Bren Alder believed in beginnings that didn't apologize. He put a new spoke under Kaelen's hands and said, "You'll only learn a circle by earning it," then left him to measure while the plane sang elsewhere. Kaelen measured. He breathed. He tried to make his shoulders forget they were attached to a boy with an ego and remember they were attached to work. The grain answered him with the faintest of nods.
Tamsin blew in at the threshold like a draft, hair pinned with three sticks that had all failed at stick-hood in different ways. "Verenth," she announced. "Emergency."
Bren didn't look up. "If the emergency is a poem, take it outside. If it's a broken child, take it to Sister Anwen. If it's a broken wheel, show it to me only if it is too heavy to carry alone."
"It's an emergency of civic importance," Tamsin said, unperturbed. "Sister Anwen has posted the Trials."
Kaelen's hand paused mid-mark. "Trials?"
Tamsin flourished a sheet of paper that had started its day on the temple notice board and had no idea it was destined for stardom. "Spring Trials," she read, savoring each word as if they were pastries. "For youths of Stonebridge and nearby lanes, to test steadiness, wit, and arm. Knot, candle, sprint, puzzle, and-" she glanced sideways at Kaelen with evil delight "-honorable bout."
Bren grunted. "Who writes these names."
"Someone who is in love with punctuation," Tamsin said. "It's today. Starts after second bell. Finish by dusk so the Queen's Representative doesn't have to pretend to care in the dark. Winners get ribbons, a coin, and Sister Anwen's smile in a jar."
"Tempting," Bren said dryly. "Verenth, if you want to go, go. Come back with your hands still attached."
Kaelen hated that his heart leapt. It was just a string of games. It was not important. It had importance anyway. "I'll come back," he said, trying not to throw the marking gauge down in a dramatic leap. He set it carefully on the bench in the posture of a boy who pretended not to be running inside, then actually ran.
The square had acquired purpose, that cousin of joy that doesn't laugh as loud but lasts longer. Ropes strung for the lantern canopy now held little flags with numbers. A table with thick candles waited at one end, wicks trimmed and smug. A course of buckets and bricks made an obstacle for the sprint. Sister Anwen stood with a small book in which she wrote names with a neat hand and occasional secret comments that only the gods and people with long necks would know. The watch had sent two keepers to manage the bouts, the pine-trunk men again, and a third to glare at boys who thought they might learn to juggle knives without first learning to stand up straight.
Kaelen found Daran there because of course his father would be there; he had the sort of sense of duty that answered bells with enthusiasm. He held a coil of rope and a look that had been sharpened on a whetstone and then put away for later use. When he saw Kaelen and Tamsin, he lifted his chin, the quiet version of a blessing: 'go on then, be what you're going to be.'
"Name?" Sister Anwen asked, looking up with her gaze that saw three things at once.
"Kaelen Verenth," Kaelen said, and it surprised him that he did not lower his voice.
"Steady hands," Anwen murmured, writing it down as if it were a fact to be catalogued with sunrise. Her eyes flicked past him to Tamsin. "And you?"
"Tamsin Ellowe," Tamsin said. "Pattern and audacity."
"All right," Anwen said, amused. "Don't tangle either."
The first trial was knots. Five posts stood in a row with a length of rope tied around each in a sulk. The knot sheet on the board displayed drawings that looked like accusations. Tie a clove hitch, a bowline, a fisherman's knot, a square knot, and a bend without strangling yourself or the rope. Kaelen took his place, hands already remembering Bren's rope voice: persuade, don't chase.
Garrin sidled up in the next lane and gave Kaelen a grin that was less a challenge and more a hello from one person to another on the edge of a cliff.
"I'm better at the ones where things fly," he confessed cheerfully. "Knots make me feel like the rope knows more adjectives than I do."
"Think of it as hair," Tamsin said from Kaelen's other side. "You're convincing it to be more interesting."
"Hair and I are enemies," Garrin said gravely. "I'm doomed."
The bell rang, and the rope forgot to be shy. Kaelen's hands moved without the part of his brain that sometimes tried to conduct everything with a baton. Over, around, under, through. He didn't force. He told the rope where the party was and asked it to attend. It did. He finished first by the margin of a breath. People clapped the way people do when something satisfying happens to someone who didn't expect it. Daran's mouth twitched. Tamsin leaned into Kaelen's shoulder for a heartbeat, then hopped away as if she had been caught being fond.
