Spring arrived at Solmere the way it apparently always did, according to those who had witnessed it before: all at once, without warning, and considerably earlier than anyone raised further inland would have expected. Arthur woke one morning in the middle of it to find the whole quality of the light through his window had changed.
He noticed it before he noticed anything else, the particular clarity that replaced winter's flat grey diffusion, and lay there for a while simply observing it, watching the light move slowly across the ceiling in a way it had not moved for months. Yseult had already gone. Her bed was made, her side of the room in its usual state of controlled chaos, a half-finished diagram of some component or other pinned above her desk with three separate annotations in Briar's handwriting added along its margins. Arthur dressed and went outside.
The academy grounds had transformed while nobody was paying attention. The long beds along the eastern walk, which had been bare black earth since his arrival, had filled with something small and green and determined, and the old trees that had shed their color across the autumn now carried the faint, fuzzy suggestion of leaves returning, not properly arrived yet but unmistakably on their way. The air smelled entirely different. He walked the grounds' perimeter without any particular destination, the way he'd taken to doing on mornings when he woke before the bells, and found himself passing places that had accumulated meaning across the year without his noticing the accumulation as it happened. The courtyard where Finn had first barreled into their group, arguing at maximum volume atop an overturned crate. The wide old tree where they'd eaten lunch through the whole autumn, its branches now beginning their slow return to green. The training yard where he'd stood across from Corin with a practice blade and been told, with complete aristocratic confidence, that the match would be brief.
The western track, where twenty-seven circuits had gone into the academy's records beneath his name. He stopped there for a while, looking out across the empty course in the early light. He tried to remember what he had expected, walking up that road three days out from the village nearly a full year ago now, and found the memory of his own expectations had grown genuinely difficult to reconstruct.
He had expected to be behind. That much he remembered clearly. He had spent six years knowing that the academy would be full of people whose abilities had been developing since childhood while his own had never once arrived, and had braced himself, thoroughly and repeatedly, for the particular experience of being the least capable person in every room he entered. That had not happened.
It had not been the opposite, either. He was not the best at anything, except one absurd endurance record that had lasted approximately three days in the general conversation before evaporating entirely. He was middling in most of his coursework, genuinely poor in Soul Ability theory, unremarkable in Alchemy foundations despite consistent effort. But he had not been left behind.
He thought about that for a while, standing at the western track's edge with the spring light strengthening around him, and found the reason arriving considerably more simply than he'd expected. He had not been alone.
That was the whole of it, really. Elsie had walked the entire road beside him and had never once, across ten years and three days of travel and a full academic year, given any indication of considering the arrangement a burden. Yseult had installed herself in his life on the first morning with total, unapologetic confidence and had refused, through every subsequent complication, to leave it. Briar and Finn had adopted him within a week of meeting him. Mira had let him sit beside her when she'd clearly been debating whether to sit at all. Corin, who had begun the year regarding him as barely worth acknowledging, now shared a training yard with him at dawn and refused, on principle, to admit it was deliberate.
None of that had anything to do with abilities. He walked back toward the main buildings as the first bells began sounding across the grounds, and thought about his parents.
He had written to them every week, as promised. His mother's replies arrived reliably, full of village news he had begun, somewhat guiltily, to find distant, the small ordinary happenings of a place that had once been the entirety of his world and had become, across a single year, somewhere he thought about warmly and rarely.
His father's letters were shorter. They usually asked about his training. Arthur had written back describing the pivot correction Corin had shown him, the half-beat inefficiency that six years of Calder's instruction had never caught, and had worried afterward that it might land badly, that his father might read it as criticism. Calder's response had arrived the previous week.
Good. That's the thing about teaching someone: eventually they find a better teacher, and the whole point of the work was always to get them somewhere you couldn't take them yourself. Keep the correction. Thank the boy for me.
Arthur had read it four times and folded it carefully into the small stack he kept in his desk drawer. The grounds filled gradually as the morning properly arrived, students spilling out toward lessons in the new warmth, the whole academy waking around him, and Arthur, crossing the eastern courtyard toward the refectory, spotted Elsie already at their usual table through the tall windows, gesturing at something while Finn responded with visible outrage. Nine months.
That was how long it had been since he'd stood at the crest of that final rise and seen Solmere spread out below him for the first time, white stone and red tile and a walled academy on the northern hill, and had felt entirely, genuinely uncertain whether he belonged anywhere in it. He pulled the refectory door open, and the noise and warmth of it rolled out to meet him, and Finn's voice rose immediately above the general clamor demanding that Arthur come and settle an argument whose terms nobody had adequately explained. Arthur went to settle it.