The bakery smell reached the second floor.
Not strongly. The Accord's Duncarrow branch had been above it long enough to develop its own institutional scent of slate-cleaner and old paper. But underneath that, persistent and warm, the proving bread made itself known through the stone. Taelith noted it as he climbed the stairs. The building had the quality of something repurposed: high ceilings cut for warehouse storage, walls partitioned twice since their original construction, a corridor floor worn smooth in a single track where three decades of foot traffic had concentrated. Thornside ran to this kind of architecture. Functional spaces that outlasted their purposes.
The intake room held eleven candidates.
He catalogued them the way he catalogued any room. Periphery first, centre second, the things that didn't fit third.
Two Brawlers by the window, both Raw Pulse from how they held themselves: shoulders forward, weight low, the specific readiness of bodies that had spent enough time under Vis enhancement to stop thinking about the adjustment. A Weaponer near the back corner, probably Stone Hand, fidgeting with a knife sheath in the absent way of someone whose hands needed occupation more than his attention required it. Three candidates he couldn't read immediately from posture alone. They might be holding their signatures deliberately flat, or they might simply be nervous enough that their bearing had defaulted to civilian.
A woman sat against the far wall with a book open in her lap. Silver-white hair, pulled back, framing a face that was younger than the colour suggested. She turned a page without looking up. The book was either genuinely absorbing or she was very good at not being present in a room full of strangers. Magiker. The stillness had the particular quality of someone managing awareness rather than attention. First Candle, probably, though the management itself suggested more practice than that tier usually produced.
He filed both readings.
Near the door, a man sat with a halberd across his knees. The weapon said three years, minimum. It wasn't displayed but carried, the way a tradesman carries the tool that defines his morning. A Hollow Giant, probably Iron Vein and Iron Body from the ease of the weight distribution. The halberd's binding had settled into the metal with the specific depth that only came from sustained proximity. He wasn't showing it to anyone. He was simply in the room with it, and the room had adjusted.
The Accord's credential desk sat at the room's centre. Behind it, a woman in her fifties reviewed a slate with the unhurried patience of someone whose patience was structural rather than performed.
A leather document case at her elbow had been worn to the specific softness of fifteen years of daily use.
Taelith approached and set his identification on the desk.
"Taelith," he said. "Morning session."
She looked up. Reading glasses on a chain. Her gaze moved across his face with the practised assessment of someone who had processed several hundred candidates and found each of them individually worthy of the same eight seconds of full attention.
"Aldris," she said. "Chief Examining Officer. You're third in sequence. We'll call when Stage One is ready." She marked something on the slate without looking down at it. "Sit where you like. There's water by the window if you want it."
He sat where he could see the door and both windows. Not a tactical decision in any meaningful sense. The Accord's branch office was not a threat environment. But he had spent enough time in rooms where the exits mattered that the practice had become ambient, applied without differentiation, the way some people always noted the nearest bathroom.
The woman with the silver-white hair had not looked up from her book. She had, however, shifted her position since he entered. Fractionally, the kind of micro-adjustment that placed the entrance in her peripheral vision without appearing to turn toward it. She was aware of the room. The book was also real. Both things were operating simultaneously, and the fact that he could read this about her in under a minute suggested she was doing something similar with him.
The man with the halberd sat three chairs away, against the wall without a window. His back to stone rather than glass. His hands on the weapon's shaft were still in the specific way of someone who was not resting but had decided not to move. There was a weight to him that wasn't physical. The halberd accounted for some of it, but not all. The rest was the particular presence of a person who took up the space he occupied completely, without apology and without display.
Aldris called the first name. A young Brawler stood with the careful energy of someone whose body had been sitting longer than it preferred. She followed Aldris through a door at the corridor's far end. The door closed behind them.
The room adjusted the way rooms do. A small redistribution of collective attention, the remaining candidates recalibrating their awareness of the space without any of them appearing to move.
Taelith reached for the name of the licensing examiner who had administered in Duncarrow before Aldris. The one whose Stage Two procedural notes he had read two months ago while preparing.
He had noted the name specifically because the approach to paired assessment had been unusual, worth understanding before he walked into his own.
The name wasn't there.
He followed the path the information should have taken. Not grasping, retracing, the way he always did. The path was intact. The terminus was absent. A shelf that should have held something, the wall behind it smooth.
He let it go. He had been letting these go for long enough that the motion itself was practised. Reach, trace, find the absence, release. He did not examine the practice.
The Magiker turned a page. Her hand paused on the paper, barely visible, the duration of a blink, before completing the motion.
Aldris returned. She called the second name. The room shifted again. Smaller by one, the attention redistributing. Time moved in the specific way it moves in waiting rooms: not slowly, but without weight. Nobody spoke. The Brawlers adjusted their posture. The Stone Hand Weaponer had stopped fidgeting with his sheath and was now sitting very still, which meant his name was close.
The man with the halberd hadn't moved since Taelith entered. Not once. His breathing was even and his attention was on the room in the same way the floor was on the ground. Present, total, and uninterested in announcing itself.
Aldris returned again. She looked at her slate, then at Taelith.
"Third," she said. "This way."
He stood. The corridor stretched ahead, and at its end the door to the Stage One room was closed.
It had been closed since the first candidate went through, and it had the quality of a door that knew it was being watched. Which meant it was just a door, and he was the one supplying the significance.
He walked toward it.