Chapter 106: 106: The Academy Test XVI
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Fartray arrived home early. He had a plan. He had three, in fact.
First, he would speak to a cousin on the Discipline Board and make a tidy case that ’Void magic’ in the yard was unsafe and improper. He would use the right words: liability, precedent, decorum. If the masters did nothing, he would make notes for later.
Second, he would learn the test routes. Aqua always learned water routes and people routes. If there was a way to nudge a gate, to move a rope, to send someone the long way round, he would find it. A delay could break a score. A delay could keep a peasant in a village where he belonged.
Third, if both steps failed, he would set a welcome at the south road after the exam. Not in the city, not where the law had too many eyes. Just beyond the gate where watchmen yawned and taxes ended. A lesson. A warning. A clean removal of a problem and his ridiculous spirit.
He fixed his hair with quiet care while the first guests came in. Blue sashes. Pale gloves. A ripple of house crests that never learned to be shy. A violin started and then found a friend. Servants in dove-gray moved with plates that made small, polite circles in the crowd.
Fartray wore the coat that matched the shade of the Aqua banners at the high court: a blue the family called river at noon. The piping was lighter. The stitch was fine. The cut was expensive and everyone knew it. He checked his shoulder in the tall glass and told his mouth to be calm.
"Cousin," said Sevrin, tall and fine-boned, with the lazy smile of a man who believed he would never die in an ugly way. "You look repaired."
"Was never broken," Fartray said.
Sevrin’s eyes flicked — one quick reach for gossip, withdrawn empty. He accepted it. "Then drink. We are expected to look as if we like each other."
The room swelled. Laughter made the chandeliers sound brighter. A small trio near the hearth switched from court-quick to drawing-room sweet and the conversations moved with them. A lady in a pale dress told a story about a dog that had learned to bow. Two young men compared the new fountain at the west gate to the old one and decided the new one had worse taste. Someone mentioned the exam in one day and the word drifted through the air like a coin in a fountain, tossed and watched.
Fartray took a glass, let it wet his mouth, and held the line of his plan steady in his head.
Across the room, a pair of cousins peeled off a conversation and came to him with soft-footed intent. "We heard a tale," said one — the serious one everyone called Linnet even though his name was Killian. "A boy with a hole for a hand."
"A trick," Fartray said, smooth. "And a peasant’s anger."
"And a spirit with a mouth," said the other, grinning. "I almost went to the yard to see."
"You missed nothing," Fartray lied. "Master Hale dislikes noise. It ended at ’file your statements.’ The boy will learn to stand at the back of a line. He will learn the academy is not a ditch that forgot to be closed."
"That would be a relief," Killian murmured. "The city is full of people who forgot where they belong."
Music lifted, then paused as the trio turned their pages. In that small hush, a scent arrived: the faintest kiss of warmth that did not belong in a cool, fine room. It did not alarm. It suggested.
Fartray brushed a sleeve with his fingers. Warm. Not hot. A trick of the lights, perhaps. He smiled at a lady he needed to impress and said something easy about the wine.
Across the carpet, a young man in a lapis vest leaned against a pillar and made a joke about river floods. Three friends laughed. One covered her mouth the way nice girls are taught to do when real laughter wants to be seen.
The coat sighed.
Fizz’s little ember —sewn into the thread under the seam as neatly as a bad idea— woke, stretched, and asked the coat if it wanted to be honest. The coat, which loved looking like water, did not want to be honest. The ember did not care. It went to work, not with flame the room could see, but with a quiet bite that belonged to another place. It did not eat wood. It did not eat skin. It ate cloth. It told the cloth to forget what it was.
Fartray felt it first at the shoulder. It was a tickle, a small wrong. He reached up, pressed the place, and frowned at his fingertip. No mark. No stains. He rubbed his fingers together and told himself not to be foolish.
Nearby, Lady Siris lifted her fan. "Is it warm," she murmured to no one in particular.
"It is full," someone said, which at parties means the same thing.
A footman passed with a tray of sugared almonds. Fartray reached for one. As the coat seam kissed the napkin edge, the napkin learned a new word: ash. A neat oval browned itself on the linen, slow but sure, like bread that won’t be told. The footman did not notice. He drifted on, leaving a smoke thread that died before it deserved the name.
Sevrin leaned closer, amusement thin as a knife. "You are making sparks with your sleeve, cousin," he said, teasing on the surface, sharp underneath.
"Do not be absurd," Fartray said, teeth near his smile.
The ember took the hint from the shoulder and went logging down the seam. It found friction, that old friend. Cuff to cuff. Brush to brush. It carried its lesson like a note passed in the lap of a class that had been told to be quiet.
In three breaths, the cuff seam softened. A loose thread sighed away from its neighbors. Fartray felt fabric give a little and grabbed at it with two fingers, pinching the edge together as if a coat could be bullied into behaving.