The candle sprint came next. The same path as yesterday's festival race, but with a floating hoop near the pier that you had to step through without losing your flame. Little charms waited for those who could make the fire listen; the rest had hands. Tamsin charmed her flame with a whisper that sounded like a joke and made it burn as if gossip had been kind. Garrin coaxed wind to behave like a gentleman at a dance. Kaelen cupped his candle and ran with a breath held behind his teeth in a steady shape. He finished not first and not last, flame trembling at the edge of a sneeze, and felt oddly proud of that. Sister Anwen recorded his time and drew a little circle beside his name, the Anwen notation for Not Loud, But Yes.
The puzzle was a tangle of carved blocks that looked like a child's toy designed by a bridge. Tamsin ate it for dessert. Kaelen nearly solved it, then found that one piece had been holding back the entire river of solutions and gave it up with a laugh. Garrin tried to strength his way through until he admitted defeat in good humor and begged Tamsin to teach him where the secret lives later.
Between trials, the square lived its regular life. Maelin sold pears to a traveling piper who kept thanking her in ascending notes. Mrs. Kettle told a girl to stop using ribbon as reins on a cat because cats do not have union protections. Bren Alder wandered by, clucked at Kaelen's knots with approval, and then pretended to be uninterested when Tamsin made fun of him for pretending.
And then the honorable bouts. Names drawn from a bowl. The pine-trunk watchmen chalked a ring in the dirt and explained, in exactly ten words, how losing worked. Kaelen's first draw put him against a boy from south-bank whose wrists were stronger than his intentions. Kaelen breathed, remembered Nyx's trick of telling his body he wasn't going to swing and then swinging anyway, and found the timing that sits in the corner and waits to be invited. He won that one by a hair, paternal pride a warmth on the back of his neck.
Second bout, a girl with fast feet and a grin that could trip a person by itself. Kaelen lost the first exchange, laughed at himself for it, and won the next two because he stopped trying to impress the grin and addressed the sword. Tamsin cackled like a crow.
Garrin crushed his own first two with a beauty that made people murmur. His new affinity for Wind flickered at his edges; the air liked him. He did not abuse it. He used it to give his blade honesty, not flash. It impressed Kaelen more than if he'd brought hats off heads. The crowd felt that too, the way a crowd can feel a boy choosing not to be a peacock and decide to like him more for it.
Final rounds gathered themselves to a point. Sister Anwen stood closer to the ring with her book closed, as if ready to intervene not with magic but with the weight of her attention. Daran changed position so he would be in Kaelen's peripheral life but not his eyes. The square stretched its neck.
Kaelen and Garrin climbed into the ring at the same moment. There was no shame in losing now. There was no shame in winning, either. Kaelen's ribs remembered Garrin's gift from yesterday. Garrin tilted his head very slightly in something like apology for bruises exchanged, and Kaelen smiled in return because politeness costs the least and buys the most.
The bell tapped. They moved.
Kaelen's first exchange was clean. Parries like firm answers. His second was less so. He turned his foot on a stone because the world occasionally hides rocks where boys step. He corrected. Garrin did not punish the slip because people were watching and because his face had learned something since yesterday. The third exchange lasted a while, and in it Kaelen forgot to be an audience to himself and just was. He felt Daran vanish from the edge of his thought and leave only the ring and the boy.
And then it happened. Not big, just enough. Garrin's wind kissed Kaelen's ankle. Barely. Legal? The pine-trunks had not forbidden the new affinities, and if they began, they would never finish. A whisper, the kind of advantage magic gives you when you've earned it yesterday and haven't yet learned how not to lean on it. Kaelen took a step his ankle had not agreed to, overbalanced, and the sword handle bit his palm so suddenly his fingers decided there were better employment opportunities elsewhere. The blade jumped from his grasp and thunked into the dirt at the line. He windmilled like a small mill and then caught himself half a breath too late to avoid the humiliation that is laughter when your body has betrayed you in front of people who matter.
It was not cruel laughter. Not all of it. Some. Just enough to put a string around Kaelen's chest and tighten it.
The watchman stepped in before Garrin could pretend to be magnanimous. "Point," he declared. It was fair. It still burned.
