Chapter 139 — The Cohort
The notice waiting for him at the guild hall’s orientation desk the next morning was brief and businesslike: Cohort Group 14 — mandatory group briefing, second floor annex, midday.
Arlen arrived early, curious, and found a modest circle of chairs already half-filled with faces he recognized only vaguely from Corwin’s and Ferrin’s earlier sessions.
"You’re late," said the woman nearest the door, though the clock hadn’t yet struck midday. She had the sharp, deliberate poise of someone who’d been taught to carry herself before she’d learned to walk properly, dark hair pinned with a precision that suggested a household considerably wealthier than any Arlen had grown up in.
"I’m early," Arlen said mildly.
"Early’s still not first." She said it without particular malice, simply stating what appeared to be a fact she found self-evidently important. "Elira Caldstrom. You’re the frontier transfer, aren’t you — the one Corwin spent an extra session on."
Arlen felt a flicker of unease at that, wondering exactly how much of yesterday’s assessment had already made its way into casual conversation. "News travels fast."
"Everything travels fast here, if you know who to ask." Elira studied him with open, appraising curiosity, the same way a merchant might size up unfamiliar goods. "I’ve been training under a private instructor since I was twelve. Confirmed Novice before I even registered. I mention it so you understand where the actual standard sits, rather than measuring yourself against whoever passed for talented back on the frontier."
"Leave the man alone, Elira. He hasn’t even sat down yet."
The voice belonged to a stocky dwarf a few seats over, broad through the shoulders in the particular way that suggested years of physical labor rather than combat training alone, hands callused and faintly stained along the knuckles with something dark that Arlen guessed, from long habit, was ore dust rather than dirt.
"Dallin Marrow," the dwarf said, offering a hand once Arlen had taken the seat beside him. "Don’t mind her. She says that to everyone her first week, then spends the rest of orientation actually being decent company once she’s proven her point."
"I don’t need to prove anything," Elira said, though something in her tone suggested she didn’t entirely mind the teasing either.
The instructor running the session — a brisk, unnamed staff member Arlen hadn’t met before — called the group to order shortly after, working through a checklist of practical orientation matters: schedule confirmations, equipment recommendations, a brief overview of which guild services were available to cohort members specifically. Arlen listened with half his attention, the rest occupied by the strange, unfamiliar sensation of sitting in a room full of people roughly his own age and rank, all of them navigating the same overwhelming newness he was.
"Mining family," Dallin said quietly, once the instructor had moved on to a less pressing point, apparently picking up their earlier introduction where it had left off. "Third generation working the Ironhollow veins, southeast of here. Came up wanting to see what the Depths actually held, rather than just hauling out what other people found there." He held up one hand, tracing a faint shimmer of stone-gray light along his knuckles for just a moment — a small, practiced demonstration rather than any real display. "Aura runs through the hands, mostly. Good for gripping, breaking, holding weight nothing my size should reasonably manage. Not flashy. Useful, though."
"That’s more than I’ve properly seen from anyone here," Arlen admitted, genuinely interested. "Most of what I’ve watched since arriving has been considerably showier."
"Showy gets you noticed. Doesn’t always get you home." Dallin shrugged, unbothered by the comparison. "What about you? Corwin doesn’t spend extra time on people without reason."
Arlen considered his answer carefully, the familiar deflection settling into place. "Turns out I’d gone a long while without anyone properly explaining the realm system to me. Frontier branch, limited resources. He was mostly just filling in the gaps."
"Huh." Dallin studied him a moment, curious rather than skeptical. "Explains the accent, I suppose. You don’t talk like most capital-raised sorts."
Elira, who had clearly been listening despite her own conversation with someone on her other side, leaned back into the discussion without any particular subtlety. "Frontier training does tend to leave gaps," she said. "No offense meant. It’s simply a different pace of instruction out there, from what I understand — necessity over refinement."
"None taken," Arlen said, and found he genuinely meant it, the observation landing closer to simple fact than any real insult.
The session continued through the early afternoon, the instructor eventually setting the cohort loose to explore the guild hall’s training facilities together — a practical bonding exercise as much as an orientation task, Arlen suspected, watching Elira demonstrate a clean, controlled ice-lance technique against a padded target with the same crisp precision she brought to conversation, the frost crackling audibly along the target’s surface before dissolving. Dallin, in turn, pressed his palm flat against a reinforced stone wall meant to withstand considerable abuse, and Arlen watched, genuinely impressed, as a network of hairline cracks spread outward from the point of contact before the dwarf eased off, satisfied rather than destructive.
"Control matters more than force," Dallin said, catching Arlen’s expression. "Could’ve brought the whole section down, probably, if I’d wanted to show off. Rather keep my instructors trusting me with the reinforced walls, though, than earn a reputation for needing the cheap ones."
Arlen found himself, by the session’s end, genuinely grateful for the day’s unglamorous, ordinary texture — not another revelation about his own strange, unfinished foundation, simply the plain, human business of two new people slowly becoming something like acquaintances, the same patient process that had once turned Cobb and Sil from strangers into something close to family, half a world and a whole lifetime ago.
"Same time tomorrow," Elira said, as the cohort began dispersing for the evening, her earlier sharpness softened now into something almost companionable. "Try to actually be early next time. Might make an impression."
"I’ll consider it," Arlen said, and found himself smiling despite the day’s earlier awkwardness, walking out of the guild hall’s annex with Dallin’s easy company beside him and the accumulated, ordinary weight of a genuinely good day settling into him — the kind Aurenholt, for all its overwhelming scale, had somehow still managed to offer him within his very first week.