The road into Ardent held a dust vein that never left. On the day the wizard arrived, that vein looked like a bruise on the earth. A carriage more ornate than any local lord's rolled in — black lacquer, ironwork that caught light in thin bright knives. Men in blue-stitched robes stood by the wheels; their faces were pale where the sun did not touch them.
The steward met them at the gate with too much courtesy. News ran ahead of the carriage like a nervous child: WIZARD, WIZARD, WIZARD. The household gathered because houses gather. Households are social engines for gossip, and gossip was hungry.
Kael watched from a pillar on the courtyard wall. He had been sparring at dawn and his tunic still smelled of sweat and sand. He was thirteen and taller than many of the boys in the yard. He could already do a shoulder-roll and a thrust that left marks. He was not heir; he had permission to be reckless, on the edge where nobles let the second son make mistakes and then find his way.
The wizard that disembarked from the carriage did not cut the expected figure of a kindly sage. He was thin, wrapped in a robe that moved like slow smoke. His face had the look of someone who read old books and then forgot that the world did not need to be known the way books required it. A ring of small sigils circled his bald crown. His hands were covered in faint scars that glittered when he moved them.
He carried no staff. Instead, he wore a small metal plate at his throat with an etched rune that hummed faintly. He walked like a man whose ears heard a different music. People fell silent because their chest told them to.
The steward did his duty. The wizard accepted it with a tilt of his head and asked for the children to be gathered.
"We test for affinity," he said, voice like a page turned slowly. "The Crown requires truth. We will not refuse the Ardent house."
That last sentence suggested a threat without words. The steward's smile stiffened. Houses complied because houses understood the map of power: a wizard's favor made a baron safe, and a wizard's displeasure made a house small and rumoured and dead.
Children shuffled forward. Kael pushed through on habit — not the arrogance of an heir but the muscle memory of training, where one answers to a challenge simply because one is able. The wizard's gaze landed on him like a measuring rod.
"Name?" the wizard asked.
"Kael Ardent." His voice did not wobble.
The test was not theatrical. It was procedure. The wizard laid a flat stone on the grass and produced a vial of ink the color of winter water. He drew a thin sigil on Kael's palm with a steel stylus and asked Kael to sing an old phrase in a tongue that felt like the inside of a seashell.
Kael knew the phrase through accident: childhood memory, a school assignment that taught him about phonetics, a fragment from a library book about languages. He shaped sound and the sigil drank it. For a breath, the world was all edges. The steward swallowed. The others leaned to watch.
The wizard's face tightened a fraction. He pressed his scarred fingers to Kael's wrist and closed his eyes. For a moment the air above the stone clouded; the grass at the boy's feet grew thin frost that vanished like a coin dropped in water.
"Trace," the wizard said to no one. "Small, unusual. An instrument attached."
Kael's body cooled. The panel flashed at the back of his sight.
[ICE AFFINITY: TRACE (Codex Attached)][FROST CODEX: SEALS = 12/12; IDENTIFICATION: ARDENT-WEAVE IMPLANT]
The steward's smile broke. Eyes moved like darts toward Kael's family and then to the carriage. The wizard looked at Kael with something that was not curiosity and not pity. It was assessment.
"You will come to the hall," the wizard said. "Your house will answer for your training and for your consent. If you bear seals of binding, we must report them. The Crown will decide their fate."
The words were formal and lethal. Reported meant tested further. Tested further meant layers of inspection that could strip a boy of whatever safety a baron could give. The Ardent house could argue and pay and present men in robes and middling sums. But the wizard saw the codex at Kael's marrow like a small, hard thing under glass, and a lightness left the steward's step.
Kael's pulse did not race so much as tighten to a wire. Time sharpened. The steward called for the head of household. Fathers conferenced like generals. Mothers arranged their faces into strategies. Siblings clustered. Ardent lives reshuffled.
Kael knew what he must do because he had memories from a life of choices: do not reveal more than necessary; do not make it easy to take you; gather information. He also knew something new and dangerous: the codex could be used if seals were broken. The cost for breaking a seal appeared in the panel briefly as a ledger line: SEAL 1: Requires dragon-ice shard; Unlocks — Frost Edge. COST: unknown (rare material consumption). That line vanished before any eye could copy it.
"Young Kael," the wizard said, turning back. "Do not practice any thing in the open. Hide your exercises. We value the Crown's instruments; we do not encourage improvisation. If a house attempts to hide an instrument, the Crown treats that as conspiracy."
Kael nodded. He left the courtyard on his own feet, an act of self-control. Behind him Marcus watched with a look that meant rivalry and something like calculation; the other brothers followed at a distance, a pack of curious wolves.
When the men in blue-stitched robes left at dusk, they took lists and signatures. They left an order: Kael was to be delivered to the nearest knight instructor for supervised training until the Crown assessed him. They left another note: the Academy would send a delegate; a ship would carry selected youth to the school.
Kael put his hands into the cold of the fountain, and the water stitched into faint ice on his fingers before melting. It was a small thing. It was a private fact. A single trace.
He had twelve seals between him and power. He had a codex that demanded rare things. He had a house with many children and many moving pieces and the kind of safety money buys but does not guarantee.
He also had an advantage no one in the courtyard suspected: he remembered, in clear, practical fragments, how to manage risk. That memory would be the difference between being escorted to an academy as a ward and being stripped and questioned in a cellar.
The Crown's carriage that brought a letter the next dawn called for Kael by name. The letter read plainly: TRAIN. OBEY. PREPARE FOR THE SEA.
He sat with the inked words in his lap and the panel in his vision, and he thought, as any practical boy might, about lists: materials to acquire, allies to make, the exact sequence of movements he would use to hide the codex from a search that was competent and hungry.
Outside, the day wore its ordinary cruelty: a stablehand struck a horse, a beggar cursed under breath, a hawk took a fledgling. The world kept moving. Inside him a cold, patient instrument waited for a set of keys. He would collect them. He would learn to wield frost like a tool.
Above the keep, a raven cried once and the sound was like a punctuation mark.
Kael rolled the words of the panel in his head and made a single choice: train harder, ride harder, and when the sea came, take the ship and leave nothing naïve behind.
The House would provide a shield for a while. The Frost Codex would not grant mercy. It would grant potential — a ledger, not a conscience. Kael had both a ledger and a list. He set them side by side and began to plan.