Professor Quill's note said supplemental instruction, but the place he led us after morning drills was nowhere near a ring-room.
"Lower Market?" Sera said, squinting as Crownspire's neat avenues gave way to streets with opinions. Her pot trundled at her heel, lid tied down with a strip of cloth like a traveling hat. "You're taking us shopping for verbs?"
"Adverbs," Quill said, and didn't slow. "Specifically 'safely.' We are visiting a community clinic. You will practice listening to lattices that do not belong to you. You will not write without permission. You will observe, and you will tell me afterward what you saw."
"What you really want is spies," Sera murmured.
"What I want," Quill said, stepping off a curb that was trying to be two heights at once, "is for my second-years to learn what bad work looks like before it kills a familiar. The Trium Council is prowling because someone is selling edits in alleys. Unframed. Unasked. Quick."
"Scratchers," I said. Jes Toller had used the word with the same tone she used for "rust."
Quill's mouth tilted. "That will do."
The clinic took up a corner of a long, low building that had been a grain store a century ago and never quite gave up the smell. A chalkboard out front read FAMILIAR AID — FREE in letters polite enough that you could tell someone had re-written them twice. Inside, benches ringed a central table where three menders in gray worked with the calm of people paid to never go faster than a breath. A kettle spirit that looked older than the city kept a pot of tea just-off-boil on a slate. Spirits lined the benches like a small zoo had been invited to sit: a fishing lantern with a stubborn glow, a dog-shaped clay toy whose tail thumped when someone laughed, two bucket spirits arguing in drips about whose water tasted more like river.
Jes Toller stood near the far wall talking to a woman with copper bracelets. She saw us and lifted a hand. Her living hammer gleamed once and then remembered it should be dignified.
"Professor," she said by way of greeting. "Bricklayer. Brewer."
Sera tried not to look pleased that Jes had decided Brewer counted as a name. "We're here to listen," she said.
Jes's mouth made the pretend-frown she used to hide approval. "Good. You'll have plenty." She jerked her chin toward the line shuffling in from the door. "Market day. Half the city's runes are holding up other halves."
The first patient was a fisherman with hands like rope and a lantern spirit that had forgotten the difference between dawn and dusk. Quill nodded to me. "Kael?"
I settled on the bench, emberling a polite weight under my ribs. The lantern spirit's glass was cloudy and the lattice under it fuzzed like old wool. I set a gray channel stone against the body and felt the slow glow—mid-thick, not thin, but lazy with drift.
"What happened?" I asked the fisherman.
"Paid a boy to make it brighter," he said, not meeting my eyes. "Did, for a night. After that it just…looks at me. Burns oil like it owes a debt."
"May I?" I asked the lantern, because habits are how you keep from lying to yourself. The spirit did not answer in words. The glow tugged sideways toward a knot near the range rune, where someone had carved an extra line—the lazy curve of wide—without telling cost or efficiency what they had done. The formula had bulged like a sack loaded wrong.
"Scratch," I said.
Quill nodded. "Reset."
I drew a small Contain around the bloated line, then tapped the base rune at Range—gently—undoing the thief's curve. The extra fell away as ash. I smoothed Efficiency with two strokes and wrote a tiny Gather at the edge of the wick so the spirit wouldn't spend half its breath chasing its own light. The lantern brightened—no flare—then settled as if deciding to forgive the room.
The fisherman blinked. "How much?" he asked, blinking harder when Quill told him it was a lesson, not a bill. He pressed a packet of dried fish into my hands anyway and fled before we could argue. The emberling perked up under my coat with the intense interest of someone who had just smelled a new diet. I tapped it. "No. You eat iron. And charcoal. And maybe slag."
Jes laughed once. "You can try fish when it grows gills."
We worked. An hour vanished in a string of small wrongs and smaller rights. Sera tuned a tea-kettle's simmer so it would stop swearing at soup. I unstacked a child's scribble of range and strength on a toy cart whose wheels had begun to spin themselves to splinters. Jes re-bound a baker's oven to vent properly after a cousin with too much pride and just enough knowledge had convinced it that heat should find the quickest path and stop asking questions.
By midmorning, my shirt stuck to my back and my ears rang with runes. Quill took our place at the bench and waved us to the tea. "Watch," he said. "You'll learn more from three of my mistakes than thirty of your successes."
We sipped and watched Quill undo something ugly: a brass bird meant to carry small letters that had been shoved toward speed until its joints squealed. He wrapped the formula in a net and replaced strength with efficiency a stroke at a time, like swapping screws without letting the door fall. He moved with the patience of a man who enjoyed taking apart clocks and putting them back together without leftover gears.
