The boys gave themselves two more days before any of it had to begin.

There was sense in it: the ship wanted provisioning, water and salt-meat and crates of the fruit that grew nowhere else, and Morgana's people saw to all of that with brisk hands. 

But mostly there was no sense in it at all, and that was rather the point. They had crossed half a world and heard the worst of what waited at the end of the road, and tomorrow's work would keep until tomorrow. By a kind of unspoken agreement, the lot of them set the whole weight of it down for a while, and were simply where they were.

And where they were turned out to be a very easy place to be.

Ithrenaar in the morning light was almost unfair. 

The sea came in every shade of blue a sea had any business being, and a few it had no right to; the cliffs rose green and gold above the harbour; the air smelled of salt and citrus and someone's cooking always close at hand. 

Adom slept late, which he never did. He ate too much, which he also never did. He found the frostpetal fizz the islanders drank against the heat, and a flatbread folded round grilled fish and a bright, sharp sauce that he made Sam try and then ate most of himself.

On the second afternoon he got hauled into a game of Krozball on the hard sand below the walls — islanders, a few of Morgana's soldiers, Kafi grinning like it was a feast day — and he played like he hadn't let himself do in years. 

All of that for fun and the plain joy of the thing. Karion held forth to whoever would stand still for it. Damus, of all people, learned to fish off the rocks, and was fiercely proud of the three he landed. Sam read in the shade and came out only to laugh at the rest of them.

This, Adom thought, more than once. This was the thing he'd come back to live for. Not the saving of the world, but the fizz, the fish and his friends being idiots in the sun.

Then it was the third morning, and it was time.

They gathered their few things and went down to the harbour, and Morgana came with them to see them off, though no running this time, and no honour guard. 

Just her, and Bedivere a pace behind, with the bright clean morning, and the ship at the quay with its sails already shaking loose.

"You're sure it has to be now?" Morgana asked. "A week wouldn't cost the world much, all things weighed. And the company's been good." She gave a small shrug. "We don't get a great deal of it out here."

"I wish we could." And he did. "But there are classes waiting on me, and a stack of magus business that's only grown taller while I've been away. Can't be helped." 

He smiled. "When this is behind us, though — when it's all settled — we'll come back and take that week. Take a month. As many as you can stand to host."

"Listen to you." Morgana’s mouth curved. "All grown up and responsible. Magus business." 

She shook her head. "It feels like yesterday the worst worry in your life was packing on enough muscle down at the Combat Athletic Club."

Adom laughed, and so did Sam.

"Good times," Adom said.

And it reminded him he ought to look in on the old crowd soon. Hugo, Kaius, Phil, the rest of them; they'd all wound up under the Magisterium one way or another, and he'd let far too long go by.

"I'll send word," he told her. "For real, this time. I think I've got a way to reach you."

Her eyebrow rose. "Have you? My home is not, you may have noticed, the easiest place in the world to post a letter."

"Wind elementals." He'd watched them ride in over the crossing. "They can reach this place without the slightest trouble; I checked. And I've a friend who's an elementalist. I'll ask her to carry letters out to you on hers."

There was a small pause, then...

"Her," said Morgana.

"Her, is it?" said Karion, lighting up.

"Oohh," Sam agreed.

"She's a friend." Adom felt the ground going out from under him and kept talking anyway. "An elementalist. She is not my girlfriend."

"Did anyone say girlfriend?" Karion asked the open air. "I don't believe the word girlfriend was spoken."

"You were about to."

"Was I, though?"

"Regardless," Adom said, with what dignity he could gather, "I don't have a girlfriend." 

He looked round at all of them. "And before this goes any further, not one of you does either, so let's all mind the stones we're throwing."

"Speak for yourself," said Damus, and everything stopped.

Adom turned. Sam's mouth had come open. Karion had gone completely still.

"...I beg your pardon," Karion said. "What?"

Damus looked back at them, serene, and offered not one word more. He had the best card at the table and no intention of showing it.

"You can't just say that and—" Sam began.

