Mav came back to the Nexus with mud on his new jacket, and he went straight to the wall of names.
He stood in front of it for most of the morning.
This time, he wasn’t looking at his own name. He was reading the rules, which were written in small pale letters at the bottom of the wall. On his first day, he had been too tired to study them. Now he read them slowly, twice, because he wanted to understand every one of them.
Ronald found him there at noon, with a girl behind him.
Mav had seen her in class without ever really looking at her. Tamsin Bell was small and thin, with short brown hair, a sharp, worried face, and dark circles under her eyes, as if she hadn’t slept properly in weeks. She carried a slate under her arm and held it tightly against her chest. Her green scarf was tied with two knots.
"He has been here since the gate opened," Ronald told her. "He always does this. He stares at a thing until he understands it."
"I’m reading the rules," Mav said.
"I can explain them to you," Tamsin said. She spoke quickly, and she looked at his shoulder instead of his face. "It would be faster. I mean, only if you want. I studied all of them in the first week, because I thought they might be useful. But then they weren’t, because nobody at the bottom ever challenges anyone, so..."
She ran out of breath and stopped, and her face turned pink.
"Please go on," Mav said. He liked people who were precise.
She looked surprised. Then she began to explain, and her voice became calmer as soon as she talked about numbers.
"This is the Class Ladder, and there’s one for each year. It starts with the number of days that each of us needed to reach rank E. After that, it only changes when someone challenges someone else. Anyone can challenge anyone above him to an official duel. If the challenger wins, he takes the loser’s place, and the loser drops one. If the challenger loses, nothing moves. But a duel is fought with real Manifestations and real Subjects, so losing can cost you everything you brought."
"Can the person who is challenged refuse?"
"He can refuse three times in a year. After that, his name turns red on the wall." She almost smiled. "Nobles hate that more than anything, so they almost never refuse."
"There is one more thing," Tamsin said. "The Ladder uses your real name, so you can’t hide. And House Sunspire, which runs most of the media, shows every change on Earth the same evening."
Mav was silent for a moment.
He had known that last part. He had watched the Class Ladder on screens his whole life. But he had always watched it as something that happened to other people.
Now he pictured the screen in his uncle’s kitchen.
He imagined the line under his face changing, week after week. He imagined the men on the furnace line seeing it, Mister Harrow in his office, and the sergeant at the Homegate.
Something strong and warm rose in his chest, and it took him a second to recognize it as hope.
’He asked me to stay last and to stay alive. I’m sorry, Uncle, but I can only do one of those.’
"If I beat someone 200 places above me," he said slowly, "can I go up 200 places?"
"Yes, in one single duel."
"And what if I beat the person who is ranked 214th?"
Tamsin stared at him. Ronald knew that Dorian was ranked 214th, so he began to grin.
"Then you would be 214th," she said. "But you can’t do that. I mean, nobody could do it from the bottom. He has ash hounds at rank E+ and a real trainer, and you only have..." She stopped, and her face turned pink again. "I’m sorry. That was rude."
"It was true," Mav said. "But it won’t be true for long."
-----
The laughter reached them before the people did.
It was a loud, easy laughter, from people who were used to being watched. The crowd in front of the wall moved aside for them without being asked.
There were six of them, and they wore white.
Mav knew those colors, because he had seen them on the screen in his uncle’s kitchen the night before. They wore white coats with gold edges, and on each chest, there was a sun with nine rays. It was the mark of House Sunspire.
He recognized the girl in the middle at once, because her face had been on every wall of the foundry district for a year.
Thalia Sunspire was 19, and taller than he had expected. Her skin was the warm brown of the desert Worlds. Her hair, turned almost white by a harder sun than Earth’s, hung to her waist in a braid as thick as his wrist. She had a wide mouth and gold dust on her eyelids, and she walked like someone who enjoyed being looked at.
She held last year’s record, with four days. Until a month ago, nobody had been faster in a generation.
"There it is," she said, and pointed at the top of the wall with a finger that wore a gold ring. "Two days, and then three days. I kept my record for one year, Perrin. Only one. My mother had already printed the banners."
Nobody laughed. Thalia didn’t like being beaten, and her friends knew it.
Then her eyes went down the columns, all the way to the bottom of the wall.
"Oh, that’s cruel. Listen to this." She spoke louder, so that everyone could hear. "Number 21,307. Thirty days exactly. And his species is..."
She leaned closer, as if she couldn’t believe it.
"It’s seaweed. Seaweed! Somebody tell me that it’s a joke." She put a hand on her chest. "He needed a month to grow a salad. The poor thing. Our house showed his face all week, and I thought that the writers had invented him."
The laughter was louder this time, and people who weren’t with her laughed too. Some of them turned their heads to look for the boy from the screens, and a few of them saw Mav.
Tamsin tried to hide behind her slate, and Ronald’s hands closed into huge fists.
Mav felt his face grow hot with anger. Her house was the reason his uncle had burned hands. But she didn’t sound cruel. She only sounded amused.
She wasn’t trying to hurt him. To her, his name was only something funny that she had read on a wall.
He looked at her for one second, so that he would remember her face.
Then he turned back to the wall, and went on reading the rules.
He didn’t answer her, and he didn’t leave.
Behind him, the laughter became weaker, and then it stopped.
"Is that him?" someone whispered. "The one with the green scarf?"
"He heard you, Thalia."
"He’s not even..."
There was a pause.
Mav couldn’t see her face, but he could feel her staring at his back. Nobody ignored a Sunspire. People bowed to them, blushed, or begged. They didn’t simply ignore them.
"Well," Thalia Sunspire said, after a moment. She tried to sound as cheerful as before, but she was clearly annoyed. "He’s ruder than he looks on the screen."
She walked on, and her friends went with her. But when she reached the corner of the wall, she looked back at him once, with a small frown.
Mav didn’t see it, but Ronald did, and he told him about it later.
-----
A bell rang across the plaza.
At the bottom of the wall, a new column of letters was appearing. The crowd pressed forward to read it. Mav didn’t have to push, because people were now leaving a little space around him.
[Official duels, first round. Posted by the academies.]
Every year, the academies opened the season with a first round of duels between their first-years. The pairs were drawn by lot, so the last of the year could face anyone. Mav read down the list until he found Wildroot, and then his own name.
[Maverick Silkborn, Wildroot. Rank 21,307.]
[Against: Edric Vane, Emberhall. Rank 10,950.]
"Quill did that," Ronald said. "She signed you up. She signed all of us up."
"He’s from Emberhall," Tamsin said in a weak voice. "That’s the Pyrecrest school, and it trains soldiers. Mav, their first-years have been training to fight as a group since they were 12. And he is more than 10,000 places above you."
Mav barely heard her.
He was looking at the last line, and for the first time since the Bestowal, he was looking forward to something.
[Tomorrow, at noon. The duel will be shown on Earth.]