Calder read the letter twice before he set it down. It had arrived three days after the incident in the schoolyard, delivered by a rider Master Hobbes had paid out of his own pocket to carry it faster than the ordinary post, and it sat now on the kitchen table between the three of them, the wax seal already broken, the careful, cramped handwriting filling the page in dense, deliberate lines.
CLD: He's put it plainly enough. There's a place for you at the academy in Solmere. Not now. Not for years yet. But he's spoken to a colleague there directly, and the door is open, waiting, whenever you're ready to walk through it.
ART: How many years?
CLD: He suggests fifteen. Old enough that the journey and the schooling won't undo you before you've begun. Young enough that you'll still have time to make something of what you learn there.
Wren had not said anything since the letter arrived. She sat with her hands folded on the table, her eyes moving over the words again though she had surely read them enough times by now to know them by heart, and when she finally spoke her voice carried the particular careful evenness of someone holding two feelings at once and refusing to let either one win outright.
WRN: Fifteen. That's six years from now.
ART: Six years is a long time.
WRN: It is. And it will pass faster than you think, and one morning you'll be standing at that door with a bag over your shoulder, and I will still feel, somewhere underneath everything, that it arrived far too soon.
She reached across the table and took his hand, the good one, and held it for a long moment without saying anything further, and Arthur understood, in the particular way he had come to understand his mother over the years, that this was not reluctance. It was simply the shape grief and pride took when they arrived in a person's chest at exactly the same time. Word of what had happened in the schoolyard had, by then, traveled the whole of the village and back again several times over, gathering embellishments the way all village stories did, until the telling bore only a passing resemblance to the thing itself. But underneath the exaggeration, one fact had settled, plain and unchallenged. Felix was gone.
His family had pulled him from the school within the week, quietly, without much explanation offered to anyone who asked, though the village supplied its own explanations readily enough, whispered over fences and across market stalls. Some said his parents could not bear the shame of what the whole school had witnessed, a boy who had ruled that yard for years, undone in a single afternoon by the one person he'd spent that whole time certain he could never lose to. Others said it was simpler than that, that Felix himself had asked to leave, unable to walk back into a place that had watched him fail so completely and so publicly, unwilling to face the version of the story that would follow him through every remaining year of his schooling.
Arthur did not know which version was true, and found, somewhat to his own surprise, that he did not much care to. He did not hate Felix. He had turned that over enough times in the weeks since to be reasonably certain of it. He had been angry, and hurt, and humiliated in ways that had cost him things he would carry for a long while yet, but somewhere in the telling and retelling of that final afternoon, in the memory of Felix's stunned, frightened retreat, in the small crack of fear he'd glimpsed beneath the anger the moment before the bolt left his hands, Arthur had found something that made hatred difficult to hold onto.
He had simply been a boy who had never once been told no, and the world had finally told him, and he had not known what to do with that, and so he had left. Arthur hoped, quietly and without much conviction that it would matter, that wherever Felix had gone, he found something better to build himself around than being feared.
The years that followed did not arrive all at once. They arrived the way years always arrived, one ordinary day compounding into the next, until enough of them had passed that looking back felt like looking across a great distance rather than remembering something recent. Arthur trained.
Not only the sword, though the sword remained the center of it, Calder's lessons growing longer and more demanding as Arthur grew taller and steadier, but everything else besides, the long hours spent testing his own limits against whatever the village could offer him, a stubborn insistence that had not left him since the night he cried alone in his room and would not, it seemed, ever fully leave him again.
He discovered, over those years, that Master Hobbes had been right about one uncomfortable truth. Whatever lived inside him did not arrive freely. He tested it, cautiously and then less cautiously, against small things, the recoil of a poorly thrown punch, the sting of a training blade caught at the wrong angle, and found that it answered, sometimes, in small measured increments, never as a gift, always as something wrestled loose through repetition and failure, exactly as the old, half-legible book in Hobbes's office had suggested it might. He did not master it. He was not sure, even after six years, that mastery was the correct word for whatever this was.
But he grew less afraid of it, and less afraid, in general, of the parts of himself that did not look like everyone else's. Elsie remained beside him through all of it, the way she always had, her own gift growing steadily alongside her, her wind carrying voices further now than Arthur imagined she'd once thought possible, and somewhere across those six years, without either of them quite deciding it aloud, it had become simply understood between their two families that when the time came, she would go to Solmere too.
WRN: You're certain, Elsie. It's a long way from home.
ELS: I've never once let him walk into anything alone. I'm not about to start now.
She said it the way she said most things, plain and certain, and Wren, looking between the two of them across the kitchen table one evening not long before it was time, found herself smiling in a way that held both sorrow and relief in equal measure. The morning Arthur turned fifteen, he stood at the edge of the village with a pack over his shoulder and Elsie beside him, and his parents in front of him, and the whole of his childhood spread out behind him in a shape he was only now, standing at its edge, beginning to properly see.
CLD: You remember everything I taught you.
ART: Every form. Every correction. I remember all of it.
CLD: Then you'll be alright.
He said it with more confidence than Arthur suspected he actually felt, the particular brave performance of a father sending his son somewhere he could not follow, and Arthur crossed the last of the distance between them and embraced him, and Calder held on a beat longer than strictly necessary, and neither of them commented on it.
WRN: Write to us. Every week, if you can manage it.
ART: Every week, mama.
She held his face the way she had held it that night at the kitchen table six years before, her thumbs brushing his cheeks, her eyes bright and wet and fiercely proud all at once.
WRN: Whatever you find out there. Whatever this thing in you turns out to be, in the end. You remain, first and always, my son. Nothing that happens in Solmere changes that. Do you understand me?
ART: I understand, mama.
WRN: Good. Go on, then. Both of you. Before I lose my nerve and refuse to let either of you leave at all.
She said it with a laugh that did not quite mask the tears underneath it, and Arthur and Elsie turned together, the road stretching ahead of them toward a city neither of them had ever seen, toward a school that had agreed, six years before, to open a door for a boy the world had once called nothing, and Arthur walked forward into it with his oldest and truest friend at his side, the weight of everything he had built across the hardest years of his life settled quietly into the shape of who he had become. He did not look back until the village had nearly disappeared behind them.
When he finally did, he saw his parents still standing at the edge of it, small in the distance, his mother's hand raised in a wave she held far longer than necessary, and Arthur raised his own hand in answer, the same hand that had once trembled and burned in a scorched schoolyard, now steady, now entirely his own. Then he turned back toward the road ahead, toward Solmere, toward whatever waited for him there, and walked on.