Sera nudged me with her elbow. "That man could talk a storm into being punctual."
"Don't let the Council hear you," I said. "They'll make him teach weather."
Something moved at the edge of the room, where the door stood open to the market. Not someone, a feeling—like a draft that didn't belong to the day. A man in a long coat leaned against the jamb with the practiced relaxation of a person who belonged wherever money asked him to. His hair was oiled, his boots were clean, and his eyes slid from spirit to mender to me the way a pickpocket's hand slides in and out of pockets.
"Afternoon," he said to no one specific. "Busy, I see. I've a quick tune if anyone wants a quicker one." He tapped his breast with two fingers. "Fitch. I work on commission."
Jes's shoulders went hard. "We don't commission here."
"Oh, I know," Fitch said. "You teach. Useful for the long winter. The summer needs allies who prefer results." His gaze tracked to my coat when the emberling gave itself away with a small impatient pulse. "Elemental," he said, amused. "A brave pet for a boy."
"It's not a pet," I said.
"No?" He smiled in sympathy with something inside canines. "You could make it bark at thieves for a handful of brass. You could make it sing. You could make it spectacular. The green pays to be impressed."
Quill didn't look up from the brass bird. "Leave," he said, mild as a summer. "I cannot stop you from plying your trade on the street, Mr. Fitch. I can keep my threshold clean."
Fitch spread his hands. "Clean thresholds are for squares and saints." He turned his smile on me. "Think on it, bricklayer. The Council wants cakes on platters. I sell icing."
He left with a swagger small enough to pass for stride.
"Scratchers," Jes said. "Think glamour is grammar."
I finished my tea and rinsed the cup because it felt like the right kind of pointless. The emberling shifted under my coat again, restless. Iron hunger, not food. I fed it a stingy pinch from the pouch and it settled, channels warming a hair's worth along the sulky eighth.
We were packing up when the clinic door opened hard enough to knock the bell sideways. A boy stumbled in with a girl on his back. They were Blue sashes—first-years—and their faces were the color of raw dough.
"Help," the boy said, and didn't register the word had landed until Jes lifted the girl from him with one arm and laid her on the table.
Her familiar—a bead-bright wind wisp—wasn't with her. Her seal glowed an ugly yellow through her shirt like bile under skin.
"Name," Jes said.
"Ren," the boy said. "She's Neri's dormmate. She—there was a man—"
"Fitch," I said, at the same time Jes did. The room actually cooled, as if the menders' quiet had stolen heat.
Quill bent over the girl's chest and drew a rune with two fingers on her shirt without touching—an old mender's check. "He swapped a base," he said, voice flat. "Wind to lightning on an innate. The formula fell to ash in her familiar and tried to regrow while he kept pushing. He wanted a spark trick. He got a convulsion."
"Can you—" the boy started.
"We can undo," Jes said, already rolling back the girl's sleeve for access to the edge of the seal. "We can't unspend cost. Hold her hand. Quill, net."
They worked like people who had done this before and hated that they had. Quill wrapped the writhing ghost of the lightning rune in a four-stroke net; Jes laid a Contain around the whole whispering mess and pressed until the ash fell and the seal dimmed from bile to weak candle. The girl breathed in a stutter and out smoother. The world remembered to turn.
"Her wisp?" I asked when I could trust my voice.
"Back in the seal," Jes said. "Hiding. Sensible."
The boy sagged against the table. "He said," he mumbled, "he said he could make her cut through any wind. It was just a little change—"
"Wind to lightning is not a little change," Quill snapped, angrier than I'd heard him. He took a breath. "And lightning does not respect little channels."
Jes's mouth was a hard line. "He's working the market two streets over, near the copper-spice sellers," she said to Quill. "If your Council friends want a fish, the hook is baited."
"They do," Quill said. "They just prefer someone else hold the rod."
He looked at me then, and Sera, and I saw what he wanted before he spoke. It wasn't heroics. It was boring.
"Walk home by Copper Row," he said. "Hands in your pockets. Ears out. If Fitch approaches you, I expect you to recite the Academy's policy loudly and clearly and tell him you are on your way to report him. Then you will walk on. You will not bargain or grandstand or try to be interesting."
"Bones," Sera said.
"Before bolts," Quill agreed.
We went because we had been told and because the world twitched when you let someone like Fitch do your thinking.
