Soren woke to a corridor full of noise and the taste of wax in his mouth. It took a beat to orient: the bell had gone twice, he'd missed the summons, and now a dozen bodies funneled toward the lower drill amphitheater.
He managed a coat, wrong sleeve, then right, before plunging into the clot at the stairs. The shards of conversation caught in his ears: "Three knights," "full Velrane," "the duelist's here," and, whispered close: "One of them doesn't blink."
He followed the tide down, past the glass mosaics and the false-mirror corridor, until the world opened onto the immense practice ring, a phalanx of benches circling an oval pit paved in white tile and powdered ice.
The other recruits. double, now, from the night before, packed into arbitrary order, coats flashing every sigil Soren had seen on Veyr's map, and several he hadn't. Somewhere above, Veyr watched from a mezzanine, hands folded, eyes fixed on the churn below.
The noise shut off. Three figures stood at the lowest step. Soren instinctively clocked the hierarchy: the first, a spindled scarecrow in white, armor etched with sunbursts so artfully they seemed to burn into the metal.
His face was all lines, hair slicked flat, eyes a pale gloss, almost clear, and arms crossed as if to conserve the bare minimum of warmth and goodwill. Cassareth Vale, arrived by rumour hours before his body.
Next to him sprawled a slab of man, not fat but packed the way rubble is packed: Knight-Brecht, of the warhammer and the vocabulary. Brecht wore no helm.
His face sagged under the weight of veined scars, a nose flattened into myth, lips set in a permanent wince. Even at rest, he radiated the certainty that he'd killed men for fun and regretted only the effort.
The third, half a pace behind: Ser Caldryn Veyne, house colors only on the cuffs, gloves dark as wet slate.
He looked bored, but something in the poise suggested a man who'd never been surprised in his life.
Soren watched him the longest, not because of the duelist's legend, but because Veyne's eyes took him in as if reading print off a page. The look made Soren need to adjust his collar.
The three let the hush settle. Then Cassareth Vale stepped forward, boots clicking with delight on the cold tile.
"First Assembly. There are forty-two of you, which is at least a dozen too many." His voice was crystal, no, Soren thought, glass. Ready to splinter.
"These are not your fellow students." Vale let the words bench-hop. "These are your antagonists, your biographers, your best-case hazard. Fail and you will be replaced." He smiled, and Soren saw it wasn't a threat—it was a seasoning, meant to flavor the air. "Every week, someone will be missing. Consider it mercy."
Brecht snorted, then took the floor. "You will run drills in groups. You're blades-in-bone. A body does not get to choose its own hands or feet. You will be your worst enemy's best hope. If you cannot be that, at least don't disgrace the marrow."
The knight punctuated these instructions with the warhammer: he tapped it, lightly, against his own armored shin until the sound carried through the pit and up to the rafters.
Veyne didn't speak, but at a signal Soren missed, half the crowd reshuffled into pairs, then teams of four. He ended up with Juno, Dain, and the glove-girl, who this time relented and gave a name: Linné.
Soren heard the accent as soon as she said it, Valekhyri. That explained the gloves, the elegance of movement, the dislike of food on test days. Linné, not Linnea.
She never looked directly at Soren, only measured the space around him, as if plotting how it could be better spent.
"Group Five, you're first," Brecht growled.
They followed the call to the sparring ring. The rules were loose: contest the center, two teams at a time, until only one lasted. Half the blades were blunted steel, but a few shimmered with blue or white edges, liquid glass, Mage-touched.
Dain started with a low rush, moving quicker than Soren could guess. Juno hung back, playing the heavy, drawing attention.
Linné disappeared, he blinked and she was already at the shoulder of a boy twice her size, suppressing him with a disarm that looked accidental. Soren kept to the edge, watching the rhythm, absorbing the small failures, the ticks of wasted motion.
It was a blur after that: his hands remembered the drills better than his mind, correcting in real-time, the overlay flickering at a volume just shy of intrusive.
At one point, Juno clubbed a lad to the ground and bellowed "As advertised!" which earned her a warning from the white-armored knight.
Dain parried a blow that would have ruined his lungs, then flicked it toward Soren, who sidestepped, used the moment, and cut the victor clean off his feet.
They lost, but only by a margin. Vale watched from the dais, mouth pressed tight, then jotted something on a thin board. Brecht rolled his eyes and gestured for the next teams up.
It went like that. By midday, Soren's muscles shook with the effort of staying upright. He felt both less tired and more alive than yesterday; the memory sometimes glitched, running ahead or behind, but always leaving him a step ahead of whichever blue-blooded competitor dared to underestimate it.
