The nine-year-olds of Ivory Village left for the aptitude test on a morning that couldn't decide between autumn and winter, the air carrying the particular sharpness that meant the cold was on its way and wasn't planning to leave until spring had argued it out.
There were eleven of them. Aaron was the tallest, which meant nothing in terms of mage potential but had the side effect of placing him at the front of the group by default, where the village elders could watch him while pretending they were just walking in the same direction.
He understood the pressure without anyone having to explain it. A village like Ivory didn't produce academy material. It barely produced mages. The elders were hoping — carefully, in the private way of people who'd been disappointed before — that one of these eleven children might have enough aptitude to attend one of the lower academies, which would mean better prospects for the village's next generation, which meant a great deal in a world where the difference between a farming village and a prosperous one often came down to a single person with a ranking worth respecting.
Aaron's mother had embraced him for three minutes at the village entrance before releasing him. She was a small woman who smelled like the cook fire and kept her hands busy always, and she hadn't said much — she never said much — but when she'd stepped back, her eyes were the eyes of someone making a calculation they couldn't bear to put into numbers.
He had wanted to tell her: don't worry. He had wanted to tell her he was going to the Five Elements Academy specifically, and that he'd already decided, and that nothing short of a dramatic accident would change that.
He said: "I'll do my best."
She'd nodded, which meant she didn't believe him because doing his best had never been the issue, and he'd turned and walked to join the group.
"She knows you're holding something back," Sirath said, as they cleared the village gate and started down the mountain path.
"She's my mother," Aaron said quietly, at a volume that wouldn't carry to the other children. "Mothers always know."
"In my experience, mothers know that something is being withheld. The contents of the secret are a separate matter."
"Did you have a mother?"
A pause that felt surprised. "That is a question no one has ever thought to ask me."
"Did you?"
"Yes. She died when I was young." Sirath was quiet for a moment. "She was not a mage. She believed I was going to get myself killed by reaching too high."
Aaron thought about that for the rest of the mountain path.
— — —
Eskra was a proper town — perhaps forty times the size of Ivory Village, with a wall and a gate and a guard who took a fee to enter and didn't bother making eye contact while he did it. Aaron had been here twice before, both times on errands with his father. It looked the same as he remembered: two main roads crossing in the centre, the Mage Association building at the junction, shops and residences spreading out in increasingly modest rings around it.
What was different today was the crowd.
The aptitude test drew children from every village, hamlet, and homestead in the surrounding region, and their families came with them, and the families had opinions about prime spots near the Association building, and the result was a crowd of perhaps a thousand people pressed into a town square built for three hundred. The noise was considerable.
The children of Ivory Village stopped walking and stared.
"What do you expect?" Sirath said, with a mildness that meant he was privately amused. "Do you know how many people want access to a higher ceiling? In my time, this would have been nothing. I've seen pilgrimages of ten thousand."
Aaron scanned the crowd the way he always scanned new environments — quickly, systematically, filing what he saw. Commoners in their usual work clothes. Village elders in their best. And, in a separate cluster near the Association entrance, children in uniforms Aaron didn't recognise, surrounded by adults in robes that cost more than Ivory Village's annual food stores.
Noble families. Attending with their own tutors, their own advance preparation, their own completely different set of expectations.
He watched them for a moment. A boy his age, perhaps, in dark blue silk, standing with the relaxed confidence of someone who had never had to wonder whether they were going to succeed. Not arrogance exactly — or maybe arrogance, but a specific kind, the kind that came from having never been told your odds weren't good.
Aaron felt something that wasn't quite envy. It was more like the recognition of a handicap — clean, factual, useful to know. He set it aside.
"The noble children will have better starting compatibility," Sirath observed.
"Probably High for the most part," Aaron agreed quietly. "A few Exceptional, from the better bloodlines."
"And their absorption speeds?"
"High to Exceptional." He watched the noble group. "Their tutors will have worked them hard. The test isn't just compatibility — it's both. They'll be competitive."
"Does that concern you?"
Aaron thought about the four years he'd spent on the mountain summit before dawn. He thought about the compatibility barrier he'd dissolved that morning, and the weight of space particles he could feel, constant and clear, moving through his meridians with practised ease.
"No," he said.
— — —
The process was orderly: each child received a number, waited, and went in one at a time. The testing happened inside the Association building, in a room with the academy representatives seated in the audience.
