Chapter 1: Wood and Silver

Otis Kane came in with his weight already forward. Six months of doing it, and it was still the only tell he had.

Cal let the practice sword come. He waited until the wood was close enough to move the hair on his forehead, then pushed off the outside of his left foot, dropped his shoulder, and was somewhere else.

“Sparrow Step,” a boy by the east wall said, in the voice of somebody who wanted credit for the identification.

Two girls in the second row called Cal’s name at the same time. One of them got the whole thing out, and then lost her nerve and looked at her nails.

Otis heard them. His jaw worked. “I’m not going easy,” he said, loudly, so the front rows would hear it too.

Cal’s blade came up low and out of nowhere, a thrust so short and so straight it barely qualified as a swing, and the tip of it went through the inch of air under Otis’s ribs where Otis’s guard had been a quarter second earlier.

“Glimmer thrust,” the boy by the wall said. Nobody else bothered, because everybody was watching Otis.

Otis’s face changed. He threw himself backward, both heels skidding, and the practice sword that had been meant for Cal’s shoulder swung through nothing at all. He came out of it three steps back with his mouth pressed into a line, and the hall made a noise it had not been making a second before.

“He had to run from it,” somebody said.

Above Otis’s knuckles, silver light was already climbing, thin as frost, and the aspect blurred his hand into something that was not a hand.

The growl came out of him low. It was not loud. It got into the floor anyway, the way a truck going past gets into the windows of a house.

“There it is.” A boy at the back stood up on the bench to see. “Tier Five. He’s actually going to use it.”

“On a blank?” the girl with the nails said. “That’s not much of a —”

“Watch,” the boy by the wall said.

The silver paw closed on the grip. Otis stepped once, and the seam under his heel opened, and the wood on either side of it lifted. The swing he brought after that did not come out of any form book. It came like a door coming off a hinge.

“Cleaver,” Otis said, and brought it down.

Wood met wood.

The sound was flat and final. Cal’s sword blew apart at the middle, both halves spinning away, and the rest of the blow arrived half a second behind the break and put him eleven steps down the hall before his heels agreed to hold. He counted them. Eleven. His shoulder would have something to say about it tomorrow.

He looked down at the stub in his hand, all splinters and a grip he no longer trusted, and said, “All right. You win.”

Somebody sighed. It was a girl, and the sigh was loud enough to be a small public event, and two friends picked it up and carried it.

The boys were quieter about it, but not much. They smirked at the floor, at each other, at their own shoes. One of them had lost to Cal in the fall, in front of everyone, and he was doing an extremely poor job of not enjoying this.

“Look at the feet, though,” the boy by the wall said. “His feet are better than Otis’s feet.”

“His feet don’t have a Tier Five in them.”

“His feet got him inside twice. You saw it. If he had anything to put behind the second one —”

“If.” The taller boy with the shaved head cut him off. “Otis went up a Mark in the spring. Vane hasn’t gone up one in eight months. That’s not a bad afternoon. That’s a wall.”

“His parents were the youngest Sovereigns on record,” the shaved boy went on. “Ten years, and they took a house nobody outside this city had heard of and put it in the Five. That’s the only reason anybody still says Vane out loud.”

“You make it sound like they bought it.”

“They did buy it. With ten years and everything they had. You want me to say it prettier?”

“I want you to say it right.”

“Three years,” the boy by the wall said, quietly, which made it carry. “Three years since the Warden Front. No word, no body, nothing to bury.”

Nobody had anything to put after that.

“And the house is coming apart,” the shaved boy said, taking the ground back. “Ask anyone. Half the division heads don’t take orders anymore, and the other half are taking Sutton money and saying they aren’t.”

“So who’s running it?” the girl with the nails asked, and her voice had changed, and around the room several other voices changed with it. “Somebody’s running it.”

“Brant,” the boy by the wall said. “Two years now.”

“She’s nineteen.”

“So?”

She didn’t have anything to put after so, so she made a face at him instead, and the shaved boy said something about a chair and who was sitting in it, and one or two people half turned and looked across the mat at Cal, the way people look at a thing they have decided not to mention.

“Halcyon doesn’t take Track Two,” the boy by the wall said, to the girl, not to Cal.

“Halcyon barely takes Track One.”

Cal picked splinters out of his sleeve.

