The old bridge in Nordmark has thirteen arches. The master builder promised fourteen. He died before he could explain the difference, and the town council has paid for the upkeep of fourteen ever since.

The town council's accounts in Nordmark, note in the margin

Chapter 17

Sunday

Sundays at Déynáir were slow.

That was the first thing I learnt to love about them. There were no lessons, no bells, nowhere you had to be. The dining hall served breakfast until eleven, and most students came drifting down in pyjama bottoms and woollen jumpers with sleepy faces and hair sticking up. The food was different on Sundays: pancakes and berries and thick, warm syrup, and a kind of bread with nuts and honey that smelt of something like Christmas, even though it was only November.

Ahra was always the last to come down. He slept until half past ten every Sunday and arrived in the dining hall with a face still creased from the pillow and Lynx dangling in his arms. He sat down, ate two pancakes without talking, drank three cups of tea, and slowly began to look like a human being.

Retia was always the first. She sat with her book and her tea and waited for us, and there was something about the way she sat there on Sundays that was different from weekdays. Relaxed. Her body wasn't on guard. Her shoulders were down. Her legs were tucked up under her on the chair, and Fulmen sat on the table eating leftover berries from her plate, and Retia let it do so without correcting it.

I sat by the window with my tea and looked out over the river and felt the Sunday in my body. It felt different from weekdays. Longer. Wider. There was room in it for things that usually got no room: long thoughts, slow conversations, silences that weren't awkward but were simply silence.

That Sunday, the week before Retia's letter, we spent the morning in the First-Year Room.

Maka had come down with his guitar and sat in the armchair he always took when he came, playing songs that changed key by themselves. Some from our year were playing cards. Others were doing homework, bent over books with quills that scratched against the parchment. A boy from Ästonie sat on the window seat reading aloud from a novel to his Amícûs, a big grey cat that lay in his lap purring with its eyes shut.

Ahra lay on the rug with Lynx and a book on Dherak theory that was twice as thick as his head. He read twenty pages, sighed, turned back, read ten of them again, sighed again, and shut the book.

"I don't understand it," he said.

"What?" I said from my chair.

"Some of it." He waved the book. "Dherak resonance. Harmonic transfer. Frequency tuning between Amícûs and owner." He looked down at Lynx. "Do you understand it?"

Lynx climbed up and laid his head on Ahra's chest and looked up with yellow eyes that said he understood everything, but had no intention of explaining it.

"Let me see," said Retia from her chair, without looking up from her own book. Ahra threw the book across to her. It landed in her lap. She read for two minutes.

"You need to start with chapter three, not chapter seven," she said. "You've skipped the foundations."

"The foundations are boring."

"The foundations are what make the rest make sense. It's like building a house from the roof down."

"Who builds houses from the roof down?"

"You, apparently."

Ahra sighed again and opened chapter three.

Maka looked up from his guitar. "Little brother, have you tried asking Lynx for help? Lynx Amícûs are good at Dherak theory. It's something to do with their patience."

Ahra looked down at Lynx. Lynx looked up at him. They stared at each other for ten seconds.

"He says I should shut up and read," said Ahra.

"Clever cat," said Retia.

"He's a lynx, not a cat."

"Clever lynx."

Maka laughed and went back to his guitar, and it changed key again by itself, and this time it played something slow and beautiful that filled the room with a warmth that didn't come from the fire.

Retia put her book down and looked out of the window. The sky was grey and low, and something had begun to fall that wasn't quite snow but wasn't rain either, something in between that settled on the windowpane in small, half-transparent drops.

"Sleet," she said. "My mother hates sleet. She says it's the weather's way of saying 'I haven't made up my mind yet.'"

"That's a good description," I said.

"My mother's good at descriptions." Retia touched the window with her fingertip and drew a small line through the condensation. "She's good at lots of things. Just not at stopping waiting."

Ahra looked up from his book but said nothing. That was one of the things he had learnt these last weeks: when to talk, and when to let the silence do the work.

I sat in my chair and let my eyes wander round the room. Sera sat in a corner knitting something with wool that changed colour with every stitch. Kael was arm-wrestling a friend at a table, and the table shook, and someone shouted at them to stop it. Vessa and a girl from her team sat in the other window seat talking quietly with their heads close together, the kind of talk that is about someone who isn't there.

This was what the First-Year Room was. A place you lived in while you became who you were meant to become. A place that smelt of beech from the fire and old carpet and the cakey smell that always hung in the air on Sunday afternoons, because somewhere in the castle kitchens someone was always baking something on a Sunday.

Alôpex lay asleep in my chair with her nose between her paws, and her breathing was slow and regular, and it was the sound of something safe, and I let it fill my ears while Maka played, and Retia watched the sleet, and Ahra read chapter three with a frown and a pencil he was holding wrong.