Aaron's number was 373. He waited for two hours, watching children emerge from the building with a range of expressions — quiet joy, barely-contained excitement, tears, the blank face of someone trying not to show how disappointed they were. The village elder near him kept track, quietly: two from other villages admitted to minor academies, one exceptional case whose test had apparently caused a stir, though the details hadn't filtered out yet.
The noble children went in and came out looking exactly as they had going in, which suggested their results had met expectations.
When Aaron's number was called, the elder grabbed his arm. Startled, Aaron turned. The man was looking at him with an expression he hadn't expected — not hope, exactly. Something more fragile than hope, something that had been wrong before.
"Just do your best, son," he said.
Aaron looked at him for a moment. The man had three grandchildren who worked the upper terraces of the village farm. He was seventy years old and had never in his life stood inside a building nicer than the Association entrance.
"I will," Aaron said.
This time he meant it in a way the elder didn't quite understand, and walked inside.
— — —
The testing room was large. A stage at the front, a testing stone in the centre, and five tables arranged in a semicircle where the academy representatives sat. The representatives of the four minor academies were already watching when Aaron walked in — assessing, comparing him to the previous hundred children the way merchants compare goods.
The Five Elements Academy representative sat at the farthest table, slightly apart from the others. He was older than the rest, with cropped grey hair and a posture so still it was almost architectural. His face was unreadable.
Aaron noted all of them in the half-second it took to walk to the stage.
"First test," said the Mage Association worker on the stage — a fourth-rank mage, which had stopped being impressive to Aaron about two years ago. "Place your hand on the elemental stone and relax. We measure affinity and compatibility."
Aaron placed his hand on the stone.
For a moment, nothing. Then the stone began to glow.
Silver.
Pure, clear silver, the colour of starlight concentrated into a point, flooding outward through the stone and reflecting off the room's walls and the ceiling and the faces of every representative present. It was not a dramatic light show — Aaron was not trying to make one — but it was the light of exceptional space affinity, and in this room, in this empire, it was the rarest result the stone could give.
The minor academy representatives sat up straighter.
The Five Elements representative did not move.
"Elemental affinity," the worker said, and Aaron could hear the effort of keeping his voice professional. "Space element. Exceptional level."
Before the man had finished the sentence, three of the four minor academy representatives were already half out of their seats.
Aaron stood still and waited.
He looked at the Five Elements representative while the others competed for his attention. The man was watching Aaron back with the calm, measuring gaze of someone who was not yet finished forming an opinion.
Good, Aaron thought. That means you're serious.
"Gentlemen," the worker said, making a visible effort to restore order. "We have one more test."
The absorption test. The stone passed to Aaron was smaller — a mage stone, dense with gathered force. He would be timed from the moment he began absorbing it. Exceptional: under one minute. High: under two.
Aaron began.
The mage stone's energy was far purer than anything he'd trained with on the mountain. For a moment it was almost disorienting — the difference between river water and spring water. He adjusted, reoriented, and pulled.
He absorbed slowly for the first forty seconds, building the correct current through his meridians, feeling the stone's energy flow into him properly rather than messily. At the fifty-second mark, he felt the stone approach depletion, and stopped.
"Done," he said.
The worker looked at his watch. "One minute, fifty-three seconds."
The minor academy representatives deflated somewhat. Exceptional compatibility, high-end absorption — remarkable, but not world-ending. Several of them would still want him.
The Five Elements representative stood up.
He was taller than Aaron had registered from across the room. He crossed the floor with the unhurried precision of someone who had never needed to hurry for anything.
"My name is Elder Thorn," he said. He had a voice like stones settling. "You measured at exceptional compatibility and peak high-tier absorption. The Five Elements Academy's floor for exceptional compatibility candidates is peak high-tier absorption."
"I meet the floor," Aaron said.
A fraction of something moved in the elder's expression. "You precisely meet the floor. Which means you either trained to exactly that standard on purpose, or you trained to a higher standard and chose to demonstrate only this much."
Aaron said nothing.
Elder Thorn looked at him for a long moment.
"Come to the academy," he said. "We will have time for the other conversation later."
He handed Aaron a letter of admission, folded in heavy paper with the academy seal pressed in gold, and returned to his table without waiting for a response.
Aaron looked at the letter in his hand. The gold seal caught the silver light still fading from the testing stone.
One year, he thought. Then the real training starts.
He walked out into the crowd.