The bell tapped again in the tidy way bells do. Kaelen retrieved his sword and tasted his tongue as if it had become copper. Garrin looked at him, regret and triumph getting in one another's way like two boys at a doorway. Kaelen nodded once, 'yes, I know; yes, I am here; yes, again', and they went at it one more time. This time Garrin did not use the wind. He didn't need to. Kaelen overreached: the kind of mistake you make when you are trying to erase the last ten seconds with valor. Garrin took the opening like someone who had learned not to apologize for being in the right place.
Match.
Kaelen stood with his breath doing theatrical things and tried to teach it an inside voice. People clapped. Tamsin cheered like a storm. Maelin, somewhere in the crowd, whistled in a way Kaelen had only ever heard when bread rose exactly right. Daran didn't move and in not moving said, I saw, and also, I am here.
"Good bout," Garrin said, meaning it, not crowing. "Sorry about the-" he gestured vaguely and made a breeze with his fingers, embarrassed by the gift he'd been given and how it had arrived between them like an uncle everyone tolerates but no one knows where to seat.
"It's what you are now," Kaelen said and surprised himself by meaning that too. "Learn to use it clean."
Garrin opened his mouth to say something that might have been a promise or a vow never to use wind on ankles again. Tamsin slid between them like a ribbon cut free. "Rope-pull rematch later," she announced. "Rope does not respect wind."
Laughter helped. It always does, if it's arranged by the right person. Sister Anwen came into the ring, put a hand on each boy's shoulder, and gave them both a fraction of her weight as if to say: 'carry yourselves gently now.'
After, when the crowd took its attention elsewhere and boys returned to being boys who needed water and pride rubbed down with a rough cloth, Kaelen escaped the way animals do: sideways, slowly, with dignity until they are out of sight. Tamsin started to follow; he gestured don't and she, who could ignore crowds but not him, stayed and began composing a terrible rhyme about wind-hair that would have to be edited for decency.
He went to the bridge. He leaned on a pier stone that had watched more children learn humility than any book could record. The Lark sucked slowly at the banks, patient even with people. Pigeons held a meeting in the eaves about loaf futures. Kaelen pressed his palm to the stone and let it take some heat.
"Steady hands," said Daran behind him.
Kaelen swallowed. He hadn't heard his father follow, which meant Daran had been practicing his stealth again, which was unfair to sons in need of privacy.
"I dropped it," Kaelen said.
"You did," Daran agreed, and then added, in the tone he used for facts that insisted on being spoken aloud: "He tapped you. It was within the allowance. He won. And your shame sits bigger than it needs to because you like him."
"I don't," Kaelen said on reflex.
"You do," Daran said without heat. "You don't like what he stands for today: all the boys who got kissed by magic while you were looking the other way. That will change if you let it. Or it won't, and you will be stuck in one small room for a long time, and I'll have to come and fetch you out."
Kaelen huffed. "Is it so obvious."
"I am your father," Daran said. "I changed your diapers with the devotion of a saint and the language of a sailor. I know your face."
Kaelen sat on the low step by the pier and tucked his hands into his sleeves. "I wanted to win without feeling like I needed to prove anything," he said, hearing himself sound like he was twelve again and disliking it, then forgiving it because it was true. "I wanted the world to say good job and move on. That never seems to be the shape of things."
"It very rarely is," Daran said. He lowered himself onto the step with the air of a man negotiating with his knees. "When I was your age there was a boy named Corin who could charm steel to remember being ore. He made a spear so light in the hand and heavy in the work that it made other men feel old. I hated him for three weeks and then realized that a spear like that, in a war, was a gift to the man beside it. So I trained next to him. He made me better. I never told him. He didn't need to know."
Kaelen glanced at him. "I do not think I hate Garrin."
"You don't," Daran agreed. "Which is more dangerous and more useful. You can learn from him, and he can learn from you, and neither of you has to pretend you are not a little jealous of the other."
Kaelen let his head fall back against the pier. The stone accepted him without commentary. "He used the wind."
"He did," Daran said. "And then he didn't. He will figure out what kind of person the wind is when it is with him and what kind it is when he asks it to visit other people's ankles. He will have to decide. A boy who gets a tool too soon has to grow hands for it."
Kaelen considered this, found something in it he could hold, and held it. "Sister Anwen said I have steady hands."
"She is a very accurate woman," Daran said. He reached out and squeezed one of those hands gently. "You can do a lot with steadiness while other people burn themselves with fireworks."
