The story reached Castelgard weeks before he did, which Corin discovered at the first watchtower and found he had been dreading since Solmere without once admitting it.
TLN: They know.
COR: Yeah, I can see that they know.
The watchman at the outer gate had come down off the wall to take the horses himself, which watchmen did not do, and had called him young lord twice and champion once, and had then been visibly unable to decide whether the second word was permitted and had gone red to the ears about it. Two more men had come out of the gatehouse to look. Neither of them said anything. They simply stood there in the road with the particular expression of soldiers looking at a thing they had heard about in a tavern, and Corin, who had been looked at by four hundred people in silence eleven weeks ago, found that this was considerably worse. They rode on through the lower town. It got worse. A woman at a well said that's him to another woman at the well. A child ran alongside the horses for the length of the market. At the recruiting post on the square, where the notices had grown thicker since the winter, somebody had pinned a sheet among them that said, in an earnest hand, that the heir of the house had won the Trial of Power at Solmere against the champion of four years standing, and with his sword never drawn. Corin stopped his horse in front of it.
TLN: Corin.
COR: With his sword never drawn.
TLN: It's true, technically.
COR: sigh It's true in every detail and it is the single most dishonest sentence I have ever read.
He did not take it down. He wanted to. He sat on his horse in front of a recruiting board in his own city and wanted, with considerable force, to tear a sheet of paper off a nail, and understood that tearing it down would be for him and not for anyone else, and that Rufus Hale had had something to say about exactly that, and he turned the horse and rode on. Talon left him at the bottom of the hill. The Pryce house was on the eastern side of the town and his mother had been writing to him weekly since the closures, and there was nothing to be gained by putting off either of their homecomings by riding up together.
TLN: Tomorrow?
COR: Tomorrow.
TLN: Corin. They're going to be proud of you up there.
COR: I know.
TLN: Let them, for one evening. You can tell him the rest after supper.
COR: That's cowardly advice.
TLN: It's kind advice. They look quite similar from a distance.
His mother met him in the hall and held him at arm's length and said he had grown again, and that she had not braced for it again, and that she had promised herself she would brace for it this time and had failed. Then she told him the household had heard about the Trial on the eleventh, from a carter, and then on the thirteenth from a second carter with a different version, and then on the fifteenth from a formal letter bearing the academy's seal, which his father had made her read aloud to him four times.
MTH: Four times, Corin.
COR: What did the letter say?
MTH: That you had won. That the final had been decided in your favour by the presiding faculty. It was very short. Your father said it was the best letter he had ever received and he has received letters from the provincial court.
Corin said nothing. The letter had been written by the academy's registrar, who wrote all of the academy's letters in the same three sentences, and it would have said decided in your favour by the presiding faculty because a hand had been placed on his shoulder and a voice had told him that was enough. His father was in the east study. The chair was the same chair and the blanket was the same blanket and the fire was lit in the middle of summer because a man who cannot walk feels the cold in places a man who can does not, and Corin stood in the doorway and saw that his father had been waiting there, dressed properly, with a glass poured, in the way a man waits for an occasion.
FTH: Champion.
COR: Father.
FTH: No. I'll have it the once. I've waited two months to say it and your mother has heard it so many times she's threatened to leave me. Champion.
He held out his hand, and Corin crossed the room and took it, and his father's grip had got a little stronger since the winter, which nobody had mentioned in any letter.
FTH: Sit. Tell me all of it.
Corin sat in his chair. He told his father about the rounds. He told him about the festival and the endurance course and the boy who ran twenty-seven circuits, which his father enjoyed enormously and made him repeat. He told him about a boy called Finn who had gambled four times in one match and lost the fourth, and about a girl called Mira who had won a chess tournament with a rook sacrifice, and about the semifinal, where the champion of four years had frozen Arthur Lyerm in the air and Arthur had moved anyway.
FTH: Moved how?
COR: Nobody knows. Including him. I watched it from twenty feet and I could not tell you.
FTH: And then you had the man in the final.
COR: Yes.
FTH: And you never drew. The carters were very insistent on that. Never drew once.
COR: No.
FTH: How did you beat a man like that without drawing, Corin?
