Chapter 7: A Day at the University

THERE ARE DAYS that matter only in retrospect.

You live through them without noticing, the way you breathe without thinking about your lungs. They seem ordinary at the time---unremarkable hours filled with work and conversation and the small rituals that make up a life. It’s only later, looking back from the other side of catastrophe, that you realize those ordinary hours were the last ones you’d ever have.

This was one of those days.

I tell you about it now not because anything remarkable happened, but because everything that happened was so beautifully, heartbreakingly normal. But I’m getting ahead of myself. At the time, I didn’t know I was memorizing the last good day. At the time, I was just a young man who was hungry and annoyed about a binding.

Indulge me.

“You’re going to eat if I have to tie you to a chair and spoon porridge into your mouth.”

Simmon stood at the edge of my workstation in the Fishery, his arms crossed in an unconvincing imitation of sternness. Behind him, Wilem waited with the patient expression of a man who has learned that resistance to Simmon’s social campaigns is both futile and exhausting.

“I’m in the middle of---”

“You’re in the middle of starving to death, is what you’re in the middle of.” Sim reached over and plucked the soldering iron from my hand with the confidence of someone who has done this many times before. “Lunch. Mess Hall. Now. The binding will still be here when you get back.”

“He’s right,” Wilem said. “You look like a corpse that hasn’t been told to lie down.”

I looked at them both. Sim, with his earnest face and his stubborn kindness. Wil, with his dry practicality and his rock-steady loyalty. My friends. My best friends, if I was being honest about it, which I rarely was because honesty about things like friendship felt dangerously close to vulnerability.

“Fine,” I said. “But if the binding warps while I’m gone, I’m holding you personally responsible. And I want that on record.”

“Then you’ll fix it. You’re good at fixing things.” Sim grinned. “Except yourself. That’s what we’re for.”

The Mess Hall was loud and warm and smelled of mutton stew and fresh bread. We found a table near the back, away from the worst of the noise, and settled in with bowls that the kitchen staff filled with a generous hand.

“So,” Sim said, tearing bread with the enthusiasm of a man who considers lunch the most important meal of the day. “Tell us about the Adem. The real version, not the one you told the Masters.”

“I told the Masters the truth.”

“You told the Masters a version of the truth that was carefully edited to avoid getting expelled.” Wil sipped his water. He never drank anything else at meals, a Cealdish discipline I found both admirable and slightly inhuman. “We want the unedited version.”

I considered what to tell them. The Adem training was difficult to describe to anyone who hadn’t experienced it---the discipline of the Lethani, the economy of movement, the way they communicated as much through gesture and expression as through words.

“They’re remarkable people,” I said. “And terrifying. Imagine a culture where everyone moves like a cat, speaks with their hands, and could probably kill you with a dinner fork if the mood took them.” I grinned at their expressions. “Their culture is built around a concept called the Lethani---a kind of moral compass, except it’s not moral in the way we think of morality. It’s more… practical. Situational. The right action at the right time, determined not by rules but by understanding.”

“That sounds exhausting,” Sim said.

“It is, at first. But once you internalize it, it becomes instinct. Like sympathy, except with more bruises.”

“And the fighting?” Wil asked.

“Extraordinary. They move like water. Like wind.” I paused. “You know how Elodin talks about naming---how it’s not about commanding things but about understanding them so deeply that your will and their nature align? The Ketan is like that. You don’t force your body into forms. You understand movement so completely that the right action flows naturally.”

“You’ve changed,” Sim said. His voice was different now. Quieter. “Not just the fighting. The way you sit. The way you hold your hands. Even the way you talk---you’re more… measured.”

“Is that bad?”

“It’s different.” He looked at me with those honest brown eyes, and I saw genuine concern there. “You used to be all sharp edges. Quick tongue, quick temper, quick everything. Now you’re…” He searched for the word. “Contained.”

“The Adem would consider that a compliment.”

“I’m not sure I mean it as one.” He went back to his bread, but his brow was furrowed. “I liked the sharp edges. They were annoying, but they were you.”

The conversation lapsed into an easier rhythm. Sim talked about his thesis on the sympathetic properties of organic compounds, which was either groundbreaking or insane depending on which Master you asked. Wil described his family’s iron mines in the Cealdish mountains---a vein running thin, a new shaft that had collapsed, the political tangles of mineral rights that made University politics look simple by comparison.

“My father wants me to come home,” Wil said. “Help with the new shaft. He says a Re’lar with engineering knowledge is worth more to the family than a scholar with a degree.”

“He’s wrong,” Sim said immediately.

“He’s practical. There’s a difference.” Wil looked into his cup of water as if it might contain answers. “Sometimes I think he’s right. The mines are real. The iron is real. Everything else---sympathy, naming---it all feels very abstract when your family’s livelihood is collapsing into a hole in the ground.”

“But you’re still here,” I said.

“I’m still here.” He shrugged, a very Cealdish gesture---minimal movement, maximum meaning. “I keep thinking one more term. One more answer. And then I’ll have whatever it is I came here looking for.”

“What did you come here looking for?”

He was quiet for a moment. Then: “Certainty. The kind you get from understanding how the world actually works, not just how it appears to work.” He met my eyes. “Same as you, I think.”

I didn’t argue. He wasn’t wrong.

Then, inevitably, Sim brought up Fela.

“She’s been helping me with the mathematical frameworks,” he said, in a tone of studied casualness that fooled no one. “She has an incredible mind for spatial mathematics.”

“Among other incredible qualities,” Wil murmured.

Sim’s ears went red. “I’m talking about her intellect.”

