Declan followed Lucinda through the hallways until he reached a low-ceiling stone room filled with racks of rune stones, each rough arcite-ore with simple lines emblazoned. In the center of a the room, a stone circle lay carved and filled with dust.

  Lucinda chatted as she prepared. “We don’t get many walk-in applicants. Not with a blood-stone. I didn’t know your father but no matter what, I’m sure he’s proud.”

  It sounded like the kind of lie people told each other. Declan had never known the man, beyond a few admissions from his mom. “I’m sure he is. What do I do?”

  “Set down your bag, this won’t hurt, and it won’t take long, sadly.”

  She winced as he dropped the pack. Every rune-stone in the room vibrated as the bearings clinked. “We’ll start by testing your blood-rune, some called it the soul-rune. Bloodlines often inherit one. Even if the arcsoul isn’t open, it will show and can be used. No need to hold your breath.”

  Lucinda produced a rune-stone from the rack, three wavy lines stacked on top of each other. It glowed white as it began to circle her, then locked into place. A wind rose around Declan, raising the dust in the circle higher and higher, until it formed a fog around him. “Now, we use soul-sight.”

  A second rune orbited once. This was clearly an eye surrounded by a trio of circles. It rotated twice before locking into place.

  Soul Sight: Reveal the_____—-#$%&1

  Declan went blind as the world flashed blue like the ocean.

  It left spots in his vision that slowly faded.

  The storm had collapsed, the dust fallen, and now she stood, arms crossed. “Don’t move.” Again and again, she tested.

  Learning to close his eyes was natural. He waited as she called other testers, who called others, but at last, he was allowed to step out.

  “It makes no sense. There’s a definite reaction. It’s like your arcsoul. I can feel that it’s not open, but at the same time you have the sort of mana weight I’d expect from a tier four arcanist. Let’s test spells.” She handed him a scroll. “Open it, read it. The mana cost is negligible. Literally anyone can use it, if they have the funds of a small nation to afford a scroll.”

  Declan unrolled it. The rune on the scroll was a square. Again, that gut feeling, though the words didn’t speak. “Protection?”

  “Well done!” she said it like a toddler wouldn’t know that symbol. “We call it Protect. Push mana into the scroll, it will do the rest.”

  That was easier said than done. He tried. This was something he actually had experience with, something he could do, but the scroll actively fought him. After long minutes, desperation grew. This was a test of will and he had it. He treated it like the mana bearing. And inch by inch, began to win the battle. The scroll fought him, but he wouldn’t be denied. “Almost!”

  The scroll errupted in an explosion of blue that burned the tips of Declan’s fingers and brought examiners running to test, followed by an actual healing arcanist, who manifested a tier three soul-rune. The fifty-point star was all squares rotated over a circle, but as it invoked it turned bright green and healing power washed over Declan’s fingers, cooling burned flesh and turning blisters pink again.

  Healing? He thought. The idea was unsteady.

  Lucinda looked shaken. “Probably defective or clogged mana channels. It happens and can be trained around with enough practice and treatments. The final test is orbiting a rune. I think I’ll have Keel test you. He’s got more experience doing it in actual combat than I ever will. Come with me.”

  Keel skinner’s office was disturbingly near the alley. Declan saw it as his inevitable destiation, but the moment the door opened, the old man filled him with hope. Keel Skinner was burned, as in burned by fire, with a heavily scarred right side of his face, a non-functional right hand and the cane that strapped to his right arm said the leg was no better, but his gaze in the remaining eye was sharp. He listened to Lucinda’s story, checked the blood-stone himself, and finally dismissed her.

  “Forget everything you’ve heard. It’s easy to bind a rune-stone, it’s hard to bind one worth having.” Keel said. “Every rune you add makes it more difficult to bind another. You can’t just throw them away and bind another without training and practice. I tell those whiners who won’t let me sleep—”

  “Students?”

