As Yanko scrambled up, he glimpsed a blaze of light behind him. Gold Hawk had also reached the platform, and he had chosen a more direct way of dealing with his tormentor. A swirling ball of fire flew through the air toward the handsome woman opposing him. It splashed on an invisible barrier several feet away from her, the flames dispersing and disappearing, but the applicants watching from the beach and the crowds of spectators on the docks and ships burst into an enthusiastic rendition of the appreciation song.
Yanko would have rolled his eyes at the overemphasis people put on the thermal sciences, but he had reached the bottom of the rib cage and was too busy climbing. He scampered through, leaping from bone to bone, until the hair on the back of his neck stood up. An attack was coming. He tried to face it and raise his own defenses—not certain if they would be nearly enough against a fifth-year student—but his heel slipped as he pivoted. He might have recovered, but a ball of fire was hurtling through the air toward him. There was no time to regather the concentration needed, not when he was busy flailing for balance. Yanko let himself slip off the bone, dropping and catching it with his hands on the way down. The flames poured through the rib cage, not stopping as they roared toward him, the heat of the fire scorching the air. This was not an illusion.
Since he had fallen, he wasn’t in the fireball’s path, but it seared his fingers as it blasted through the skeleton, and he gasped in pain. Tears sprang to his eyes, and he wanted nothing more than to let go, to fall into the water and cool his hands. But he would lose a minute, if not more, swimming to the platform and repeating the climb. Even though his skin blistered, he managed to pull himself back up. A good choice, since he glimpsed that black shark fin gliding through the water underneath him.
Back in the race, Yanko leaped from rib to rib, but he knew the braided woman must be readying another attack for him. Apparently, his fish-to-the-cheek tactic had not impressed her.
His hands burned so much that he didn’t know if he could concentrate on forming a barrier to deflect whatever she threw at him next. Better to distract her again. He doubted a fish would catch her by surprise twice, but as he reached the top of the rib cage and struggled to climb one of the bones up to the shoulder blades, he caught sight of that fin again. He also caught sight of the woman with her hand outstretched toward him.
Food! he cried into the shark’s mind at the same time as he flung an image of the woman on the platform at it. This time, Yanko didn’t try to cajole; he tried to command. He wouldn’t know if it had worked until the shark reached the platform, and he felt uncomfortable trying to convince an animal to kill another person, but that fireball could have burned him into cinders. Everything seemed fair and acceptable in this portion of the contest.
Ignoring the pain in his fingers, Yanko pulled himself up atop the shoulder. His instincts cried out at him again, those instincts honed over years of study to feel the telltale crackle of power in the air, the promise that someone had him targeted with the sciences. He stopped, focused his mind, and called forth the air around him, compacting it into a barrier.
He was almost too slow. The second fireball blasted fully into him, its heat scorching his cheeks. But enough of a barrier had formed to deflect the attack. Flames sizzled around him, and his clothes might have caught fire had they not been so wet, but this time, he did not receive any burns. Before the flames had fully dissipated, he resumed his sprint, aiming for the top of the spine and the skull. The finish platform with flags waving at the corners floated in the water beyond it.
A startled cry came from below and behind him. The shark leaped from the water, arcing straight at the woman. She flung herself to the side to avoid it, but there wasn’t enough platform to catch her. Her hip struck the edge, and she bounced into the water.
At the base of the skull, Yanko hesitated. The shark had plunged back into the water on the other side, and it could turn in an instant to attack her. But Gold Hawk and Tam Tam were both on the shoulder blades, running toward him.
Praying to the badger goddess to protect the woman, Yanko sprinted up the skull. In a few seconds, he would finish, and he could help her if the test proctors did not handle it. Though he worried he was making the wrong decision, that she would be horribly maimed or worse, he ran across the flat lizard head and leaped off the edge, calling the wind again to push him out to the platform so he wouldn’t have to swim. He had not checked, but he would be shocked if there was only one shark down there.
Even with the help of the wind, he barely made it to the edge of the platform. At the last instant, as he realized how far he had dropped and how fast he was going, he wished he had aimed for the water after all. He hit the bamboo platform hard. He turned the landing into a roll, trying to spread out the impact as he had been taught when falling in combat, but gravity was a hard master to thwart. He was hurtled across the bamboo, battered as badly as sugar cane going through a press, and his breath flew out of his lungs. He came to a stop, his entire body hurting, inches shy of falling off the far end of the platform. He couldn’t manage to breathe, but he saw the flags overhead and knew he had finished the course.
“Eight minutes and forty-seven seconds,” the timekeeper stationed on the corner of the platform said blandly, as if he watched such spectacles every day.
