CHAPTER 19: FIRST PRACTICAL EVALUATION

The academy called us to Arena One at second bell. The ward line hummed high and clean, blue light crawling the ring like a patient animal. Seats filled fast—nobles in neat knots near the front, commoners in looser clumps toward the back and along the rails. Betting whispers moved through the air quicker than chalk dust.

Proctor Halden Pierce stepped to the center with his slate and his permanent ink-stain fingers. He didn’t raise his voice; the ward did that for him, carrying every syllable to the worst seat in the house.

"First practical evaluation," he said. "Four pillars. Individual Combat. Group Tactics. Magical Theory. Crisis Response. Composite scores determine advancement, scholarship retention, and your slotting for the next term. Failures will not be repeated in this hall."

A ripple of sound—murmurs that tried not to sound like fear.

"The schedule," Pierce continued, chalk tapping the air as the ward sketched his words. "Individual Combat: tomorrow morning. Group Tactics: tomorrow afternoon. Magical Theory: written and practical, morning after. Crisis Response: final day. Saints compete if they are students. Observers are not competitors."

Saintess Liora Anselm stood at the end of the dais with her hands loosely folded, white-gold bands resting against her wrist bones. She didn’t speak. She didn’t need to. The presence did the work—a quiet weight with a will attached.

On the upper catwalk, an older figure watched with a stillness that read like discipline, not boredom. Dorian Kest—upper-year Saint, observer, not competitor—eyes steady on the ring like he expected it to break and wanted to see how.

Pierce gestured and the ward flickered through rules. No maiming. No duels outside assigned rounds. No use of civilians as shields; in Crisis Response, civilian markers would carry heavy weight. A soft cough of laughter came from a pocket of nobles who didn’t believe in soft rules. Pierce ignored it. He had practice.

"Scoring," he said. "Composite. We don’t publish the exact arithmetic so you don’t game the test. Assume that ethics are not a rumor. Any questions, save them for your house tutors. Or for your prayers."

The nobles near me snickered in the way boys do when they think they are men. "Composite," one said. "So even if you don’t know which fork to use, you can still cry your way into a pass." He wore Voss blue. The sneer came naturally to his face and sat there like it paid rent.

A voice behind him—cool, amused. "Some of us prefer real tests. The kind you can’t plagiarize." Seraphine Duskveil moved like a knife wrapped in silk. Pure white hair, amethyst eyes that sliced without touching. She didn’t look at me. She didn’t have to. The angle of her chin said enough.

Aldric Voss—tall, brown hair, cold blue eyes—leaned into the space she made for him like a loyal dog that wore a smirk. "He’ll fold before noon," Aldric said, not bothering to keep his voice down. "Valcrey’s leash always snaps when people look."

A few heads turned. Some to me. More to see if I’d bite.

I didn’t. I watched the ward line and listened to the hum. I felt the leash in my chest—rope, not wire now—hum back. Marrow and Hollow rested in Shade beneath the stands, close enough that I could pull them up with a word. I didn’t. Not in a room that had rules. Not when Liora’s eyes were somewhere on the floor.

’No speeches,’ I told myself. ’No performances. Work.’

The Compass made a pleased little noise where it lived. "Correct," it said. "Also do not throw nobles. It upsets the ward."

Cael Veyron stood in the front row of the gallery, a clean silhouette cut out of calm. Dark hair that refused to lie flat, hazel eyes that didn’t blink more than needed. He didn’t cheer or scoff. He only watched. I didn’t look long. Mountains don’t move faster because you stare.

Pierce wrapped the logistics in a string and tied it neat. Names would be drawn at third bell for Individual Combat brackets. Tactics squads would be randomized after that. Magical Theory would require both ink and proof. Crisis Response would be—he paused a second long enough to make a point—"uncomfortable."

He stepped back. The ward dimmed to a patience that made the air feel colder.

The space broke like ice. Sound erupted: bragging, worrying, planning. A bookmaker—an upper-year with quick hands and quicker eyes—carried a leather ledger down the aisle. Coins clinked. Odds got set and reset on shouts.