Will Mathson came by after lunch and sat in an armchair and talked to Ahra about nothing. He laughed and was relaxed and said funny things, and he was the Will he always was, the friendly one, the easy one, the one who made everyone relax. But twice that afternoon he glanced over at the armchair in the corner where Nihil usually sat with his book, and it was empty, and his smile was a few watts too dim, and he breathed in a little too deeply, and I saw it because I saw everything.

When Ahra went upstairs for another book, Will moved over to the chair next to mine. He leant forward with his elbows on his knees, and his hands hung between them.

"Is he all right?" he said quietly. "You live with him. He doesn't say anything to me."

It was strange to be the one who had to answer. It used to be me who asked.

"He reads," I said. "He sleeps. He eats."

Will nodded, as if that was what he had been afraid of. His fingers tightened around each other.

"He was always quiet," he said. "But this is a different kind of quiet."

I knew why. He had told me three nights earlier.

It was long past midnight, and the room was so cold that I could see my breath in the little light from the window. The ermine lay curled up on his pillow, a white lump with a black tip to her tail, and Alôpex lay on mine, keeping an eye on her, as she always did. I thought he was asleep. Then he said it out into the dark, without turning over.

"The cold came to us too."

I said nothing. I knew which cold he meant.

"The first night. The fire got smaller and smaller, and Marcus wanted to put more wood on. I said we should put it out. Completely. And lie still." His voice was flat, like someone reading aloud something he has read too many times. "We lay in the dark all night, and it went round us. You could hear it. It sounded like frost settling on a windowpane. Will held my hand. None of us dared to get up until the sun was high, and by then we had lost a day." He drew a breath. "The island saw that I was hiding."

I thought of the fire I had seen go out far to the east, the night the cold came to us. Suddenly, as if someone had smothered it. I hadn't thought any more about it at the time.

"Or that you tricked something stronger than you," I said.

It was quiet for a long time. The ermine lifted her head from the pillow and put it down again.

"Shut up, Godrand."

But he didn't say it hard. It was the first real conversation we had ever had.

Will was still waiting for an answer. I didn't give him what I knew. It wasn't mine to give.

"He's having a hard time," I said. "But he's there."

Will looked at me a moment too long. Then he got up, clapped me once on the shoulder and headed for the door. In the doorway he stopped, and his hand rested on the door frame, and his fingers tightened a little. Then he went. And I thought that there is a particular kind of pain in watching someone you love disappear into something you can't follow them into. And that Will carried that pain with a smile a shade too wide, because it was the only thing he knew how to do.

It was a Sunday. Nothing happened. It was enough.

Dario Fell lost to Retia in spells that Thursday. Nothing big. Just an exercise. Retia's "Scutum" was stronger than his "Ignis", and that was that, and Professor Daleth said "Good, Caritas" and moved on.

But I saw Dario's face in the split second afterwards. The moment between the losing and the mask you put on. And that face wasn't arrogant. It wasn't angry. It was afraid. The same fear I knew: the fear that you aren't enough, that your worth sits in what you achieve, and that if the achieving fails, you disappear.

He put the mask back on. Smiled. Said "Well fought, Caritas" in a voice that was perfectly controlled. But his hands, down at his sides, were clenched, and he walked out of the room with steps that were too quick, and he didn't look at anyone.

I knew that face. It was my own face. Just from the other side of the room.

Potions on Tuesdays was the subject I had been most afraid of, ever since the first Tuesday.

In the tower room the windows were still shut against the frost, and it smelt of everything. Herbs and spices and earth and metal and something sweetish like blackberries, and the smell changed from lesson to lesson depending on what was being brewed. The cauldrons stood in rows on long tables, and they steamed and bubbled and made sounds that were each their own, every table its own tune of clucking and hissing and the low hum that tells you magic is present.

Professor Meriken's apron was stained with hundreds of colours from hundreds of brews. He smelt of belladonna that day; tomorrow it would be something else, always the smell of the last thing he had brewed, as if his body soaked up its own work. He talked fast and moved fast, and his eyes were everywhere at once, and there was something in that speed that said he had once learnt what happened when you were too slow.

"Craft," he said as we came in, the way he said it every time. His hands were cutting a herb into precise pieces without looking down, his fingers finding the right angles by themselves.

For two weeks I had been practising what Gopaltu had taught me in the corridor: how to close my nose, the way you close a door. Breathe through the mouth. Think of cold water. I practised in the mornings at the open window and in the evenings in the room, and Nihil watched me from his bed as if I had lost my mind.

The first Tuesday after that I still couldn't. The fumes poured over me from twenty cauldrons, and I had to go out and stand at the window in the corridor and breathe with my forehead against the cold glass before I could go back in. But I didn't throw up, and I went back in.

