by Andrew Rowe
“Well, this is all very exciting.” I tried to sound as unenthusiastic as possible. “But, as you’ve both made it clear you understand, I’m an exhausted coward who wants nothing but luxury, so I’m off to bathe and bed.”
I gave Sera one last look as I walked past her. Her expression had shifted from playful to contemplative. I gave her an exaggerated wink.
I wasn’t going to compete with her for Father’s approval, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t find a way to make this into entertainment of my own.
Chapter V — Orientation
I had a couple weeks between earning my attunement and the start of the academic year, and I intended to make good use of them.
My first matter of business was trying to figure out how to use my attunement. We had a number of books on attunements in the library. Unfortunately, we didn’t have many on enchanting. To the best of my knowledge, I was the first Enchanter in the family. That wasn’t exactly an honor. We’d made our family name in battle, not as crafters or merchants.
From what I could glean from the more general texts on attunements, most people could use their attunements intuitively. If I was a Shaper or an Elementalist, I could already be hurling bolts of raw mana. According to a book called Styles of Spellcasting, the methodology would depend on where I received my mark.
Hand marks are the most common, which begat our tradition of wearing gloves to hide them. Those attuned with hand marks excel at accurately directing spells at distant targets.
Leg marks allow for instantaneous delivery of powerful spells through physical contact. They are the favored marks for Guardians and other physically adept attunements.
Heart marks can channel mana through the entire body before dispersing it through a spell. This requires intense focus and slows the casting of the spell, but increases its intensity.
Lung marks allow the attuned to fill the air with mana as they speak the words of an incantation, directing their spells across a broad area. They are exceptional in large confrontations, such as siege warfare.
Finally, mind marks enhance the attuned’s ability to sense and manipulate the mana inside their body. This can potentially allow mind-marked to construct spells inside their own bodies purely through focusing their minds. This is an excellent attunement location for Menders, who can heal themselves simply through concentration, as well as shadows, who can use it to cast illusions without any warning.
That description made my own mind mark sound pretty interesting, until I read a bit further and found out that Enchanters could only enchant items, not people.
That was disappointing. I’d been looking forward to permanently enhancing myself somehow. Maybe an enchanting-specific book would give me a better idea of what I could do.
I did pick up a few more things about enchanting from the few books we had, but not enough that I could actually practice it at home. They were more about theory and history, written mostly for non-Enchanters who wanted to learn about the basic concepts. That was frustrating — whenever I walked by Sera’s room, I could hear her practicing some kind of spell incantations, presumably already mastering her Summoner abilities.
Occasionally, I’d even see an icy glow emanating from her room or see water dripping down the side of her door.
Aside from studying my attunement without success, I had another thing to research: the symbol on the glove I’d found on the body in the prison. That, fortunately, was simple enough. We had a book on heraldry, and it was one of the first entries. House Cornell.
I wrote them a letter explaining what I’d found, apologized for my failure to save their child, and enclosed the glove.
I left the letter anonymous and paid a courier to deliver it. I gave the courier explicit instructions not to identify me as the sender.
It was a coward’s approach, and I knew that. They would have questions. Perhaps they’d be angry at me for coming back alive when their child had not. Maybe they’d want to thank me for giving them some closure.
Maybe if my mother had received a letter like that one about Tristan, she’d have stayed with my father. Or maybe it would have just made things worse.
All I knew was that the uncertainty of Tristan’s fate had eaten me inside for years, and I wouldn’t condemn another family to that same condition if I could avoid it.
Maybe I was a coward, but a coward’s gift was better than no gift at all.
***
Before I left on the train to the Lorian Heights academy, I spent one last morning sitting in a grassy field where Tristan and I used to play, and I remembered.
He was tall. So much taller than I was. Taller than our father, even at fourteen. At nine, I hadn’t quite hit my growth spurt yet.
With his long, thin limbs, climbing the tree must have seemed like a trivial effort.
To me, it was an exercise in terror just to scramble up to the lowest branches.
“C’mon!”
I looked around uncertainly. Inside the house, Sera was playing a game of Valor against Father again. Lately, she was even starting to win a few rounds here and there.
Mother was out on business again, and our other retainers were all inside, tending to various chores.
There was no one nearby to catch me if I fell.
Tristan was already a good ten feet above me. High enough that looking up at him made me feel sick. Could I survive a fall from that height? Maybe hitting the branches on the way down would slow me enough that I’d just crack some bones open.
But he smiled brightly at me, encouraging as he always had been, and I fought past the fear.
My arm muscles were pretty strong for my age. Even then, I’d spent a lot of time practicing with weapons. Mostly the traditional ones like sword and spear. I didn’t have enough mana at that point to use a dueling cane with any degree of seriousness.
So, pulling myself up wasn’t a problem; it was just a matter of being able to reach a good branch in the first place.
Tristan waited for me as I inched, calculated, and feared. And finally, I reached... and pulled my way up to the next section of the tree. And the next. My fear grew with every inch, but he bolstered me with encouragement.
