The Sect-house was called Aldermere, and Thomas's first sight of it, cresting the last low hill of the road Aldric's directions had set him on, was not the soaring pagoda-and-cloud spectacle Halvard's old traveler's tales had led him to half-expect, but something closer, in its overall shape, to a very large, very well-organized farm.
There were training yards, certainly — he could see disciples running forms in the middle distance, the disciplined rhythm of bodies moving through drilled motion visible even from this far off. But there were also fields, unmistakably fields, worked in neat rotated strips that ran right up to the training yards' edges without any apparent embarrassment at the proximity, and beyond the fields a long low building with smoke rising from several chimneys that could only be a kitchen large enough to feed several hundred people at once, and beyond that, smaller and plainer than Thomas had expected, a building whose open doors and steady traffic of disciples carrying baskets and bandages marked it, even from a distance, as some kind of clinic.
"Not what you pictured," said a voice beside him, and Thomas turned to find a girl about his own age, dark-haired and travel-worn in the specific way that suggested she'd walked a considerably longer road to reach this hill than he had, looking at Aldermere with the same open assessment he'd been giving it. "I read three books about Sect-houses before I left home. None of them had a bean field in the middle."
"Was one of the books called something like The Ascension of the Ninefold Sword?" Thomas asked, half a guess, and the girl laughed — a real laugh, surprised out of her — and admitted that yes, one of them had been almost exactly that.
Her name, he learned over the walk down the hill, was Wren, and she'd come from a district two provinces over that Thomas gathered, from the careful way she mentioned it, had fared considerably worse than his own during the frontier's breaking — she didn't say more than that, not that first day, and Thomas, who understood something about carrying a grief too large to hand a stranger on a first meeting, didn't press.
They arrived at the gate together, and were sorted, along with perhaps thirty other new disciples that spring, by a steward whose name was Elder Marek — a broad, weathered woman with forearms like a blacksmith's and a manner so entirely without ceremony that Thomas mistook her, for the first ten minutes, for someone's mother come to see her own child settled rather than the person actually in charge of the whole intake.
"You'll each be assigned a work rotation before you're assigned a single lesson," Elder Marek told the gathered new disciples, in a voice pitched to carry without needing to be raised. "Kitchen, fields, clinic, or the youngest children's minding — everyone rotates through all four across their first year regardless of what you think you came here to learn. If that disappoints anyone hoping to start their morning with a sword in hand, I'd rather know it now than have you sulk about it for a month." A ripple of nervous laughter went through the gathered disciples; Marek did not smile, though Thomas thought he caught something warm moving beneath the flatness of her delivery. "You are not here to be taught how to be strong. You are here to be given the chance to become the kind of person strength is safe to hand to. We've found, across a great many generations of trying it the other way round first, that the order matters rather a lot."
Thomas was assigned, that first month, to the fields, alongside Wren and a third new disciple named Iyo — grey-skinned, long-limbed, quietly watchful in a way that put Thomas, with a small private jolt, in mind of the Vessic he'd seen in the market square as a very small child, carrying a sick foundling through a crowd that had made room for both of them without comment. Iyo, it turned out, actually was Vessic, one of a small handful at Aldermere that year, and bore the careful, economical grace of a species built for long endurance rather than short bursts, which made them, Thomas quickly learned, considerably better suited to a full day's harrow-work than either of the two humans sweating and blistering beside them.
"You'll toughen," Iyo said, on the third evening, watching Thomas examine a new blister with the resigned expression of a boy discovering that a twice-lived life had not, in fact, spared his hands from the ordinary consequences of unfamiliar labor. "Everyone does. The Sect doesn't hand out salves for it either, before you ask — Elder Marek says a disciple who can't be trusted to tend their own small hurts honestly can't be trusted to properly weigh the size of anyone else's, later."
It was, Thomas thought, turning the observation over that night in the long dormitory hall he now shared with some forty other new disciples, a very Aldermere kind of lesson — not delivered as a lecture, simply lived, embedded in the ordinary friction of the days, the way Sennet's teachings had always arrived sideways rather than head-on.