"I can," Damus said, and adjusted his cuff. "And I have."

He didn't elaborate. He never would, in fact, however the subject was come at in the months that followed; but that was a problem for later mornings than this one.

Bedivere's laugh broke first, that great rolling thing of his, and then Morgana was laughing too, the tiredness gone clean out of her face for a moment.

"God," she said, pressing the back of a hand to one eye. "That. That's what I'll miss. The whole lot of you, carrying on—" she waved at the bickering tangle of them, "—I'd forgotten what it was even like, to have it around."

"Then we'll bring it back," Adom said. "You don't get to build a place like this at the edge of the world and then complain that nobody visits." He waited a beat, then… 

"You're not as far off as you think, Morg. Not anymore. We found you once. We'll keep finding you."

It wasn't really enough for what he meant. But she seemed to have understood, so he left it at that.

"See that you do," she said.

From the deck above, one of Lowe's men called down that the tide was with them and the wind sat fair, and they'd best be away while both still held.

So that was that, then.

Bedivere came forward and took Adom's hand in that walnut-cracking grip of his, one last time.

"When you see your father," he said. "If the moment ever sits right for it; tell him the Papa's still above the ground. He'll know the name." 

There was an old fondness under the bluster as he said it. 

"And tell him he turned out better than I ever beat him into expecting. He'll know what that means well enough."

"I'll pass it on," Adom said, chuckling at the nickname, and finding himself very much wanting to hear his father tell it 

"He'll be glad of it. More than glad." He added. "He'd want to hear it from you himself, I think. When things are quieter."

"Aye. Perhaps he would. When things are quieter."

Then Morgana stepped in front of them.

"Wait. Before you go." She lifted a hand. "Let me look at you. Properly. You two especially—" Adom and Sam — "stand still a moment, and let me."

They stood still. She looked at both of them, fixing them in her memory, taking in whatever it was she meant to carry off this dock and keep. Neither of them said a word. It didn't seem the moment for it.

Then she pulled them in — both at once, an arm round each neck, the way she had the day they'd arrived — and held on.

"Next time we meet," she said against them, "I want it to be in peace, just like this. The two of you turning up out of the sea for no better reason than to be a nuisance." A breath. "So take care of yourselves out there. Both of you, all of you. And whatever it costs, whatever you have to do—" her voice caught, but she didn't fight it, "—don't die. Please. Don't die on me."

"We'll do our best," Adom said.

"Do better than your best."

"...We'll do better than our best."

She let them go. When she stepped back, her eyes had gone red at the rims, though her voice held steady, and she didn't trouble to pretend otherwise.

"Go on, then. Before I make fools of the lot of us."

They went up the gangway. Lowe's crew cast off, the lines coming in wet and heavy, and the ship swung its nose toward open water and the veil beyond. Adom found himself a place at the rail.

On the quay Morgana didn't wave. She only stood there with Bedivere and the two brothers and watched them go, getting smaller, the green cliffs and pale towers rising behind her, the blue of that sea widening between ship and shore.

She lifted a hand once, near the end, when they were almost too far to make out.

Adom lifted his back.

Then the harbour folded shut behind them — the veil drawing across it the same way it had drawn open, sky and water closing over the place as though it had never been there to find — and Ithrenaar was gone, and there was nothing ahead but grey sea.

The boys stood still at the rail, and when the island was well gone, Adom found he couldn't put it off any longer.

"There's a thing I should say. Properly." He turned from the water to face them. "I asked the three of you to come on this with me, and I told you it was for the company. That part was true." He hesitated a bit. "It wasn't the whole of it."

The others waited.

"Your families." He made himself say it plainly. "If this goes the way it might — if it comes to standing Morgana up against the Emperor — then proof won't be enough on its own. She'll need houses behind her. Names with weight. And the three of you happen to come from three of the names that carry it." 

He grimaced. "To be clear, I didn't bring you out here to use you. But I'd be lying if I said the thought never crossed my—"

"Adom." Karion lifted a hand. "Stop talking and let me save you the speech."

Adom stopped.

