Dawn put a pale ring on the west side of Crownspire, the kind of light that makes stone look honest. I reached the west ring early enough to hear the campus shift from night to day: carts, kettles, birds arguing with gutters. The emberling rode in my coat like a pocket stove, heat polite against my ribs.
Professor Quill was already there with two wooden crates and a waxed roll of glass. He had the keyed-up calm of a man who slept four hours on purpose. Sera jogged in a minute later, hair braided back, pot trundling at her heel with the eagerness of a dog that knows this walk.
"You got the note too," she said, breath ghosting the morning.
"I thought I hallucinated it," I said. "But my mother saw him."
Quill flicked the clasps on a crate. "You're both here before bells. Good. We can pretend punctuality is a rune." He nodded toward a pair of bench-shelves he'd dragged to the ring's edge. "Set up."
We did: boards flat, knives, cloths, a rack to hold glass, a bucket of water that had opinions about being cold. Quill unrolled the waxed cloth to reveal a small alembic—glass bulb with a neck—two flasks, a stoppered coil, and a fragile funnel that looked like it would shatter under a dirty look.
"We're brewing?" Sera asked, delighted despite herself.
"We're measuring," Quill said. "Council watchers sat through yesterday's exhibitions and requested a demonstration of applied runic control. They find kitchens less political than duels." His mouth twitched. "They are wrong, but their error suits us."
As if the word had summoned them, two figures in gray coats glided into the shade on the far side of the ring and pretended the pillar made them invisible. Lapels too sharp. Faces too polite.
Quill didn't look at them again. He laid three sprigs of keral leaf on the board. "We will make a standard extraction. Target temperature: one hundred sixty of Crownspire's degrees. No boil. You—" he pointed at Sera "—keep the bath constant. You—" at me "—deliver heat across distance without loss. No flares, no scorches, no cleverness you cannot repeat on command. Tiny audience," he added, and tipped his head toward the gray coats. "Do not perform for them. Perform for the leaf."
Sera set the pot on its stand. I rolled my shoulders, breathed four-counts, and coaxed the emberling onto the stone by the alembic. We had a plan: Latch, Steady, Bank. Sera would watch the rise on the thin glass thermometer Quill had stuck in the bath like a reed. I'd be the hearth that moved.
"Begin," Quill said.
Sera tapped the pot. It breathed a neat column of steam. I drew a heat thread—arm's length, low cost, high efficiency, gentle strength—and hooked it into the pot's lip with the Latch we'd practiced until our wrists remembered. A tug pulled back at my chest; the pot answered like a partner. The emberling brightened under my hand but didn't throw. I banked a thumb's worth of heat for insurance, set two barbs on the rim, and felt the lattice hold like a cupped hand that wouldn't spill.
"Leaf in," Quill said. Sera slid chopped keral into the flask with water, then set the flask in the pot's bath. The glass sighed. The thermometer climbed. When the red line brushed a notch too far, I bled heat back to Bank. When it dipped, I fed a shaved coin more into the thread. The line hovered where Quill had told it to live.
"Range," Quill said without looking at the gray coats. "Take three steps and keep the line steady."
I moved. Latch held. The tug in my chest adjusted its angle; the thread thinned then thickened with breath. Sera's eyes never left the glass. The emberling's heat felt focused rather than fierce, a hearth taught to mind itself.
"Perturb," Quill murmured, almost pleased. He snapped his fingers near the coil. Sound jumped. The pot burped; the emberling flared—small—but the barbs on Bank caught the slop and returned it to my hand like change. The thermometer's red line bobbed and settled.
Quill waited until the first breath of fragrance came off the coil—green and sharp, not bitter—then lifted a hand. "Enough. Strain. Bottle. Do not spill."
Sera poured as if pouring were a rite. I backed the heat down and unhooked the latch without a jerk. The last thread of warmth went into Bank for later. The alembic did not crack. The gray coats did not clap. Quill's eyes smiled once, quick as a match.
"Good," he said. "Now we do the thing the Council actually came to see."
He opened the second crate. Inside lay a shallow stone tray filled with fine ash, a cup of charcoal dust, and a small pouch labeled in Quill's neat hand: SLAG (Jes Toller).
I touched my satchel involuntarily where Jes's shard lay. Quill noticed and didn't comment.
"Elementals write innates when they surge," he said to both of us, but his gaze was on me. "You have fed charcoal, you have persuaded a channel with iron sand, you have banked, you have worked. Your emberling is primed to try something on its own—the way a child tries to stand when no one is looking." He set the ash tray on the stone. "We will let it, and then we will decide what it gets to keep."
Sera's pot thrummed nervous sympathy. The gray coats leaned in without moving.
Quill sprinkled charcoal dust in a loose ring in the tray. "Into the ash with it," he said gently. "If it collapses, your seal will collect it. If it surges, the ash will feed the edges and keep the flare from licking your eyebrows off."
