The village had disappeared behind them by midmorning, and by midday it had stopped feeling like something they had left and started feeling like something that simply existed elsewhere now, a fact of the world rather than a place they could turn around and walk back into within the hour. Arthur found the road easier than he'd expected.
Not physically. Physically it was long, and his pack sat heavier by the third hour than it had by the first, the particular deceptive weight of things that seemed reasonable when you packed them and unreasonable once you'd carried them a dozen miles. But the walking itself, the steady rhythm of it, the particular meditative blankness that long travel eventually settled a person into, felt familiar in a way he hadn't anticipated, an echo of countless evenings spent running forms in the yard behind his house until his legs ached the same patient ache.
ELS: You're doing the thing again.
ART: What thing?
ELS: The quiet thinking thing. You've been doing it for an hour.
ART: I'm just taking it in.
ELS: You can take it in out loud, you know. I don't mind.
He glanced at her, walking easily beside him with her own pack settled comfortably across her shoulders, her hair pulled back against the traveling wind, and felt something loosen in his chest at the simple, ordinary fact of her presence, the same presence that had sat beside him at a well ten years before and had not once, in all the years since, properly left his side.
ART: I was thinking about how strange it is. That we're just walking toward it. Six years of Hobbes's letter sitting in a drawer, and now we're just walking, same as any other road.
ELS: Did you expect trumpets?
ART: A little, maybe.
She laughed, and the sound of it carried easily across the open road, and Arthur found himself smiling despite the ache in his shoulders, the particular lightness that traveling with the right person could bring even to the longest distances.
They crested the final rise on the third afternoon, and the whole of Solmere opened out beneath them at once, and Arthur stopped walking entirely.
He had imagined it, across six years of imagining, in the particular vague and inadequate way a village boy imagined things he had never seen, some hazy composite of his father's old stories and his own limited experience of what a large place might look like. None of it had prepared him for the actual scale of it.
The city spread along the western coastline in a wide, gleaming sprawl, white stone and red-tiled roofs catching the late sun in long warm sheets of color, the harbor beyond it crowded with ships whose masts rose like a second forest against the horizon. Streets radiated outward from a central district in careful, deliberate patterns, wide avenues cutting between districts that even from this distance announced their different characters, the dense close-packed warmth of a market quarter, the wider formal spaces of what had to be a noble district, the particular organized calm of somewhere built with real intention rather than simply grown.
And above all of it, set on a rise at the city's northern edge, walled entirely in pale grey stone that caught the light differently than the rest of the city around it, sat the academy.
ELS: Oh.
She said it very quietly, and Arthur understood the sound completely, because he did not have a better word for it himself. The academy's walls alone seemed larger than the whole of their village combined, towers rising at intervals along their length, and beyond the walls he could make out the suggestion of green, courtyards and gardens and open training grounds, the particular grandeur of a place built not just to educate but to announce, unmistakably, its own importance.
ART: That's where we're going.
ELS: I know.
ART: I mean, I knew it would be big. Hobbes said prestigious. I just didn't understand what prestigious actually looked like, up close.
Elsie was quiet for a long moment, her eyes moving across the whole sprawling scale of the city and the walled campus above it, and when she spoke again her voice had lost some of its earlier lightness, replaced by something more careful.
ELS: Do you think we'll fit in there?
ART: I don't know.
ELS: That's not very reassuring.
ART: I'm not trying to reassure you. I'm trying to be honest. I don't know if we'll fit in. But I know we walked three days to find out, and I'd rather find out than wonder about it for the rest of my life.
She looked at him for a moment, something in her expression settling, the particular fierce quiet resolve that had carried her through a fence confrontation with Felix and had not, in all the years since, ever fully left her.
ELS: Alright. Let's go find out, then.
The road down into the city took the better part of the afternoon, and the closer they came, the more the sheer noise and motion of the place pressed in around them, merchants calling their wares in accents Arthur had never heard, carts and carriages moving through streets crowded in a way the village had never once been crowded, the particular overwhelming abundance of a place where thousands of lives moved through the same narrow spaces every single day. They reached the academy gates as the sun was beginning its long slow descent toward the harbor, painting the pale stone walls in deep gold, and found themselves in a line of other arriving students, families embracing at the gate's edge, the particular universal ritual of parents letting go of children they had raised toward futures the parents themselves would only ever witness from a distance. A woman in academy robes moved along the line with a ledger, checking names, directing new arrivals through the gates in an efficient, practiced rhythm.
WOM: Names.
ART: Arthur Lyerm.
WOM: Lyerm. Yes. Recommended admission, village sponsorship. And you?
ELS: Elsie Tanner.
WOM: Tanner. You'll have a brother already here, then, an upperclassman. He's been asking after your arrival for weeks.
ELS: That sounds like Rowan.
The woman marked something in her ledger and gestured them through the gates, and Arthur stepped across the threshold into the academy grounds proper, and felt, for one suspended moment, the full weight of everything that had led to this exact step, a scorched schoolyard, a burned hand, a letter carried by a paid rider, six years of forms practiced in a yard behind a farmhouse, all of it compressing down into this single ordinary act of walking through a gate. Beyond it, the grounds opened into wide green courtyards, students moving between buildings in loose unhurried clusters, the particular busy calm of an institution large enough to hold thousands of separate lives within its walls at once.
WOM: You'll want the administration hall, just ahead, for room assignments. Welcome to the academy.
She moved on to the next arrivals, and Arthur stood for a moment longer, looking out across the grounds, Elsie beside him doing the same, and neither of them said anything at all, because there was, for the moment, nothing that needed saying. They had arrived. Whatever came next would simply have to be walked into, the same as everything else.