“She’s brilliant,” I agreed. “And she brought me lunch at the Fishery yesterday and spent the entire time casually mentioning how thoughtful you are. Nobody does that accidentally, Sim. Even I can see it, and I’m famously terrible at this sort of thing.” I took a spoonful of stew. “Don’t let her forget it. Life is shorter than you think.”

Something in my voice must have carried more weight than I intended, because both of them went quiet.

“You sound like you’re saying goodbye,” Sim said.

“I’m saying don’t waste time. There’s a difference.”

But I could see in his eyes that he didn’t believe me. And looking back, he was right not to.

We finished our meal in the warm, yeasty air of the Mess Hall, surrounded by the noise and motion of hundreds of students living their ordinary lives. I memorized it all---the way the light fell through the high windows, the particular timber of Sim’s laugh, the comfortable weight of Wil’s silences. I didn’t know I was memorizing it. I thought I was just living.

You always think that.

Elodin’s naming class met in the wide, grassy courtyard behind the Mains.

There were seven of us. Fela, with her dark hair pulled back and her notebook open. A boy named Teren who I didn’t know well. A girl called Hestia whose eyes had the distant, glassy quality of someone whose sleeping mind was more awake than most. And four others---quiet students who watched Elodin the way small animals watch hawks.

Elodin arrived late, as always. He came around the corner of the building at a half-run, his coat flapping, his hair windblown, carrying what appeared to be a large clay pot filled with water.

“Afternoon,” he said, setting the pot down in the center of our circle. “Who can tell me the name of water?”

Silence.

“Nobody? Wonderful. That means you’re all still sane.” He knelt beside the pot and peered into it. “The name of water is one of the most beautiful things in existence. It shifts. It adapts. It becomes whatever shape contains it while remaining fundamentally itself.” He looked up. “Sound like anyone you know?”

Nobody answered.

“Today we’re going to do something different. I want each of you to put your hand in the water. Just your hand. And I want you to tell me what you feel.”

They went one by one. Cold, wet, heavy, still. The answers were mundane, descriptive, limited. Elodin listened to each one with the patient expression of a man who has expected disappointment and is not surprised to find it.

Then it was my turn.

I lowered my hand into the pot. The water closed around my fingers, cool and yielding and---

Something moved.

Not in the water itself. In the space behind the water. In the name that lived beneath the surface, the way a dream lives beneath the skin of sleep. I felt it stir, felt it recognize my touch, felt it reach back with a curiosity that was not quite human and not quite animal and not quite anything I had words for.

“It’s alive,” I said. “Not alive the way fish are alive. Alive the way a song is alive. It has a shape that changes but a nature that doesn’t. It remembers every vessel it’s ever filled. It knows where it came from---a well, a spring, before that a cloud, before that an ocean. And it knows where it’s going.”

“Where is it going?” Elodin asked. His voice was very quiet.

“Down,” I said. “Eventually. Everything water does is a way of getting down. Rain falls. Rivers run. Tears drop. Water is always going down, always seeking the lowest point, always trying to reach the place where it can finally rest.”

The courtyard was silent. The other students were staring at me.

Elodin’s face was doing something complicated. He looked like a man who has opened a door expecting to find a closet and has discovered instead that it opens onto the edge of a cliff.

“Take your hand out,” he said.

I did.

He stood there for a long moment, looking at me. Then he picked up the clay pot, walked to the edge of the courtyard, and poured the water out onto the grass.

“Class is over,” he said.

“But we’ve only been here for---”

“Class. Is. Over.” He looked at each of us in turn, his expression strange---not angry, not afraid, but something older. Something I might have called reverence if it hadn’t been mixed with grief. “Go home. Read something. Kiss someone. Do whatever it is young people do when they’re not wasting an old man’s time.”

He walked away without another word, leaving the empty pot on its side in the grass.

Fela looked at me. “What just happened?”

“I’m not sure,” I said.

But I was lying. I knew exactly what had happened. Elodin had been testing us, the way he always did---dropping stones into the well to measure its depth. And what he’d found in my well had frightened him.

Not because it was shallow.

Because it was deep.

That evening I went to the Eolian. The crowd was thinner than I remembered, older, harder---more travelers than students, and the conversations quieter, more urgent. Count Threpe found me near the bar and told me the roads were growing unsafe. Fewer performers were coming through. The Eolian, which had always felt like a sanctuary, was beginning to feel the weight of whatever darkness was spreading through the countryside.

“The darkness is starting to care about music,” Threpe said, and the faintest tremor in his voice told me he meant it literally.

I played anyway. “Tinker Tanner” first, because it made people smile. Then something older, an Yllish melody whose strange intervals caught the ear and held it. The room softened. People turned toward the music the way sunflowers turn toward light---not by choice, but by nature.

And for that hour, everything was all right. The world was a place where people gathered in warm rooms and listened to music and forgot, for a little while, that they were afraid. I played songs I knew by heart and songs I invented on the spot, weaving melodies together like threads in a loom. Each one building on the last.

I kept glancing at the door. I told myself I wasn’t looking for anyone in particular. I was lying, of course. I was always lying about Denna, even to myself. Especially to myself.

She didn’t come.

When I finished, the applause was warm. Not thunderous---this wasn’t a crowd for thundering. But genuine, and grateful in a way that mattered more than volume.

I set my lute in its case carefully, the way you handle something precious. The wood was warm from my hands, the strings still humming faintly, holding the ghost of the last note I’d played.

It had been a good day. A beautiful day.

I just didn’t know it was the last one.