1: The Cow

# Chapter One — The Cow

The brook ran shallow in late summer, and Wynn had decided this made it better for catching crawfish. Her logic—offered to Kael without his asking—was that less water meant fewer places to hide. She had been sitting on the same flat rock for the better part of an hour, and he had counted three crawfish released for every one she kept.

She had named the one she kept. He could tell because she'd stopped putting it in the bucket with the others.

"Kael," she said, without looking up.

"Wynn."

"You're going, aren't you."

It wasn't a question. Wynn had never bothered framing things as questions when she already knew the answer.

He sat down on the bank—not on a rock, because the good flat rocks were hers—and looked at the water. The brook came down out of the hills above Hollowmere and ran west through the lower fields before bending south, and in late summer it shrank to something you could step across if you were determined enough. Wynn had been determined about it since she was six. She had the scars on her shins to prove she'd stepped and misjudged at least twice.

"Don't know yet," he said.

She made a sound in the back of her throat that meant she thought he was lying but wasn't going to press it. She was ten and had strong opinions about the limits of direct confrontation.

The afternoon was loud with late-summer insects and the particular smell of sun-warmed stone and meadow grass that Kael had been breathing his whole life and still couldn't describe in any way that would mean something to someone who hadn't grown up breathing it. He had tried once. He had written three sentences in the margin of Schoolmistress Orrith's borrowed primer and looked at them and scratched them out because *smells like the end of harvest* was not a description, it was a fact.

Somewhere up the hill, Clover lowed once. Then silence.

The Common Petition. Once a year. Twelve seats. Eight hundred applicants, this year's estimate—he had read the Conclave newsletter six times at the schoolroom, standing over the open pages because Schoolmistress Orrith had been clear that borrowing and reading were the same thing, but borrowing and keeping were not. The Petition opened on the first day of autumn. He had time. He had the route memorized from the atlas. He had everything except the coach fare, which Durr the post-cart driver had quoted him, unprompted, as a number that landed in his chest like a wet sack.

What they had in liquid savings was two silver and forty coppers.

Clover lowed again.

He had done the arithmetic so many times he could do it in the dark. Six silver for Clover at summer weight—Durr's estimate, which he had no reason to doubt since Durr had been buying Bridgemill cattle for thirty years and had the look of a man who knew the price of things. The coach north: thirty coppers to the Heartlands junction, another thirty to Castellune. Food for six weeks, if he was careful, was another forty coppers, maybe fifty. The Common Petition application fee was ten coppers—he had that already, saved from two market runs. So: six silver, minus two silver in travel and meals, leaving four silver when he walked up to Argent Vale's gate.

Four silver. He had looked up what a student needed to survive the first term on the Common Petition fund. The scholarship stipend was five silver a week. Which was enough for books and meals at the refectory, if you were not buying anything else.

He was not going to be buying anything else.

"She's worth six silver in summer weight," Wynn said, very carefully, to the water.

He looked at her. She was looking at the brook like she'd never spoken at all, and her hands were very still around the crawfish that had a name.

He almost said: *I'm not asking you to sell the cow.*

He said: "Let's go home."

---

On the walk back through the lower fields, he counted the apple trees. Twelve of them, planted in a crooked line by someone's grandfather's grandfather, heavy with fruit this year in the particular abundance that meant extra work come autumn. Every apple would need picking, sorting, trading or pressing. His aunt Mella would help—she always came in September with her cart and her opinions and a seed-cake she'd been perfecting for twenty years and would not share the recipe for, on principle. Without Kael there to carry, Tomis would need to ask the Fenwick boy from two fields over. The Fenwick boy was adequate but slow.

He thought about this the whole walk home and came to no conclusion except that he was thinking about it the way a man thinks about a problem he has already decided to create.

The farm sat at the end of a dirt path off the south road. Two rooms and a loft, a vegetable patch behind, a small outbuilding for tools and animals. The wheat was cut and bundled in the field beside it—Tomis Vance's version of order, everything in its place before any other thing got discussed.

Clover was in the yard. She turned one brown eye toward Kael as he came through the gate, in the specific way she had of looking at people that had always suggested she was conducting some kind of assessment and finding the results satisfactory but not impressive. She had one ear that wouldn't stand up straight—whether something had happened to it or it had simply grown wrong, Kael had never found out. He had never asked because it was the kind of question that would make his father stop what he was doing and give him a look.

"You're worth six silver," he told her.

She looked at him with the assessment eye. Then she looked away.

