Chapter 1
The river behind our house had no name.
Papa said that was because it had always just been ours — too small for maps, too quiet for songs, just wide enough for two bare feet dangling off the bank on a warm afternoon. That was where I was when the mages came. Feet in the current, watching a leaf spiral downstream, thinking about nothing at all.
I was six years old. I did not know that thinking about nothing was a luxury.
“Elowen!” My mother’s voice cut through the tree line — not her calling-for-supper voice, not her you’ve-stayed-out-too-long voice. Something else. Something tight.
I pulled my feet from the water and ran.
There were three of them standing in our front yard. Mages of Nodia, I would learn later, though at the time I only knew they were important by the way they made our small home look smaller. Two wore deep blue traveling cloaks dusted with road. The third — a tall woman with silver rings on every finger and the kind of stillness that made you feel like you were the one intruding — wore white.
My father stood in the doorway with his arms crossed. Papa was a woodcutter. He had hands like slabs of bark and a voice that could carry across a valley when he wanted it to. Right now he was very quiet.
“There he is,” the woman in white said. She wasn’t looking at my face. She was looking at the air around me.
Later I would understand what she saw. Mana, in most people, sits like a shallow pond — present, still, usable. In rare individuals it runs deeper, a lake rather than a pond. The mages had instruments for measuring it: a thin copper rod etched with runes that glowed faintly blue in the presence of magical potential.
When the woman in white pointed hers at me, it shattered.
The sound was like a fingernail on glass, a sharp little crack, and then the rod split cleanly down the middle and fell in two pieces to our dirt yard. I stared at it. The woman stared at me. My mother made a sound I had never heard her make before — something between a gasp and a prayer.
“Remarkable,” one of the blue-cloaked mages murmured, writing in a small leather book. “We haven’t seen readings like this since the Archon of—”
“He’s six,” my father said.
“Yes,” the woman in white agreed, as if that were simply an interesting detail. “He’ll be seven by the time he reaches the Nodia Academy. That’s within acceptable parameters.”
“He’s not a parameter.” Papa’s voice had gone very flat. “He’s my son.”
The woman looked at my father the way adults sometimes look at children who’ve said something sweet but incorrect. Patient. Final. “Under the Mana Sovereignty Act of the Third Compact, any citizen of Nodia whose magical potential is assessed at Tier Six or above is subject to mandatory enrollment in the Royal Academy of Arcane Arts. For their protection. And for the protection of the realm.” She tilted her head. “Your son is, at minimum, a Tier Eight. We have not had a Tier Eight in thirty-one years.”
The number meant nothing to me then. I watched a beetle walk across the toe of my boot and thought about my leaf, still spinning downstream somewhere, alone.
My mother came to me that evening while I was supposed to be sleeping. She sat on the edge of my bed and held my hand and didn’t say anything for a long time. The candle on my windowsill burned down to half. I could hear Papa outside, talking to the men from the village — low, heated sounds that went nowhere.
“Mama,” I said, “do I have to go?”
She squeezed my hand once, hard. “Yes, little branch.”
“For how long?”
She was quiet for too long before she answered. “Until you’re grown.”
I thought about that. I thought about the river with no name, and the leaf, and the way the afternoon light came through the trees in long gold bars when the wind moved them. I thought about how I had never once in my six years thought to remember any of it, because I had always assumed it would simply be there.
“Will you write?” I asked.
“Every week,” she said. “Every single week.”
She kept that promise for three years. Then the letters slowed. By the time I was ten, they came once a month. I told myself she was busy. I told myself the roads were bad. I folded each letter into my pillowcase and slept on them until the paper went soft.
The Nodia Academy sat on a hill that had no business being as large as it was — a great grey shoulder of stone rising out of the Midland plains, the Academy at its crown like a crown of its own, all towers and carved archways and windows that caught the light wrong, throwing it back in colors it hadn’t arrived as. My first sight of it was from the back of a courier’s cart, wrapped in a wool blanket that smelled like someone else’s dog.
The other children in the cart were older. A girl of maybe nine with dark red braids sat across from me, arms crossed, staring out at the plains like she was mapping them for a future escape. Beside her, a broad-shouldered boy with a split lip and a bruise yellowing across his jaw sat turning a copper coin over and across his knuckles without looking at it. He had the look of someone who had learned very early that crying solved nothing and had made his peace with it.
I was the youngest. I was also the most frightened, though I was working hard not to show it.
“First time?” the girl with the braids asked me.
I nodded.
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” she said. Then she looked back out at the plains. “Well. It’s exactly as bad as it looks. But you get used to it.”
“Sable,” the boy with the coin said, without looking up, “you’re terrible at comfort.”
“I’m a healer, not a nursemaid.” She glanced at me. “What’s your name?”
“Elowen. Elowen Ashveil.”
The boy’s coin-flipping paused for just a moment. “Ashveil. You’re the Tier Eight.” It wasn’t a question.
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I said nothing.
His name was Calder. His father had been a knight of some reputation before a duel gone wrong had unraveled the family’s standing. Calder had tested at Tier Four — respectable, he said, without sounding like he found it respectable — and had been granted a conditional enrollment: earn his tuition by working the Academy grounds and kitchens alongside his studies. He said all of this the same way he flipped his coin — practiced, like he’d rehearsed against the sting of it.
The girl was Sable Dawnmere. Tier Five, specialized in restorative magic. Her mother had been a field medic in the last border skirmish. Her grandmother had been the same. She said she didn’t see the point in fighting a pattern that old.
By the time the cart wheels hit cobblestone, I had two things I hadn’t started with: names, and the particular comfort of people who understand what it is to be taken somewhere they did not choose.
The Academy’s receiving hall smelled of candle smoke and old stone and something faintly metallic that I would later learn was the residue of decades of spellwork soaked into the walls. A proctor in Academy grey assigned us dormitory numbers and handed us each a folded schedule without looking at us. Mine was different from the others — more lines, different rooms, a notation in red ink at the bottom that read PRIORITY TRACK — REPORT TO MASTER VESSIN DIRECTLY.
Calder looked at my schedule over my shoulder. He let out a low whistle. “No free periods,” he said. “At all.”
Sable looked at it too. Something in her expression shifted — not pity, exactly. More like recognition. “They’re going to work you very hard,” she said quietly.
“I know,” I said, though I hadn’t known until she said it.
That night, in a narrow bed in a room with seven other boys I didn’t know, I put my hand on my pillowcase and remembered it was empty. No letters yet. Nothing of home.
I stared at the ceiling for a long time, listening to the unfamiliar sounds of a building full of strangers, and I thought: This is the beginning of something. I don’t know if it’s good or bad yet.
It would be years before I understood that some things are neither.
