Morning found frost beading along the balustrades like pearls left in the cold. Bells tolled a measured three; ravens shifted on the parapets, feathers dark and thoughtful. Ernest buttoned the cuffs of his Class C uniform and slid the Aldery blade into its hanger by the wardrobe. He did not take it. Steel had uses, but not for the lesson ahead.
The corridor murmured. Names and houses braided into gossip; laughter flared, then withered. Ernest stepped into the stream and let it part around him. He did not push. Water always remembered the rock in its middle.
"Control drill today," someone said. "Halvern will skin anyone who scorches a bench."
"Servants said there's an announcement from the Headmaster at noon."
"About what?"
"Priests."
A ripple of distaste, quickly masked. Ernest's mouth didn't move, but his thoughts tightened: Flies at the wound. They smell Celina. They smell me, even through the Veil.
Lecture hall three wore the same circle of light as before. Magister Halvern stood at the dais with a bucket of river pebbles and a tray of clay bowls. He set one bowl on each bench with the solemnity of a rite.
"Today," he said, "we practice precision. Not light. Weight. Not spectacle. Measure. You will draw and sustain a thread, not wider than a hair, for the count of fifty heartbeats. If you flare, you start again. If the bowl rattles, you start again. If you break the thread—" he lifted an eyebrow "—you begin before sunrise tomorrow."
Groans. A few smirks. The signet heir—Rival, for lack of a better name worthy of ink—rolled his shoulders and flashed a smile meant for a mirrored room.
Ernest placed his fingertips on the bowl's rim. Cool clay. A pair of pebbles lay within, dull gray. He drew. Mana rose—eager to flood as ever—and he thinned it until it obeyed. A single filament touched the bowl's base, lifted, hovered. Pebbles eased upward with the caution of a man stepping onto ice.
Heartbeats slowed. The room thinned to light, weight, breath.
Across the curve, Celina's pebbles rose and held. Her thread burned a shade too bright, the green-white of sapwood cut fresh; twice it shivered, as if bitten. Both times she steadied it—not with fear, but with a knowledge that came from having weathered pain and refusing to make a sound about it.
At the twentieth beat, a bowl rattled—sharp, embarrassed. Another. Halvern didn't look; the bowls did the looking for him. Ernest breathed. At the forty-ninth beat, he wanted to release; at the fiftieth, he made himself hold one heartbeat more, then let go without letting the pebbles fall. They kissed the bowl's floor as if they'd always wanted to be there.
Halvern's gaze cut up; he grunted approval that wasn't praise so much as the absence of correction. Celina released a breath so quiet it would have been a secret if Ernest hadn't been listening for it. The rival's bowl rattled on the twenty-first, cracked on the thirty-second, and shattered on the fortieth. His smile didn't reach his eyes when his friends laughed too long.
"Again," Halvern said, and the class learned what repetition is for.
By the time the bell chased them into the yard, attention had congealed. Names had started to matter less than the shapes worn around them. Ernest recognized the shift the way he'd recognized silence in the forest—stillness full of bite.
The rival found him near the chalked dueling circle. He walked with two boys half a step behind and one half a step ahead, as if even his followers couldn't agree about whether to be shields or spears.
"Aldery," he said, tone pitched to be private and public at once. "Do you only lift pebbles with that careful little frown? Or do you know what a blade is for?"
Ernest looked at him. The yard's breeze found a loose thread on the rival's cuff and teased it. "Control is what a blade is for," Ernest said.
"Control," the boy repeated, and let the word curdle. "That what you call standing still? Makes sense. If I were that small, I'd stand very still too."
His friends smirked, then looked to see if anyone else had seen them smirk. Ernest let his gaze slide past the heir's face to the soft meat just under his thumb where the signet sat. The ring had rubbed a faint red circle there.
"You hold your sword like a goblet," Ernest said. "That's why your wrists tremble."
A flush climbed into the boy's cheeks like a fire touching dry curtains.
"Duel," he snapped—too loud now to pull it back. "This afternoon. The circle. Show us your 'control.'"
Silence opened around them. It had texture—grain like wood cut across.
Ernest considered the circle, the chalk smudges, the instructor at the far end of the yard pretending not to listen and listening anyway. He considered the priest on the terrace, head turned slightly toward them, as if a hawk had cocked its head at a mouse to decide whether hunger was stronger than patience.
"No," Ernest said.
It wasn't refusal shaped like retreat. It was dismissal shaped like truth.
The boy blinked. "No?"