Copper Row was a braid of stalls and steam. Spices made the air taste like arguments. A chorus of hawkers sang: thread, wool, knives, lamps that only lied on Fridays. Sera's pot rolled between our feet like a small dog that refused to be stepped on. The emberling tucked itself high under my collar as if the crowd were a river it didn't trust.
Fitch had set up to the right of a brazier roasting nuts, because of course he had. Heat and scent; a place to make a point. He was tuning a messenger badge for a courier with more enthusiasm than coins, making the edges of the metal glow pretty, not better.
"Quick," he said. "Tidy. Impress your boss. Five brass."
The courier nodded, dazzled by the way the badge hummed without understanding that the hum would want the coin he could not spare.
We didn't stride up. We walked by within earshot. Fitch's eyes picked me out of the stream as if a pin collector had spotted a rare back.
"Bricklayer," he said. "Changed your mind? I could give your ember trick a party trick. It'll wow an inspector from twenty paces."
I stopped, because that was the point, and pitched my voice for distance. "The Academy's policy," I said, and I heard Jes in my own flatness, "forbids unframed edits by unlicensed hands. Report of solicitation has been made to the Trium Council and the Marshal of Training. Any student witnessing such is required to leave and inform their instructor."
Around us, the market heard the words Trium Council and Marshal and turned its attention in a small moving wave. Fitch's smile didn't drop. It calcified.
"You'll live a long time, son," he said. "It will be very boring."
"I like boring," I said. "You don't."
We walked on. It hurt, not because I wanted anything Fitch had, but because there was heat in me that wanted to burn something, and walking away asks you to spend it on feet. Sera bumped my shoulder with the pot's handle.
"Good boy," she said, and for once I didn't mind the tone. "We told."
By the time we'd wound back up Crownspire's hill, Quill had sent a slate-runner with a note: Marshal informed. Council watchers notified. Clinic girl stable. Which meant: the world had not ended and our job had been to not let it start.
I didn't see Brann at afternoon drills, which is how you learn your rivals have lives outside your neat stories. Aureline was there, crisp as a winter morning. Neri was there, eyes rimmed red, wisp hovering low and sheepish.
"You heard," she said when I sidled near. "Ren's fine. The menders say she'll sleep and wake with a headache and a new appreciation for wind."
"I'm sorry," I said. "We saw the man who—"
"I'll tell Osk if I see him," she said, and then, softer, "Thank you. For yesterday. For catching steam."
"We had a pot," I said.
"You had sense," she said. "We'll borrow it if you're not using it."
Osk made us run with our mouths shut and our hands doing something our feet didn't like. It was the kind of training that made your brain throw up its hands and let muscle remember. Concord felt less like a magic trick and more like two people deciding to carry a table without arguing.
At the end of the block, Professor Quill's whistle wasn't a whistle so much as a polite sound that made three hundred bodies remember how to be still. He kept us only long enough to say, "Demonstration green at first bell tomorrow. Inspectors present. You will not perform for them. You will show your work to me, and I will happen to be watching from their table. The Council would like a cake. We will bake bread."
The emberling pulsed once against my chest, as if excited or preparing to pretend it wasn't. I fed it a shaving of slag, a pinch of iron, the idea of patience. Its channels hummed quieter.
We had a quiet evening planned. The city preferred a different narrative.
The knock on our door came just as I set the emberling on the hearth to do its small proud veil for Lark. It was a knock that hadn't learned to ask. I opened to find Brann on the step with his ant under his arm like a child who had lost the path and refused to admit it. He looked like he'd run without being chased.
"Don't slam it," he said when I stared.
"I wasn't planning on—"
"Good," he said, and shouldered in like a flood with manners. "It's broken."
I looked at the ant. It looked back with the affront of a creature who had been tuned like a drum and then asked to be a bell. Its mandibles glowed at the wrong edges. The lattice under its carapace blurred and sharpened as if it couldn't decide whether to sit or stand.
"Did you—"
"No," Brann said, too fast. Then, "Yes. Not him. I tried to write a blade line. It worked for a blink. Now it hums where it shouldn't. The menders will tell my father and my father will tell forty people and I will never hear the end of it. Fix it. Please."
He let the please out as if it hurt.
I should have sent him to Quill. I should have sent him to Osk. I should have done a hundred tidy things and one that required less of my hands. Instead, I took the ant, because it had done nothing but try, and put it on the table under Lark's patient attention and my mother's raised eyebrow.
"Minute only," I told Brann. "If it takes more, we go to the menders and you practice saying 'I meant that' with dignity."
"Right," he said, and swallowed.
