The street of the academies began on the far side of the plaza, and Mav smelled it before he saw it. It smelled of cut flowers, hot food and money.
People called it the Row. He had seen it on screens since he was a child, usually behind a smiling presenter from House Sunspire. On a screen, it had looked large. In front of him, it looked like the place where giants kept their houses.
Every academy was the size of a small town, and no two were alike. The first one on his left was a palace that had not been built at all. It had been grown. A single tree as wide as a city block rose out of the ground, and its trunk had been shaped into halls, balconies and staircases, with lamps hanging in its branches like fruit. That was Evergrove, the best school in the Nexus. It belonged to House Thornwald, like most of the best schools.
Across from it stood a fortress of black glass that showed the sky like still water. Farther down, a tower of blue ice rose higher than anything else on the street, and it steamed gently in the warm air without ever melting.
Mav stood there for a moment with his mouth slightly open. He couldn’t help it. He had grown up in three rooms above a street black with dust, and he felt out of place.
’Close your mouth. You have three hours.’
In front of each gate, there was a long table with a banner over it, and behind each table sat recruiters in the colors of their school. The first-years stood in lines, which moved quickly. A recruiter asked for a name, looked for it on a slate of pale letters, and either waved the student through the gate or shook his head.
Mav joined the line at Evergrove. He had no real hope. But he had made himself a rule at the bottom of his sea, and the rule was to test a thing before he gave up on it.
The boy in front of him was waved through, and Mav stepped up.
The recruiter was a woman with a wreath of green leaves pinned to her collar. She looked at his rags, and her nose wrinkled.
"Name."
"Maverick Silkborn."
She didn’t look at her slate. She didn’t need to.
"Evergrove is full."
The boy behind him was waved through a moment later.
-----
He tried the fortress of black glass next. Its banner showed a red flame, and its recruiters wore the dark red coats of House Pyrecrest’s soldiers. One of them heard his name and laughed until he had to put down his pen.
At the tower of ice, a pale man found him on the slate and read the line aloud, slowly, for the benefit of the whole queue.
"Rank 21,307. Thirty days. Species... seaweed." He looked up. "Is that a joke, or a spelling mistake?"
"Neither," Mav said.
"Then the answer is no."
There were more than 40 academies on the Row. Mav walked from table to table while the gold sun slid down the sky, and he heard the same thing in a dozen different voices. Some of them refused him for his name. Others refused him for his species, his rank or his clothes. A few didn’t bother to give a reason at all.
By the twentieth table, he had stopped expecting anything. By the thirtieth, the worst of his anger had burned down into something cold and steady.
The refusals bothered him less than how easy they were. Each of these people closed a door on the rest of his life in the time it took to shake a head, and then looked past him at the next in line.
’Fine. One day, these same people will come to my table.’
"You look like a young man who is running out of doors."
Mav turned.
The man who had spoken sat alone at a small table between two academies, under a banner with a blue wave on it. He was plump and smiling, with rings on three fingers, and he had the comfortable voice of someone who sold things for a living.
"Bram Hollis, for House Brightwater," the man said. "Sit down. You’ve been turned away from every gate on this side of the street, and I’ve watched you take it without begging once. I respect that. So I’m going to offer you something better than a school."
He slid a sheet of pale letters across the table.
Mav didn’t sit, but he read it. He knew what it was before he reached the second line. Half the families in the foundry district had someone who had signed one.
It was a servant contract.
The idea was simple. A commoner with a weak World swore that World to a noble house. He swore his World to the house, which meant that the house could walk into it whenever it pleased. He also gave it a share of everything his World produced, every year, for the rest of his life. In exchange, the house kept other people from robbing him, and it didn’t let him starve.
Nobles called it protection. In the foundry district, they called it a leash. More than half of the commoners of every year were wearing one before their first winter, because the other choice was to face the Nexus alone.
"A third of your World’s yield," Hollis said pleasantly. "That’s generous. Most houses take half from a potential of E. You’d have a roof, a little training and our name behind you. Nobody would bother you. And frankly, son, with seaweed, nobody else is going to make you an offer at all."
He held out a pen.
Mav looked at the pen. He thought of his seaweeds, and of Six, who had planted himself in front of a boulder to save the Heartstone. Then he thought of what a noble house would do if it ever walked into his sea and understood what it was looking at.
His stomach turned over.
"No."
Hollis waited for the rest. There wasn’t any.
"No?" The smile thinned a little. "You might want to think about that. The sun sets in half an hour. After that, no academy will ever take you, and my offer will be a half instead of a third."
"I heard you," Mav said, and he walked away.
"You’ll be back!" Hollis called after him. He didn’t sound angry. He sounded like a man who had said those words many times, and who had usually been right.
-----
The Row ended in a wall.
Mav stood in front of it with the last light on his back. He had been to every table. He had 41 refusals and one leash, and the sky over the towers was turning the color of a furnace.
For a moment, he let himself feel all of it. He was tired to the bone, and he was hungry. He had almost died about once a week for a month to be standing here in time, and it had bought him nothing.
’Without an academy, I have no teachers and no allies. I’d be alone in a place where everybody else has a house behind him.’
He had been alone before, though, and it hadn’t killed him.
He was turning to go when he noticed the smell.
It didn’t belong on the Row. Under the flowers and the food, there was something warm and rank, like wet fur and old straw. It was coming from a narrow side street on his right, which he had taken for an alley.
There was a sign at its corner. The paint had peeled so badly that he had to step closer to read it.
It showed a faded brown root, and under the root, an arrow.
At the far end of the side street, a single gate still stood open.