"You're not worth the practice," Ernest said. He stepped around him. The boy stumbled a half-step to block him; Ernest did not pause, did not quicken. He walked through the space the rival had thought he owned and left him holding air.
Laughter didn't rise. A different sound did—the rustle of a page turned in a book right before the good part.
Sword forms again. The instructor moved them through cuts that made lines in the air. "Not painting," he said, tapping a boy's elbow. "Write with it. Words you can live with."
Mikel—the honest blade from yesterday—paired with Ernest without fuss. They moved like practice should look: clean touches, retreat, reset. No triumph at touch, no anger at being touched. The instructor's staff struck the ground near them once in the rhythm of good and moved on.
Close by, the rival turned drill into contest again; when he overreached and his partner's wooden blade popped him lightly under the ribs, he snarled, turned, and would have swung harder if the instructor's staff hadn't snapped across both their blades with a crack that made the air flinch.
"Control," the instructor said for the third time in as many hours. "Or I will teach you remembrance."
Sweat cooled at Ernest's nape. He catalogued the rival's errors—which were many—and his strengths—which were one: he loved to be seen. A man who needs eyes to live can be blinded by closing a door.
The noon bell folded the yard into neat halves. Students filed toward the main court. The Headmaster stood on the steps again, priests flanking him like teeth.
"Brief," he said, and somehow made it true. "The temples will observe certain trainings this season. Dungeons have multiplied; your generation will meet them. The gods' servants," he inclined his head with the courtesy of a man who knew exactly how much he owed and to whom, "will advise."
A murmur, quickly bitten. Priests smiled their soft smiles. One—older, with lashes white as snow and eyes that did not blink often enough—let his gaze rest a moment too long on Ernest. It slipped away like water off oiled silk, the Veil closing with a grace Ernest had not yet had to command.
Celina stood three steps behind the front rank. She did not look at the priests. She did not look away. She stood like a question with an answer that would cost someone their teeth.
Afternoon brought diplomacy—etiquette layered over strategy like frosting thick enough to hide the taste. A professor in lace cuffs spoke about precedence and insult as if they were birds he bred in a cage. Which fork, which bow, which word.
Ernest learned it all. He had learned to copy shapes long before he knew they were spells.
At the session's end, someone left a calling card on his desk. Thick cream paper, edges gilded; a crest stamped in red wax: a rearing stag. On the back, in a hand that tried too hard to look casual:
Tomorrow. After last bell. The circle. Bring your control. — R. Stag
He turned the card over once, then lay it facedown as if it might be contagious. When he stood, Mikel hovered a pace away, clearing his throat with small courage.
"They're planning to corner you," Mikel said. "Not just him. A few others. He wants to force a scene."
"Scenes are for those who cannot write," Ernest said. He slid the card into his sleeve, not to keep, but to keep until it was useful. "Thank you."
Mikel's shoulders eased. "If you—if you need someone to stand by—"
"I need you to stand where you already do," Ernest said. "Steady."
The boy nodded, grateful for being seen exactly to his shape.
Twilight hung blue from the eaves when Ernest reached the dormitory. Candles pricked alive behind a dozen panes. He laid the card on his desk and set a paperweight on it like a pin through an insect. The crest looked both proud and silly under glass.
He took out his notebook.
Rival = R. Stag house. Noise as armor. Collects witnesses before he collects skill.
Priests to observe training. The Veil holds. Do not flare.
Celina holds at threshold. Pain trained into silence. Strength, not pity.
He paused, quill suspended, as if the next line needed the right axis to turn on.
Accept duel on my terms, not his. Set the story before he finds a chorus.
He left the page open to dry. The window admitted a line of cold air he did not yet close. Below, the dueling circle shone faintly, chalk biting clean against dark stone. Two second-years argued there, blades tapping in a rhythm that said they did not know yet whether they were practicing or performing.
Across the green, a candle in Celina's window burned steadily, griefless and bright. For a moment it flared too high, then steadied as if a hand had pressed the flame's head and told it to sit.
Ernest's reflection looked back at him as if he were already on the circle—composed, merciless, a boy-shaped absence that made other boys fill the silence with their own undoing.
He closed the window, shut out the cold, and turned down the lamp. The room breathed. In the dark, he said the truth the way some people say prayers:
"Noise is small," he told the night. "Control is victory."
He lay down. Sleep came as it always did when he asked it to—obedient, immediate, a servant that understood his will. Tomorrow would be the first bite the class took out of itself.
He would make sure it choked.