Chapter 63

Chapter 63: Chapter 63

According to the morning broadsheets in the Crown Jewel, a copper boiler had ruptured beneath the Merchant’s Square during the Festival of Jute.

Nia read the article aloud over breakfast on Monday morning, her toast held halfway to her mouth.

"Listen to this," she said, scanning the inked column with a mix of disbelief and reluctant admiration. "’City engineers attribute the blast to faulty pressure valves installed during the spring renovations. Casualties were minimal, and the Imperial Guard restored order within the hour. Headmaster Corvus of the Academy expressed his gratitude that no cadets were near the district at the time.’"

She lowered the paper and looked across the oak table at the three of us.

Luckas let out a short, bitter laugh, poking at his scrambled eggs with a silver fork. He had a faded purple bruise along his left cheekbone and his eyebrows were slightly singed at the tips—souvenirs from keeping thirty crossbowmen pinned down with his own body heat.

"Faulty valves," Luckas muttered. "I ruined my best velvet doublet in a sewer pipe, burned through half my reserves, and didn’t even get my name in the paper. Not even a footnote."

"If your name was in the paper, the Republic would know who stopped them," Kaelen said, reaching across the table to steal a strip of crisp bacon off Luckas’s plate. "Eat your eggs."

"That was my bacon," Luckas complained, though he didn’t try to take it back. He leaned his chin on his hand and looked at me. "How’s the palm?"

I flexed my right hand under the table. It was wrapped in clean white linen smeared with numbing salve from the infirmary. The skin underneath was tight and pink, itching fiercely as it healed from the acid burn, though it didn’t hurt much anymore.

"It’s fine," I said, taking a sip of hot black tea. "Stiff in the morning, that’s all. I’m more annoyed about my knife. I had that blade for two years."

"You have an excuse to visit Master Bram, then," Nia said, folding the newspaper and tucking it into her satchel. "The quartermaster down in the Vaults. Since the Headmaster confirmed your third-place ranking, you’re entitled to third-tier steel. Most first-years only get standard iron practice gear."

"Do I need a voucher?" I asked.

"Just your rank badge and a thick skin," Nia grinned. "My brother told me Bram hates everyone under the age of forty. If you ask him for something pretty, he throws a hammer at your head."

"Sounds like home," I said, finishing my tea and standing up. "I’ll go before Geography. Save me a seat in the back."

"Try not to break the old man," Luckas called after me. "I need him to polish my rapier next week."

"Polish it yourself, Vance," I said over my shoulder as I walked out of the dining hall.

The Armory Vaults were carved into the bedrock beneath the Vanguard Pits, far removed from the bright marble towers and floating gardens of the upper campus. As I walked down the wide stone steps, the air grew cooler and smelled of coal smoke, whale oil, and quenched iron. It was the most comfortable place I had found in the entire citadel.

The main forge was a wide, low-ceilinged hall lined with racks of halberds, longswords, and oiled leather brigandines. An older man with a thick grey beard and a leather apron burned full of tiny spark-holes was standing at an anvil, straightening the guard of a bent practice sword with short, precise taps of a ball-peen hammer.

I stopped beside the wooden counter and waited until he finished the bend and plunged the iron into a barrel of oil. Steam hissed up toward the ceiling.

He wiped his hands on a greasy rag and turned to look at me. His left ear was missing its upper half, likely taken off by a blade decades ago, and his eyes were small and shrewd behind thick iron-rimmed spectacles.

"If you’re here to complain that your practice sword is too heavy, go do push-ups until it isn’t," Master Bram grunted.

"I need a combat knife," I said, resting my bandaged right hand on the counter. "Eight-inch blade, drop point, single fuller. Non-reflective steel if you have it. And a replacement right gauntlet. Heavy leather, iron-weave lining in the palm."

Bram paused, looking down at my linen bandages, then up at the silver Rank Three clasp pinned to the collar of my dark grey cloak.

"You’re the 7th Legion girl," he said. It wasn’t a question. "The one Corvus sent down a note about on Saturday night. Said you melted a Veriti trench knife."

"Acid," I said simply.

"Waste of good frontier steel," he muttered, though the annoyance in his voice softened a fraction. He turned and unlocked a heavy iron gate behind the counter, disappearing into the deeper storage vaults reserved for the top ten rankers.

He came back two minutes later carrying a flat wooden box and a pair of dark, supple leather gauntlets. He set the box on the counter and flipped the brass latches open.

Resting on a bed of oiled wool was a heavy trench dagger forged from matte-grey folded steel. The hilt was wrapped in rough sharkskin for grip when wet, and the pommel was shaped into a flat, heavy octagon meant for cracking helmets.

I picked it up with my left hand, testing the balance on my index finger. It sat right at the guard. No jewels, no gold etching, no family crests. Just nine inches of ugly, reliable metal.

