The warmth spread steadily through Owen’s arm.
He opened his eyes and watched the wound. The torn edges were drawing toward each other, slowly, the raw flesh knitting closed beneath the healer’s palm. It didn’t hurt, exactly. It felt as though something hot were moving around under his skin, and he had to fight the urge to pull away from it. Bit by bit, the bleeding slowed, and then it stopped.
"Now your ribs," the healer said. "Straighten your back for me."
He tried. Pain shot through his side before he was halfway there, and he sucked in a breath through his teeth.
"That’s what I thought." She pressed her fingers carefully along his ribs, one after another, then laid her hand flat against his side. The warmth came again, deeper this time.
Around them, the slope had turned into a field hospital. Healers knelt beside the injured, speaking in low, even voices. Satchels rustled. Boots moved back and forth across the stones. Somewhere farther along, a candidate Owen couldn’t see let out a long groan and was told quietly to keep still.
The healer had cleaned the blood from his arm, but he could still smell it on his clothes.
At last, she sat back. She took his left arm, bent it at the elbow, turned his wrist one way and then the other, and watched his face while she did it.
"Good," she said. "You can walk, and you can use that arm. But you’re going to be sore for a few days, and I don’t want you doing anything strenuous until then. Healing it doesn’t mean it’s forgotten it was hurt."
"I understand," Owen said. "Thank you."
She nodded and moved on to the next candidate.
Owen flexed his fingers, then lifted the arm slowly above his shoulder. A dull ache followed the movement, nothing like the tearing pain from before. His ribs still complained when he breathed too deeply, but he could breathe.
His eyes went up the slope, to where the soldiers were gathered around the body.
He thought about the scholars and their theory. People who had tried to force their Awakening. Perhaps they had been right. But even if they had, it explained nothing about why the thing had thanked him.
He didn’t know enough to answer that. Nobody here did, as far as he could tell. The Academy was examining the body, and if there was anything to learn, he supposed he would hear about it eventually.
He let it go.
"Well?" Elias came over, walking much more easily than before, though Owen noticed he still kept a little weight off one side. "Did they fix you?"
"The worst of it."
"Good." Elias looked genuinely relieved. Then, in almost the same breath, "So, now that you’re feeling better—"
"No."
"You don’t even know what I was going to say."
"You were going to ask about the rifle."
Elias opened his mouth, then shut it. "That’s not fair. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life, and you keep making it vanish."
"We’ve just been healed," Owen said. "Give it a day."
Eveline and Marianne came over a short while later. The healers had seen to them as well, though neither of them looked much better for it. There was dust caked around their boots, and Eveline’s jacket was still torn at the elbow.
"How’s the arm?" Eveline asked.
"Better. Sore."
Marianne had taken one look at Elias’s face and grinned. "He’s asking about the rifle again, isn’t he?"
"He is," Owen said.
"Show us," Marianne said. "Just once. We won’t touch it."
"I’ll touch it," Elias said.
"He’s only just been treated," Eveline said, before Owen could answer. "Leave him alone for one evening."
Owen looked at the three of them. The examination was over. He had never once agreed to travel with any of them. And yet, they were still here
He found that he didn’t mind.
"Owen Ferrers?"
A soldier had come down the slope toward them.
"Yes."
"The Commandant and the senior officers are ready to see you, sir. If you’ll come with me."
"Of course."
Elias looked at him sharply. "Why do they want you?"
"Captain Pike told me about it earlier," Owen said. "Right after it happened."
"It’ll be about the rifle," Marianne said. "It has to be."
"Or the creature," Eveline said. "They’ll want to know exactly what happened."
"Probably both," Owen said. "I’ll find you afterward."
He followed the soldier.
* * *
They didn’t go far before the forest gave way, and Owen saw the Academy for the first time.
The sun was sinking toward the horizon, and the long shadows of buildings lay across wide paved paths and open training grounds. Great stone halls rose up beyond the grounds, the sword and laurel carved above their doors. Banners hung from tall poles and stirred in the evening breeze. Soldiers in Academy uniform moved along the paths, carrying equipment, or stood at the edges of the grounds directing candidates toward the buildings.
Lamps had begun to glow along the paths. As Owen watched, another one flickered into light ahead of them, and then the next.
There were candidates everywhere, being led in small groups toward what he guessed were the accommodation buildings. Some of them were talking over each other, loud and excited. Others walked with their heads down and said nothing at all.
He caught pieces of what they were saying as he passed.
"—soldiers came straight in when the barrier dropped. Dozens of them—"
"—a monster nobody was supposed to be fighting, that’s what I heard—"
"—and that noise, right at the end. Did you hear it? Like thunder, but it wasn’t—"
The soldier didn’t slow down, and Owen didn’t stop to listen.
The building the soldier brought him to was smaller than the halls, and plainer. Inside, he was shown along a corridor and into a room where three people were waiting.
It was a working room. A broad table filled most of it, covered with reports, candidate records and maps of the examination grounds. A projection hung against one wall, showing a stretch of the forest. Lamps had been lit against the dusk gathering outside the windows.
Owen knew all three of them. Captain Pike, who nodded to him as he came in. A woman with a report spread open in front of her. And the man who had spoken to every candidate from the sky at the start of the examination.
The Commandant gestured toward a chair. "Sit down, Lord Owen."
Owen sat.
"How are you feeling?"
"Better, sir. The healers took care of the worst of it. I’m still sore."
"I expect you will be for a while." The Commandant studied him across the table. "I want to thank you. What you did out there stopped that creature from reaching anyone else. I won’t pretend otherwise."
He said it plainly, and then he moved on. "But there are things we need to understand properly for the investigation. This shouldn’t take long."