Chapter 19
Orientation
The official orientation for all new students -- provisional and general cohort together -- happened at the end of the first week.
It was held in the Academy's main hall, which was the largest indoor space Cyan had been in. High ceilings with mana-crystal lighting, tiered seating, a stage at the front with a podium that had probably hosted the same speech a hundred times. Maybe two hundred. The Academy was three hundred years old.
He sat with Fen in the provisional section, which was cordoned off to one side in a way that was technically just seating arrangement but functionally felt like something else.
The headmaster delivered the orientation address. He was a Gold-rank mage in his seventies, the kind of person who had spent so long at the apex of the system he'd forgotten it had a bottom, and his speech reflected that. It was about potential and legacy and the Academy's role in shaping the kingdom's future. It used the word excellence eleven times. Cyan counted.
Fen was keeping count of something else -- she had a small notebook and was making marks in it. He didn't ask what she was tracking.
The substance of the orientation was in the rules section, delivered by a junior administrator after the headmaster finished. Cyan had already learned most of it from the provisional orientation, but the general version had more detail.
Rank advancement was by evaluation, not by time. Students could request advancement testing whenever they believed they were ready. Advancement brought privileges: better library access, priority practice hall booking, eligibility for the contracted dungeon runs that were the Academy's most prestigious practical component.
The dueling system was sanctioned and formally administered. Students could challenge each other to registered duels with faculty witnesses. Results were recorded. Consistent winning moved you up. Consistent losing moved you nowhere, but wasn't penalized beyond the loss itself.
The restricted archive was off-limits without faculty authorization. Violations were grounds for immediate expulsion. No exceptions.
Cyan noted that one carefully.
Provisional students were subject to additional restrictions: no dungeon run authorization for the first semester, no rank advancement testing until passing evaluation, no access to the advanced practice halls.
The administrator recited all of this in a tone that suggested he'd said it so many times that the words had stopped meaning anything to him. Cyan listened to every word.
After the formal portion, there was an hour of what the schedule called informal mixing, which meant standing in the main hall with refreshments while students who knew each other reconnected and students who didn't clustered by whatever affiliations they had.
Cyan stood at the edge of the room with a cup of something warm and watched.
He watched the Gold-rank students move through the space. There were four of them in the new cohort -- young, all of them, seventeen at most, with the specific ease of people who had grown up knowing they were exceptional. They clustered together first, then separated into the room with the confidence of people who expected the room to accommodate them.
He watched the Silver-ranks, who were more numerous and more varied. Some of them moved like the Gold students. Most of them moved like people who knew their rank was good but weren't forgetting there was something above it.
He watched the Bronze-ranks, who were the majority, and who mostly seemed relieved to be here and uncertain about what came next.
He watched all of it and felt the mana of three hundred new students filling the hall like a tide, and kept his right hand in his pocket, and thought about what the Warden had said.
The right place for his questions.
He thought about what that meant. About what it implied about the questions themselves -- that they were the kind that had a right place, which meant they were the kind that most places would handle wrong.
Fen appeared beside him.
'Third null result showed up,' she said quietly. 'The missing provisional.'
'Where?'
She tilted her head toward the far corner of the room. A boy -- young, maybe fifteen -- standing alone near the wall with a cup he wasn't drinking from and an expression of careful blankness that Cyan recognized because he wore it himself.
'Name's Pell,' Fen said. 'From the south. No guild, no house.'
Three null results. One sealed letter each. Same cohort, same semester.
Cyan looked at the boy in the corner.
'Someone is collecting us,' he said.
Fen said nothing. She didn't have to.