"Dwarven ore from the deep mines," Bram said, watching how I held it. "Quenched in brine. It won’t hold an edge forever if you go hacking at granite with it, and it doesn’t have any runes carved into the fuller, so don’t try pushing too much heat through it. But it won’t snap in a ribcage."

"It’s good," I said, sliding the dagger into the empty sheath on my right thigh. It fit with a solid snick. I tried on the new right gauntlet, flexing my fingers carefully over the bandages. The leather was already broken in, oiled and soft, with thin overlapping plates of dark steel sewn inside the palm. "Thank you, Master Bram."

"Sign the ledger," he grunted, shoving a dusty book and a stub of charcoal across the wood. "And next time you run into alchemists, use a rock instead of my knives."

I signed my name—neater than usual, now that I wasn’t using a fragile goose quill—and headed back up into the morning sun.

If the Armory felt like home, third-period Ember Manipulation felt like pulling teeth.

The class was held in the Crucible, a domed stone hall lined with individual slate workbenches. Twenty-four first-year cadets stood at their stations. I was at the back table between Luckas and Nia, with Kaelen one row ahead of us.

Our instructor, Professor Maren, was a slender, sharp-featured woman in her fifties who had never set foot on a battlefield, yet possessed the most terrifyingly precise thermal control I had ever seen. While she spoke, three tiny spheres of blue fire orbited her left wrist like miniature moons, never wavering by a millimeter, never scorching the lace cuffs of her sleeves.

"Most of you believe strength is a matter of volume," Professor Maren said, walking slowly down the center aisle. "You think the mage who burns the hottest wins the engagement. That is how border soldiers think, and it is why border soldiers plateau at the Swelled Bud stage for the rest of their short, brutish lives."

Her gaze flickered briefly toward the back row. I kept my face blank.

"To reach the Bud Burst, you must learn to thread a needle with a wildfire," she continued, tapping her wand against the chalkboard. On every slate desk sat a delicate leaf blown from paper-thin clear glass, resting inside a brass ring. "Your task today is simple. Draw your internal Ember out of your palm, form a stable thermal ring around the glass leaf, and raise the temperature of the brass outer ring by exactly forty degrees—enough to make the brass glow dull red—without cracking the glass leaf in the center. Begin."

Around the room, cadets rolled up their sleeves and held their hands over the brass rings.

Beside me, Luckas let out a quiet breath and held his right hand two inches above his desk. Within five seconds, a neat, shimmering circle of orange heat formed around his brass ring. He was good at this; he had been practicing formal forms since he was eight years old. Still, a bead of sweat rolled down his temple as he fought to keep the heat from bleeding inward toward the fragile glass.

On my other side, Nia closed her eyes, biting her lower lip. Her internal Ember was much smaller than ours, barely a flicker compared to Luckas’s furnace, so it took her nearly a minute just to warm the brass. However, because her output was low, her control was remarkably steady. The glass leaf inside her ring didn’t even tremble.

I looked down at my own glass leaf.

On the battlefield, I used my Ember like a battering ram—shoving massive surges of heat into my muscles or dumping raw power into the runes on my sword. I had never needed to warm a piece of brass without hurting a leaf.

I held my uninjured left hand over the desk and tried to draw out a thin thread of heat.

The Ember in my chest answered immediately, surging up my arm like water through a broken dam. I tried to pinch it down at my wrist, forcing it into a circle.

For two seconds, the brass ring glowed dull red. Then my concentration slipped by a fraction of an inch. A stray pulse of heat leaked inward.

Crack.

The glass leaf snapped cleanly down the middle, the tiny stem melting into a droplet of clear liquid on the slate.

Luckas glanced sideways without moving his hand, a corner of his mouth twitching upward. "Murdered the leaf, Lieutenant."

"Shut up," I muttered.

I raised my hand to ask the teaching assistant for a replacement glass leaf. Over the next forty minutes, I broke six more of them.

The seventh time, it wasn’t even the heat that did it—the cold, passive hum of the Rune of Antiquity on my right arm interfered with my focus, pulling ambient light toward my desk and creating a localized draft that shattered the hot glass. By the time the bell rang to end the period, a small pile of broken glass sat on the corner of my workbench, and my shoulders were knotted tight with frustration.

Professor Maren stopped by my desk as the students began packing their bags. She looked down at the pile of melted glass, then up at me. She didn’t sneer like the noble cadets did; her expression was purely clinical.

"Your output is too heavy, Cadet Elvit," she said calmly. "You are trying to carve wood with a siege hammer. Until you learn to separate your combat instincts from your circulation, the Bud Burst will remain completely out of your reach. I expect to see you in the practice rooms this evening."

"Yes, Professor," I said tightly.

As we walked out into the sunny quadrangle for the afternoon break, I rubbed the bridge of my nose, feeling a dull headache coming on behind my right eye.

