The wagon smelled like canvas and old wood and something faintly sweet that Aldric could not place. He sat with his bag between his knees and his mother's bundle in his lap and tried not to look at the other four people sitting across from him.
He failed.
There were four of them. Two boys and two girls, arranged along the opposite bench and the wagon's sides the way strangers arrange themselves — with gaps between them, careful not to touch. They were around his age. Maybe older. One of the boys was broader than Aldric and sat with his arms folded across his chest, staring at nothing. One of the girls had her knees pulled up and her arms wrapped around them, watching the canvas sway with the movement of the road.
Nobody spoke.
The wagon creaked and rocked. Outside, Aldric could hear Garrett's voice — low, steady, speaking to the horses or to one of the riders. The wheels ground against dirt and stone. The world moved around them and they sat in the middle of it, five strangers in a box, heading somewhere none of them had been before.
Aldric looked at his hands. They looked the same as they had yesterday, and the day before that. Ordinary. He thought about opening the canvas and looking back, but Ashford was already behind a bend in the road.
The silence stretched. Thin. Nervous. Everyone waiting for someone else to speak first.
Aldric was not going to be that person. He never was.
The boy next to Aldric broke first.
"I'm Darin," he said. Just like that. No build-up, no clearing of the throat. He turned to Aldric with a grin that looked like it had been waiting for permission and gave up. "Water Elemental. You?"
Aldric blinked. "Aldric. Water as well."
Darin's eyes widened. "You're joking. Same academy then." He sat up straighter. "Where are you from?"
"Ashford. The village we stopped at last night."
"I know it. Well — I don't know it. But I saw it from the wagon." Darin leaned back against the canvas wall. "I'm from Millford. East of here, past the hill country. Forty families, one inn, and a goat that bites anyone who comes near the well."
Aldric almost smiled. "Sounds familiar."
"The goat or the village?"
"Both."
Darin laughed — short and easy. He was not much bigger than Aldric. Brown hair that stuck up at odd angles, a face that moved when he talked — eyebrows, mouth, everything. He could not sit still and did not see the point in trying.
"When did you find out?" Darin asked. "About the magic."
"A week ago. Maybe less."
"Same. The official came through Millford on a Tuesday. I touched the stone and the whole thing lit up and my mother dropped a basket of eggs." He said it like it was the funniest thing that had ever happened to him. "Did yours glow bright?"
"Yes," Aldric said.
"Mine too. Nearly blinded the man holding it." Darin shook his head. "A week ago I was carrying flour sacks for my father. Now I'm in a wagon heading to an academy I've never seen in a city I can't picture. Strange world."
Aldric nodded. He did not say that he understood, but he did. Everything Darin was describing — the speed of it, the strangeness — Aldric knew all of it. He just did not have Darin's way of saying it out loud.
"You're quiet," Darin said. Not as a complaint.
"I suppose."
"That's fine. I talk enough for two." He grinned again. "Probably three."
Darin's voice did what silence could not — it opened the wagon up.
The broad boy across from them spoke next. "Soren," he said. "Earth Elemental." Two words and a nod. He did not offer where he was from or when he found out. His arms stayed folded. His face gave nothing away.
Darin waited for more. Nothing came. "Right," he said. "Good to meet you, Soren."
Soren nodded again. That seemed to be his preferred method of communication.
The girl beside Soren leaned forward. She had sharp features — narrow jaw, quick eyes that moved between them. "Petra. Charmer. Code of Tamer."
"Tamer?" Darin said. "So you — what, tame animals?"
"I suppose. That's what they told me." She shrugged. "I touched a silver bell and it rang on its own. That was enough for them to write a letter." Then she looked at Aldric. "You're both Water?"
"Seems like it," Aldric said.
"Interesting." She did not explain why it was interesting. She leaned back and pulled one knee up, arms wrapped around it, and that was the end of her introduction.
Darin glanced at Aldric with a look that said well, she's fun.
One left.
The girl sitting at the far end of the wagon had not moved during any of this. She sat with her back against the canvas wall, her hands resting on her knees, watching. Aldric had been aware of her since he climbed in — the girl from last night, the one who had looked at him through the gap in the canvas with dark eyes that gave nothing and took everything in.
She looked at Darin. Then at the others. Then she spoke.
"Kira. Sanctifier."
Her voice was quiet but clear. She simply did not use more words than the moment needed.
"Which church?" Petra asked. The first sign of genuine interest she had shown.
"Both. Sanctifiers train in both."
Petra raised an eyebrow. "Grace and Radiance. That's a lot of ground."
Kira shrugged. A small movement, barely there. "It's how it works."
Darin filled the pause before it could harden. "So we've got two Water mages, an Earth, a Charmer, and a Sanctifier. That's nearly half the schools in one wagon."
Nobody answered, but something shifted. The introductions were done. They were no longer five strangers sitting in a box — they were five strangers who knew each other's names, and that was different, even if only slightly.
Aldric looked at Kira. She was looking at the canvas wall where the light came through in thin lines. Her face was still. Not blank — still. Like someone thinking about something she had no intention of sharing.
She did not look back at him.
* * *
The road went on. The wagon rocked and creaked and the light through the canvas shifted as the sun climbed higher.
The conversation came and went. Darin asked a few questions — where Soren was from, what Petra knew about the Charmer academies. He got short answers and did not push for more. The wagon settled into a comfortable quiet. Not like before. Something easier.
After a while, Garrett called a stop. They climbed out to stretch their legs and eat at the side of the road. The air was cool and the sky was wide and Aldric stood in the grass and breathed in a way he had not been able to inside the wagon.
He sat against a tree with his mother's bundle open on his knees. Bread, cheese, dried meat, a small jar of honey wrapped in a rag. He ate slowly.
Kira sat a few paces away, eating from her own bundle. She did not join the others. She did not sit alone on purpose either — she simply sat where she sat, and it happened to be near him.
Aldric looked at her. "You were in the wagon last night. Before Ashford."
She glanced at him. "I was."
"How long have you been travelling?"
"Three days. Garrett picked me up in Thornwall."
Three days in that wagon. Aldric had been in it for a morning and already felt the walls pressing in. "That's a long time."
"It's not bad," she said. "The road is quiet. I don't mind quiet."
Aldric nodded. He understood that.
A pause. Then Kira said, "You're the last one Garrett collected."
"I think so."
"You are. He said Ashford was the final stop before Valmont." She looked at him. Dark eyes, steady. "You looked like you didn't want to leave."
Aldric did not know what to say to that. It was true, and it wasn't. He had not wanted to leave. But he had not wanted to stay either. He had not wanted anything — that was the problem.
"I don't think any of us did," he said.
Kira looked away. "Some of us didn't have a choice."
Before he could ask what she meant, Garrett called them back to the wagon.
They rode through the afternoon. The road changed beneath them — dirt to packed earth to something harder. The sounds outside shifted. More carts passing. Voices in the distance. Dogs barking.
Near dusk, the wagon slowed and stopped. Garrett pulled the canvas aside and the evening light came in, warm and golden.
"Harrenfield," he said. "We'll stay the night. There's an inn."
Aldric climbed out. It was a small town — smaller than Cresthill, bigger than Ashford. Stone buildings along a single road. A market square with empty stalls. Smoke from chimneys.
The five of them stood together in the street, blinking in the fading light. They had been strangers that morning. They were still strangers now. But they had shared a road and a wagon and a day, and tomorrow they would do it again.
Garrett led them toward the inn. Aldric followed.