Remembering the braided woman, Yanko forced himself into a sitting position. Gold Hawk landed lightly on the center of the platform, glared balefully at him, then looked to the timekeeper.
“Eight minutes and fifty-five seconds,” the man announced.
Yanko took some satisfaction from the fact that Gold Hawk’s fine robes were soaking and torn, but he didn’t spare the other man more than a glance, looking instead back out to the course. Under the rib cage, the braided woman was still alive. Either through her own power or another mage’s, she levitated in the air, her hair and robe dripping. No less than three shark fins circled in the water below her. As she floated back to her spot on the platform, she glared over at Yanko.
He sighed and wiped the water off his face. Another person who would never want to be friends with him.
Tam Tam came down a moment later, his landing as awkward as Yanko’s, maybe more so. If Yanko hadn’t reached out to catch him, Tam Tam would have rolled off the platform and into the water. The entire side of his face was burned, with blisters scorching his chin.
“Nine minutes and twenty-seven seconds,” the timekeeper announced. “You may return to the beach. You’ll find out later if you made it through this round, based on the times the others earn.”
Yanko could have swum to the beach, but he was glad an oarsman came out to pick them up in a dinghy. After seeing all those sharks, he was not eager to dangle his body in the water. He had known these tests would be difficult, but he hadn’t realized they would be life-threatening.
His father and Uncle Mishnal were waiting on the beach when Yanko came ashore. He walked toward them, trying to judge the expressions on their faces. His time had not been as good as he had thought it might be when he first saw the course, but it had been well under the cut-off. And he didn’t think he had embarrassed himself too badly, given the circumstances.
When he came face-to-face with them, Yanko pressed his palms together in front of his chest, ignoring the pain that came from touching his fingers, and bowed his head. “Honored Uncle, Father.”
Neither brother was known for his smile, but Mishnal clasped him on the shoulder and gave him a nod of approval. Yanko allowed a ribbon of relief to flutter through him. He hadn’t known his uncle well until he had come to work in the mines six months earlier, for “hardening,” as his father had called it, but Mishnal had proven to be an honorable and fair man, despite his perpetual scowl. He had even praised Yanko on occasion, something his father had not done for a long time.
Now, his father was tugging at his black mustachios as he looked back and forth from the timekeeper to the nearest proctor. “Eight forty-seven, was it? I hope that’ll be good enough. They were hard
er on you than the others, don’t you think so, Mish?”
Yanko lowered his hands—he wanted nothing more than to run and find the healer who had attended the wounds some had received during the combat round—but he hadn’t been dismissed yet. Even though his father seemed more interested in talking to his brother than his son.
“They were hard on him,” Mishnal said. “We didn’t expect anything different.”
“No, I know. The journey is such a difficult one. I don’t know if he...” Finally his father looked directly at Yanko, but it was only to survey him and shake his head doubtfully. “It is a great challenge. Too much for him maybe. I wish Falcon...” He shook his head again, not saying the words.
He didn’t have to. Yanko looked away, blinking so moisture wouldn’t form in his eyes. His older brother had always been Father’s favorite, the one most like him, the one he understood. But like Father and Uncle Mishnal, Falcon had never shown an aptitude for the mental sciences. Yanko was the one who had inherited their mother’s talent, whether he wanted anything from her or not.
“I will find the healer, Yanko,” his father said. “Prepare yourself for the last test. The others will find this the easiest part of the exam, but I never could convince you to spend enough time studying the thermal sciences. You always wanted to be out in the woods, playing in the dirt. And those poems—” He cleared his throat and spat. “A warrior mage doesn’t write poems. A warrior mage is the one poems are written about, great ballads that become legend.” Father groaned and walked away.
“They were for Arayevo,” Yanko whispered, and he had only written poetry one time, that was it. He’d had too many outdoor hobbies as a boy to spend time inside with quill to paper. Too bad. If he had actually finished any of those poems and handed them to Arayevo, she might have realized how he felt about her and stayed.
Yanko slumped, feeling the weariness in his limbs now that his muscles had cooled and the obstacle course was past. He didn’t know whether to be relieved or not that the next test would be purely mental.
Mishnal surprised him by patting his shoulder. “I know you’ve been studying fire these last months. You’ll do well.”
“Thank you, Honored Uncle.” Yanko stood straighter, afraid he must look like a pouting child.
Mishnal gave him another pat, then headed to the log benches near the arena, an arena that would be used for something besides fighting this time.
* * *
Yanko sat cross-legged in the center of the arena, his hair and clothing dry, his fingers raw and tender but, thanks to the healer, no longer as tender as they had been. The rest of the applicants had finished—or hadn’t finished—the obstacle course and the results had come in. With his time, Yanko had come in eighth place. It was not as good as he had hoped, but he had done better in the swordplay than he had expected, so he was sitting in a comfortable place for this last challenge. All he needed to do was finish in the three-minute time limit to ensure himself a place at Stargrind. His father’s dream might finally come true.