There it was. He had known it would arrive and he had known roughly where in the conversation it would arrive, and he had ridden four days composing an account of it, and in a mill yard in Astoria he had decided what the account would be, and Talon had stood at the bottom of the hill an hour ago and offered him one evening's grace. He looked at the glass his father had poured for the occasion.
COR: Badly.
FTH: Badly?
COR: I could have beaten him in about ninety seconds. My ability is the opposite of everything his is and the match was finished the moment it began. I took eleven minutes over it.
He did not look away.
COR: He had frozen my friend and thrown a punch at his face, and I decided he would be made to feel small for it. In front of four hundred people. I explained his ability to the arena out loud so that every person there would know how little he had ever had to do. I put him face down and I held him there with the hilt between his shoulders and told him he was a loser in every regard. And I did not stop until Instructor Sutton put his hand on my shoulder and told me there was nothing further to be taken that was worth what taking it would cost me. That is what the letter means when it says the final was decided by the faculty.
The fire moved in the grate. His father's face had not changed.
COR: Nobody cheered. I want you to know that too. It was the Trial of Power and four hundred people watched me win it and nobody made a sound.
He stopped. His father did not speak for some time. He set the glass down, which took a moment with his hands as they were, and he looked at the fire, and then at his son.
FTH: Why are you telling me this?
COR: Because the sheet on the recruiting board says I never drew, and every word of it is true, and it is a lie. And because I spent a week this summer carrying grain for a miller who had never once asked anyone for anything, and an old man by a stream told me to take my share and not anyone else's. This is my share. You were going to be proud of it without knowing what it was, and I could not let you.
FTH: You could have.
COR: Yes.
FTH: Most would.
COR: I know. I'd have been one of them a year ago.
His father was quiet for a long while.
FTH: I'll tell you what I am proud of, then, since the title's spoiled. And I'll not take it back after, so listen.
He leaned forward in the chair.
FTH: I sent you away because I was afraid. I told you half of it last winter. I thought this house had made a boy who was strong and could not be trusted with it, because I'd made him, and I knew what I'd put into him. Every lord in this province has a son like that. Most of them never find out what they are. The ones who do, find out on a battlefield, with a man underneath them, and they find out too late.
He held his son's eyes.
FTH: You found out in a school. In front of a teacher who could stop you. And you came four days home with it and put it on my table before the soup. That's the thing I'm proud of, Corin. Not the title. The title belongs to the academy. This is yours.
Corin sat very still.
COR: I don't know what to say to that.
FTH: Then say nothing. You're getting better at it. Your mother will be pleased.
They had supper. It was a good supper and his mother talked for most of it, about the household and the harvest and a cousin who had married badly, and nobody mentioned the Trial again, and Corin found the not-mentioning was a different thing from the silence in the infirmary at Solmere. That had been people not knowing where to put something. This was people who had put it somewhere and were letting it stay there. His father had a letter brought in at the end of the meal. It had come that afternoon from the northern line, and Corin watched him read it with the particular stillness he had learned last winter meant something mattered.
COR: What is it?
FTH: Harlow's Reach. The watchtower at the sea end. There was an incursion two nights ago.
MTH: Is anyone-
FTH: Four men hurt. None lost. They held. The things came up out of the water at the cliff base, which they have never done before, and they went back into it when the tower lit its fires, which they always do.
He folded the letter.
FTH: Out of the water, Corin. Twenty years I've had reports off that line and they've always come down the coast road. Never up the cliff. Never out of the sea.
COR: The Serenity closed this month.
FTH: I know when it closed.
He looked at the letter in his lap for a while longer.
FTH: I'd go and see it. In the ordinary way of things I'd ride up there tomorrow and look at the cliff base myself and talk to the men who held it. That's what the lord of this house does.
He did not look at the chair. He did not need to.
FTH: Will you go for me?
Corin understood exactly what was being asked, and exactly what was not, and sat with both of them for a moment.
COR: Yes.
FTH: Look at it properly. Talk to the men. Not as the champion of anything. As my son, who is going to have to hold that wall one day and should know what it looks like before he does.
COR: And then?
FTH: And then you come back down and tell me what you saw.
He held his son's gaze across the table.
FTH: And then, in September, you go back to that school. You made me a promise last winter. I'm not going to remind you of it. I'm going to trust you to remember it on your own.