The side street was short, and it got worse with every step.
The stones of the street were cracked. The lamps hadn’t been lit. On both sides, the back walls of two great academies rose like cliffs, and between them, at the very end, sat a school that looked as if it had been built from what the others had thrown away.
It was a low huddle of brown brick buildings around a yard of beaten earth. Half of the roof tiles didn’t match. A wooden board hung over the gate, and somebody had painted a root on it a long time ago, with a name underneath.
WILDROOT ACADEMY.
The noise hit him at the gate. Something was howling behind the main building. Something else answered it with a deep, wet bellow, and under both of those he could hear hooves, a great many of them, drumming on hard ground.
Mav stopped, confused. The Arbiter had told him that no Subject could be brought into the Nexus.
Then he remembered the rest of the rule. Outside the arenas. A school had to have training grounds, and a training ground was an arena. Whatever was howling back there was standing on a piece of somebody’s World.
’So this is where they put the students with weak beasts. Far away from the nice streets. It’s probably the academy with the lowest-ranked students.’
A small table stood inside the gate. Behind it sat an old man, packing pens into a box. He had a white beard, a green scarf around his neck and only one arm, and he didn’t look up.
"We’re closed."
"The sun hasn’t set," Mav said.
The old man glanced at the sky, which was still red at the edges, and sighed like someone who had lost an argument with it before.
"Name."
"Maverick Silkborn."
That made him look up. His eyes went over the rags and the harpoon. Then he found the name on his slate, and his white eyebrows climbed.
"Last. The very last. Thirty days, and on the final hour." He tapped the slate. "And your species is a water plant. Son, this is a school for people who command beasts. Wolves. Boars. Things with teeth. What exactly am I supposed to teach a salad?"
Mav said nothing. He had heard better insults that afternoon, and he was too tired to pretend that this one hurt.
"I’m sorry," the old man said, and he almost sounded it. "We’re poor, but we’re not that poor. Try the Brightwater table."
"Wait, Osk."
The voice came from the doorway behind him.
The woman who stood there was about 50, short and narrow, and she held herself like a soldier who had never been told to stand at ease. Her gray hair was cropped close to her skull. An old burn covered the left side of her jaw and ran down her neck, where it vanished under a green scarf. Her sleeves were rolled to the elbow, and her forearms were a map of scars.
She wasn’t looking at the slate. She was looking at Mav’s face.
For half a second, something moved behind her eyes. It might have been surprise. It might have been something heavier than that. Then it was gone, and Mav wasn’t sure that he had seen it at all.
"Silkborn," she said.
"Yes."
"You reached rank E in 30 days, alone, with a plant for a species."
"Yes."
"How?"
Mav met her eyes. All his life, he had answered powerful people with lowered eyes and careful words. He noticed, with some interest, that he no longer felt like doing it.
"Slowly," he said.
The old man coughed. The woman’s mouth twitched at one corner, and the burn twisted with it.
"Put him on the list, Osk."
"Mara, he’s dead last. The board will ask why we took the worst result of the whole year."
"Then the board can ask me." She took a pen from the box, leaned over the slate, and signed it herself. "A boy who lives 30 days at the bottom of a sea with a weed for company has learned something that the other 21,000 haven’t. I’d like to find out what it is."
She straightened up.
"Instructor Mara Quill. You’re in my class. Don’t make me regret the ink."
Mav felt something loosen in his chest that had been tight since noon. He wasn’t sure what to do with it. In eight years, nobody had taken his side in front of a stranger, except a boy with shoulders like a cargo door.
"I won’t," he said. It was the closest thing to thanks that he had in him.
-----
"MAV!"
He barely had time to turn around.
Something the size of a wall hit him, and then his feet weren’t on the ground anymore. Two arms like ship’s cables had closed around his ribs, and the yard was spinning.
"You’re alive! I looked for your name every day! Every single day, and it wasn’t there, and this morning it was at the bottom and I thought I’d read it wrong!"
"Ronald," Mav wheezed. "Ribs."
Ronald Brown put him down.
He had changed too. He had always been the biggest boy in their year, but a month in his highlands had packed another layer of muscle onto him, and his round, untroubled face was brown from the sun. A long white scar ran across his forearm. He wore a clean shirt, patched trousers and the same green scarf as the other two, and he was grinning so widely that it looked painful.
Mav discovered that his own throat had gone tight, and that he had no idea what to say. So he said the first true thing that came to him.
"Seventeen days. That’s good. Why did you choose this academy? I bet you had better options with your potential."
"It was the boars. They did most of it." Ronald waved one huge hand. "They dig, Mav. You should’ve seen them. I got to my hills with two shovels, and by the third day I didn’t need either of them."
He scratched his neck, and for once, he looked a little embarrassed.
"Two schools on the Row wanted me. Good ones. But I thought about it. If you ever came out of that water, no good school was going to take you. This is the only one that takes anybody. So I signed here the day I arrived, and I waited."
Mav stared at him. He had expected many things from this day, but not that. For a moment, he couldn’t trust his voice.
"You’re an idiot," he said at last.
"I know." Ronald grinned. "What about you? What did you even do down there? I kept thinking about you sitting in the water with a..."
He stopped. He had finally noticed the faint green light that came through the holes in Mav’s shirt.
"What’s that?"
"Something from my sea."
"You’re wearing it?"
"It’s a long story."
Ronald studied the green light with the same serious face he had once turned on two shovels. He reached out one finger. Under the torn cloth, One shifted, and Ronald pulled the finger back.
"Does it bite?"
"Only me."
Ronald laughed, because he thought it was a joke. Mav let him. He felt a small, sharp twist of guilt, and pushed it down. There were things about One that he couldn’t say in a yard, with two strangers listening, even to the only friend he had.
’Later. When it’s safe to tell him.’
-----
The one-armed man, whose name was Osk, came around the table and held out a folded square of green cloth.
"Your uniform."
Mav looked at it. It was a scarf. He waited for the rest.
"That’s all of it," Osk said. "Evergrove gives its students three coats and a cloak. We give you that, and you buy your own trousers. The other schools call it the collar, because they call this place the Doghouse, and they think they’re funny. You’ll hear both words a lot. I’d advise you to get used to them."
Mav turned the scarf over in his hands. It was plain wool, thick and a little rough.
He tied it around his neck, and saw at once what it was good for. It covered the back of his neck, where One went into his skin. That was the one place a shirt couldn’t hide.
"It suits you," Ronald said, with complete honesty.
Instructor Quill had watched all of this without a word. Now she pointed at the main building.
"There are some folding beds upstairs for those who want them, and food in the hall until it runs out. Classes are three days in seven. The rest of the time, you’re on your World, where you belong." She looked at Mav’s harpoon, and at the knife tied to its end. "Be in the south yard at dawn."
"For what?" Mav asked.
"Tomorrow, you will learn to manifest."