Chapter 24: The Narrow Gate

For one whole week, Aren did nothing at all.

No Old Quarry, no bandages, no climbing out of windows at midnight or crawling through drains or selling anything to anyone. He went to Crane’s classes, carried Crane’s ledgers, swept the alchemy wing on his porter shifts, and when the shifts were over he went to bed like a normal student and lay there staring at the ceiling.

It was the hardest week of his new life.

Somewhere in the city, men in grey robes were missing a black iron nail. He didn’t know their faces, but he knew the person who had taken it had climbed out of a cellar on the east bank at dawn, bleeding, the morning after the Night of Bells. If the Choir was hunting that person, they would be hunting someone who was never where he was supposed to be. So for one week, Aren was exactly where he was supposed to be, every hour of the day.

’The best hiding place is a boring life. Unfortunately, it’s also extremely boring!’

He spent his evenings with Mira, though he hadn’t planned to. On the first night she knocked on his door to ask if he wanted to walk down to the docks, clearly expecting him to say no like he always did now, and when he said yes sshe looked so surprised that he nearly laughed at her.

They helped her father pull broken planks out of the wreck of his boat at the end of the pier, good wood on one side and rotten wood on the other. Her father wasn’t a talker. He was a big, quiet man with hands like Doran’s, and he looked older than Aren remembered, but on the third evening he glanced up from the planks and said, "You’re a good lad, Aren. Always were," and went back to work, and Mira carefully didn’t look at either of them for a while.

Afterward they sat on the edge of the quay eating fried fish out of paper while the river went dark. Mira told him indignantly about her Hearthwarden instructor, who made her hold her dome against falling sandbags until her nose bled. He told her about Crane’s ledgers and the nervous librarian. They argued about whether the cow in Nell’s book was ever going to do anything. Mira was sure it would turn out to be magic, and Aren was sure it would get eaten.

For seven evenings he was just a boy from the lower city sitting by the river with his oldest friend, and it felt like putting on a coat he had forgotten he owned.

On the last evening, Mira bumped his shoulder with hers. "This was nice."

"It was."

"You should do it more often. Not work so much." She smiled shyly at the water. "I like you better like this."

He didn’t tell her that he was only here because he was hiding from a cult, or that next week he would be gone again. He smiled back and said nothing, which was its own kind of lie.

On the seventh day, Doran took out his stitches. The old butcher bent over the long pink scar with a tiny pair of scissors and carefully pulled the threads one by one, each one stinging a little, and when he was done he pressed along the whole length of it from rib to hip with two thick fingers and grunted.

"Clean. No rot. Mag’s paste is worth what she charges, for once." He wiped his hands on his apron. "Healed doesn’t mean strong, boy. Take a hard hit there in the next two weeks and it’ll open like a purse."

"I’ll be careful."

"You won’t. But I said it, so it’s not my fault."

On the first morning of the new month, the nurse at the healer house met him at the door holding a small grey box no bigger than her hand, with Nell’s name on the lid in neat, old-fashioned letters.

"It was on the table in her room when I came in." "The door was locked, and I’ve got the only key." She held it out. "Is this the medicine?"

Inside were grey crystals that smelled faintly of thunder, exactly one month’s worth.

"Yes. It’s the medicine."

She studied him a moment longer, then decided not to ask, the way people in the lower city learned not to ask about a lot of things, and went to dissolve the first spoonful in warm water.

That afternoon he paid Rook his first installment, two gold crowns and four silver out of his share of the east bank, and Rook counted it quickly without looking up from his book. On the walk back up the hill, Aren took stock. The salt was paid for, the debt was shrinking, the east bank was making money, and he had seventeen silver in his pocket, a sword, and a scar.

He was afloat, barely, and that was still more than he had been a month ago.

"Some of you," Professor Crane announced the next morning, "will never reach Rank D."

He looked slowly around the basement as if he were counting the people he meant, and it was a long count.

