I stood at the back of the Society line and felt the quiet of it immediately.
Twenty people ahead of me, give or take. Nobody was talking. Nobody was shifting their weight or cracking their knuckles the way the Eratiell applicants were doing thirty feet away. They stood still and forward-facing with the particular focus of people who had already made a decision and were here to find out if it would be accepted. The line moved in small increments. Each person stepped up to the plain table, offered their arm, and either got sent away or got pulled aside. Most got sent away.
I looked back across the road. Valor was still in the Eratiell line, his jaw tight, watching me.
I faced forward.
"NEXT." The tester's voice cut across the ambient noise of the festival without effort. "You don't have a lick of magick in you. Move along."
The boy at the front of the line stormed off with his fists balled at his sides, not looking at anyone. The line shuffled forward one place. A ripple of quiet murmuring moved through the people around me. I'd always assumed magick was more common than this. Looking at the faces of the people being turned away, I wasn't sure anymore.
A boy ahead of me, dressed noticeably better than anyone else in the line, collar starched high enough to cut his chin, turned and addressed the line at large.
"Filthy commoners shouldn't have magick. It's a distinguished gift. Not fit for the likes of you."
Heat moved through my chest. I stepped forward before I'd decided to.
Someone else got there first.
A tall broad man came down from the testing stall with the unhurried ease of someone who has never once needed to move quickly to make a point. He stopped in front of the boy and looked down at him from a height that put the boy entirely in his shadow.
"What was that you just said?" Not a question. "Something about commoners." He turned and pointed at the boy who had just been turned away, still walking, already twenty feet down the road. "I happen to come from the same town as him. Does that make me a filthy commoner as well?"
The boy's face went white. His mouth opened. Nothing came out.
The man's hand came up.
Flames erupted.
Fire took the boy in a single roaring bloom, the heat rolling outward hard enough that I felt it on my face from ten feet back. The boy went down screaming, rolling on the cobblestones, clawing at himself. The smell reached me a second later and I stopped breathing through my nose.
The man stood where he was and watched without expression. Then he waved his hand and the fire went out as completely as if it had never been there. He looked around at the nearest knights. One of them caught his eye and looked away immediately, finding something very interesting to study on the far side of the road. The others had already turned.
He walked back to the stall without hurrying. His voice carried the full length of the line without being raised.
"Let it be known. Anyone can join the Society. Birth, town, or whatever else you think plays a role. It does not."
The line stood in complete silence. The smell of burnt cloth and something worse stayed in the air. I looked down at the scorched circle on the cobblestones, still faintly smoking, and then at the boy sitting against the wall of the nearest stall with his hands shaking and his face raw and his eyes seeing something the rest of us couldn't. The people around me had gone very still in the specific way that people go still when they've just been shown something and are deciding what to do with the knowledge.
I'd heard stories about the Society. I'd always figured most of them were exaggerated.
I wasn't figuring that anymore.
The line moved forward. I moved with it.
A vial caught my eye at the front of the line, held up by the tester for a brief moment before he set it down. It glowed a vivid blue, pulsing steadily, the liquid inside sparking with pale light.
"Well look at that." He was grinning. "You've got potential. Sign here and here. Next."
My heart was beating harder with every step. The person ahead of me stepped up, offered their arm, the needle went in. The vial stayed completely flat. No color, no reaction. Nothing.
"Sorry love. You don't have what we need. Next."
I stepped up to the table.
The tester looked at me the way he'd looked at everyone else. Professionally. Already thinking about the next person.
"Your arm."
I held it out. My hand was shaking and I couldn't make it stop. He pressed a fresh needle to the inside of my forearm and pushed it in. I felt the sting and the brief dark welling of blood.
The vial sizzled.
The liquid inside went black. Not dark, not clouded. Black, the specific black of a sky with no stars, collapsing inward from the edges toward the center. Hairline cracks ran through the glass in a web that spread and spread until the vial should have fallen apart in his hand. I stumbled back a step. Along the stall the torches bent sideways simultaneously, their flames dragged toward me as if something behind my ribs was pulling at them. Shadows slashed across the back wall of the stall in shapes that had no light source to explain them.
