Sword of Fate

The Aether Symposium arrived on a Thursday.

The Academy’s gates opened at midmorning, and with them came the particular energy of a place that had been institutional and contained suddenly becoming something more permeable. Families arrived. Benefactors arrived. The kind of well-dressed visitors who walked through the training halls with expressions that mixed pride and evaluation in roughly equal parts. Administrative staff who were normally invisible became visible. Vareth, who was always visible, became somehow even more visible — appearing at precisely calibrated moments in precisely the right locations, which was either masterful choreography or the natural result of someone who treated every situation as a logistics problem to be optimized.

Kael watched this transformation from the window of his morning class.

Below, in the main courtyard, a third-year was doing a demonstration of advanced form work for a small audience that included a man who was almost certainly his father — the resemblance was strong enough to be unmistakable, and the man’s expression had the particular quality of someone watching their own investment perform. Not unkindly. Just assessingly.

He thought about Destan Ardenvast, who would not be attending. His father could have come. He simply hadn’t. The Duchy demanded his presence, and the Symposium wasn’t the sort of event that justified leaving those responsibilities behind.

His father had sent a letter three weeks ago — brief, practical, asking about his progress and mentioning nothing personal, which was Destan’s way of asking about everything personal through the implication of silence. Kael had written back with similarly practical information and one sentence at the end: I have found people worth being around. He didn’t know why he’d written it. He thought it had been true enough to include.

His father had not replied yet.

— ◆ —

The Symposium’s competitive element was a form demonstration tournament — students volunteered to display their development, and a panel of instructors awarded scores. No significant consequences; the scores affected nothing official. It was, as Kael had told Sable, mostly an excuse. But the kind of excuse that people took seriously because the audience was real.

Sable had told him, very flatly, that she was not participating.

"You could," Kael had said.

"I’m Bronze Class."

"The tournament is open to all levels."

"I’d be at the Bronze tables competing against first-years who’ve been here for three months." She’d said this without visible frustration — just the statement of a fact she’d already processed. "That’s not interesting."

"Then what would be interesting?"

She’d looked at him. "The Silver level. That’s where you’re competing."

"I’m not competing either."

She blinked once.

"Why not?"

He’d thought about it. "Because the open assessment is next week and I’d rather not show everything in the Symposium and then be readable at the assessment."

Sable had looked at him for a long moment. "You always have a reason."

"I have thoughts. They’re not always reasons."

"The ones you say out loud are reasons. The ones you keep are thoughts." She’d paused. "What’s the thought?"

He’d looked at her, slightly surprised. She’d looked back with the expression she used when she’d said something more accurate than she’d planned and was waiting to see how it landed.

"The thought," he said slowly, "is that I’m not sure what I’m demonstrating yet. The technique is solid. The integration is there. But there’s something I’m not finding yet — something in the way the Silent Night form extends past where I’ve taken it. And I’d rather not perform something publicly until I know what the next version of it is."

Sable had absorbed this. "So you’re waiting until you find the next version."

"Yes."

"What if you don’t find it before the assessment?"

"Then I perform the current version and it’s sufficient." He’d paused. "But I think I’ll find it."

She’d made the almost-sound that was her version of a skeptical reaction. "You think a lot of things."

"I’m usually right."

"That’s an incredibly annoying thing to say."

"Yes," he’d agreed. "But accurate."

She’d left. He’d filed the exchange in the same place he filed moments he thought he’d want to remember.

On the day of the Symposium, Kael spent the morning doing exactly what he’d planned: nothing visible.

He attended his classes. He ate lunch at the corner table, which was quieter than usual because Eiran was absent — presumably attending to whatever Eiran attended to on event days, which Kael suspected involved a great deal of watching and a carefully maintained appearance of not watching. Torven was there, eating his food with the same systematic quality as always, apparently unaffected by the Symposium’s ambient excitement. Sable was there, also apparently unaffected, though she had positioned herself to see the main courtyard through the window and was watching the demonstrations with the specific attention she used when she was evaluating something.

