The grand hall of the Conclave of Meridian had not seen this many kings seated beneath one roof in forty years.
Four thrones had been arranged in a semi-circle at the center of the chamber, each one carrying the weight of a kingdom's pride in the craftsmanship of its making. To the east sat King Aldus of Vantoria, a broad-shouldered man whose beard was the colour of winter frost and whose eyes held the particular kind of sharpness that came not from intellect but from decades of watching men lie to his face. To the west, King Brennan of Ostara lounged in his seat with a casualness that was entirely deliberate, one leg crossed over the other, his ringed fingers drumming a slow rhythm against the armrest as though the entire summit were a mild inconvenience he was enduring out of courtesy. Beside him, the youngest of the four, King Farren of Dawnholt, sat rigid and upright in the way of a man who had not yet learned that showing discomfort was a form of weakness. His crown sat slightly too large on his head and he had not yet grown into either it or his throne.
And at the northern point of the semi-circle, King Edric of Sidonia.
He was not the tallest man in the room, nor the broadest, and unlike Aldus he had no beard to lend him the illusion of ancient authority. What he had instead was a stillness about him, the kind that settled over a man who had spent many years holding things together with nothing more than composure and will. His robes were deep navy, edged in silver, and the crown on his head was the simplest of the four, a single band of dark iron set with a pale blue stone at its center. Sidonia's crown. A kingdom that had never tried to look like more than it was.
The chamber itself was magnificent in the way that neutral ground always tended to be, built to impress all parties equally and therefore belonged to none. Tall pillars of pale stone rose to a vaulted ceiling painted with the four sigils of the human kingdoms, each rendered in equal size, equal colour, equal standing. Torches burned in their brackets even though it was midday. The windows were high and narrow, admitting thin blades of light that fell across the stone floor at long angles. Around the perimeter of the room, each king had brought a retinue of advisors and knights, and these men and women stood in their respective corners in perfect silence, because they had all been told, in no uncertain terms, that this particular meeting was for four sets of ears only.
The herald who had opened the session had long since retreated. The doors had been sealed.
For a moment, the four most powerful men in the human domain simply looked at one another.
It was Aldus who broke the silence, because it was always Aldus. He was that particular breed of man who found silence in a room of important people faintly offensive.
"We all know why we are here," he said. His voice carried well, the voice of a man accustomed to speaking in halls much larger than this one. "So I see no point in the usual ceremony of pretending we have gathered to exchange warm regards."
Brennan's fingers stopped their drumming. He smiled. "How refreshing. You have gotten blunter in your old age, Aldus. I did not think that was possible."
"And you have gotten no sharper," Aldus replied without looking at him.
King Farren of Dawnholt cleared his throat. "Perhaps," he said carefully, in the measured tone of a young man who had been coached extensively on how to conduct himself in exactly this kind of room, "we could begin with the matter itself. The inter-race summit is fourteen months away."
That landed the way he had intended it to. The light banter between the older kings died immediately, replaced by something heavier.
Fourteen months.
King Edric of Sidonia said nothing, but his gaze moved slowly around the room and settled somewhere between the floor and the painted ceiling, as though he were reading something written in the air above their heads.
The inter-race summit. The gathering that occurred once every generation, where representatives from the four races of the world came together on neutral ground to demonstrate their strength, affirm their standing, settle old disputes, and establish new hierarchies with as little open bloodshed as possible. The humans. The elves. The therianthropes. The dwarves.
And of the four, humans were considered the weakest.
This was not a secret. It was not even a sore subject among those who had long since made peace with the reality of it. Elves lived for centuries and carried magic in their blood like a second heartbeat. Therianthropes were physical creatures of terrifying capability, capable of pushing their bodies beyond what any human frame could achieve. Dwarves carried a mastery of craft and stonework that translated, in a fight, into defences and weapons that human artificers had spent generations trying and failing to replicate. And humans, for all their ambition and adaptability and stubborn refusal to stop multiplying, had always arrived at the inter-race summit and acquitted themselves just well enough to avoid genuine humiliation.
Just.
"Fourteen months," King Aldus repeated, and the word tasted different in his mouth. He leaned forward in his seat. "And we cannot even agree on which of our own kingdoms is the strongest. How are we supposed to stand before the elves and the therianthropes as a unified human domain when our Academies are producing graduates who cannot hold a candle to a second-year student from the Elven Conservatories?"
"That is a slight exaggeration," Brennan said.
"Is it?"
The silence that followed confirmed that it was not, in fact, an exaggeration in any meaningful sense.
It was Farren who put forward the proposal that had been the real reason for this gathering. He produced it carefully, in the way of someone who had rehearsed the exact manner of its presentation, having clearly decided that the content was bold enough that the delivery needed to be as unassuming as possible.
