Chapter 14
The Road North
Four days of walking.
He'd done longer stretches. After the monastery, before the guild
district, there'd been a period of about eight months where he'd moved
from town to town doing whatever work was available, sleeping in barns
and waystation shelters, eating when he could and not eating when he
couldn't. He knew how to travel with nothing. He was, if anything, more
comfortable in motion than standing still.
He owned a pack with a change of clothes, a water skin, enough dried
food for three days, a small knife that wasn't a weapon, and the letter.
That was everything. He'd never accumulated much beyond that â€" boarding
house living didn't encourage accumulation, and he'd never had the
income for it anyway.
The road north was well-traveled. Trade routes ran between the guild
district city and the Heartlands constantly, and he fell in with the
rhythm of it â€" merchants with wagons, travelers on horseback, foot
traffic moving in both directions. He walked at the edge of the road and
watched people and didn't start conversations.
He thought about the Academy.
He'd heard things over the years, the way you heard things when you kept
your ears open in a guild district. The Royal Academy of the Arcane was
the kingdom's premier institution â€" not the only magic academy, but the
one that mattered, the one that the Crown funded directly and the noble
houses sent their heirs to. Getting in required either exceptional rank
or exceptional sponsorship. The education was the best available. The
politics were apparently brutal.
Most of what he knew about how ranked mages actually developed their
abilities had come from watching Corris and listening to Hess. The
Academy presumably taught that in a more structured way. Whether they'd
teach it to a null-result provisional student was another question.
On the second day he passed through a small town that had a Runestone in
its central square â€" a permanent one, not a testing station, the kind
that sat as civic infrastructure and was used for official rank
verification. He stopped and looked at it from across the square.
It looked ordinary. Grey stone on a plain housing, faintly glowing with
the ambient light of active mana.
He wondered if it would crack if he touched it.
He didn't test it. He kept walking.
On the third day the Heartlands began in earnest â€" the landscape
shifting from the working-city density of the south into something older
and more deliberate. The roads were better maintained here. The towns
were cleaner, the buildings newer, the mana infrastructure noticeably
heavier. More lights, more enchanted gates, more of the faint pressure
of concentrated ranked mages that Cyan's palm now registered like a
compass pointing toward density.
The gap between the Heartlands and the guild district south wasn't just
about wealth. It was about mana. Everything here ran on higher-grade
enchantments, maintained by higher-ranked mages, because the money and
the political will to pay for it lived here.
He watched it and felt, for the first time on the journey, something
that might have been anger if he'd let it develop that far.
He didn't.
On the fourth day, mid-afternoon, the road crested a long hill and he
saw Valdren's Rest for the first time â€" the Heartlands' administrative
capital, wide and old and built in the particular style of a city that
had been important for a very long time and knew it.
And above it, on a raised plateau to the north of the city, the Academy.
He stopped walking.
He looked at it for a long moment.
Then he adjusted his pack and kept going.