"For whatever it's worth, you have mine," Karion said. 

"Not the house's to give yet, I know that, that's my father's word, not mine. But I know how the man thinks." 

There was none of his usual performance in it, only a plain certainty. "He's a Dimitri to the bone, and there are two things he despises above all else in this world: being made a fool of, and a man who'd sell his own people. Lay proof in front of him that the Emperor's done both — sold Sundar's own subjects and murdered his brother to bury it — and you won't have to ask House Dimitri for a thing. We'll already be standing there."

"...Thank you," Adom said.

"Same from mine." Damus added. 

"House Lightbringer doesn't move fast. Never has. But it doesn't forget an oath, and the old houses swore to the founding laws same as anyone: fratricide, the slaving statute, all of it." 

He leaned on a bar. "My father will want the proof set in front of him twice over before he commits a single man. But once it's there, he commits all of them. I'd stake my name on it." 

He paused, as if realising something. "I suppose I'm staking it already, just by being here."

Satisfied, Adom turned to Sam, who had gone quiet and was already shaking his head before Adom could get a word out.

"Don't look at me like that. I'm not a lord." 

Sam pushed his glasses up. "My family sells things. Very well, and for a great deal of money… but we sell things. We're not sworn to any founding law, we don't owe the crown an oath, and I'm not the head of the house, my father is. I can't stand here and hand you the Harbinskys the way these two can pledge their banners." 

He said it flatly, which was unlike him. "And merchants don't think in oaths anyway. They think in ledgers. Which way the wind's about to blow, and how to be standing on the right side of it when it does."

"I know," Adom said. "I wasn't going to ask you to—"

"I'm not finished." A dry flicker of a smile, very Sam this time. 

"Because when it comes to ledgers, the day there's hard proof the Emperor's been selling his own people to slavers; the day that's out, and the houses start to move, and anyone with sense can see how it ends?" 

He looked at Adom. "No one on this earth changes tables faster than a rich man who's just watched the safe money get up and walk. My father first of all. When it comes to light, the Harbinsky house will know precisely where to place its coin. I know exactly how he counts."

Adom observed the three of them, and felt the weight he'd been carrying since the breakfast table ease by a fraction.

"Thank you," he said. "All of you. Truly."

"Don't go sentimental," Karion said. "It doesn't suit you."

And that was the end of it. The wind held fair, the ship came round, and they set their course back across the long grey miles toward Arkhos.

Chapter 36. Celebrity

Three days after he came home, Adom sat through a session of the Council of Magi, and the air in the room felt almost… cordial.

It wasn’t warm, to be clear. He wouldn't have gone so far as that. But since the duel the worst of the edges had come off, and the change showed in small ways. A few of them had even said good morning to him on the way in. 

The bar was that low, but it made for an easier meeting. 

The last report wound down — Corvus, something about the ley-survey out east, thorough to the point of cruelty — and Gaius let the silence sit a moment before he gathered his papers.

"Thank you, all of you. Good work this month." A dry glance down the table. "Some of you more than others, Corvus."

Chairs scraped. The room rose in its usual unhurried shuffle, talk breaking out in twos and threes, and they drifted toward the great doors. Beth passed Adom's chair and tapped him once on the shoulder with a knitting needle, said nothing, and left.

What the hell was even that?

"Magus Sylla." Gaius didn't look up. "A moment, if you have one."

He'd actually been looking forward to going home and getting a few chapters into a book that had been waiting on his nightstand for a week; but the Archmage was his boss, and "no, I'd rather go read" was not among the answers available to him.

So he stayed.

He waited out the slow emptying of the chamber and the grind of the doors. Then he crossed to the head of the table and dropped into the chair beside the Archmage's.

They'd done the hard part of this on the day he'd come home, the whole of it: the massacre, the army, the proof and Morgana's terms, laid out over an afternoon and most of a pot of tea. 

There was nothing left to report. Only one thing still hung between them, unanswered.

"You never told me when," Adom said. "Castle White. You said you'd think on the timing."