The second time I closed the door. Not completely, but enough. I breathed through my mouth and thought of the ladder at Løverodde and made the potion by the book, line by line, the way Jorin did. My hands did the rest. They found the right temperature by touch. They knew when a herb was cut finely enough. They felt the change in texture that said it was time to stir the other way.

The third time I opened the door again. Carefully, just a crack, only when I chose to. And then I could smell when a potion was ready. Not by following a recipe, but by feeling the moment when all the smells in the cauldron melted together into something new, something that wasn't the sum of its parts but a whole new thing, and that moment was the right moment to stop.

Jorin sat at the cauldron next to mine, as he had done since the day he helped me clean my cauldron. He was good at potions in the patient, careful way that means reading the recipe twice before you begin, and his cauldron always bubbled at the right pace.

"What's your secret?" he whispered to me one day, when my cauldron turned the exact shade of dark blue that said it was ready.

"I can smell it," I said.

"You can smell when a potion's ready?"

"Yes."

He looked at me with wide eyes and slowly shook his head and said nothing more. But sometimes he leant over and sniffed at my brew with his eyes closed, and it was both touching and comic.

"Godrand," said Professor Meriken, looking down into my cauldron. "It's perfect."

"Thank you."

"No, you don't understand. It's perfect. Your first Tuesday I wrote 'Not passed' next to your name." He tapped twice on the rim of the cauldron with one finger. "I have never seen that before."

He looked at me with the look teachers have when they see something they can't explain. Then he moved on to the next cauldron. Jorin laughed so loudly that Meriken turned round.

Ahra, who was standing at the cauldron beside me, looked down into his own brew, which was the wrong colour and bubbling too fast.

"I hate you a bit," he said.

"I know," I said. And laughed.

Spells was the opposite: a subject that demanded everything potions didn't. Not hands. Voice. Will. Words spoken with a precision that was more than physical.

Professor Daleth was a tall, thin woman with white hair that had once been black, and a voice so precise that every word sounded like a needle pushed through cloth. Her cat, an old grey creature called Visper, sat on the desk and looked at us with the same appraising look as Daleth herself. The room was cold and bare, with no furniture except chairs in a circle, and the air in it had the sharp, clean quality you notice after a thunderstorm.

"Spells are not saying words," she said in the first lesson. "Spells are meaning them. You can say 'Ignis' a hundred times and nothing will happen if you don't mean it. Meaning is everything. Meaning is Dherak shaped into intention and sent through language."

She had us practise with simple words. "Lux" for light. We sat in the circle and said "Lux" over and over, and most of us produced nothing, and a few produced a faint spark, and Retia produced a whole ball of white light that hovered over her hand for three seconds before it went out.

"Good," said Professor Daleth. "Caritas understands. The rest of you: you are saying the word. You are not meaning it. Find the meaning."

I closed my eyes. "Lux." Nothing. "Lux." Nothing. I thought of what Canthara had said to Retia: "Let go." Not forcing. Letting go. I stopped trying and simply said it.

"Lux."

The light came. Not a ball. A wave. It spread out from my hands in every direction, and the whole room went white for a moment, and everyone looked, and Professor Daleth raised one eyebrow a millimetre.

"Godrand," she said. "Less. Much less."

"Sorry."

"Don't apologise. Control it."

That was the problem. I had power enough. What I lacked was control. That was what Haltora knew. And that was what frightened him: that a fifteen-year-old boy with an ocean of Dherak and no training in steering it was like a river without banks.

Spells was also where I first saw Nihil do something that surprised me.

We were practising "Scutum": the shield spell. The same word Ahra had chosen on the test island. Most students produced a faint flicker in the air in front of them, a shield that lasted a second or two and then vanished.

Nihil produced a wall.

Not a flicker. A wall. Dense, solid, transparent but clearly there, and it stood for ten seconds while everyone watched, and it hummed with a low note that said there was a lot of Dherak in it. Nihil's face was concentrated, his jaw tight, and his hands were raised in front of him with the fingers spread, and he was trembling slightly with the effort.

When he let go, he dropped to one knee. His face was white. Will started towards him from the other side of the circle, but Nihil got up by himself, quickly, and his eyes said "don't touch me."

"Mathson," said Professor Daleth, with the raised eyebrow. "Impressive. But you used too much."

"I know," said Nihil. His voice was hoarse.

I looked at him across the circle. He looked back. And there was something in that look that was different from the distance there had been between us. It was recognition. He knew what it felt like to have too much power and too little control. He was fighting the same thing I was, only from the opposite side: he had control but forced too much through it. I had power but no control at all.

We were two sides of the same coin. And we both knew it.

That evening he sat on his bed with a handkerchief pressed against his nose, and it was red right out to the edges. His hands were shaking. He tried to hide it by holding them still in his lap, and then they just shook there. The room smelt of iron, and it wasn't only his scent.

I didn't offer him anything. I didn't say anything. He wouldn't have wanted it.

But I left the lamp burning until he had fallen asleep.