The emberling stepped into the tray and sank as if the ash were a bed it remembered. Quill shook a whisper of iron sand along the emberling's right shoulder—the place the eighth channel had sulked—and the spirit's glow shifted, brightening along that line.
"Now," Quill said, voice low enough that the gray coats had to listen with their heads as well as their ears, "you do not write. You watch. You will feel a swelling. That swelling will try to arrange itself into a formula: element, type, range, cost, efficiency, strength. You will not shove. If you hate what it wants, you will change a base rune—type to type, not element to lightning, for now—and you will write a containment wrapper so the ash catches what falls."
I breathed. The emberling breathed. The seal over my heart warmed as if leaning against a window. Heat gathered at the emberling's core and moved—outward, downward, upward—choosing lines like a river picking a braided channel. A familiar pull formed near "type." Not a thread. Not a shroud. A…burst. A pop. The lattice hummed with a small impatience. If I let it have its way, we'd get Flare Pop: a fast, ugly little explosion that would be impressive, wasteful, and a nightmare in a kitchen.
"No," I said aloud, mostly to keep my own certainty from slipping. "We don't want to be that."
The lattice shivered, offended that I noticed. I touched it at "type" and pressed—not hard—just sideways, as if guiding a shoulder through a too-narrow door. Burst resisted. Shroud waited to see if I meant it. I set a tiny Contain—four lines, tight but vented—and swapped the base rune: Type: Burst → Type: Shroud. The half-grown formula sighed like a child choosing to be good in public. The burst that had been gathering along the outer channels fell in on itself as ash and then lifted again as a veil. A thin layer of heat spread out from the emberling's core across its rind, not hot enough to scorch, just steady enough to hold weather off.
My hands trembled when I took them away. Sera let out a laugh that sounded a little like a sob and wiped her cheek with the back of her hand. The gray coats conferred with their eyebrows.
Quill peered through his brass lens. "Cinder Veil," he said, not without admiration. "You traded teeth for skin. Sensible. Adjacency honored; lattice uncracked. Write it before your hand forgets."
I wrote, not on slate but into memory: Element: Fire. Type: Shroud. Range: Self. Cost: Low. Efficiency: High. Strength: Gentle. Wrapper: Contain (vented). Notes: sand persuasion on channel eight, slag if tolerance improves.
"Slag?" I asked, looking at the pouch.
Quill's mouth did that smile he made when a student asked the right question on purpose. "Jes's slag will help the Bank remember shape. Fire that has chosen to be stone sits well with fire that hasn't decided yet. A hint only. Do not feed your familiar rocks and call that nurturing."
I rolled the shard in my palm. It warmed by association. I set it at the edge of the ash tray. The emberling leaned toward it the way my mother's plant leaned toward sun. The Cinder Veil didn't flare; it thickened, a layer more like cloth than air.
The calibrator would have been nice to brag to. Instead, the seal over my heart pulsed twice—warmer, faster. A number isn't always a needle. Sometimes it's the way your bones know your breath.
"Level five," Quill said after a heartbeat, voice almost offhand. "Minor evolution. Add it to the ledger. Do not preen."
I did not preen. Much.
Sera knocked her knuckles against the pot. "You should be able to hold your heat now," she told my emberling like a grandmother instructing a clever child to carry the soup carefully. "Which means Kael can stop hovering."
"Hovering is my art," I said, and the emberling made a sound like a coal deciding to approve.
Quill set the ash tray aside and tapped the chalkboard with his wand. The ring-room instincts came back: sit, slate, chalk, breathe.
"Concord," he wrote on the board in neat strokes. A rune I hadn't seen: two interlocked loops with a barbed line between them. "Weaving formulae across two lattices."
He sketched how we'd done it the sloppy way—Latch + Steady + Bank—and how he wanted us to do it now: a short-form Link built from Bind and Range-sharing, with efficiency tuned so neither familiar paid twice for the same promise.
"We teach Concord in fourth term," he said, ignoring the way my eyes widened. "But some of you are writing like bricklayers and lifting like oxen, so we will borrow a piece. Today, you—" to both of us "—will write a modest Concord that lets a thread move with a pot without pulling at a rib. Tomorrow, you will forget how clever you are and go back to practicing Gather until you can draw it on a boat in a storm."
We worked until the sun cracked fully over the ring wall. Concord felt like braiding hair with someone else's hands: unforgiving at first, then suddenly smoother when my barbed line sat in the notch Sera left on purpose. By the time the gray coats drifted away, satisfied or bored or both, our thread rode the pot like a leash that didn't yank.
Quill dismissed us with a flick that would have been rude from anyone else. "Marshal Osk is already sharpening his whistle. Eat. Then go let him." As we turned, he added, almost as an afterthought, "You will keep your runes tidy and your mouths tidier. The Council is sniffing around reports of unframed edits happening in alleys for coin. If you are asked by anyone not employed here to 'tune' a familiar they didn't bind, you will say no and then you will tell me. There are politics you cannot yet bear."