"I did. I have." Gaius reached for his pipe and busied himself with the lighting of it, which Adom had long since learned to read as the man arranging his thoughts. "I do not think you will like it."

"Tell me anyway."

"Not yet. Not for a good while yet." He drew on the pipe. "Getting you in isn't the trouble. I could have you through Lord Aldric's gate within the week, with papers good enough to fool his steward. It's what comes after that I won't gamble."

Sweet smoke curled between them.

"Proof is only worth the ground that's ready to take it. Stand Morgana up tomorrow with a perfect recording of that night, and all you've got is a miracle no one's prepared to use. The houses aren't aligned. The Magisterium's own footing isn't where I need it." 

He tapped ash. "Too many pieces still on the wrong squares. Move too early and you spend the best card we will ever hold, for nothing."

"How long, then?"

"To do it right? To have it land the way it has to?" Gaius weighed it. "A couple of years. Perhaps a little past that."

Adom sat with that.

It was longer than he'd wanted, by a wide margin. But he'd been a long time alive, in his way, and he knew sound counsel when it was set in front of him. This was sound.

"And in the meantime?"

"In the meantime we don't sit on our hands." Gaius's eyes sharpened. "The man's still selling people, Adom. Today, while we wait for the board to come right."

He gestured with the pipe.

"No reason at all we can't be quietly undoing some of it. Closing routes. Freeing what cargo we can reach. Making that quiet little trade of his far less profitable and far more bother than it's worth." 

He gave a thin smile. "With the happy side benefit of bleeding him while we're at it."

"...I see," Adom said slowly. And he did. It was a long game. He'd have to learn to play one.

Gaius reached for the tea things, and his voice came out lighter.

"Tell me something pleasant, then. Your classes. My apprentice, Eren. How's he coming along?"

Adom found himself smiling. "Good. He's good." He took a sip of the tea. "Not exceptional, but solid. Works hard for everything he gets, and gets most of it in the end. I don't hold that against him."

"No. Nor should you." Gaius chuckled. "Do you know, I think he may be the only honest learning curve left in my private circle. Every other person is a prodigy of one stripe or another, and you, my boy, the most outrageous of the lot. Youngest magus in the history of the Empire. It's nearly obscene."

"I had a head start, that's all," Adom said.

"A head start." Gaius snorted. "A head start. Listen to him." 

He waved the pipe. "Same head start I had, near enough, and it didn't make me the youngest magus in imperial history. So let's not pretend it's only the years doing the work."

Adom let that pass with a small smile. It was an old argument and neither of them ever won it.

"But that's rather my point," Gaius went on. "It's why I'm glad of your Eren, and his plain, hard-won progress."

"How so?"

"Second circle that young is no small thing. But he still needs teaching. Still gets stuck and asks the wrong question and learns from the asking. He still wants someone at his shoulder to say there, look there." 

The Archmage's smile went almost wistful. "That's the whole joy of it, you understand. Being needed. A student who turns up already knowing — who never once needs you for anything — it's a wonder to watch. But it takes half the fun clean out of the work."

"He's lucky to have you," Adom said. Which was true, and meant rather more than one thing.

"They all are," said Gaius, with no modesty whatsoever, and grinned while pouring the tea.

What came after had nothing to do with emperors at all.

For the better part of forty-five minutes they simply sat over the tea and talked. About the old life, both of theirs, and the handful of genuinely funny things to be dredged out of two lifetimes that had not, on balance, been overburdened with comedy.

Gaius told the one about the duel, the goat, and the visiting dignitary, which Adom had heard twice already and would happily hear a third time. Adom gave him the first spell he'd ever truly botched, eighty-odd years gone, which still set the old man wheezing.

It was the easiest Adom had felt in days.

At last Gaius wiped at one eye, still chuckling, and glanced at the long gold light coming through the window.

"Ah — no, look at the hour. That's me, I'm afraid. I've somewhere to be." 

He set the pipe down with real reluctance. "The Elven Archmage of the Greywood crossed the water to see me this morning, and I've kept her waiting quite long enough as it is."