"The third-year with the red hair," she said. "His weight distribution going into the fifth form transition is off."

"I know," Kael said.

"He has good technique otherwise."

"Yes."

"The problem is he knows it. He’s performing the technique instead of just doing it. They’re different things."

Kael looked at her. "Yes," he said. "They are."

She glanced at him. "What?"

"That’s a precise observation."

"I’ve been working on my own weight distribution problem all week. You notice what you’re working on." She returned to the window. "The girl after him will be better."

"How do you know?"

"Because she’s been warming up near the east wall for the past twenty minutes and she’s not performing for anyone. She’s just doing it."

The third-year with the red hair finished his demonstration. The girl after him — second-year, from what Kael could see — began hers. Sable was right. The difference was immediately apparent. Not in technical skill — the red-haired third-year was more technically accomplished. In presence. The second-year was simply there, in her form, not watching herself do it.

"You’re right," Kael said.

Sable ate a bite of bread. "I know."

Torven looked up from his food. He looked at Sable. He looked at Kael. He looked back at his food. "She’s been right about the form assessments all morning," he said. "I’ve been keeping count."

Sable didn’t react to this. But Kael noticed something in her expression — small, brief, the kind of thing that appeared and disappeared so fast it might have been nothing.

It wasn’t nothing.

It was the expression of someone who had spent a long time being right about things in rooms where nobody was keeping count.

Lira arrived at the table mid-afternoon, which was unusual for Lira on a Symposium day — she was usually reliably in the library for the duration of such events, the reduced foot traffic apparently being valuable.

She sat down. She had her notebook. She opened it and looked at it. She closed it.

"Did you sleep?" Kael asked.

"Four hours."

"That’s an improvement."

"I was in the middle of something."

"The restricted collection?"

She looked at him. "Aldris gave me clearance last week."

This was new information. "He gave me the file and you clearance."

"Different tools for different—" She paused. "Yes."

"What did you find?"

She looked at her closed notebook. "Something I need to think about before I describe it accurately." A pause. "I’ll tell you when I’m certain the description is right."

Sable was watching this exchange. "This is a thing you two do," she said. "You discover things and then you hold them until you’re sure you can describe them correctly."

Kael looked at her. "Yes."

"It’s very careful."

"It’s accurate."

"It’s also slightly maddening from the outside."

Lira looked at Sable. It was the kind of look Lira gave things she was deciding whether to incorporate into her model. "You prefer faster disclosure even at the cost of precision."

"I prefer knowing that something exists even if I don’t know the exact shape of it yet."

Lira considered this. "That’s a reasonable preference." A pause. "I found something in the restricted collection that changes the shape of the third question." She looked at Kael. "The one about whether the convergence zone and the unregistered gate are the same location."

He waited.

"I’m not going to say what it is yet," she said. "I need one more day." She looked at Sable. "But something exists. And you should know it does."

Sable absorbed this with the flat efficiency she brought to partial information. "Okay," she said.

Torven, who had been quiet through all of this, said: "Aldris also called me in this morning."

Everyone looked at him.

He looked back at them with the expression of someone who had said a thing and was waiting to see if it required elaboration. He apparently decided it did. "He asked me what I thought was happening," Torven said. "With the gate. With what Kael had told me."

"What did you say?" Kael asked.

"I said I thought something large was building toward something and that my job was to be as prepared as possible for when it arrived." A pause. "He was quiet for a while. Then he said: that’s the right answer. Then he gave me access to additional training space in the east wing."

Silence..

"He’s building something," Lira said. Quietly. To herself, mostly. "And he’s decided what each component is."

"What are we components of?" Sable asked.

Nobody answered.

Not because they didn’t want to. Because they didn’t know yet.

The Symposium continued outside the window. The demonstrations went on. Vareth appeared and disappeared with his particular choreographic precision.

And at the corner table, in the ordinary noise of an ordinary afternoon, four people sat with the specific weight of something they couldn’t yet see clearly — something that was building, somewhere north-northwest of here, that they were separately and together becoming the answer to.

— ◆ —

— End of Chapter 28 —