They sat that way long enough for two pigeons to conclude their meeting and take their mediocre minutes to the ledge. The river kept its talk gentle. Somewhere back toward the square, applause went up for something that had just gone right. Kaelen didn't look. He didn't need to. He knew Stonebridge's claps by flavor.
When they rose, the day resumed with that small click good days make when they get back into gear. Daran returned to the watch with an apology to his knees. Kaelen drifted toward the temple, not intending to go in and then, somehow, inside the door with the sense that if he didn't go now he would go later and what was later for if not this.
The nave smelled of beeswax and people who had tried not to cry in public and succeeded just enough. Sister Anwen stood at the railing, speaking quietly to a woman with hands red from laundry. A pair of small children argued in whispers about who had the better ribbon; a third fell asleep in a posture that suggested he'd been considering angels and lost his train of thought. On a side bench, a man sat with a cloth packed against his palm, blood seeping through in that glorious manner hands have of dramatizing injuries that are inconvenient more than dangerous.
Kaelen hovered. Anwen noticed. Of course she noticed. She finished her sentence to the woman and then dispensed a small smile over the top of it for Kaelen, a thing she did that made you feel both caught and welcomed.
"Do you want to be useful?" she asked.
"Always," Kaelen said, too fast.
"Good," she said. "Hold this," and put a bowl of clean water into his hands. "And hold this," and gave him a look that meant: hold your pride the same way.
She went to the man with the bleeding palm and bent over his hand with the consequential focus usually reserved for queens and knitting. She spoke the sort of charm that made heat leave a thing obediently, then wrapped a clean cloth tidy as a fold in a formal shirt. "You'll be fine," she told him. "Work with your left. Leave the wheelwright to someone with young hands." She flicked her eyes to Kaelen and made a small point of it.
The man peered. "You're the Verenth boy," he said, and Kaelen was surprised at the lift in himself that followed the recognition. "Good bout. The drop made me laugh and then hate myself for it. Sorry."
"I laughed too," Kaelen said, and the man relaxed as if absolved.
After, in a quiet moment that smelled like beeswax and the kind of cleanliness that isn't about brooms, Tamsin's question from yesterday snuck back into Kaelen's mouth. "Sister," he said, "when people say Sister Mirel-"
Anwen smiled with only her eyes. "Means healer," she said. "Not wife of anyone. Not mother of anyone. Job of anyone. We forgot the word Brother for it because we didn't need it for a few hundred years, and words left on shelves get dusty. He answers to what patients will call him because you don't correct someone while they're bleeding."
"Right," Kaelen said, relieved that his world could hold both that and his bruised pride without spilling over. "Thank you."
"Steady hands," Anwen said again, almost to herself, almost to the gods, as if recording it downstairs and upstairs at once.
Evening did not finish neatly. The Trials bled into supper; kids wandered home with ribbons they intended to wear to sleep and woke in the night strangled by their own glory. Maelin bullied Kaelen into eating seconds because victories require fuel and so do losses. Bren sniffed at his knots and said tomorrow would begin with spokes again. Garrin dropped by with a face that had a conversation on it and left when he saw Kaelen was already speaking to someone else, which was very polite of him; Tamsin shouted after him that wind was not shoes and he should stop using it like shoelaces; Garrin laughed and did not answer because an answer would have made it an argument.
Kaelen went to bed with the bout still happening behind his eyes in the unfair way bouts do, repeating the bad parts not the good like a child who has misunderstood what stories are for. He told himself a better version: the moment he had caught a rhythm, the block he had loved because it had been clean, the laugh from Daran that had sneaked across the ring when Kaelen had done something exactly right and no one else had noticed. He fell asleep holding that one like a stone a river had given him for free.
He didn't finish the day. He left it lying open like a book he would return to because he had to, because tomorrow was Bren and wood and bruises softening, because Garrin had said again in the tone of a boy who meant tomorrow not next week, because Tamsin had threatened to make the rope-pull the scene of a renown so intense it would alter the city's opinion of rope forever, because Sister Anwen had said steadiness with the kind of insistence that puts bell-ropes into hands.
At dawn, the city did what cities do: made breakfast out of last night's triumphs and failures and then asked for help carrying the day.
Kaelen woke to the smell of bread and the point of his rib reminding him about wind.