At break, the four slumped together at the edge of the pit. Juno, sweating so hard her freckles ran, nodded once at Soren. "You learn fast, Ashgard."
He tried to shrug, but his shoulder felt like a cudgel had been taken to it.
"It's not a compliment," Dain said, still watching the floor.
Linné peeled off her gloves, then flexed her hands, revealing a latticework of old scars, each crossing the next like failed equations. "He's cheating," she said, but there was no malice in it, only curiosity.
Soren struggled to find the right lie. "I watch. Then I try. Bad habit."
"Not that," said Linné. "You're like a haunted person."
He risked a glance. Her eyes were pale, not quite blue, but the irises had a tremor to them, like ice about to crack.
Juno said, "I'd kill for that edge, haunted or not."
"Don't need to kill," said Linné, rising. "You just have to last."
The bell sounded, and they all got up, knees popping.
The rest of the day was theory, run by a tired priest in a mud-splattered robe who failed to pronounce any of their names correctly and seemed more interested in the window than the lesson. Soren drifted, doodling tactics into the edge of his paper, letting the overlay do its own rehearsal below consciousness.
The evening passed to a fog of hunger and bone-weariness. Mess was chaos, but the table found itself: Juno, Soren, Dain, and eventually Linné, who ate nothing but drank the brine from every cup she could find.
Soren tried to remember if he'd ever hated anyone, really hated, and decided he hadn't. But he could see, through the day's parade, how a person might learn.
When the mess broke, Soren wandered the upper yard. The sky was clear, the flags along the battlements still straining against their tethers.
Somewhere below, the whicker and crash of night practice echoed, someone, somewhere, always running drills for an audience even if only the dark.
He watched, for a minute, the windows of the main house. Most were blank, but one glowed blue, stuttering like a lighthouse on a storm coast. He let the memory of Valenna rise, see what she made of the place.
She approved, quietly: "If you can't rule a city, you rule the space inside your own veins. That's what these people do."
He almost agreed. But he knew what haunted meant, and so did Linné, and it did not have anything to do with blood.
He went to his quarters. The cot was less a bed than an invitation to die horizontal, but he accepted. The shard at his chest hummed, alive now, as if the day's work had resharpened it. He pressed a thumb to it, felt the old pulse.
"Groomed," Valenna whispered.
"Ashgard never did grooming," he muttered.
She laughed, not quite cruel, just tired. Maybe it was pride.
The next morning, and the one after, bled together. Brecht made the drills harder, and Dain started winning every third match.
Linné smiled more, but only at Juno. Veyr reappeared now and then, trailing fresh stories and fake insults, but never staying. Soren noticed that all the boys who'd scoffed at him on the first day now watched him with a careful, deliberate boredom.
A while in, Vale dropped the pretense, calling Soren and Dain up to the dais at end of day. "Telmaris, Thorne. Duel off record, here and now."
Soren knew this one: no out, no witnesses but the three knights. Maybe, he thought, a chance to make or break a future.
Dain went for blood. Soren recognized the style, a blend of city and noble, grace stapled onto violence.
It was the best fight he'd ever had, and the first where he was not sure who was teaching whom. The world blurred down to sword, forearm, and the taste of metal as Dain's blade swept past his ear. Soren let the overlay run wild, let Valenna have the moment, just to see who she would make him.
When it ended, they both stood, winded, bleeding at the sleeve and nowhere else.
Vale nodded. "Good. Both survive. Remember that."
Brecht added, "If you don't, you get replaced."
Veyne said nothing. But as Soren retreated, he caught the duelist's eyes on him again, same as before: not reading, but waiting for something stubborn to declare itself.
He counted that a win.
The night, again, was a pageant of exhaustion. Soren stayed up, trimming his nails, then watched the moonswath as it cast the flags pale and delicate. He heard, distantly, the bell for midnight drills.
He listened for Valenna, but she only murmured: "See? You're not the worst after all."
He let the moonlight cut across his cot, eyes open, body singing with ache, and wondered if there was a better word for haunted, or if that would have to do.
Juno snored in the next room. Soren grinned, then slept.
–
He woke once, hours before dawn, to the sound of something tapping at the window.
When he peeled back the frost, there was nothing there, only the echo of the sound, and his own reflection, wide-eyed and a little less sure of itself than yesterday.
He closed it, then, and slept again, chasing whatever dream had tried knocking.