The gate was the same gate. Arthur had half expected it not to be. He had walked up to it a year ago with his whole life in a pack and his father's letters in his pocket and no idea at all what was on the other side, and he had thought it the largest thing he had ever seen. He stood in front of it now on the fourth evening out of Hollowell, with Elsie on one side and Yseult on the other and Mira a half step behind, and it was simply a gate. It was a large one, and old, with the academy's crest worn soft in the stone above it by a great many years of weather. But it was a gate he knew. He knew the place on the left post where the stone had been patched in a different colour. He knew that the right-hand door stuck in wet weather and had to be shouldered. He knew that just inside it, on the wall of the porter's lodge, there would be a board with notices on it, and that most of them would be about meals. He had not known, a year ago, that you could come back to a place and have it be smaller because you were bigger. He knew it now.
YSE: It's shrunk.
ART: I was just thinking that.
YSE: I know. You had the face. Come on. I want to see if they've moved the good bench.
They went through. The academy had not been empty all summer. That was the first thing he noticed, and the thing he would not have thought of if he had not been told. Three hundred and eleven students had stayed behind when the Serenity closed, with nowhere to go and the whole of the long vacation in front of them. The place had the look, faint and particular, of somewhere that had been lived in rather than waited in. There were paths worn across the lawns where there had not been paths in June. There was a vegetable patch, badly fenced, in a corner of the east court that Arthur was fairly sure had not been there before. There was washing hung out of a third-floor window of the north dormitory on a line strung to a gutter, and somebody had painted a very large and very rude picture of a fish on the wall of the kitchen yard, and nobody had painted it over.
MRA: They made it theirs.
ELS: They had to. They couldn't leave.
MRA: No. I know. I meant that it's good that they did.
Bevan was in the kitchen yard. He looked up from a crate of something as the four of them came past, and took them in, and nodded once. Then he handed each of them, without a word, a heel of bread still warm from the oven, the way he had been handing people bread for as long as anybody could remember, and went back to his crate. Finn found them before they had got their bags as far as the stair. He found them the way Finn found anything, which was audibly and from a considerable distance. They heard their own names coming across the main court some seconds before they saw him, and then he was there, brown from the sun and thinner in the face and talking before he had stopped moving.
FNN: ARTHUR. ELSIE. YSEULT. MIRA. In that order, because that's the order you came through the gate, I've been watching the gate since noon. Do you know where I've BEEN? You don't. Nobody does. I've been to PORTVALE. On my OWN. There are over two hundred bridges and nobody can count them the same way twice, I tried, I got a hundred and ninety-one and then two hundred and six and then I stopped because a man told me that was the whole point. I ate chowder every day for three weeks. I have a STORY.
YSE: You've always got a story.
FNN: This one's TRUE.
YSE: That's new.
Briar came up behind him a moment later, at a walk, with his pack on one shoulder and his hands in his pockets, and stood there and let Finn finish. It took some time. Briar was browner too, from the fields, and there was something in the way he held himself that was a little different from June and that Arthur could not put a name to. It might have been the look of somebody who had done a sum he did not like the answer to and had decided to carry it anyway. His boots were the same old boots. Arthur noticed that, and did not know why he noticed it, and did not say anything.
BRR: Hello.
ART: Hello. How was home?
BRR: Small. Good. Expensive. I'll tell you about it some time.
ART: All right.
BRR: Not today.
ART: All right.
Finn had stopped talking, which was unusual enough that all of them looked at him. He was looking at Briar with an expression Arthur had seen on him perhaps twice in a year. Then he leaned over and said something to Briar very quietly, so quietly that none of the rest of them caught it. Arthur saw Briar's face change.
BRR: You did what?
FNN: You heard.
BRR: You walked away from a table. While you were ahead.
FNN: I did.
BRR: Who are you?
FNN: I genuinely don't know. It's been very upsetting. I'll tell you about it some time.
BRR: Not today?
FNN: Oh, no, today. Definitely today. Tonight. At length. You're not getting out of it.
Corin and Talon came in on the horse. They came through the gate a little before dark, both of them on the one animal, which Corin explained to nobody in particular was because the horse was stabled in the city and belonged to his father and they were taking it down there next, and Talon explained to everybody in particular was because the second horse had thrown a shoe outside Draymere and Corin had refused to wait the hour. They got down in the main court. Corin got down first, and stood by the horse's head, and looked across the court at the six of them by the stair, and the six of them looked back.
He looked thinner too. They all did, Arthur thought. It had been a long summer for everybody. But it was not only that. There was a cut, healed pink, across the back of his right hand, and he stood a fraction more carefully than he used to, as though something along his ribs had only recently stopped complaining. And his face, which had always been a closed door, was not closed exactly. It was a door that had been opened once, very wide, and then shut again, and still had the light round its edges. He walked across the court to Arthur and stopped in front of him.
COR: Lyerm.
ART: Ashby.
COR: I got your letter.
ART: I got yours.
COR: You said see you soon.
ART: You said it first.
COR: I did.
That was all. Neither of them said anything else, and neither of them needed to. Corin looked at him for a moment longer, the cool, level, assessing look he had looked at him with from the first week, and something passed between them that had not been in that look in the first week and was not, Arthur thought, ever going to go out of it again. Then Corin nodded, once, and turned to the others.
COR: Hello, all. Finn, you're very brown. I assume you've a story.
