Chapter 14
The Road North
Four days of walking.
He'd done longer stretches. After the monastery, before the guild district, there'd been a period of about eight months where he'd moved from town to town doing whatever work was available, sleeping in barns and waystation shelters, eating when he could and not eating when he couldn't. He knew how to travel with nothing. He was, if anything, more comfortable in motion than standing still.
He owned a pack with a change of clothes, a water skin, enough dried food for three days, a small knife that wasn't a weapon, and the letter. That was everything. He'd never accumulated much beyond that -- boarding house living didn't encourage accumulation, and he'd never had the income for it anyway.
The road north was well-traveled. Trade routes ran between the guild district city and the Heartlands constantly, and he fell in with the rhythm of it -- merchants with wagons, travelers on horseback, foot traffic moving in both directions. He walked at the edge of the road and watched people and didn't start conversations.
He thought about the Academy.
He'd heard things over the years, the way you heard things when you kept your ears open in a guild district. The Royal Academy of the Arcane was the kingdom's premier institution -- not the only magic academy, but the one that mattered, the one that the Crown funded directly and the noble houses sent their heirs to. Getting in required either exceptional rank or exceptional sponsorship. The education was the best available. The politics were apparently brutal.
Most of what he knew about how ranked mages actually developed their abilities had come from watching Corris and listening to Hess. The Academy presumably taught that in a more structured way. Whether they'd teach it to a null-result provisional student was another question.
On the second day he passed through a small town that had a Runestone in its central square -- a permanent one, not a testing station, the kind that sat as civic infrastructure and was used for official rank verification. He stopped and looked at it from across the square.
It looked ordinary. Grey stone on a plain housing, faintly glowing with the ambient light of active mana.
He wondered if it would crack if he touched it.
He didn't test it. He kept walking.
On the third day the Heartlands began in earnest -- the landscape shifting from the working-city density of the south into something older and more deliberate. The roads were better maintained here. The towns were cleaner, the buildings newer, the mana infrastructure noticeably heavier. More lights, more enchanted gates, more of the faint pressure of concentrated ranked mages that Cyan's palm now registered like a compass pointing toward density.
The gap between the Heartlands and the guild district south wasn't just about wealth. It was about mana. Everything here ran on higher-grade enchantments, maintained by higher-ranked mages, because the money and the political will to pay for it lived here.
He watched it and felt, for the first time on the journey, something that might have been anger if he'd let it develop that far.
He didn't.
On the fourth day, mid-afternoon, the road crested a long hill and he saw Valdren's Rest for the first time -- the Heartlands' administrative capital, wide and old and built in the particular style of a city that had been important for a very long time and knew it.
And above it, on a raised plateau to the north of the city, the Academy.
He stopped walking.
He looked at it for a long moment.
Then he adjusted his pack and kept going.