Bound to the Fallen King

Chapter 4: Lessons in Lore

The days after the chain trial fell into a rhythm I hadn't expected to find comforting, but did.

Mornings began with combat drills in the training yard, where I learned quickly that whatever promise I'd shown with a blade back home counted for very little against Ashveil's instructors, who corrected my stance and my grip and my breathing with the same brisk indifference they might have shown a piece of poorly forged steel. Afternoons were lore long hours in the east wing's cold stone classrooms, memorizing the names and natures of things that had, until a year ago, existed for me only as stories told to frighten children into locking their doors at dusk.

It was in lore that I saw the most of Thorne.

Not because we sought each other out, I told myself that firmly, more than once, but because Ashveil's first years were small enough in number, and the seating arrangements haphazard enough, that our paths crossed with a regularity that felt, some days, less like coincidence than I wanted to examine too closely. He sat near the back of the classroom, usually, unremarkable in the way I was coming to understand was entirely deliberate on his part, though I couldn't have said, that first week, why I believed that so certainly.

"You're staring at your parchment like it's insulted you," he said one afternoon, low enough not to draw the instructor's attention, when I'd spent the better part of ten minutes failing to sketch the binding-sigil we'd been assigned to copy.

"It's not my parchment's fault I can't draw."

"No," he agreed, entirely too solemn. "That would be your hand's fault."

I shot him a look that should have ended the conversation. It didn't. Something in his expression not quite a smile, more the shape one might take before deciding whether it was worth the effort suggested he found my irritation more entertaining than deterring, which irritated me further, and which I suspected he knew perfectly well.

"Here." He reached over, without asking, and turned my parchment a quarter-turn on the desk. "You're starting the sigil from the wrong point. It reads outward, not in." His finger traced the air just above the parchment, not quite touching it, following a line I hadn't seen until he showed it to me. "Most people assume it begins at the center because that's where the power gathers. It doesn't. It begins at the edge, where the binding takes hold first."

I copied the sigil again, following his correction, and found it resolved itself far more easily than my first four attempts combined. "How do you know that?"

Something crossed his face briefly, unreadable, gone before I could name it. "I read ahead."

It wasn't a lie, exactly. I understood that even then, in some instinctive way I couldn't have explained if pressed. It also wasn't the whole truth, and some quiet, wary part of me the part that had spent the last year learning to notice when the world wasn't telling her everything filed the moment away without quite deciding what to do with it.

The instructor, an older man named Aldric with a voice like gravel and very little patience for whispering, rapped his cane against the front table hard enough to silence the room. "Marchetti. Thorne. Something you'd like to share, or shall we continue?"

"Nothing, sir," Thorne said, entirely composed, while I felt heat climb my face despite myself.

Aldric's gaze lingered on him a moment longer than it needed to, long enough that I noticed, filed that away too, though I couldn't have said what exactly I thought it meant. Then the lesson resumed, and the moment passed, and I told myself, as I was becoming rather tediously accustomed to telling myself, that it meant nothing.

That evening, Junie found me in the corridor outside the dining hall, falling into step beside me with the easy familiarity of someone who had decided, somewhere in the last week, that we were friends now, whether or not I'd formally agreed to it.

"You and Thorne," she said, without preamble, in the tone of someone who'd been waiting all day for an opening. "That's a thing now?"

"It's not a thing."

"Could've fooled half the lore classroom." She grinned, unrepentant, when I gave her a look. "I'm not saying it's a bad thing. He's — I don't know. Odd, but not unpleasant-odd. Nobody really knows where he came from. No family name anyone recognizes, no sponsor from any of the noble houses, which is strange for someone who tests as well as he does." She shrugged, the observation clearly less important to her than it suddenly felt to me. "Anyway. Supper's getting cold, and I'm not eating alone on your account."

I let the conversation move on to safer things: the impossible weight of Aldric's reading assignments, the rumor that second years got real weapons before the frost fully broke, and told myself Junie's idle observation didn't deserve the attention I was giving it, turning it over in my mind long after we'd found seats in the dining hall.

No family name anyone recognizes. No sponsor from any of the noble houses.

It shouldn't have meant anything. Ashveil took in strays and orphans and second sons with no better prospects, same as it took in daughters of minor houses like my own; a lack of pedigree was hardly unusual among first years scraping by on talent instead of connections. And yet some small, stubborn part of me the part that had noticed his ease with a binding-chain no first year should have handled so easily, the part that had noticed the flicker in Aldric's gaze, the part that kept noticing far too much about a boy I had no good reason to be noticing at all turned the thought over and over through the rest of supper, unable to set it down.

Across the hall, at his usual unremarkable distance, Thorne caught my eye once, briefly, and inclined his head in the same small, polite acknowledgment he always offered; nothing in it that should have unsettled me, and yet something in it that did, all the same.

I looked away first, again. It was becoming something of a habit.

Later, lying awake with my mother's blade close at hand, I found myself doing the arithmetic of it without meaning to, the ease with the chain, the too-precise correction on the sigil, the absence of any name or house behind him and arriving, each time, at a sum I wasn't yet ready to trust.

Not proof. Not yet.

Just a shape, at the edge of things, that I couldn't quite stop myself from tracing.