“You can do it!” and “Don’t be afraid!” echoed in my mind.
I was just one section below him. I judged the distance. “I can’t make it. It’s too far! I’m not tall enough to reach the branch.”
He laughed and reached down with a hand. “Then I’ll help you!”
I reached up to take his hand. With Tristan’s help, maybe I could reach —
Tristan leaned forward too far. His hand brushed against mine as he fell.
I winced, blinking away the memory. Tristan had been fine. He’d laughed when I’d finally made it back down the tree, fighting fear to scale my way down far faster than I’d gone up. The branches had bloodied him, but he’d made it through the fall without any permanent damage.
But I remembered that he’d fallen trying to help me, and that was Tristan to his core. He was always trying to lift me up, even at his own expense.
After so many years of Tristan looking out for me, it was long past time I did the same for him. I knew that I wouldn’t be going back into the tower immediately, of course. Attempting to climb the tower was far more dangerous than simply going through a Judgment, and what I’d seen inside had made it abundantly clear that I was not prepared for the true dangers of the tower yet.
So, I’d need to be patient. I’d practice. I’d master my attunement, grow strong enough to survive.
But when I was strong enough, I’d reach for that highest branch.
I hoped that Tristan could keep waiting for me, just a little bit longer.
***
Riding on the train was a considerably different experience with Sera sitting next to me.
It wasn’t the first time we had traveled together; we had rarely been apart as children. Three years apart had changed both of us, however, and my father’s plans — maybe our father’s plans �
� had been deliberately formulated to create a degree of tension between us.
I wasn’t going to let things stand that way.
When we’d first left the station, she’d sat with perfect poise, looking out the window and waving at the house servants that stood at the station. The perfect image of a young noblewoman already missing her family and friends.
Within minutes, she’d shifted in her seat into something resembling a ball, curled around a book.
This was the Sera that I remembered. Someone I could work with.
I pulled out a book of my own. Trials of Judgment, the book from inside the tower.
Then, flipping to a blank page, I removed the quill and inkwell from my backpack.
I caught her eye flickering toward me, curious. She caught my eye catching her eye. I caught her eye catching my eye... you get the idea. We exchanged glances, saying nothing.
I began to write.
Oh, Great Mysterious Book Entity, Voice of the Tower, etc. etc.
Are you receiving this message? I’m not sure if this thing works, now that I’m outside the tower.
Really, I’m not sure if the book itself was ever significant or if you were just using it as a medium to communicate with me.
Please clarify.
Yours in an unspecified amount of indentured service,
Corin
I smirked, waiting and watching for a few minutes. In spite of my brilliance, there was no reply.
I sealed the ink container and stashed it, the quill, and the book back in my bag.
Sera glanced at me again as I finished putting the book away. “Magic book,” I said simply.
I knew of no reasonable creature who would not respond to a nonchalant declaration like, “Magic book.” Sera was a complex companion, I knew, but eminently reasonable when such hooks were presented.
Her eyebrow raised accommodatingly, and, for emphasis, she added, “Define magic book.”
I shrugged, stretching. “Oh, you know, just your typical book connected to a nigh-omniscient spiritual entity contained within the Serpent Spire. What are you reading?”
“Hartigan’s Compiled Treatises on Advanced Binding Theory.” She retrieved a bookmark from her bag, set it to mark her progress and closed the tome. “Nothing that would be applicable studies. It’s for Summoners.”
I nodded sagely. “Studying early? Well, I certainly wouldn’t want to interrupt that with something as uninteresting as—”
She uncoiled herself and leaned in closer. “No need to be so blithely manipulative, Corin. You’ve got my attention. Now, what percentage of that was actually true?”
I looked upward, and then tilted my face down, giving an exaggerated look of concentration. “Eighty... no, seventy nine point nine percent?”
She laughed obligingly, grabbing toward the back. “Okay, come on, show me.”
I showed her the book, and she sat a little closer while I went over each of the pages, telling her bits of the story that went along with each.
I stopped just before the prison, after the book told me that, “You shouldn’t have done that.” It was a good place to hook her interest, and beyond that, I was pretty sure I shouldn’t be sharing the incidents with the prison and beyond — and certainly not in public.
I really wanted to tell her about Keras fighting Katashi. The idea that there was a presumably mortal swordsman that could even hold a visage at bay was almost unthinkable. I’d been raised to believe the visages were unstoppable forces of nature. Everyone had.
Was Keras an exception? Was he truly that powerful?
Or was he another visage himself?
Wydd, the Visage of Forbidden Knowledge, was known to take on many forms depending on her current whim. Maybe Keras being another visage was a simpler answer than assuming he was a human with some kind of unknown power source.
But even if it was a simpler answer, I didn’t know if it was a better one. Two visages fighting each other was potentially more worrisome than a human managing to put up a fight. Some kind of in-fighting among our pantheon could not possibly be a good thing — and it probably wasn’t something a mere mortal should know about.
And Katashi knew that I’d seen the fight.