We promised, because promising was easier than understanding.
Osk did not need a whistle. He had us in two columns before the last bell stopped being smug. "Yesterday you learned to cut air," he said. "Today you learn to not be winded when someone—" he pointed at me "—asks you to carry their breath while yours is busy."
I did not ask how he knew about Concord. Osk knew everything if it mattered to legs or lungs.
We ran balance ladders with the pot hanging from a leather strap, thread latched and Concorded, the emberling veiled and bright. When I stumbled, the thread wavered then steadied, the pot hissed a rebuke, and Osk's shadow fell over me like a mountain that had learned to talk.
"Vent line," he said, and I corrected it while moving because Aureline had been right: haste is for mouths.
Brann's ant cut and caught, cut and caught, better than yesterday. Neri's wisp liked Concord enough to purr. Aureline's salamander learned to shrug Sera's steam off its wings without swearing. The field smelled like sweat and interesting problems.
Mid-block, Osk made us hold a plank while our familiars held a formula. It was obscene. My shoulders shook; the emberling's veil wavered; Sera blew hair off her forehead with dignity and didn't drop the pot. That counted as a win.
"Enough," Osk grunted, which meant he would take five more minutes and then say it again. "Eat. Then break something that isn't me."
The carts rolled. I took my ration of charcoal with less reverence than the first day and mixed a few grains of Jes's slag into the emberling's Bank. The pocket held shape more naturally, the way clay remembers a bowl after a good potter touches it. Not proof. Persuasion.
"Foundry tonight?" Sera asked around a mouthful of bread.
"Yes," I said. "Jes likes me because I say 'yes, Master Toller' and don't write in her furnace."
"She'll like you more when you do," Sera said. "On her say-so. That's the trick."
We were halfway through packing our gear when Aureline slid in close enough to disturb the air and not the conversation. She didn't waste words.
"Your veil," she said. "How long does it hold without attention?"
"Three breaths," I said. "Four if I bank before."
"Put a weave-knot on the lower edge," she said, drawing a tiny twist in the air with two fingers. "It will spend a hair more cost to maintain itself when you blink."
I drew it. The emberling's veil stopped sagging at the hem. Sera made a low approving noise.
"Thank you," I said, again meaning it.
Aureline's mouth quirked. "We will all be less dead if the underdogs don't embarrass us in front of state inspectors." She walked away, salamander shadowing like a living cloak. Brann watched her, then me. That curiosity again. He did not come over. I wasn't sure whether I wanted him to.
The day ran long. Quill drowned us in grammar until my chalk snapped in my hand and I wanted to eat a slate. Osk made us run with buckets because balance is not poetry. Sera taught her pot a new patience: "Steep," a sibling to "Boil," that cloaked bitterness where it wanted to be useful. By the time I trudged to the foundry, the emberling was a compact, cooperative coal and my legs were opinions wrapped in skin.
Jes Toller said, "Bank," and I banked. She said, "Vent," and I vented. She said, "Now write into my furnace," and I almost dropped the poker.
"On your say-so," I said, too quickly.
"On my say-so," she confirmed. "A Bank and a Vent, nested. We are quenching a run of blades and I will not scorch a week's work because you fear success."
The furnace was a built thing with a history: brick, iron, soot. A spirit lived in it, older than either of us, bound to heat and draw and hold. I asked before I touched it. It liked the attention. I wrote a Vent like Quill would approve and a Bank like Osk would begrudge, neat and barbed where it must be so the heat would not slop when metal met oil.
The quench went like a throat swallowing right. Jes watched me the way a crow watches a ring, bright-eyed and greedy for competence. When we were done, she set another shard of slag on the bench and pretended she hadn't.
"Don't let Council boys push you into clever," she said, which meant: someone had tried when she was my age, and she had an opinion about it. "Make bricks. Then build arches."
I took the tram home in the dark and walked the last two streets because the emberling warmed the cold out of my coat and my feet remembered a promise I hadn't made yet. My mother had left a plate under a cloth and Lark on the sill, brighter than a plant needed to be.
"Surge?" she asked, taking in my face before I knew what it said.
"Veil," I said. "Level five."
Lark chimed the way bells do when a breeze is nice to them. I set the emberling on the hearth. It lifted the veil like a cat lifting a paw. Lark leaned and did not burn. The seal over my heart felt like someone had set a candle behind a thin door.
"Good," my mother said simply. "Write it down."
I wrote it down: Cinder Veil, Bank+Slag memory, weave-knot hem, adjacency rules, Surge grammar: ask, don't shove; if you must shove, change type before you change world.
When I finally slept, I dreamed of ash falling into shapes—for a breath, a burst; then, because I asked it to, a cloth that held. In the dream, a voice that sounded like Osk's and Quill's and Jes's at once said: bones first, then bolts, and maybe—if you're careful—wings