The people behind me stepped back. The murmur turned to something louder. The tester's hands were shaking. He lifted the vial carefully, like it might make a decision he wasn't prepared for, and passed it to the man from before.
I couldn't get a full breath. My chest was doing something I had no framework for.
The man came out from behind the stall holding the cracked vial up to the grey morning light. He turned it once, studying it. Then he looked at me with an expression I couldn't read.
"What's your name, boy."
"Oren Leatherglove." Some part of me that hadn't caught up with the rest of the moment put a thread of pride in my voice anyway.
His eyebrow moved. "Lucas's boy." He looked at the vial again, then pocketed it. "Well, Oren. You have a rare and powerful gift. We can teach you to use it." He nodded toward the ledger on the table. "If you're interested."
I looked back across the road.
Valor was standing beside the Eratiell stall with a form in his hand. He'd been accepted. When he met my eyes across the crowd his face had already closed over into something flat and cold and sharp underneath, the expression of someone who has just seen something they were afraid of seeing and have decided what it means.
He turned and walked away without saying anything.
"Come on mate." The person behind me shifted their weight. "Other people want to sign up."
"Sorry."
I picked up the quill. My hand was still shaking. I thought about my father in his chair this morning with his hands stopped on the net and that look behind his eyes. I thought about the shack and the sound of the harbor through the walls and the life we'd scraped together at the end of the dock road.
I wrote: Oren Leatherglove.
A hand closed around my arm before I'd fully registered what I'd done and pulled me aside. The man with the vial was standing over me.
"Oren. My name is Damian Cross." His grip was firm but there was nothing cruel in it, not yet. "Be here next week. Nine sharp. Initiation and orientation begin then." He handed me a folded form and walked back into the stall.
I walked away from the table holding the paper tight enough to crinkle the edges. The questions came all at once and circled without landing. What was that look on Valor's face. Why did my blood turn black. What did I just do. I was still trying to sort through them when I walked directly into someone's shoulder.
"So."
Valor's voice.
He was leaning against a market post with his arms crossed and his new Eratiell form folded in his breast pocket, watching me with that closed flat expression that had replaced the grin somewhere in the last ten minutes.
"Why them, Oren." Quiet. Even. The kind of quiet that means the feeling behind it is something much larger. "They're legalized criminals. They kill without mercy. They care about nobody."
There were things behind his words that neither of us was saying. Things from before. I knew what he was thinking about and he knew I knew.
"I don't know," I said. "It felt right in the moment. My feet just moved. I can't explain it."
He shook his head once and walked away.
I didn't follow.
● ● ●
I walked back toward the docks the long way, along the edge of the festival where the noise was thinner. The smell of burnt flesh had followed me further than I expected it to. I kept moving until the festival sounds dropped behind me and the harbor sounds came back up to replace them, the creak and slap of the waterfront, the smell of fish and brine and salt-soaked timber.
Valor was gone. Probably headed home.
The docks were quieter the further along I went. The morning crowd had mostly cleared. Our shack came into view at the far end of the road, small and tilted and familiar against the grey water behind it.
The door was ajar.
My father never left the door open. Not in the morning, not any time. The harbor air got into everything.
I walked faster.
Then I ran.
"Dad?"
I hit the door with my shoulder and came through into darkness. Too dark for the middle of the morning even with the shutters closed.
"Dad!"
A match flared in the corner of the room.
My father sat in his chair. Perfectly still. His face carved from something harder than I'd ever seen on him. He wasn't alone.
Damian Cross stood behind him with one hand resting on my father's shoulder, easy and casual, the way you'd rest a hand on a piece of furniture you owned.
"Oren." His voice was warm. Genuinely warm, which was somehow worse than anything else. "Good. You're home. We need to have a conversation about your father's outstanding debts."
The cold moved through me from the inside out.
"What debts."
Damian smiled.
"The ones you just inherited."