FNN: I've got a TRUE story.
COR: Heaven help us.
Talon had not come across the court with him. He had stayed by the horse, holding its head, with his left shoulder held a little stiffly in a way Arthur noticed and did not understand. He was looking past all of them at Mira, and Mira was looking back at him, and neither of them moved for a moment. Then Mira went across the court to him, not quickly, and stopped in front of him, and looked at his shoulder, and then up at his face.
She did not ask. He did not explain. She put her hand, very lightly, on his arm just below the shoulder, and left it there, and he looked down at it and then at her with an expression Arthur had seen on him only once before, on the morning they had left for the summer, when he had hugged her goodbye and said a word in her ear that nobody else had heard. Nobody remarked on it. That had become the arrangement.
YSE: Well, I'm going to remark on it.
ELS: You're not.
YSE: I'm going to remark on it later, though.
ELS: That I'll allow.
The first day of the second year began at seven the next morning, with a bell. It was the same bell. He knew that too. He went down the stair with the others and out into the main court, which was full. It was fuller than it had been in June, fuller than it had been all year, because the first-years had arrived overnight from the provinces that were still open. They were standing in clumps about the court looking at everything with the particular expression of people who did not know yet where anything was and were trying very hard not to let anybody see it. Arthur watched a boy of about fifteen stand in the middle of the court with a pack on his back, turning slowly in a circle, looking up at the towers. He remembered being that boy. It had been exactly a year ago and it felt like a great deal longer.
The faces that were missing were missing too. He noticed them the way you notice a step that is not there in the dark. Dane Whitlock was gone. The champion of four years standing had walked out of the gate in June for the last time, and the place by the arena wall where he used to stand on his own between classes was simply a wall. Rowan Tanner was gone. Elsie had said so on the road, once, in a voice that did not invite anything further. Half the faces he had learned to nod to across the refectory last year were gone with them, finished and scattered back to the provinces, and in their place were new ones, younger ones, that did not nod to him yet.
He went to the notice board by the porter's lodge to find out where he was meant to be. Everybody else had already been and gone. The others had gone ahead to the refectory, Yseult to secure the good bench, Finn to secure Briar for the telling of the story, which was going to take most of breakfast. So he stood in front of the board on his own, in the press of first-years, looking for his name.
He found it. Second year, combat practical, Instructor Sutton, east yard, eight o'clock. Alchemy, Instructor Vance. Soul theory, Instructor Pratt. History. The same names in the same hand on the same board, a year on. He read them through twice, and put his hand flat against his jacket over the inside pocket without thinking about it, and felt the shape there. Then he stepped back from the board and turned round, and walked straight into somebody.
It was not a hard collision. It was the kind of thing that happens a dozen times a morning in a crowded court. His shoulder, the good one, met somebody else's shoulder, and something fell out of somebody's hand onto the flags, and he said sorry, sorry, without even looking, the way you do. Then he looked.
She had blue hair. That was the first thing. It was not dyed. He knew dye, Yseult had tried it once in the spring and it had gone green. This was simply the colour it was, a deep, cold, clear blue like the sky an hour after the sun has gone, cut straight at the jaw. It was the bluest thing he had ever seen on a person. She was about his age, perhaps a little older. She was not tall. She stood very straight, the way people stand who have been told all their lives to take up as little room as possible and have decided instead to take up exactly as much as they need and not an inch more. And she was looking at him.
It was not a friendly look. It was not an unfriendly one either. It was simply cold, the way deep water is cold, all the way down, with nothing in it to warm it and no apparent interest in being warmed. She looked at him the way you look at a thing that has got in your way and that you are deciding whether to walk round or through.
He bent and picked up what she had dropped. It was a single folded sheet of paper with the academy's seal on it, the kind they gave you on your first day with your timetable. He held it out.
ART: Sorry. I wasn't looking. I'm Arthur.
She took the paper from his hand without touching his fingers.
???: I didn't ask.
ART: No. I know. I'm just saying. In case. We're probably in some of the same-
???: Isolde.
She said it flatly, the way you put a coin down on a counter to end a conversation about the price. Her eyes went over him once, very fast, the way Briar's went over a page of figures. Down to the sword on his back in its new scabbard, and to his hand, still half raised over the pocket of his jacket. Then back up to his face. Something moved behind them, very briefly, too fast to read. Then it was gone.
???: Now move. You're in front of the board.
He moved. She stepped past him to the board, and read it, and folded her paper away inside her coat, and turned, and walked off across the court through the press of first-years without looking back. The crowd parted round her without seeming to know that it was doing it. He watched her go. He did not entirely know why. She went under the arch on the far side of the court toward the east yard, and the blue of her hair was the last thing to go, and then she was gone.
He stood there by the board for a moment longer, in the noise of the first morning, with his hand over his pocket. Behind him, two second-years he did not know were standing by the lodge wall with their timetables, watching the arch where she had gone. They were not talking to him. They had not noticed him at all.
STU: That's her. That's the transfer. The one everyone's been on about since last night.
STU2: Where's she transferred from? Nobody transfers in second year.
STU: That's the thing. That's why everyone's on about it. She's from Valdrun.
Arthur stood by the notice board with the word going round in his head, and understood, with the particular sinking clarity of somebody watching a cup go over the edge of a table, that his belief this year would go normally had been thrown out of the window before it had even started.