  “Yes. My students, to choose them with care when you have a choice. This. It’s strike. Probably the most boring rune you could ask for but also one of the easiest.”

  Strike: Produce a ranged blow that______———____—.

  Again, a smashing headache struck him and Declan fought it off. The stone was rough arcite ore with a single line down it. Declan finally held an actual rune-stone. He clamped his fist around it and began to push will down into it. Something he’d done since he was ten. Something he’d done on an item not even meant to be used.

  As minutes past, his frustration and fear grew higher and higher. It wasn’t that the rune was unweilding, it was that every time he did make progress, it drew right back.

  “Try this one,” Keelan said, swapping out rune after rune. “Sometimes you need the right fit. The orbit takes effort, yes, but it’s owning the stone that’s hard. Also the orbit. And using it. It’s all hard but this is the first hard part.”

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  Moments became minutes. Tears threatened to mingle with sweat as his opportunity slipped away. It was near dusk when the old man spoke. “That’s enough. We appreciate you coming all this way. Keep up your work, maybe you will qualify next year.”

  Another lie that wasn’t comforting.

  Declan stood and shouldered his bag, straining against the weight and picked up his toolbox. “Thank you, sir.”

  Keelan limped out first and opened the side door. “Not many left, you can spend a few moments to recover. I’d sell you the strike to practice with but it’s five thousand rin and the cheapest rune we have. If you could afford it you’d already have one.”

  “No, sir. Thank you again.” He walked out into the alley, where the first lanterns began to flicker. Foundry life didn’t give much room for grief but he’d imagined this day leaving triumphant. Being welcomed. Being respected and most of all, seeing himself wielding the power of an arcanist.

  He drew his mana bearing and held it, still hot. Still impossible to force his will on, just in a different way. Years wasted. Years! “Ashes! Fucking Ashes!” He slammed the bearing into the alley stone, shattering the stone and throwing chips everywhere. It rang like a bell, despite the pits. Years of being handled had stripped the corrosion, leaving silver-black metal.

  And even now, he felt something from it. As he had every other night, he focused on it, letting the frustration of failure flow through him like mana, adding it to the mix. The fear. The regret. The sadness. And for just a moment, the bearing yielded. It drank in the mana. It wobbled, rolling six inches to stop at his boot.

  Sheer shock left Declan speechless. He knelt down and picked it up. It was hot to the touch, not just warm, but as he held it, it cooled and the exhaustion that had filled him let up. He still hurt. Despair followed like the clouds above. But Pop had taught him better. There was always work to be done, and sometimes the work was finding work.

  Declan stored the bearing, slung the pack and picked up his toolbox.

  Only then did he see the old man watching him, smoking goose-weed in a pipe. Keel had opened the door at some point, and now stared.

  “Shit and ashes.” The right thing to do was to apologize and move on. Declan adjusted the grip on his toolbox. “Sir?”

  “Felt something hit the door. Didn’t expect it to be a chunk of the road,” Keel said slowly. Expectantly.

  Declan hefted the toolbox. “If it’s damaged, I could fix it. I’m a workman like my pop. I’m decent at carpentry, better at finish work, don’t love soil-work, but who does?”

  The old man continued to watch him. “Raleigh Thorn. Insight Thorn. Didn’t know him, know his name from reports. What do you know about Ariloch Academy? Don’t repeat the stupid stories about how glorious it is.”

  “The greatest arcanists in the world are trained there.”

  “So, nothing. You know how many student deaths we have a year? You know you have to be eighteen because of the risk? You know it’s divided by the noble houses, major and minor?”

  “I knew some of that,” Declan said. Students died? That wasn’t said. It was dangerous, people claimed. That he believed a bit, like tavern tales.

  “You’re not quite eighteen. The blood-stone may be broken but it has ways of telling.” Keel drew it out again. It wasn’t a question to Declan, it was the old man speaking to his own ghosts. “You can’t legally consent, but then again, it’s the House master who checks and he’s been dead centuries. Name the noble houses.”