He went inside.

---

His mother was at the hearth with a pot going. His father was sitting at the kitchen table looking at a piece of scrap wood the way Tomis Vance looked at things when he was thinking—not at the object itself but somewhere past it.

"Wynn's at the brook," Kael said.

"I know." Iselle didn't look up from the pot. "She's been going there every day this week."

He sat down across from his father. Tomis set the wood flat on the table and folded his hands on top of it. He had very wide hands. Kael had looked at his own hands sometimes and thought they were narrower, that he'd gotten his mother's build, that whatever his father had that made him good with wood he hadn't inherited. And then he'd look at a room or a person and realize he had inherited something, just not the hands.

"Your mother and I," his father said, "have been talking."

"I know."

"You've been quiet all week."

"I've been thinking."

"About Castellune."

"About the road to Castellune." It was precise. He was thinking about the road, not the city. The city he couldn't plan for yet. The road was six weeks of specific problems he could organize.

Tomis was quiet for a moment. Outside, Clover lowed. It was her evening sound, the one she made when she wanted moving from the yard to the pen. Kael and Wynn had spent two summers cataloguing her sounds.

"The Common Petition," his father said. "Once a year. Twelve seats. Out of—"

"Eight hundred applicants, this year's estimate. Last year was seven hundred sixty."

His father made a sound like something settling. Not approval. More like recognition.

"Clover's worth six in summer weight," Tomis said. "Durr will take her to the Bridgemill market if we ask. He owes us."

"I'm not asking you to sell the cow."

"I know." His father looked at him steadily. "We're telling you we're going to."

Kael sat with that for a moment.

His mother had stopped stirring. The cottage was very quiet except for the fire.

"We've been watching you read things," Iselle said, still looking at the pot, "since before you could read things properly. You used to carry that primer around like it was a live animal." She paused. "We've been talking about this since spring."

"Since spring."

"Before you brought it up. Before you very deliberately didn't bring it up." She turned, and looked at him with the same attention she gave patients—the assessment behind the warmth. "You're not asking because you don't want to owe us."

He opened his mouth. He closed it.

"I know my child," she said, and went back to the pot. "We know what the school costs beyond the first year. We've been asking the corvid-courier for two years. Tuition, books, a fitted wand eventually." She stirred. "Six silver gets you there. You get yourself the rest."

"I will," he said. A promise with no specific plan behind it yet and every intention of keeping.

His father picked up the wood again and looked at the grain. "Get accepted first," Tomis said. "Then we'll worry about wands."

---

After supper, Wynn sat next to Kael on the cottage step and didn't say anything for a long time. The evening insects had quieted. The late-summer sky over Hollowmere went the color of a bruise healing, deep purple at the edges, before going dark. He had always thought it a specific kind of beautiful that only worked because he'd been looking at it his whole life. He was fairly sure it would look the same if he came back in a year.

He was equally sure he would feel it differently.

"You'll write," she said.

"Every week."

"Even when you don't have anything interesting to say."

"I always have something interesting to say."

She gave him the sideways look—their mother's face with an expression entirely her own, a ten-year-old skepticism that he suspected would only sharpen over time.

"You're not worried," she said. "Are you."

"Not about the exam."

"What are you worried about?"

He considered a half-truth. He told her the whole one instead, because Wynn was sharp and he thought the only way to keep someone's respect when you left them was to be honest before you went.

"I don't know what I don't know yet," he said. "I've read everything I could get hold of about Argent Vale. The Five Disciplines. The Resonance Stone. How the entry test is structured. But eight hundred people are going and I've never met most of them, and I'm going to walk into that exam hall having had less practice at nearly everything than anyone else there." He stopped. "I know how to read. I know how to watch. But I've never done magic in front of someone who was trying to test me."

"What if you fail?"

"I come home. Figure out what I missed. Go again next year."

She was quiet for a moment. "You only have the one cow."

He almost laughed. "I know."

She put her chin on her knees. "I think you'll pass," she said.

"You don't know that."

"No." Simply. "But I think so."

He sat with her until it was full dark, and when their mother called them in he stayed on the step for another minute alone. Hollowmere at night was very small—a dozen lantern-squares of cottage light, the mill dark against the hill, the Brown Mare's sign creaking in the breeze. Somewhere a dog was considering barking and deciding against it.

Six weeks north of here was Castellune.

He had never been further than Bridgemill.

He went inside.