He came to understand, across that first season, that the fields and kitchen and clinic and children's-minding weren't merely a hazing ritual dressed up as humility training, though he'd half-suspected, his first week, that this was exactly what it was. The harvest from Aldermere's fields, he learned from an older disciple overseeing the rotation, went first to the three poorest villages within a day's walk of the Sect-house, before a single sack of it fed the disciples who'd grown it — a detail that struck Thomas, hauling grain sacks onto a wagon bound for a village he'd never see, with a force he hadn't expected a simple logistical fact to carry. The clinic, similarly, treated anyone who came through its doors, disciple or villager, free of any fee, staffed on rotation by disciples still years from any formal healing technique, doing nothing grander than changing dressings and minding fevers under a trained healer's watchful direction, because — as the healer running that week's rotation told them, in the same flat, unceremonious tone Elder Marek favored — a disciple who'd never sat through a full night with a frightened, feverish child had no business, later, being trusted with techniques that could do considerably more damage than good in careless or untested hands.
"Where does it come from, then," Thomas asked Iyo, one evening, turning over a question that had been building in him since his first sight of the training yards. "The techniques. The manuals. I keep waiting for someone to tell me they're locked in some hall I'll need to earn my way into, guarded, secret — every book I ever read about a place like this made a whole drama out of that part. Nobody's mentioned it once."
"Because there isn't one," Iyo said, with the mild puzzlement of someone answering a question they'd never thought to consider strange. "The Archive's open to any disciple who wants to walk in and read, first day or fortieth year, doesn't matter. Elder Marek says hoarding a technique that could save a stranger's life, just to keep some advantage over a rival Sect that might otherwise reach the same skill first, is exactly the kind of unlove the whole cultivation the technique's meant to channel would refuse to reward in the first place — what would be the sense, she says, in gatekeeping knowledge with one hand while claiming to serve with the other." Iyo considered this a moment longer, in their careful, unhurried way. "It doesn't actually cost the Sect anything to keep it open, either, if you think it through properly. A disciple who hasn't grown the reach to wield a District-threshold technique can read every word of the manual describing it and still not manage to do more than the words on the page, the same way you could read every treatise on swordplay ever written and still lose your first real bout to someone who's simply drilled the forms ten thousand more times than you have. The knowledge was never the scarce thing here, Thomas. The capacity was. And capacity can't be stolen off a shelf."
The formative event of that first season — the one Thomas would return to, years later, whenever anyone asked him what had actually convinced him Aldermere's teachings were more than pleasant theory dressed up in a farm's clothing — came in early summer, when Elder Marek announced that the new intake's first true assignment outside the Sect-house walls would not be any kind of combat trial, but a relief mission to a village three days' walk east, still recovering from a spring flood that had washed out half its granary stores before the planting season could properly begin.
"No techniques," Marek told them, the morning the wagons were loaded. "No cultivation on display, no drama, nothing any of you will be able to tell a proud story about afterward. You'll dig, and haul, and rebuild what the water took, alongside people who are tired and frightened and in no mood to be impressed by a Sect-house robe. If any of you came here half-hoping your first mission would look like something out of a storybook, I'd rather disappoint you now, gently, than let the village's own patience do it less gently later."
Thomas went, alongside Wren and Iyo and some two dozen others, and found the work exactly as unglamorous as promised — three days of mud and lifted timber and the particular bone-deep exhaustion of labor his old-world hands, even relived through a body considerably younger and hardier than the one he'd died in, had never quite grown fully accustomed to. He noticed, on the second day, one of their fellow new disciples — a sharp-featured boy named Corrin, from a wealthy merchant family in the capital, who'd made no particular secret, across the season, of his ambition to reach District-threshold before he turned twenty, a target Elder Marek had received, when Corrin first announced it, with an expression Thomas privately catalogued as patient, weathered dread — working with a visible, performative intensity that outpaced everyone else's honest effort by a wide margin: lifting heavier loads than necessary in full view of the village elders, making a point, twice that Thomas witnessed directly, of loudly refusing his own share of the relief meal in favor of a village child who hadn't actually asked for it, in a gesture so carefully staged that the child, confused, had simply looked to her own mother rather than accept it.
Thomas felt the air, that evening, and understood immediately, with the same clean certainty he remembered from watching Perrin's woodpile a decade before, that nothing had settled over Corrin at all. No stillness. No weighing. The boy had worked as hard, by any mundane measure, as anyone else on the mission, and had, by every account the ledger apparently kept, earned nothing whatsoever for the working.
