the particular combination of deep expertise and limited patience for students who hadn’t done the assigned reading.

The assigned reading was twenty pages on the historical development of Aether integration techniques. Kael had read it in the first week of term, when it was listed in the course outline, before it was assigned. He sat in the back row and listened to Carell explain it to the students who hadn’t read it, which was most of them, and thought about other things.

Specifically: he thought about Sable’s form sequence and the problem of the third transition.

He’d spent the afternoon yesterday watching her work through it. She hadn’t found the solution yet — by the time the light shifted and they’d both needed to move toward dinner, she’d tried four different approaches to the third transition and discarded all of them. Not frustrated, or not visibly frustrated. Just working. The particular quality of attention she brought to physical problems was different from how she talked about them. Quieter. More patient.

He thought about the stone wall with forty-three names.

He thought about what it meant to do something worth marking.

He wasn’t sure yet. He had the feeling he was accumulating the components of an answer without having assembled them yet. This was how he usually worked — let things gather until the shape of them became clear — and it was usually accurate, and it was also sometimes slow.

The class ended. Students filtered out. Kael stayed in his seat for a moment after, looking at the front board where Carell had drawn a diagram of the Aether integration pathways that the early form theorists had identified.

The diagram was accurate as far as it went. It was also, he had realized in the past few months, significantly incomplete. The pathways shown were the ones that standard techniques used. There were others that the diagram didn’t show, pathways that existed but that no current curriculum addressed. He’d felt them. Not clearly — not with the precision that years more of development would eventually provide. But he’d felt the shape of them, the way you felt a room’s dimensions in the dark.

Carell was at the front, erasing the board.

"Instructor Carell," Kael said.

Carell looked up.

"The diagram shows four primary integration pathways," Kael said. "Are there records of attempts to work with pathways that aren’t in the current curriculum? Historical attempts, before the current form schools were established?"

Carell was quiet for a moment. He had the particular expression of a teacher encountering a student question that didn’t come from the assigned reading. "What makes you think there are others?"

"The diagram shows which pathways current technique uses," Kael said. "It doesn’t explain why those were selected over alternatives. Selection implies alternatives existed."

A pause.

"There’s a dedicated archive in the library," Carell said. "Third floor, restricted collection. You’d need Aldris’s clearance to access it." He returned to erasing the board. "The short answer is yes. There were attempts. Most of them failed. The curriculum was built around what worked."

"What did the failed attempts produce?"

Carell stopped erasing. Turned.

"That’s in the restricted collection," he said. His voice was not unfriendly. It was the voice of someone communicating a boundary rather than a prohibition. "If you have Aldris’s clearance."

Kael stood. "Thank you."

He left.

In the corridor, he added restrictedcollection, thirdfloor to his notebook. Below Aether Integration Institute (original name). Below the network is much larger than the fifteen gates.

The page was getting full.

A shadow fell across the page.

Kael looked up.

Gresham leaned against the opposite wall, arms folded, as though he’d been waiting for someone else entirely.

"So," Gresham said. "Still collecting answers?"

Kael closed the notebook.

"Trying to."

A faint smile tugged at Gresham’s mouth.

"Enjoy the quiet while it lasts."

He pushed away from the wall and continued down the corridor without another word.

Kael watched him disappear into the crowd.

"..."

Then he slipped the notebook back into his coat and headed for dinner.

— ◆ —

Dinner that evening was better than lunch. Actual stew, the kind with identifiable components. Sable had gotten two servings before the rest of them arrived, which she explained by saying she’d had a long afternoon, which was Sable for I worked through something and I’m hungry.

"The third transition," Kael said.

"I found something," she said.

Everyone at the table looked at her, which she ignored in the practiced way of someone accustomed to being looked at and having decided not to perform anything for the lookers.

"The problem isn’t the third transition itself," she said. "The problem is what I’m doing right before it. My weight distribution coming out of the second creates the whole issue." She ate a spoonful of stew. "If I fix that, the third can stay as it is and the fourth doesn’t create the secondary exposure."

Kael thought about this. She was right. He’d seen the weight distribution issue himself but hadn’t said anything — it was her form, her problem to find. "When did you figure it out?"

"About an hour ago. In the courtyard."

"Alone?"

"I work better alone when I’m actually solving something." A pause. "Observation is fine when someone is just watching. But if they’re thinking about the problem at the same time, it interferes."

He hadn’t known this about her. "I’ll remember that."

"You can watch again once I’ve found the solution. Then you can criticize."

"I said I was observing."

"You’ll be criticizing by then. You’re patient, but you have opinions."

Torven made a short sound. Not a laugh — the Torven version of a laugh, which was about thirty percent of the volume and none of the performance.

Lira looked up from her book. She’d brought a book to dinner, which she sometimes did. "The weight distribution issue in the second transition is a common problem in self-developed forms," she said. "Standard curriculum forces you to develop it correctly because of how the drills are structured. Self-developed forms often compensate around it rather than through it."

Sable looked at her. "You’ve been watching me train?"

"No. You just described the problem and it fits the pattern."

A pause. "How do you know the pattern?"

"I’ve read seven texts on form development theory." Lira returned to her book. "The eighth is in the library. I haven’t finished it yet."

Sable stared at her for a moment. Then she returned to her stew. "That’s impressive and deeply unsettling," she said.

"Objectively," Lira said.

Kael looked at this exchange and felt, with a specificity that surprised him, something that he recognized — after a moment — as happiness.

Not the large version. Not the overwhelming kind that arrived at peaks of accomplishment or resolution. The smaller kind. The kind that came from being in a room with people who were being exactly themselves, without performance or apology, over stew that had identifiable components.

He wasn’t sure he’d felt it very often in his previous life.

He was glad to recognize it now.

— ◆ —

— End of Chapter 27 —