Adom glanced up. "Oh? Athena Ravenshadow?"

Gaius's brows rose. "You're familiar?"

"Never had the pleasure. Not in the flesh." Adom turned his cup. "But I knew of her. Before. Fierce as they come, by everything I ever heard; and she finished up headmistress here, at Xerkes, near the end of it, after the Greywood fell. Held the whole place together with half of it burning, the way the story went."

"Did she, now?" 

A panel in the wall had slid back at some point during the talk, baring a tall mirror Adom had never once seen uncovered in all his visits, and Gaius had drifted in front of it without quite seeming to notice he'd done it. He was working at a tie. 

"Well. She's none of that yet, and I'd thank you not to tell her it's coming." 

He reached for a small bottle at the foot of the mirror and spritzed it twice, once at the throat and once at the collar, then set to arranging his hair and smoothing his beard. 

"I'd take you along to meet her, only she's here quietly. Very quietly. She'd not love being paraded in front of company." 

A last adjustment. Then he breathed once into his cupped palm, sniffed it, and looked satisfied.

Adom looked at him as the pieces fell into place in no particular hurry. 

His brows drew down, then climbed. "...Gaius. Are you and she—"

"That'll do." Gaius was all brisk business now. "Let an old man keep one or two of his secrets, thank you kindly." 

He gathered his robes and made for the door. "And shut it behind you when you go. Properly. The wretched thing sticks."

And so he went, as Adom sat a moment, then huffed out a laugh he couldn't help.

What the hell?

At the door, Gaius paused, one hand on the frame.

"Oh — by the by." He didn't turn round. "Go and see Beth. Soon as you're able."

"Why?"

"She's agreed to take you on." He gave a sidelong glance back. "Divination. She'll have you after all."

Adom sat up. "...Truly? She said yes?"

"She did."

Wow. He'd been after this the better part of a year; stubbornly, down every channel he had, Gaius among them. 

Divination was the one door that had stayed shut to him, and not for lack of shoving at it. It was scarcely a teachable thing to begin with. One either had the knack threaded through somewhere, or one did not, and the rare few who did seldom lived long enough, or stayed sane enough, to pass it to anyone else.

Beth was the only true diviner Adom had ever met. Very likely the only one he ever would.

He'd asked her himself, more than once. Each time she'd stare at him, tell him he wasn't ready, and go back to her knitting as though that closed the matter. Not even an explanation on how to be ready.

It was maddening. Mysterious and kind of cool, but maddening. The way she did everything.

But now, it seemed, he was ready.

"What changed?" Adom asked.

But Gaius only smiled, giving him nothing on that score. "She walks in Law's Park in the evening. Sunset, the northeast corner; by the fountain, under Law's statue. You'll not get a better chance to catch her in a yielding mood."

"Should I pretend it's chance that I'm there?"

"God, no. She'll know before you've rounded the path." He hauled the sticking door open with a grunt and a muttered curse. "Be honest with her. It's the only thing that's ever worked on Beth, and even that only sometimes."

He then looked at the clock in the chamber, noticed the hour, then "Ta-ta!"

And he was gone.

Soon enough Adom got up too, and let himself out, wrestling — as promised — with the sticking door.

He'd go to Beth's that evening. Law's Park, sunset, the fountain. The thought sat warm in him the whole way down through the Magisterium's halls.

It mattered more than he'd let Gaius see. 

A magus he already was, the youngest in the Empire's history; but a true Archmage was meant to hold all the schools at once, every discipline bent to his hand. Adom had most of them well enough, but two had always fought him. 

Elementalism he'd long since stopped coaxing and simply learned to work around. And divination he had never once managed a finger's purchase on, however hard he threw himself at it.

Those two were the wall he kept walking into. The ceiling over everything else he could do. If Beth could get him over even one of them, it might be the thing that finally broke the whole logjam loose.

He was still turning that over when he stepped out into the streets of Arkhos and a voice spoke up at his elbow.

"Excuse me… are you Adom Sylla?"