On the sideline, Coach Hobbs stood with his arms folded and his whistle still in his fist and did not blow it. He had watched the whole thing from four feet away and seen what the crowd had seen: the best-trained kid in the hall, and it was not going to matter. He had read the assessment three times. There was nothing wrong with Cal’s body except the one thing, and there was no drill for the one thing, no wind sprint that put an aspect where there wasn’t one. The file called the demotion a load issue, Track One being the track whose names went out to the schools that mattered, with a coach who did not care to carry anybody. What the file meant was that a Vane heir reading blank made a worse headline than a strong boy in the wrong room, and a house that had lost both its Sovereigns did not make anybody nervous anymore. Hobbs had been coaching for twenty-two years. He knew which of those two sentences had done the work.

The whistle stayed in his fist.

Otis walked over, sweating through his shirt, and put a hand on Cal’s shoulder, and the hand was heavy because everything about Otis was heavy.

“Don’t make a face,” Otis said.

“I’m not making a face.”

“You’re making the face you make when you’re not making a face.” Otis crouched down to Cal’s level, since standing over people was apparently impossible for him. “Don’t hold it against me.”

“For what?”

“I brought a bear to a sword fight.” He turned his hand over and looked at it, and the silver was gone from it already. “You know what I think about, when I’m not thinking about anything?”

“Your next meal.”

“Before that. I think, if you ever get any force behind that footwork of yours, I’m going to get flattened. Not beaten. Flattened. I’ll be in that wall over there, fifth row up, and some freshman is going to have to come scrape me off it with a putty knife.”

Cal smiled a little, because Otis was incapable of saying a thing like that and meaning it as a consolation prize. He meant it as a fact. He had lost to Cal in the spring, in front of everyone, and had not slept well for two days afterward, and had then come into the hall every morning until he could take that first exchange and still be standing at the end of it. And now here they were.

“Still not fixed?” Otis asked.

Cal shook his head.

“Nothing at all? Not one?”

“Not one.”

“Yeah.” Otis rubbed the back of his neck. “That was a stupid question. I knew it was stupid while I was asking it.”

“It’s a question.”

“It is a question.” He sat down heavily on the bench and put his elbows on his knees, and the bench took it, barely.

Hobbs walked out onto the mat, and the noise in the hall went down at the edges and then fell into order. He looked at the floor where the seam had opened.

“Somebody get the sandpaper,” he said, and half the hall laughed, and then he looked at them and the laughing stopped. “Otis. How many times did he touch you?”

“Twice.”

“How many times did you touch him?”

“Once.”

“Once,” Hobbs said, and turned a slow half circle, taking them all in, seated in their rows with their practice swords across their knees. “Advancement exams start the first week of next month. That’s the whole reason this hall exists. Every year at this time I stand here and tell a room full of you that it gets decided in the next five weeks, and every year most of you go home and do nothing different. So this is the year I stop repeating myself.”

He found Cal in the rows and did not make anything of it.

“Vane.”

“Coach.”

“You know what the problem was just now?”

“He’s stronger than me.”

“That’s the answer to a different question.” Hobbs tapped his own temple with one finger and let the hand drop. “Don’t take it home with you and turn it over for an hour. It isn’t your work. If it were your work, I could fix it.”

The hall was quiet in a way that meant everybody had heard it.

“Time,” Hobbs said. “Get out of my hall.”

They went. Bags came off benches, swords went into racks, the door at the east end banged open and let the warm air in.

Otis shouldered his bag and paused. “You want to run forms after class?”

“Your forms are terrible.”

“My forms are fine. My forms are backed up by two hundred and thirty pounds of credibility.” He was already walking. “Think about it. If I have to go into that wall at the fifth row, I want it to be a good day out.”

Cal lifted a hand at him, and Otis went out with the crowd, and the crowd took its noise with it, and the double doors swung shut on the smell of hot floor and chalk dust and the hall ticking as it cooled.

Cal collected the two halves of his practice sword and carried them to the rack so the quartermaster wouldn’t have a lecture for him. The break was clean. He put both halves in the scrap bin.

The seam in the floor was a dark line about three feet long, and the wood along both sides of it had lifted and split.

He looked at it for a while.

Then he pressed the heel of his hand flat against his stomach, just below the ribs, and held it there.

He could feel his own pulse under it. Nothing else.

He picked up his bag and went out through the east door.