"A bout," he said. "Between our Academies. A formal competition, structured and witnessed, to determine which of our kingdoms is producing the strongest students. The winning Academy takes the title of the Strongest in the human domain, and their methods and their faculty are then shared with the other three kingdoms to raise the collective standard before the inter-race summit."
Another silence. Longer this time.
King Aldus stroked his frost-white beard. King Brennan had gone very still, which was, for him, the equivalent of sitting up straight. Edric of Sidonia finally dropped his gaze from the middle distance and looked at the youngest king with an expression that gave away precisely nothing.
"You are proposing," Aldus said slowly, "that the losing kingdoms submit their students to the training methods of the winner."
"I am proposing," Farren said, "that we stop pretending the current arrangement is working."
The debate that followed was long and at times loud and occasionally featured the kind of language that the official record of the meeting would later describe as vigorous diplomatic exchange. Brennan wanted conditions and time limits and provisions. Aldus wanted assurances about the structure of the bout itself. Farren defended his proposal with the slightly desperate energy of a man who had staked a great deal on it being received well.
And Edric of Sidonia listened.
He listened to all of it, every objection and counter-proposal and thinly veiled accusation of bad faith, and when they had all talked themselves to a temporary standstill he spoke for the first time in nearly two hours.
"I agree to the terms."
The other three looked at him.
"Sidonia agrees," he said, simply, "unconditionally. Whatever format is decided upon, whatever the structure of the bout, we will participate. And if we lose, we will accept the outcome."
"You are confident, then," Brennan said, and there was something careful in his tone that had not been there before, the tone of a man recalibrating.
"I did not say that," Edric replied.
---
The capital city of Sidonia was called Verne, and it was, in the estimation of most who visited it, a perfectly adequate city. Not magnificent. Not legendary. Not the kind of place that poets wrote about or merchants dreamed of reaching. It was functional and solid and it had the particular charm of a place that had never tried to be more than it was, which was a quality that the Sidonian people had, over the centuries, absorbed into their general character.
The Royal Palace occupied the highest point of Verne, a structure of dark stone and pale timber that looked, from a distance, more like a very large and well-maintained house than a palace proper. King Edric had returned to it from Meridian in the kind of silence that his advisors had learned to recognize as the quiet that precedes very large decisions.
He had summoned Celeste the moment he crossed the threshold.
She arrived an hour later, which was, for a woman of her particular standing, essentially immediate. The Sage of Sidonia moved through the palace corridors with a quality of motion that made her difficult to place, not fast exactly, not slow, but somehow always present before you had quite registered that she had arrived. She was a woman who appeared to be somewhere in her middle years, though the truth of that was complicated in the way that the truth of all powerful people tended to be. Her hair was silver-white and she wore it loose, which was unusual. Most people of her station wore their hair in ways that communicated something about their station. Celeste wore hers as though she had simply not gotten around to doing anything else with it.
She settled into the chair across from the king without being invited to, which was also usual for her.
"You agreed to the bout," she said. Not a question.
"I did."
"Without consulting me."
"I am the king," Edric said, with the slight weariness of a man reminding someone of a fact they both know she does not particularly care about. "The consultation would have been a formality."
Celeste considered this with a faint expression that might, on a different face, have been a smile. "And now you have come to me with the problem that the formality would have raised."
He spread his hands on the desk between them. "Our Academy," he said, "is in a condition that I am going to describe as unfortunate."
"Unfortunate," she repeated.
"The students know what they arrived knowing. The faculty has not been updated in years. The structure is outdated and the methodology is, from what my advisors tell me, essentially nonexistent. We are competing against three other kingdoms, at least two of which have functioning Academies, and we have fourteen months."
The room was quiet for a moment. Outside, the distant sound of Verne going about its business filtered through the palace walls. A cart over cobblestones. Someone calling to someone else across a market two streets over.
"You need someone to run the Academy," Celeste said.
"I need someone to save it."
She was quiet again. Her fingers, Edric noticed, had stilled against the armrest. That, in its own way, told him something. Celeste's hands were always in motion, tapping, turning, tracing shapes that probably meant something to her. When they stopped, she was thinking about something specific.
"I know someone," she said, finally.
"A sage? There are no other sages in Sidonia."
"Not a sage. Not officially." She seemed to choose her next words with a precision that was itself a form of communication. "He was my student. A long time ago, or not so long ago depending on how you measure these things. He was extraordinary in the particular way that makes you feel, as a teacher, deeply pleased and also slightly afraid."
King Edric looked at her steadily. "Where is he now?"
"In his family's estate, most likely. Reading something he should not be reading. Or sleeping. Possibly both simultaneously." A pause. "He is the son of Duke Hayes."