In the loft that night he lay on his back and stared at the slant of the roof and went through the entrance exam in his head, the way he had been going through it every night for three months.

Written portion: one hundred questions covering the history of the Five Disciplines, basic theoretical application of Current-attunement, and Runecraft principles. He had no concern about this. He had read the Conclave's published study guides twice—Schoolmistress Orrith had ordered them from the corvid-post when he was sixteen, out of her own pocket, because she said she could see it coming and she was right—and he had worked through every practice question he could find in everything he could borrow. He was not going to lose on the written.

The practical was different. You stood in front of a proctor and demonstrated your attunement. You drew from whatever Current was yours by nature. You showed competence.

He had a willow-wand stub from his mother's old kit—undersized, stiff, meant for minor household runework—and he had, as best as he could tell from a limited sample size of two, a weak but real affinity for Earth Current. He could make a stable runic mark. He could hold the attunement for about forty seconds before his concentration slipped. He did not know if this was enough, because he had never seen anyone else do it and had nothing to compare himself to.

He thought about the spider building its web in the Bridgemill stable. Patient. Methodical. One strand at a time.

He was asleep before he finished the thought.

---

He was awake before dawn. He'd expected that. He lay in the loft listening to the sounds of the cottage—his father's quiet movements in the kitchen, the particular creak of the third step on the ladder—and then he climbed down.

His mother was at the kitchen table with his second-best robe spread out in front of her. She had already threaded her needle. Beside her was an open cloth pouch, and the smell coming off it was the smell of her workbench shelf—dried herbs in small linen packets, sorted by use. He could identify most of them by the time he was twelve. Valerian. Yarrow. Meadowsweet. The dark brown one she called honest-root, good for infections when you couldn't reach an apothecary.

She looked up when he came down. She didn't say anything.

He sat across from her and watched her hands.

She worked with the same attention she gave everything, which was complete and calm. The pouch was small—flat, about the size of two fingers pressed together—and she was sewing it into the inner lining of the robe with tiny, careful stitches, the kind that wouldn't pull loose or be felt from the outside. She had done this before, he realized. Not for him. For someone else's travel, a long time ago.

He didn't ask.

"Valerian's for sleep," she said, without looking up. "If you're somewhere strange and you can't slow your head down. Quarter-pinch in hot water. Don't use it more than twice in a week."

"I know."

"You know because I told you. That's different from knowing because you've needed it." She pressed a stitch home. "Yarrow's for cuts that won't close. You've used that."

"Twice."

"Meadowsweet for fever. Honest-root for infection—watch for the smell first, smell is the first sign it's serious." She finished a section and snipped the thread, reloaded the needle. "The last two at the bottom are lungwort and shepherd's-seal. You won't need those unless something's very wrong, in which case you should be seeing a proper healer."

"Then why—"

"Because you might be somewhere without one." She didn't look up. "Cities have healers on every other corner. But you have to get there first." She pressed the last stitch home and bit the thread and handed him the robe. He ran his thumb along the inner lining. Completely flat. You would never know.

"It'll smell of herbs," he said.

"For a week. Then it won't." She began rolling up her thread. "Wear it close. Don't let anyone go through your things without you present."

He folded the robe over his arm. Outside, the dark had started to thin—the grey before the grey before the dawn. He had time to eat something before the post-road.

His father appeared in the doorway. Already dressed, boots on, holding something.

The knife had a handle of pale wood, fitted tight, with a brass collar at the neck. The blade was three inches of good steel, narrow, with a fine edge—the knife Tomis used for joinery work, the close detailed work, when he needed something precise.

He held it out without explanation.

"That's your good knife," Kael said.

"It is."

"You use it for—"

"I have another one."

He didn't, or if he did, it wasn't as good. Kael took the knife. It fit in his palm like it had been sized for him, which it hadn't, but his hands were closer to his father's than he'd thought.

He put it in his jacket pocket.

His father looked at him for a moment with the expression he had when something had been decided and the deciding was past. Then he picked up his own jacket from the peg by the door.

"I'll walk you to the north stone," he said.

---

The north stone sat at the edge of Hollowmere where the south road became the north road—or rather where people had decided the village ended and the rest of the world began. It was limestone, about knee-high, worn smooth on one side where travelers had leaned against it over generations. No one leaned against it now. It was barely light, and Kael and his father were the only ones on the road.

Behind them, the village was quiet. The wheat fields were cut. The apple trees were heavy. Wynn had been asleep when Kael left, tucked up in the loft with her arms around something he hadn't looked closely at because he had known he would stay if he looked too long.