"Don’t let her get to you," Nia said, bumping her shoulder against mine. "Half the class cracked their glass. And the ones who didn’t barely got the brass warm."

"You didn’t crack yours," I pointed out.

"That’s because I have the Ember reserves of a teacup," Nia laughed. "If someone attacked me in an alley, I could maybe warm up their soup before they stabbed me. You can knock down a stone wall. It’s a fair trade."

"Still," Luckas said, falling into step beside us and stretching his arms behind his head. "Maren has a point. You pull all your heat from your chest at once, like you’re bracing for a charge. Tonight after dinner, I’ll show you the breathing cadence my old tutor taught me. It breaks the flow into smaller chambers before it hits your wrist."

I looked at him, surprised. In a school where everyone guarded their family techniques to protect their rank, offering to teach the student ranked directly above him was practically charity.

"Why help me?" I asked. "You’re Rank Four overall right now. If I fail my practicals at the end of the term, you take Rank Three without even drawing your sword."

Luckas stopped on the marble steps overlooking the lawn and looked at me like I had said something deeply offensive.

"If I take Rank Three from you, Elvit, it’s going to be because I beat you in the sand pits with a sword in my hand," he said, his voice earnest beneath his usual swagger. "Not because you lost a fight with a glass leaf. Besides, after Saturday night, I think I owe you a few breathing lessons."

Kaelen, who was sitting on the low stone wall waiting for us, peeled an apple with a small pocketknife. "He just wants an excuse to hang around our dorm wing," he said deadpan.

Luckas’s ears turned faintly red. "I’m trying to be a supportive squadmate, Kaelen."

"Sure you are," Kaelen said, cutting a slice of apple and popping it into his mouth.

Before Luckas could retort, the chatter on the lawn quieted down. Walking up the main path from the administrative spire was Aurio Gentrimio. As always, he wore his crimson-and-gold representative coat, though today he didn’t have an entourage of fourth-years trailing behind him. He was carrying a thick leather folder under one arm.

He spotted the four of us on the steps and changed direction, walking over with an easy, unhurried stride.

"Afternoon," Aurio said, offering a polite nod that included all four of us rather than just Luckas and me. "I see none of you are in the infirmary. That’s encouraging."

"Faulty boiler valves are terrible things, Representative," Luckas said smoothly.

A small, dry smile touched Aurio’s lips. "Aren’t they? The city engineers are working tirelessly to ensure it doesn’t happen again." He shifted his folder and looked at me. "How are you settling into the coursework, Elvit? Maren didn’t make you break too many leaves, I hope?"

"Seven," I admitted flatly.

Aurio chuckled—a genuine, surprisingly normal sound. "I broke twelve my first week. My father nearly disowned me when he got the supply bill. Fine control is always the hardest part when you have a large core."

He glanced around the quadrangle to make sure no other students were within earshot, then lowered his voice slightly.

"Headmaster Corvus asked me to keep an eye on the four of you," Aurio said, his amber eyes turning serious. "What happened under the Spire stays buried, for reasons I think you all understand. If the noble houses learn how close the Republic came to dropping a tower on their heirs, half the parliament will demand their children be pulled from the Academy, and the war hawks will push for an immediate invasion of the western border before our winter supply lines are ready."

"So nothing changes," Kaelen said quietly.

"Externally, no," Aurio agreed. "Which means the other nine hundred and ninety-six students in this citadel still think Elvit only holds Rank Three because of a letter from Commander Erula, and that the rest of you are just ordinary first-years. The end-of-month ranking purge is in three weeks. People are going to test you in the arenas, and the faculty won’t intervene to protect your spots. Keep your heads down, study your theory, and don’t give the upperclassmen an excuse to gang up on you during the team exercises."

He tapped the leather folder against his leg. "And Elvit? When you have a free evening this week, come up to the top floor of the Student Union. The top ten rankers have a private study hall up there. The tea is better than what they serve in the cafeteria, and the library has the original unedited notes on the Border Wars."

"I’ll think about it," I said.

"Fair enough," Aurio smiled, giving us a brief wave before continuing up the steps toward the fourth-year spire.

Nia let out a long breath once he was gone. "He’s much nicer than I expected. I thought the Rank One would be an insufferable tyrant."

"He’s a politician," Kaelen said, folding his pocketknife shut. "Politicians are always nice until they need something from you."

"Well, until he asks for a kidney, I say Elvit goes and steals some of that good tea for us," Nia declared, slinging her satchel over her shoulder. "Come on, Elvit. Professor Orlov is next, and if we’re late to Geography, he makes you draw the coastline of the Southern Isles from memory."

I adjusted the strap of my sword, feeling the solid, comforting weight of Master Bram’s new dagger against my thigh, and followed my friends across the courtyard.