  “Sullivan…Taylor, Domine, Rush?”

  Keel knew his ruse and laughed. “There’s a position. Don’t say yes because you don’t know what you’re saying yes to. Every house has a House Arcanist. Sometimes called ‘Honorary’ arcanist but there’s scant little honor these days. Ariloch needs one.”

  “You said it yourself. I’m not an arcanist.”

  “I also said,” he took a long drag on the pipe, “it was an honorary arcanist. Less skill with a rune, more skill with a mop. Or wrench.”

  “Wouldn’t the nobles hire one themselves?” Declan asked carefully, not daring to hope.

  “House Ariloch. The original house, the one the Academy is named for. Before there were nobles. Before Ventus Ariloch married the Sun Queen and left the academy to others who helped bind the World Wound. There’s an opening in House Ariloch for a house arcanist. You’d be responsible for the house, literally. No schooling beyond what you can afford to pay for. No special rights as a true arcanist.” Keel left the doorway, approaching one cane-step at a time. “And it’s not just dangerous, it’s deadly. It was built at the world wound, where Ventus himself unleashed the largest rune array in history. Blazed beasts swarm there first and more often than any place.”

  The opportunity sounded interesting, but the foundry crushed men who didn’t learn to look ahead. “What is being responsible for the house? And how do I keep from being killed? How much does it pay? How can I spend that so I don’t starve?”

  “Responsible means responsible. House Arcanists are in charge during emergencies. They’re responsible for order in the house. They’re responsible for what happens in their house. The academy isn’t a nursery, it’s a trial for the strong to grow stronger. Pay is fifty rin a week, and there’s an entire town built around it. The ArCore is responsible for the worst of the worst blazed-beast threats.” Keelan poked at the toolbox. “You’be better suited than the last poor soul. House work is hard work and that’s what most don’t understand.”

  Fifty rin. Fifty rin a week. Fifty rin someone else had left because of what it entailed. Foundry workers said Risk and Reward were sisters who came hand in hand. In Declan’s experience, Risk was often a bitch who ran ahead and found you on her own. “How would I get home?”

  “Global Leyline Interchange’s never free, but if you go when there’s a group, you could find ways.” Keel spoke of moving by the rune network, glint. “You wouldn’t be trapped, but I’d demand you work six months or die, either would be good reason to release you if you feel it won’t work.”

  “That’s the school year?”

  The old man almost fell over, laughing. “School years. School hours. I forget what it was once like. Blazed beast, or monsters, whatever you call them, don’t wear watches, carry calendars or follow a schedule. When the rest days come, they still come, too. Ariloch doesn’t have summer break or winter break. There are breaks, but they come when the world wound lulls. The academy grinds up the weak and feeds them to the strong—not literally, there’s a cafeteria. The food would taste better if they served ground-up students.”

  “How old are the students in this ‘house’?”

  “Real arcanists? We don’t take them younger than eighteen. There are four hundred under that age, the youngest you’d be responsible for, sixteen. Younger than that have their own minders. The sixteens are easier than the seventeens, if I’m honest, eighteens are insufferable shits to the last one. Nineteen is worse, twenty—ugh. Forty nine, that’s when you start to get some stability.” Keel leaned against the wall, watching Declan.

  “I’m eighteen,” Declan said.

  “Exactly. House Ariloch doesn’t have any surviving members. It’s mostly populated by those who couldn’t or wouldn’t stay with their actual house. That also means it’s lacking backers. Zero political power, even less rin. They’d tear down the entire building but it would leave a hole in the campus and start a war for the lot. There are advantages to be claimed, if you’re smart enough. If you’re strong enough.”

  There was a simple rule Pop had taught him through the years, the rule that said charging into a leaking pipe situation would often lead to rewards. In chaos, there was opportunity. “What day is payday, and where do I start?”