His mother had stood at the cottage door and not crossed the step. She had a way of staying still when she was saying something important with the staying still.

Now his father walked beside him and said nothing. The road was dry, the dust rising a little with each step in the pre-dawn air.

At the north stone, Tomis stopped.

Kael stopped.

The early light was just enough to see by now—that flat, colorless quality that belonged to the hour before the sun actually cleared the hills. The fields on either side of the road were dew-grey. The air smelled of wet earth and the particular cooling-down of a summer almost finished. He looked at his father standing beside the stone and noticed, the way you notice things you have always known when you suddenly understand you are looking at them for the last time for a while, that Tomis Vance had grey at his temples that he had not had three years ago. He was not old. He did not look old. But the grey was there, and Kael had not been paying attention.

His father looked at the stone, then at the road ahead of it, then at Kael.

"Come back," he said.

Just that.

Kael nodded. He wanted to say something adequate. He had been composing things to say to his father since he was twelve, in the space between what he meant and what came out, and he had never said the right one yet. He suspected this was not a problem that would resolve before he got on a coach.

He said: "I will."

Then he turned north and walked.

He didn't look back—not because he didn't want to, but because he had calculated that it would make things harder rather than easier, and he was eighteen and confident that calculation and feeling could be separated when necessary. He had been wrong about this before, specifically twice, in situations where being wrong had cost him less than it would cost him if he was wrong now. He had learned from those two times. He would learn from this one also. He was making the decision to not look back in the same deliberate way he was making every decision about this road, which was: know what the cost is, accept it, proceed.

He was wrong about that. He discovered this at approximately the third bend in the road, when Hollowmere disappeared behind the hill and his chest did something he hadn't planned for. He stood at the bend for a moment longer than he had planned to stand.

He kept walking.

---

Six weeks is a long time to be moving and a short time to cross any distance that matters.

He remembered it afterward in pieces.

The first market town past the vales was Bridgemill, which he'd been to twice with his father and which looked, now that he was passing through alone, considerably smaller than he'd remembered it. He was not sure if Bridgemill had shrunk or if he was carrying a larger idea of where he was going. The inn there he'd meant to take a room in and then done the arithmetic and spent the night in the stable instead, on straw that smelled of horses and something less pleasant, watching a spider build the corner of a web with the patient application of some private engineering principle. He thought about that spider at several points over the following weeks when the road was long and his pack was heavy. It had seemed, at the time, to know something.

The midlands were different. He had read that and found it inadequate, which was the problem with most descriptions of things you hadn't seen—they were accurate and not useful. The farms were larger and more deliberate, the roads better-kept, the villages less forgotten. He passed through two market towns and did odd work in exchange for meals and a stable corner, carrying mostly, and once helping a rune engineer's apprentice with a warped wardwork on a baker's oven that kept turning the bread. He couldn't fix the wardwork. He watched the apprentice do it and understood perhaps a third of what he was seeing, which was a third more than he'd understood the day before. The apprentice was a young woman with a methodical style and a habit of narrating her process aloud under her breath, which he was grateful for because the narration gave him words to attach to what he was watching. He filed most of it. He thought: the words for a thing are different from the thing, but the words are the only map you can carry.

He kept that to himself.

The Heartlands were where the land changed character properly. Rolling country, well-kept, with runic-lit lanterns on the posts at crossroads—a steady bluish-white light quite unlike fire or candle—and he stood in front of one for several minutes on his second evening in the Heartlands and felt, for the first time, that he was in a country different from the one he had grown up in. They were the same country. He knew that. He had it on the atlas.

He caught a short-haul coach at the Heartlands junction—three days' ride to the capital district for thirty coppers, on a bench that had clearly been designed for people without lower backs, sitting across from a wool merchant who slept the entire way and a young woman from Drysael who was going to Castellune to visit her sister and was extremely willing to discuss Drysaeli stone-magic traditions with anyone in a three-foot radius.

He listened. He thought he could learn something from almost anyone who had been somewhere he hadn't. She told him six things about earth-current attunement that were not in any book he had read. One of them—the idea that attunement was a kind of *listening* before it was a kind of *pushing*—he turned over in his head for the rest of that day and the next, the way you turn a word you've encountered in a new language, testing it against things you already know until it settles.

She also told him that the student examinations at Drysaeli schools were conducted in complete darkness, because the light was considered a distraction from Current-sense, and that she had once failed a practical examination by accidentally attuning to the wrong Current and briefly making her examiner's cup float. He did not think this information would help him. But it was interesting.