Even if he didn’t take direct action against me, there was a good chance I’d be in danger if I went back to the tower before figuring this situation out. And there was a chance he would do something, even if it wasn’t personally. Every visage had human agents. Priests, servants, that sort of thing.
Just one more thing for me to worry about.
I also wanted to tell Sera about the prison, both out of excitement and because I wanted to get her insight. I liked to plan for every contingency, but Sera had always been great at breaking down a situation into component parts and analyzing them. Maybe she would pick up on hints that I hadn’t, and I needed all the information I could so that I’d be better prepared to rescue Tristan when I was ready to climb the tower.
In spite of my desires, though, I needed to play it safe. The Voice had been clear that I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone else about the situation. It had probably saved my life by giving me a quick way out of the tower, so I owed it at least a bit of consideration. I’d still probably tell Sera eventually, but I wanted to see what this Lyras Orden had to say before I took any further actions.
Instead, I asked her how she would have handled the same tests, and we discussed and debated alternate strategies for each room for hours.
By the end of the trip, we might have almost been friends again.
***
Sera and I stood together on a broad grassy field. We were joined by a mere eight thousand other students, mostly other applicants who had survived a trip through the tower. There would be a few others. Foreign students with other attunements. A scattered few students who hadn’t taken their Judgments yet and were here to prepare.
The sea of teenagers stared at a raised stone platform where several adults in the pristine white uniforms of the Valian military stood. We’d be hearing their commencement speeches shortly.
In the meantime, Sera and I were scanning the crowd, presumably for similar reasons. I was looking for known quantities such as my few friends, or acquaintances from social gatherings. Allies. Enemies. The crowd was thick enough that I had little success.
I thought I caught a glance of Patrick Wayland, one of my childhood friends. That gave me some conflicted feelings. I hadn’t seen Patrick in years.
Would he think less of me for having a weak attunement?
Not everyone treated non-combat attunements as inferior, but it was hardly an uncommon attitude. Valia’s military was our pride, and being able to stand on the front lines and fight with magical power was a common childhood dream.
It had never been my dream, but I’d never been great at fitting society’s expectations in general.
Sera and I were both still wearing our backpacks, and I still had the goddess-given saber on my belt. About one in three of the other students was armed. I’d initially expected my weapon to be taken at the academy gates, but the military had a strong presence on the campus, and the gate guards didn’t seem the least bit bothered by the sword’s presence.
Most of the other students didn’t seem to have backpacks, although I spotted a few in the crowd. Maybe the majority of students had already found their dormitories — Sera and I had just barely arrived in time for the commencement speech.
“Students, welcome.” The sound was clear and crisp, like it was coming from right next to me, but I could see the speaker at the center of the podium. He was a tall, uniformed man with rich brown skin and a marvelous jagged scar across his forehead. It made him look ferocious. I was mildly envious.
“I’m Lieutenant Commander Jack Bennet, the vice chancellor of this institution. First, I’d like to congratulate you on getting to this point. You’ve shown a degree of worth in the eyes of the goddess to make it this far, but your training is just beginning. I’ll be keeping a close eye on you t
hroughout the years to come, helping to hone you into the fine generation of soldiers that you have the potential to become. The final arbiter of your success, however, is the chancellor.” He turned to his right, gesturing at a short, portly woman in a business coat and trousers.
Not military. Interesting.
“Chancellor Wallace will explain the rest.”
A brief introduction. Good. I can’t stand long speeches. The other students in the crowd had gone silent, turning their eyes to the stand.
The vice chancellor stepped away from the podium, allowing Chancellor Wallace to approach.
It occurred to me that no one was applauding. Were we supposed to cheer or clap? I wasn’t really sure.
“Good morning, students, and thank you for the introduction, Commander Bennet.” She nodded to the vice chancellor, and then looked back to the crowd. “My, there are a lot of you this year. A record number, in fact. That’s a good sign, a sign of the goddess watching over us. She seems to expect great things of you, and so will I. Before we continue, let us say a few words in her praise. Please join me in the Hymn of Accord.”
I suppressed the urge to roll my eyes, mouthing the words as others droned one of the many hymns that had been scratched into our brains since childhood.
Goddess great,
Goddess high,
Watching from the distant sky,
Give us peace,
Give us strength,
Watch us live,
Watch us fly.
I’d always thought “die” would have more symmetry in the last line, but when I’d brought it up to my parents, they’d accused me of being needlessly fatalistic.
There was a moment of silence as we finished the awkward recitation, then the chancellor continued her speech.
“Very good. Now, onto a bit more about the school. First and foremost, the role of this university is to prepare you for the dangers you will be facing in the future. A key component of this is learning proper discipline.”
Chancellor Wallace made a broad gesture to encompass the entirety of the gathered student base. “This year, I am not only welcoming the next generation of promising candidates from our own nation, but a number of transfer students from our friends and allies in other nations. I would like to be among the first to welcome you all to Valia. And I would also like to assure you that this academy holds all students to equal standards; there will be no favoritism toward local students.”