The king blinked. "Duke Hayes has a son capable of running the Royal Academy?"
"Duke Hayes has a son capable of running much more than that," Celeste said, and her voice carried the flat certainty of someone stating a geographical fact. "I have spent the last several years arranging for him to be trained by people I trust across multiple kingdoms and across more than one race. I called in a considerable number of favors. The elves were particularly difficult about it." Something moved across her expression, brief and complex. "By my estimation, he has absorbed more than most practitioners accumulate in a lifetime. He is nineteen years old."
The silence that followed this was the particular kind that forms around information too significant to rush past.
"Nineteen," the king said.
"Yes."
"And you believe he can prepare our students to compete against the other kingdoms."
Celeste tilted her head slightly. "I believe," she said, with a precision that suggested she was carefully selecting what she did and did not include in that statement, "that there is no one better suited to the task."
Edric studied her face. He had known this woman for twenty years and he was still not entirely certain that he could read her. It was one of the more humbling experiences of his reign. "What is his name?"
"Eric. Eric Hayes."
"And he will agree to this?"
The stillness that had settled over Celeste shifted, and what replaced it was something that Edric recognized with a start as amusement. Deep, private, and somewhat predatory amusement, the expression of someone who already knows how the next several moves of a very long game are going to go.
"He will agree," she said. "He just does not know it yet."
"How can you be certain?"
She rose from the chair with that same quality of motion, unhurried and already gone before the conversation had quite finished. "Because," she said, at the door, "there is one thing in this world that Eric Hayes cannot refuse. And I know exactly where to find it."
---
The Hayes estate sat at a comfortable distance from the capital, surrounded by enough trees and enough silence to give the impression of being much further away from the business of the kingdom than it actually was. The family had occupied it for three generations, and it had accumulated over those three generations the particular quality of a place that had been lived in by people who genuinely liked living there.
The library was on the third floor.
It had seven tall windows and more books than anyone had bothered counting, arranged in a system that made perfect sense to exactly one person. There were books stacked on the reading table and on the windowsills and in three separate piles on the floor beside the long sofa near the eastern window, which had the best afternoon light and which was therefore prime territory.
He was on the sofa.
Upside down, specifically, with his back against the seat cushions and his legs hooked over the backrest and his head hanging slightly off the edge, because he had found years ago that reading in this position did something interesting to his focus and had simply never found a compelling reason to change the habit. His dark hair fell away from his face. One arm was propped against the cushion for balance. The other held the book up at a angle that accommodated his inverted position with practiced ease.
The book was bound in a deep reddish-brown leather, the title pressed into the cover in letters that had been slightly worn down by many hands before his. Forbidden Magic: A Practitioner's Incomplete Survey of Methods Considered Inadvisable. He had found it in the restricted section of a library in Kestrel Province three months ago, tucked behind two other books as though it had been deliberately concealed, and had spent those three months reading and rereading and following the threads of its argument to their various conclusions in his own notes.
The afternoon light lay in warm slats across the floor.
He turned a page. His eyes moved down the text with the quick, absorptive quality of someone for whom reading was less an activity than a form of breathing, automatic and necessary and done without the conscious weight of effort. He reached the bottom of the page. Turned another. Paused.
Went back.
Read the passage again, slower this time. The line between his brows deepened. He tilted the book slightly, as though a different angle might resolve what he was reading into something more sensible. It did not.
"Wait," he said, to no one in particular, and in the very specific tone of a person talking to a book. "That cannot be right."
He read it a third time.
It was, apparently, right, which was somehow worse, because the implication of it cascading into the other principles he had spent three months building into a coherent framework meant that at least one of the foundational assumptions he had started with was wrong, which meant that the notes he had built on top of that assumption were wrong, which meant that the three months of work was not wasted exactly but was going to require a comprehensive and deeply irritating reassessment from somewhere around page forty.
The book slipped.
He grabbed for it. Missed. It hit the floor with a sound like a flat clap and fell open to a page somewhere in the middle, and he stared at it from his upside-down position on the sofa for a moment that stretched out into several moments.
"Crap," he said. Loudly. With feeling.
And then, because the afternoon light was still very good and the sofa was very comfortable and there was nothing immediately requiring him to be anywhere else, he swung himself upright in a slow, boneless rotation, reached down to collect the book from the floor, and turned back to page forty with the resigned expression of a man who has accepted his situation and is not happy about it but is not going to stop.
The Hayes estate was quiet around him.
Outside, somewhere in the world he was not currently paying attention to, kingdoms were making decisions that were about to find their way, inevitably, to this library.
But that was outside.
In here, there was just the light and the books and the problem on page forty, which was, for the moment, the only problem that mattered.