He stored it all.

Castellune appeared on a grey morning with low cloud.

He had expected something heraldic—towers visible from a great distance, a light in the sky. What he got was the outer city first: the sprawl and the smell and the sound of several thousand people living in concentrated space, which was a new smell and new sound both, and he stood in the middle of the approach road until a man behind him said, "Move it, boy," and he moved.

He had four silver and thirty coppers when he walked through the city gate, which was what he had estimated and privately gratifying. He had eaten from his pack more than from coin, slept free more nights than not, and spent only what was necessary and nothing that wasn't. The cheese had run out three weeks in. The apple slices had lasted four. He had been genuinely hungry exactly twice and had decided that was acceptable.

He spent two nights in the Old Quarter—a stable-side room at three coppers a night, ceiling with an interesting pattern of water-stains—and found the corvid-post office and sent a letter to Wynn that said he had arrived safely and that Castellune was larger than both of them had probably imagined and that the runic street-lamps were in fact real. He bought a meat-pie from a market stall that cost five coppers and tasted precisely like five coppers.

He asked a woman selling thread in the Old Quarter for directions to the Argent Vale coach-stand. She gave him the clearest directions he'd ever received from anyone and asked for nothing in return.

He found the coach-stand. He paid the fare. He got on.

---

The road northeast from Castellune ran through beech forest old enough that the canopy closed above it, and the light that came through was the particular filtered green-gold of late summer working its way through dense leaves. He watched it move. He was the only passenger on that leg, and the driver didn't speak, and for three hours there was nothing but the wheels on the road and the occasional bird and the smell of the forest, which was different from the forest in the Hollowmere hills—older, deeper, quieter in the way that old things are quieter.

He was thinking about the exam.

One hundred written questions and a practical demonstration before a proctor. His written scores he was not worried about. The practical was the variable. He had his mother's old willow-wand stub—past its useful life, meant for household runework, not going to impress anyone—and he had spent six weeks on the road working through every practice exercise in the one magic primer Schoolmistress Orrith had owned, which was dated forty years ago and was not the kind of book the students at Argent Vale were reading. He knew how to make a stable runic mark. He knew the theory of Current attunement. He had no idea how he would perform in front of a proctor who had seen everything.

He had, he had decided, three genuine advantages. He read fast and retained well. He watched people. And he had nothing to lose.

The last one was not comfortable. But it was real.

He turned it over the way his father turned wood.

The coach came around a long curve and the forest opened and the lake appeared.

He had not expected the lake. He had read *lake* in the atlas and formed some idea and the idea was wrong—it was vast, flat, the color of old pewter under the cloud, stretching further than he could see. The island sat at its center: white stone buildings clustered around the base of spires, the tallest of them visible even at this distance, catching the light through a gap in the cloud. There were bridges, four of them, thin lines of stone connecting the island to the mainland. There were students on the grounds, small at this distance, and the sound of the lake was very faint—a low, constant sound like someone breathing slowly.

He looked at it for a long time.

The island was not large. He had expected something more imposing, somehow—something that justified what it cost to get here. But it was just a piece of land in the middle of a lake, with old buildings on it, and very tall windows, and students walking between them who were too far away to have faces. They were just moving shapes. They did not look like anything that should be frightening.

He had grown up in a village of four hundred people, two fields, twelve apple trees, and one cow that was now in Bridgemill.

He thought: well.

He looked at his hands. Road-dirty, calloused across the palm, with a cut on the left thumb from a fence post in the Heartlands that was nearly healed. The herb pouch pressed flat and warm against his ribs through the robe lining. His father's knife sat in his jacket pocket.

He thought: *eight hundred people. Twelve seats.*

He thought, with the dry private humor of someone who had carried a thing this far and wasn't about to set it down: *the crawfish odds were worse.*

Tomorrow was the Common Petition. He was ready, or he wasn't, and he would find out in the morning.

He watched the spires until the coach took the last bend and the treeline closed over them. Then he sat back on the bench, closed his eyes, and listened to the wheels on the road. He thought about Wynn on the cottage step, who had believed in him without knowing anything more than he did. He thought about his father at the north stone. He thought about his mother's hands moving with small precise stitches.

He pressed his arm against his ribs, where the herb pouch was.

He said nothing. There was no one to say anything to.

But he thought: I know. I'll come back.

---

*End of Chapter One*