"Hm?" He turned, finding a bright-eyed young man hovering. "Oh. Yes. Hi."

"It is you." The young man lit up like a festival lantern. "I knew it! Sorry — I don't mean to be a bother, it's only — could I trouble you for a signature? Just a quick one. My sister will never believe me otherwise."

"...Sure," Adom said. "Of course."

He signed the scrap of paper held out to him. The young man beamed at it as though it were the deed to a house.

And that should have been the end of it, but it was not.

"Oh, it's you, isn't it?" said the next one, already shouldering in. Scaled and yellow-eyed, a lizardman a clear head taller than Adom, with a tourist's sunburn gone pink across his snout. 

"The Ghost. My whole clutch came up the coast to see the city, and here you are, just standing about. Would you? For us?"

Adom signed for him as well.

Which was, he understood a beat too late, precisely the wrong thing to have done.

Because there was another behind the lizardman, and two more behind that, and the word had begun to travel: the Ghost, the Ghost's out, it's him, it's actually him.

Only then did Adom remember that it was tourist season. The city ran fat with visitors this time of year, every inn full to the rafters, every street thick with people who'd come a very long way specifically in the hope of glimpsing exactly the thing now standing out in the open without the first scrap of cover over it.

And Adom, who knew better, who always wore his pointy hat and a whole careful architecture of habit built around this precise danger, had walked out of the Magisterium with his head full of divination and clean forgotten to put it on.

By the time he thought of it, there were thirty people closing in. And more coming.

To their credit though, they were polite about it.

They asked nicely, and thanked him, and told him what his Krozball run in one final or another had meant to them. Children were hoisted up for a better look. Every last instance of it was kind.

It was also a thing that, once begun, could not simply be set down. The moment he signed the first, stopping turned into its own small cruelty — refuse the next and they only pressed, gently, wounded, just one, please, we came so far — and so the simplest course, the only course, was to keep going. Smile. Sign. Smile. Sign.

And it was fine. Really, it was. It only wore on a man the same way a thousand small kindnesses did, by sheer accumulated weight, until somewhere past the first few hundred faces he'd stopped being quite able to feel his own.

Adom was lost somewhere in that fog when a sharp thing cut up through him along the spine, and disappeared.

Overstimulated as he was, for an instant he half-thought his own frayed senses had thrown it up out of nothing.

But they hadn't.

He knew the feeling far too well, even buried under all that noise: the particular pressure of mana pulling tight somewhere close, the held breath before it turned into a spell. And there was a great deal of it gathering. Enough that the battle mage part of him answered before the rest had caught up.

Offensive.

He turned toward the source and wove, in the same motion, a barrier into the air in front of him — in front of them, the whole bright crowd of them — half a breath before the spell struck it and broke apart in a wash of light.

The people began to scream.

Then came another pull, already tightening. He felt that one just as clearly, with the barrier there again to meet it, and it shattered against the wall of force the same as the first.

Then he stopped waiting for a third and jumped.

He cleared the heads of the crowd before the weaver — a man, half-tucked into the mouth of an alley — had drawn breath for his next weave, and came down on him with a hand already closing around his throat.

The second was off to the side. A woman, hand lifted, a spell most of the way to her fingertips.

There was no time to reach her, so Adom used the man instead.

[Propulsion.]

The spell seized the body in his grip and threw it; a grown man turned into a hurled stone, flung across the gap and into the woman before she could loose what she'd built. 

The two of them met in the air with an ugly sound, then went up and back together, over a gutter and into a chimney stack hard enough to split the brick.

Adom was already moving before they'd finished falling.

He reached them in a few strides. Both were mostly gone — stunned, tangled together, the fight knocked clean out of them — though the man was still trying, fingers twitching through the opening shape of a weak, desperate weave.

Adom caught the hand before it could close then pressed down, and the half-formed spell guttered out beneath his palm. And as it did, he saw the thing inked into the skin on the back of it.

A staff crossed with a quill, surrounded by a circle of stars.

…He was fairly certain that was the Order's sigil.

His Order.