The ant's problem wasn't a base swap. It was a small greed: Brann had pulled strength into the edges of the mandibles and not told efficiency what to do with the heat that leaked. The blade line wanted to skate and dig at the same time. I wrapped a net around the buzz, bled the extra into a Bank, then wrote a Trim—two strokes only—on the edge so the heat would seat where it belonged. The lattice sighed. The hum dropped. The ant clicked its mandibles experimentally and did not smoke.
Brann looked like a man who had just not died. "How—"
"Trim," I said. "Tell Range and Efficiency to be friends. Then apologize to your ant."
He did, barely. He also didn't leave. He stood in my kitchen and looked at the hearth and the plant as if he'd never realized magic could live in small rooms and not feel trapped.
"My father would pay—" he started.
"No," I said. "You can pay by telling Neri you're sorry you cut wide when Osk clapped."
He shut his mouth and opened it and shut it again. "She told you that."
"She didn't have to."
He nodded, a small surrender. "Tomorrow," he said. "On the green."
After he left, the kitchen felt three sizes smaller and three degrees warmer. My mother set a bowl on the table and didn't look at me for a breath. Then: "If Quill asks, you tell him."
"I will," I said. "I didn't edit for coin."
"You edited for pride," she said. "Yours and his. That's not cleaner, just different. Tell Quill anyway and see if he smiles."
I did. I found Quill before the night bell and recited my sins. He looked at my hands the way he looked at a formula and nodded.
"Good," he said. "We prefer our bricklayers honest. Don't make a habit of it. And if Mr. Calder thinks this absolves him of learning why his mistake nearly cost him a friend, disabuse him."
I slept the way people sleep the night before the knowing part of the test—too shallow, drawer full of runes opening and closing in my head. The emberling kept the bed warm without scorching. I woke to bells and oat porridge and the steadying sight of Lark's leaves leaning into light.
The demonstration green looked bigger with inspectors at a table and city folk on the benches pretending not to be entertained. Osk's shadow made the chalk whiter. Quill set the roster out and tucked a lens into his pocket like a promise.
"Pairs," he said. "We begin at first bell."
Sera bumped my arm once. "Bread," she said.
"No cake," I said.
We stepped onto lane five when our names were called. The emberling lifted its veil. The pot breathed. Across from us, Brann's ant clicked without smoke; Neri's wisp floated, soft and contained. The world held its breath like a net.
"Control," Quill said. "Motion. Pressure. Begin."
We did what we had practiced. Not spectacular. Not art. Bricks, laid. Latch, Bank, Vent. Cut where air made a mistake. Catch where heat wanted to run. When Osk clapped behind us, the emberling flared and held; the pot burped and recovered; the line tugged like a polite leash and did not break. We weren't there to make the inspectors applaud. We were there to make them forget we could have failed.
Halfway through, Quill lifted one finger. "Surge response," he said, voice almost conversational. "If your familiar feels a swell, you will guide it into something you can own."
That wasn't on the sheet. Sera and I didn't look at each other, which is how you know practice has done its job. The emberling's channels thrummed like a drum someone else had started to play. I felt burst consider me and shook my head. Veil? it asked, hopeful. I nodded, and the weave-knot hem held like it had been waiting to show off in front of strangers. Sera's pot decided to try a patience trick—Steep instead of Boil—and the Concord line agreed to pay the cost once, not twice.
At the end, Quill wrote something on a slate and didn't look at it again. The inspectors whispered with their eyebrows and kept their hands still. Osk's mouth twitched the way it does when he has decided not to grin for our sake.
Later, in the shade of the awning, Brann found me and did not smirk. "Thank you," he said, speaking to the ground between our shoes. "For yesterday. Don't make me repeat it."
"I won't," I said.
Neri's smile had fewer edges. Aureline tipped her chin at the field like a salute to a worthy opponent or a reliable fence. The emberling pressed its core against my palm, warm and not greedy.
Quill folded the roster and tucked it away. "That," he said, "will bore the Council beautifully."
"What about Fitch?" Sera asked.
"Marshal Osk bored him into a cell," Quill said, almost cheerfully. "The Council will unbore him at a hearing. You will not attend. You will go to class."
"Bones," I said.
"Before bolts," Quill said. "And after. And always."
After afternoon drills, a runner found me with a slip that smelled faintly of iron. Jes's hand: Foundry. Bring slag. We are trying something with memory.
I folded the note and slid it into my pocket with the dried fish I hadn't eaten because sometimes gifts feel like anchors. The emberling pulsed once, twice, like knocking.
"Work," I told it, and it agreed, which is how you know you have chosen a spirit that understands you: it thinks boring is sacred.