"Cael at one to five," someone called. "Anyone want to lose money?"

"Ariadne Valcrey at ten," another said. "Cold as stone, that one."

"Elara at eight," a third.

The bookmaker hesitated when his finger landed on my name. A chuckle rolled through the bench behind me. "What’s the number for comedy?"

"Fifty," came the answer. "Or you can just set your coins on fire; it’s warmer."

I didn’t turn. I didn’t need their faces. I had heard men say worse with guns in their hands and cold in their bones. I looked instead at the far rail where the commoners had clustered. A tight center formed around a girl with silvery-blonde hair pinned in a simple twist and a stack of notebooks hugged to her chest like a shield. Ink stains decorated the side of her hand in faint blue constellations. Lyra Faewyn. The head of the commoner cohort.

They swarmed her with questions the way a river swarms a stone—steady, unavoidable. Boys with work-rough hands. Girls with determined jaws and secondhand coats. A dozen problems, a hundred hopes. She handled them all with quiet nods and lines on a page, voice so soft I couldn’t hear the words from where I stood, but steady in a way that made the group lean in, not over.

She saw me across the distance once. Shy didn’t mean blind. Our eyes met. She didn’t flinch. She dipped her chin, not a bow, not a challenge. Just a note in the margin.

’Head of the commoners,’ I thought. ’Shy and still the gravity point.’ The reason lived under that shyness like bones under skin. Not for me to know yet. For now, it was enough to see how the cohort orbited her without begging, without braying—only trusting.

Ariadne moved through the aisle with the straight back of someone who had learned to make posture a weapon. She took a seat three rows above me and didn’t look down. There was nothing to be gained by looking. I didn’t expect her to. Still, when one of our father’s friends made a loud joke about the Valcrey twins and the family’s shrinking shine, her jaw tightened one notch. A small thing. Not a defense. Not yet.

Pierce dismissed us five minutes later with a final: "Eat. Sleep. Stop asking if the wards will save you from your choices." The ward hummed. The boys in Voss blue laughed again because they didn’t understand half of what they were about to learn.

Outside, cold air met stone steps and bodies that walked too fast for grace. The smell of boiled meat and bread drifted from the hall and fought with ink, leather, and sweat. The academy is never quiet; it only changes the texture of its noise.

Aldric Voss shouldered through with his small court intact, Seraphine an elegant snowstorm at the center of his weather. He favored the bookmaker with a coin flip and a smirk. "Put two thalers on fireworks," he said, eyes sliding past my shoulder as if my face had become a wall he’d walked past his whole life. "Duskveil’s star keeps rising. Others—" he let the word rot in his mouth, "—fall."

Seraphine didn’t break stride. The amethyst eyes slid across me and away, uninterested. Or pretending. The pretense is half the game.

Marcus Ravencrest walked alone. Dark hair, sharp features, gloves clean. He paused at the threshold, glanced at the slate where the schedule had frozen mid-fade, and wrote something neat into a pocket notebook. The hand that held the pencil was steady. He looked at me once with the cool curiosity men reserve for horses they think might clear a higher fence, then went on.

Gareth Blackwater was harder to miss even if you wanted to. Stocky, red hair cropped close, freckles thick as pepper across his nose, hands with honest callus. He stood off to the side of the commoner knot, listening to Lyra more than he talked. When she sent him away with a word and a worried line etched on a page, he went, not sulking—already building the thing she’d asked for in his head.

I took the long way to the rear quad, because walking along the side corridors lets thoughts settle in layers. The Compass ate the quiet happily.

"Composite scoring," it said. "Hidden weights. Please assume that choices you would have made anyway because you are not an idiot will be rewarded. Also assume that a great many of your peers will forget that people matter if you throw a flag in the room."

’I’ll remember,’ I thought. ’The tests are just rooms. The rooms have people in them.’

"Correct," the Compass said, smug.