Quill named the team on a gray morning, a week after the raid.
She didn’t make a speech. She walked into the classroom, put a sheet of paper on her desk and looked at all of them until they stopped talking.
"You’ve all heard about the tournament," she said. "Once a year, the academies of the Row are ranked against each other. The Class Ladder ranks students, but this ranks schools. Sixteen academies take part. They’re the oldest on the Row, and Wildroot is one of them, although most people have forgotten it. Each one sends five first-years. Two teams meet in a match of five duels, and the team that wins three of them wins the match. In the first round, each academy fights two matches. The eight best go on, and after that, a team that loses a match goes home."
She looked at the paper.
"Wildroot has finished last for 30 years."
Nobody laughed, but a few people looked at their desks.
"The academies that finish high get students and sponsors. The ones that finish last get nothing, and they slowly die." Quill put the paper down. "I don’t intend to let this school die. So this year, we’re going to win some matches."
She read five names.
"Ronald Brown. Tamsin Bell. Brann Holloway. Nell Farrow." She paused. "And Maverick Silkborn, as captain."
The class turned to look at them. Wildroot was so small that it had only one class of first-years, so all five of them were in this room.
Ronald grinned, but Tamsin looked as if she had swallowed a stone. In the front row, Brann Holloway nodded slowly, as if he had expected it. He was a broad, red-haired boy with a wolf’s tooth on a cord around his neck. In Mav’s first week, his 16 gray wolves had beaten Mav’s fish in Quill’s yard. He had been kind about it, which had made it worse.
Mav was looking for the fourth name.
He had to turn around to find her. Nell Farrow sat at the very back of the room, against the wall. She was small and thin, with a long gray-brown braid, and she had a way of sitting so still that people forgot she was there. Mav had been in this room with her for three months. He couldn’t remember ever hearing her speak.
She met his eyes and gave him a small nod. Then she looked down at her hands.
"Farrow?" a boy near the window said. "Why her?"
"Because her Subjects are small cave bats that can hear a heartbeat through stone," Quill said. "Because she has never lost a training duel. And because nobody in this room knew either of those things, so nobody else on the Row knows them either."
-----
After the class, Quill kept Mav back.
"The draw is in two weeks," she said. "The first matches come about 10 days after it. Each captain sets the order of his five in secret, and he gives it to the Arbiter on the morning of each match. Nobody can change it afterward."
"Why me as captain? I’ve only been here three months."
"Because you’re the strongest fighter in this school," Quill said simply. "And because the other four will follow you, which is rarer."
Mav didn’t know what to say to that, so he said nothing. But he felt proud, and it surprised him how much.
Quill looked at him more closely. She hadn’t asked about the raid. She had looked at his face on the morning after it, nodded once and gone back to her lesson. But he knew that she understood more than she said.
"You’ve grown," she said quietly. "I can see it in how you stand. Don’t show it in the arena until you need to."
"I won’t."
"One more thing." She took out another sheet. It was a list of the 15 other academies, with notes in her small, hard writing. "Look at the teams that won in the last five years. What do they have in common?"
Mav read the list. The answer was there, but it took him a moment to see it.
"They all have something that flies."
"Half of the teams in this tournament have fliers, Silkborn. Your dome on the sand is a target from above. Your fish can’t reach the sky, and two spitters won’t stop a flock." She put the list away. "You have a little more than three weeks. Think about it."
-----
The five of them met that evening in the roof room.
It was the first time that Brann Holloway had climbed the stairs. He looked around at the cracked window and the old benches. He seemed nervous, but he hid it behind a grin.
"I’ll say it once," he said. "I didn’t think that you’d last a month here. I was wrong, and I’m glad. I’d rather fight beside you than against you."
"You beat me in the yard," Mav said.
"I beat your fish, on dry sand, in your first week." Brann shrugged, but he looked pleased. "I’ve watched you since. I won’t be able to do it again."
Tamsin had already filled half of her slate. She was worried about everything at once, so she talked about all of it at once: the draw, the order of the duels, the academies with fliers and the fact that only two of her moths could fly. Ronald listened to her, eating bread.
Nell sat in the corner by the window. She hadn’t said a word since she came in, and Mav had almost forgotten that she was there. Then she spoke, so quietly that the others had to stop talking to hear her.
"Emberhall already knows that you’re the captain."
Everyone turned to look at her.
"Two of their soldiers were talking about it in the market this afternoon," Nell said. "They didn’t see me. People never do." She looked down at her hands again. "They said that Vane wants you."
Mav looked at her for a moment. Quill had said that nobody on the Row knew what Nell could do. He realized that nobody on the Row knew what Nell heard either.
"Thank you," he said. "Tell me if you hear anything else."
She nodded once, and for the first time, he saw her almost smile.
-----
Quill signed the entry the next morning, in the hall of the Great Arena, and she took Mav with her.
It was a high, round room above the sand, with 16 tables in a circle and a box for each of the Ten along the walls. The academies sat at the tables. The great houses that owned them, or paid for them, watched from the boxes above. Most of the boxes were empty. A few had servants in them, and three glass eyes floated in front of the box of House Sunspire.
Wildroot’s table was the smallest one, with the worst chair. Around it, the other instructors and captains were talking and laughing. Some of the captains were heirs of great houses, and all of them were rich. When Mav sat down beside Quill, the talking stopped for a moment. Then it started again more quietly.
Emberhall had sent only a servant to sign. Its captain was Cassian Pyrecrest, and Cassian Pyrecrest didn’t sign papers in person.
While Quill wrote Wildroot’s name, Mav looked up. One of the high boxes wasn’t empty.
It was a black box at the very top of the wall, and the light seemed to stop at its edge. A young man sat in it alone. He was dressed in black from his collar to his boots, and he looked a few years older than Mav. He had a thin, pale face, with his black hair tied at the neck. He wasn’t watching the instructors or the glass eyes.
He was watching Mav, and he was smiling.
There was nothing cruel or mocking in the smile. He looked delighted, as if he had found something that he had been looking for all his life.
Mav looked back at him. The young man raised one hand, very slightly, as if he were greeting an old friend.
"Whose box is that?" Mav asked the clerk who was taking the papers.
The clerk glanced up, and his face changed. He looked away quickly.
"House Voidmarch," he said. "They never send anyone."
Mav knew very little about House Voidmarch. It was one of the Ten, and it controlled the closed quarters of the Nexus, where nobody went without its leave. Its people almost never appeared on Sunspire’s screens.
When he looked up again, the box was empty.
He walked back to Wildroot through the Proving Grounds, thinking about the young man in black and about Quill’s list. The first match was a little more than three weeks away. He had a body of rank D, and his city had just held against 12 raiders. But his army couldn’t touch the sky.
Half of the teams had fliers, and Mav had none.