"For the few who might, you should know what’s waiting. At Rank D, you stop gaining levels. Levels are for children. At Rank D, your body begins to change." He turned a page. "The old masters called it Tempering. The skin first, then the flesh, then the bones, the blood, the marrow, and at the very end, the heart. Each one is reforged, slowly, by the power of your class. It isn’t comfortable, and some people don’t survive it."

Nobody laughed this time.

"Your class will also give you its second skill when you break through. And for the first time, your strength can be measured: strength, agility, endurance, perception, essence and will. The alchemist-engineers of the Free Cities built a device to read them. It’s very rare and very expensive, the Academy owns one, and you won’t see it unless you earn the right to stand in front of it."

He rolled up his scroll, stopped at the door, and added one more thing without looking at anyone.

"Those who buy their road will find the gate narrower."

The basement stayed quiet until Fenwick said, very softly, "He means the nobles," and everyone in Class D understood exactly what he meant.

Aren heard the rest in the corridors that afternoon, as you heard everything at Highcrest. Vivienne Ashgrave was already Rank E, Level 7, three weeks after her Trial. Her family’s merchants brought her a fresh E-rank core every few days, the best ones from the Free Cities, sent up the hill in a locked box, and people said she’d hit Level 10 before the end of the season and become the fastest student in a hundred years.

Aren was Level 2, and he had nearly died three times for those two levels.

’Every box that comes up that hill makes her stronger. And every one makes her gate narrower. She must know. So what kind of person hears that warning and keeps opening the boxes?’

The kind with a father like the Duke of Ashgrave, he supposed.

The monthly evaluation was held in the great training yard on the last day of the week. Every student in Class D fought one from Class A in a circle of white sand while the rest of the Academy watched, and it wasn’t meant to be fair. It was meant to show the commoners where they stood.

Crane reached the end of his list and paused, just as he had at the Awakening.

"Servant. Against Silver Moon Empress."

The stands exploded.

Aren walked into the circle with his left side already aching along the pink scar. Doran had said two weeks, and it had been eight days. He couldn’t refuse, because a Servant didn’t refuse the heir of House Ashgrave. He couldn’t win. And he couldn’t take one hard hit on his left side, or it would open in front of a thousand people and someone would want to know what had cut a Servant from his ribs to his hip.

’Fine. Easy! Lose, but carefully.’

Vivienne came in from the other side without looking at him, drew her practice sword, and when the instructor’s hand dropped, she came at him like falling water.

He didn’t block, and he didn’t really dodge. He fell. Street Fighter’s Instinct showed him where each blow was headed before it left her shoulder, and he fell away from all of them like a frightened boy tripping over his own feet. A cut at his chest sent him stumbling backward onto the sand. A sweep at his legs and he rolled away in a cloud of dust with his arms flailing. A thrust at his left side, and at the very last moment he twisted and took it on the meat of his right shoulder instead, and yelled louder than it hurt.

The stands were howling with laughter. In less than a minute he was flat on his back with her blade resting on his throat, covered in dust, shoulder throbbing, scar intact.

It was easily the hardest fight he had ever fought.

And the whole time he had been watching her breathing instead of her sword. Every time she was about to strike hard enough that a real blade would have carried a crescent, she held her breath half a second too long. It was nothing in a duel, but it would be everything inside a body, a knot somewhere deep in her where the power of her class caught and stuck before it came out.

’When she reaches her next gate, that knot is going to stop her cold.’

Vivienne lifted the sword from his throat and walked out of the circle without a word.

[Vivienne Ashgrave. Hostility: 98%.]

Crane passed him on the way out of the yard without slowing down.

"You fall very well, Servant."

Aren stood in the dust watching him go and couldn’t decide whether that had been a compliment or a warning.

That night he went to Old Mag’s for the first time in a week with a single E-rank core to sell. Prices were coming back, just as he had known they would, and she gave him seven and a half silver for it, half again what it had fetched the morning after the Night of Bells.

He was at the door when she caught his sleeve. Her one eye was very serious.

"Stone-seller." Her voice was low. "Men in grey robes were at the old dye house this morning. On the east bank. Asking the children questions." She let go. "They wanted to know if anyone saw who came out of that cellar at dawn."