House Frostmere’s court took four days to decide what had happened on the ice World. It never asked Mav a single question, because it didn’t need to.
Isolde Frostmere had told them everything. She told them about the six cloaks at the arch, the red apes on the ridge and the rocks that had broken her bridge. She told them that more than 200 people had been hunting on that World when its Heartstone was smashed, and that three of them hadn’t reached the arch before the lake fell into the dark. She also repeated the words that the whole plain had heard: Dorian Ashgrove sends his regards.
One morning, Tamsin read the ruling aloud in the yard of Wildroot. Someone had nailed a copy to the gate, and a small crowd of first-years had gathered around it.
"Dorian Ashgrove swears that he gave no such order," she read. "He says that Tobias Crane used his name without permission, to make himself important. House Ashgrove regrets the deaths. It will pay 5,000 Essence to the family of each of the three students, and 10,000 to the court." She lowered the paper. "The court also finds that Tobias Crane died while other people were defending their lives. That’s all it says about him."
"That’s all?" Ronald said. "He broke a whole World!"
"And he’s dead. A court can’t fine a dead man." Tamsin folded the paper very carefully. "There’s one more line. Evergrove Academy has taken Dorian off its team for the upcoming Academy tournament. That’s the only thing that anyone took away from him."
Mav said nothing. He was angry, but it wasn’t the hot anger that he had felt in the Great Arena. This one was cold and slow. Three students had died so that Dorian could shout his name across a frozen lake, and Dorian would pay for it with his father’s money.
’He didn’t even come himself. He sent a man with apes, and he stayed somewhere warm.’
He noticed that some of the first-years around the gate were looking at him. A few of them looked away when he met their eyes, but most of them didn’t. A boy from his class came closer, with his hands in his pockets.
"Is it true that you froze the lake?" he asked. "My cousin was on the shelf. He says that you and the Frostmere girl held a bridge for 10 minutes while the sky came down."
"It was her bridge," Mav said. "I only fixed the holes."
The boy nodded as if that were an even better answer, and he went back to tell the others.
-----
That night, Mav sat on the roof of his cabin and opened his Status.
He did it every evening now, but he never read the whole thing. He looked at his Subjects, at the bars and at his hosts. There was one line that he had never shown to anyone, not even Ronald, and he always went past it quickly, as if someone might be reading over his shoulder.
Tonight, he made himself stop on it.
[Maverick Silkborn. World: Submerged. Rank: E.]
[Potential: D]
The stone in the school hall had said E. He remembered the Officiant’s flat voice, and the murmur that had gone through the hall. An E meant that his World would grow exactly once and then stop forever. He had believed it for 30 days at the bottom of this sea.
Then, on the night his World reached rank E, the letter had changed. He had been too tired to understand it at first. When he finally did, he had told nobody, because Quill had said that his low potential was the only thing that protected him. The great houses didn’t waste time on a boy whose World would never pass rank E.
He stared at the D until the letters began to blur.
Quill had said that the potential was set on the first day, and that almost nothing could change it. Almost nothing. So something had.
’If it moved once, it can move again. When my World reaches rank D, will this line say C?’
The second question was worse. It had been waiting under the first one since the evening in Quill’s classroom.
His father had said that the ladder was rigged. He had said that he could prove it, and they had killed him three months later.
’What if my E was never true?’
He couldn’t answer that. Nobody could, except perhaps his father, and his father was dead. But there was another question that someone could answer.
What had happened to his father’s World?
Quill had taught them the rule. When an Awakened died, his World went to his liege. If he had no liege, it became an Orphan World, and it broke after one year. Corwin Silkborn had been a liege himself, and he had sworn to nobody. So his World should have stood on Gravemoor’s board for one year, eight years ago, and then it should have broken.
Mav had never asked about it, because he had been afraid of the answer. He had pictured strangers walking through his father’s World for a whole year, paying by the day to kill whatever his father had raised.
He closed the Status. He was still afraid of the answer, but he wasn’t going to let that stop him anymore.
-----
He went to the Orphan Gate the next morning, at the hour when the parties left for their Worlds and the square was full.
It looked exactly as it had on the day that Tamsin first brought him there. Nine black arches stood in a ring around a square of gray stone. The guards of House Gravemoor stood in front of them in their gray-green coats, each with a white heron sewn on the chest. The great board in the middle was as wide as a house, and its letters moved in dozens of lines. A party of second-years pushed past him, arguing about the price of a desert.
He read the board slowly, from the first line to the last. There were 58 Worlds on it. The board didn’t give the names of their owners, only the kind of World, its rank and its potential, so he learned nothing, but he hadn’t really expected to. It had been eight years.
So he asked the Arbiter instead.
It felt strange to do it in a crowd. But people asked the Arbiter questions all day long, about prices, rules and the way to the Great Market, so nobody looked twice at him. His heart was beating fast, and his mouth was dry.
"What happened to the World of Corwin Silkborn?" he asked quietly.
The answer came at once, in pale letters that only he could see.
[The World of Corwin Silkborn was never an Orphan World.]
Mav went cold.
"Did it break?"
[No.]
So it still existed. Somewhere beyond the stars, his father’s World was still turning, eight years after its owner had died.
"Who holds it now?"
This time, the answer took a moment longer. He had never seen the Arbiter hesitate before, and he didn’t think that anyone else had either.
[That answer is not given.]
"Why not?"
[That answer is not given.]
He stood in the middle of the square while people walked around him. The Arbiter had answered every question that he had ever asked it. It had told the whole Proving Grounds that his beasts were his own. Tamsin said that it answered everyone, about everything, and that it had never lied once in 500 years.
Now it was refusing. That meant that someone had the power to make it refuse.
A Gravemoor guard was watching him with some curiosity, because he had been standing still for too long. Mav made himself walk away at an ordinary pace, toward the plaza of arches. He chose an arch that he hadn’t used that week, and he waited for the crowd of the morning before he went through it.
He felt the same thing that he had felt in the trench, on the night when he first saw the lure beast’s light. There was something very large in the dark, and it had just moved.
His father’s World hadn’t broken.
It had a master.