They collected the letter at dawn and walked home.
Ashford looked the same. The rooftops, the well, the smoke from the chimneys. Nothing had changed. But Aldric felt different walking through it, even if he couldn't say how.
Maren had the door open before they reached it. She looked at Aldric first, then at Edran, who gave her a nod that said everything went fine.
They sat around the table. Aldric placed the blue-sealed letter on the wood between them, right next to the spot where the first letter had sat days ago. Two letters in one week.
"I'm an Elemental," Aldric said. "Water. There's an academy in Valmont. The letter gets me in."
The room went quiet.
Tomas picked up the letter and turned it over, studying the blue seal. "Valmont. That's three days' travel. Maybe four."
"He's fifteen, Tomas," Maren said.
"I know how old he is."
"Three days is not down the road, Tomas." Her voice was steady but her knuckles were white. "He'd be gone."
Tomas set the letter down. "The crown is offering him an education. A path we couldn't give him if we worked these fields our whole lives. This didn't come from us, Maren. It came to us."
"It came for him," she said. "Not for us."
Corbin sat at the end of the table. He hadn't spoken. His eyes moved between his parents, then to the letter, then to his own hands. He didn't fidget. He didn't reach for the letter. He was very still.
Edran leaned his stick against the wall. "The people at Cresthill were decent," he said. "Professional. They knew what they were doing." He looked at Maren. "This isn't soldiers rounding up boys for a march. It's a door. And what's behind it is better than anything Ashford can offer him."
Maren looked at Edran. Then at Tomas. The two men she trusted most were on the same side of a question she didn't want to answer. They were right and she knew it. Knowing it didn't make it easier.
"He'll need new clothes," she said quietly. "He can't walk into a city dressed like a farmhand."
It wasn't agreement. But it was close enough. Tomas put his hand over hers on the table.
Then he looked at Aldric.
"What about you?" he said. "Do you want to go?"
Everyone looked at him. His father. His mother. Corbin's sideways glance. Edran's steady eyes from the far end of the table.
Aldric opened his mouth. Nothing came.
He looked at the letter. He looked at his mother's hand under his father's. He thought about the ash darkening in the bowl and the water appearing from nowhere. He thought about the stream and the road and the cobblestones in Cresthill. None of it added up to an answer. Not because the question was hard. Because he didn't know if the answer was really his.
Everyone was waiting.
"Yes," he said.
The room moved on. Maren let out a breath and stood. Tomas nodded and folded the letter. Corbin pushed back from the table and walked outside without a word.
Aldric stayed in his seat. He had said yes because the room was waiting for yes. Saying no would have meant knowing what he wanted instead, and he didn't. He hadn't chosen. He had agreed. But nobody noticed the difference.
* * *
The days that followed were strange.
Ashford had never produced a mage. In thirty-two families and as many generations as anyone could remember, not one person from the village had tested positive for magic. Aldric was the first. And the village did not let him forget it.
Harmon clapped him on the back at the well and told him he always knew the boy had something about him. He hadn't — but it didn't matter. Old Wessler stopped him on the path and asked what kind of spells he'd be learning, as though Aldric already knew. Two women from the north end of the village brought bread to the house — the good kind, with honey — and told Maren how proud she must be.
People smiled at him more. People who had never said much to him before now found reasons to talk. A mage from Ashford. Their Ashford. It was the most exciting thing that had happened to the village in years, and they wore it like it belonged to all of them.
Aldric didn't know what to do with it. He was the same person he had been a week ago. He still did the same work, walked the same paths, ate at the same table. But the village had decided he was different now, and no amount of turning soil or carrying water changed that.
He worked the fields with Corbin. They didn't talk about the academy. They talked about the fence post that still needed replacing and whether the rain would come early this year. Normal things. But every now and then someone would pass on the road and call out something to Aldric — good luck, or make us proud, or don't forget where you came from — and Corbin would go quiet for a while after.
He never said anything about it. Aldric didn't ask.
* * *
On the last evening before everything changed again, Aldric went to the stream.
The same stream. The same bank. The same half-submerged rock where the current split into two threads and joined again on the other side. He sat with his knees drawn up, the way he always sat, and watched the water move.
It was quieter here. No one clapping him on the back. No one asking about spells. No one smiling at him like he was already someone else. Just the water and the evening light and the sound of it all moving the way it had always moved.
He thought about what Brennan had said. It's been in you since the day you were born. Water. His element. Something that had lived inside him for fifteen years without him knowing.
He looked at the stream. He had sat here a hundred times. A thousand. Watching the water without knowing why it held him the way it did. Maybe this was why. Or maybe he was just a boy who liked sitting by a stream and the rest of it was coincidence.
Tomorrow or the day after or the day after that, someone would come for him. A letter would arrive, or a cart, or whatever the academy sent to collect the children it had claimed. And he would leave this stream the way he had left everything else this week — not because he chose to, but because the world moved and he moved with it.
But not yet. For now the water ran and the light faded and Aldric sat on the bank and let the evening be what it was.