He said nothing to Corrin about it — that felt, even at twelve, like a cruelty dressed up as correction, and not his place regardless. But he found himself, that night, sitting beside Wren on the low wall of the half-rebuilt granary, turning the whole episode over with the particular unease of a boy who recognized, in Corrin's performed exhaustion, an exaggerated shadow of the very confession he'd once made to Sennet about his own mixed motives at Corah's water buckets.
"Do you think he knows?" Thomas asked. "That it isn't landing?"
Wren considered the question with more care than Thomas had expected, given how tired they both were. "I think," she said slowly, "he knows something isn't working, the way you'd know a key isn't turning in a lock even before you understood why. Whether he knows why it isn't turning — whether he's honest enough with himself yet to see the difference between what you and I are doing out here and what he's doing — that I couldn't tell you." She looked out over the half-rebuilt granary, the lantern light catching the raw new timber. "I keep thinking about what Elder Marek said, that first week. That we're not here to be taught how to be strong. That we're here to be given the chance to become the kind of person strength is safe to hand to." She glanced at Thomas, and there was something searching in it, a question underneath the question. "Maybe that's what this whole first season is actually testing. Not whether we can lift a heavy enough beam. Whether we're the kind of person who'd lift it the same way with nobody at all watching."
Thomas thought of his own mixed motive, years ago, carrying water for a widow with half his heart doing arithmetic about the Sect the whole way there — and of Sennet's answer, patient and unhurried, that the mixed motive hadn't disqualified him, only that the doing, honestly repeated, was what would eventually starve the wanting out. He wondered whether Corrin had ever had a Sennet of his own to sit with him on a stone bench and tell him the same thing, or whether the boy's whole life, in a wealthy capital household, had simply trained him toward performance long before anyone had thought to warn him what performance cost.
"I hope someone tells him," Thomas said, finally. "Before it hardens into something he can't easily set down anymore."
The mission ended, three days later, with the granary rebuilt, the village's worst immediate need met, and no ceremony whatsoever marking the disciples' departure beyond the village headwoman's plain, unadorned thanks and a shared meal that Thomas found, eating it, tasted considerably better than any feast he half-remembered from his old world's more celebrated occasions. He felt the qi settle over him twice across those three days — once, small and quiet, hauling a beam alongside Iyo long past the point his own arms had wanted to quit; once, larger, on the final evening, sitting with an elderly villager who'd lost her whole store of preserved winter food to the flood and needed, more than any physical labor Thomas could offer her, simply someone willing to sit and listen to the whole of what she'd lost without flinching from any part of it.
He rode back to Aldermere with Wren and Iyo three days later, sun-worn and blistered and entirely, unexpectedly happy in a way that surprised him with its plainness — no triumphant sense of having proven anything, no dramatic breakthrough to mark the season's end, simply the quiet, settled satisfaction of a boy who had spent a full season doing small, unglamorous, genuinely costly things alongside people he'd come, in a matter of months, to think of as something very close to family.
Elder Marek met the returning wagons at Aldermere's gate herself, which Thomas would learn, over the following years, she did for every single mission the Sect-house sent out, regardless of how minor, standing in the same plain travel-worn coat she wore for every other unglamorous task the day required, and it was there, watching her personally help unload the last of the wagons alongside disciples half her age and considerably less tired than she by any fair accounting of the day's labor, that Thomas finally understood, all the way through, something Corwin had shown him once from a father's shoulders, watching a Duke walk a whole district on his own two feet.
The greatest among them is the one lifting the heaviest sack, he thought, watching Marek shoulder a crate no younger disciple had yet moved to claim, not because anyone's watching to be impressed, and not because the rules require it of her rank. Because that's simply what her whole life has quietly become, the same way Denn's decade of fence-mending became a wall, the same way a woodpile became a boy's whole steadier posture, all those years ago, before I even had proper words to understand what I was watching.
He carried that thought with him into the Sect-house's long dormitory hall that night, tired in every honest muscle of a body that had, for the first time in this whole second life, actually earned its exhaustion rather than merely endured it, and slept more soundly than he had in longer than he could easily remember — not because the season's questions had all been answered, since he suspected, by now, that this world had never once promised him a season where every question got answered. But because he had spent it, at last, doing the small, unglamorous, entirely real work he'd been waiting nine patient years to finally be old enough to reach for, and had found, reaching for it, that it fit his hands considerably better than any dream of it ever had.