But not your dream, eh?
Yanko shook away the voice in the back of his head. He had accepted years ago that what he dreamed of doing with his life and what the world—or at least his family—demanded he do with his life were not the same. Thanks to his mother’s choice, this was his destiny, the only one to which he could honorably aspire.
“A simple task for a future Stargrind student,” the proctor, a woman this time, announced as she strolled around the circular arena, her hands clasped behind her back.
Yanko would find out just how simple it was in a minute. He had been chosen to go first again. Even though the test hadn’t begun, his shoulders were tight, his muscles tense. He could feel the other applicants, the twenty-one that remained of the original thirty-two, staring at him from the side of the arena. Between the averages of the two events, he had one of the highest scores, and the whispers floating out of the crowd implied that nobody was happy about it.
“...can’t let some pirate’s spawn into the most elite academy in the Great Land.”
“...heard he didn’t even have a tutor or formal schooling. ...can’t be qualified.”
Yanko did his best to pay attention to the proctor and ignore the commentary from the crowd.
A bald man in gray robes strolled out, whistling, an intricate wooden candelabra balanced upon his shoulder. He walked into the arena and placed it on the packed dirt, about five feet in front of Yanko. He withdrew six stubby beeswax candles from an inside pocket and placed them in holders at different levels on the candelabra, some that would be easy to reach with a match and others that were in the middle of the structure and barred by wood on three sides. A strange choice of materials for something that held flaming candles.
Or... not. The realization of what the test must involve came over Yanko. The precision that would be required daunted him, but he had practiced creating flame and lighting candles countless times in the last six months. This was doable.
“There are six candles,” the proctor announced as the man walked away. “You will light each of them before the three minutes is up.” She waved toward the bored-looking timekeeper from the platform. “If you do not finish in three minutes, you fail. If you char the wood, you fail. Stargrind prides itself on its fire mages, so if you cannot demonstrate the ability to handle this simple task, you will not be allowed to go forward with the training.” She had been addressing all of the applicants thus far, but her gaze fell upon Yanko as she spoke that last sentence.
He was trying not to feel like the entire world was against him, but it was hard. He hoped that this would be a fair test and that nobody would attempt to throw obstacles in his path.
“Are you ready, White Fox?” the proctor asked.
Yanko wiped hands damp with sweat on his trousers, took a deep breath, and nodded. “Yes, Honored Teacher.”
“Begin.”
A click sounded, the timekeeper’s watch starting.
Yanko let his eyelids lower to slits. First, the flame.
With his mind, he gathered the water vapor in the air, a task made simpler than it was back home, thanks to the humidity. He cleaved the molecules and ignited the flammable hydrogen left from the process. All thermal science manipulation was based on this process, and even though he would have been more comfortable manipulating the earth, the plants, and the trees, he had learned to deal with fire years ago. Before long, a small ball of flame burned in the air next to the candelabra.
“Thought you said he only knew the earth sciences,” someone whispered behind him.
“Just said he’s a slimy slug that would rather wallow in the dirt,” another applicant responded. That was Sly Wolf.
Yanko’s flame faltered, and he growled at himself to concentrate. He moved it toward the first candle, choosing one of the easier targets first, one that did not have wood all around it. His fiery ball whispered across the wick, and it burst into flame.
One down, five to go.
“Bet he gets tired before he makes it halfway through,” Sly Wolf said, not bothering to keep his voice to a whisper.
“He looks shaky.”
He did not. As much as he wanted to ignore the words, they kept seeping into his mind, irritating him and making him want to prove that he was just as capable as they were, even if he hadn’t gone to a preparatory school or had a long-term tutor when he had been growing up.
He squinted at his flame, manipulating the shape until it shifted from a ball to a skull, hollowing the eyes just so and making an opening for the mouth. A couple of surprised murmurs came from behind him. Good. He moved it toward the second wick, rotating it as he went, so the other applicants could see that he was a capable fire mage, damn it. Or he at least had the potential to become one.
As he lit the second wick, the timekeeper spoke.
“One minute left.”
Alarm flooded Yanko, and the outline of the skull wavered and morphed back into a lumpy ball. He couldn’t worry about
looks now. He had to finish lighting the candles. What had he been thinking? And why hadn’t the cursed timekeeper made an announcement at two minutes, as well?
He licked his lips and veered the flame toward the third candle. The wick caught, but in his haste, he almost scorched the slender wooden support behind it. A bead of sweat dripped down the side of his face as he moved the flame toward the next candle. Unfortunately, he had lit all of the easier outside ones already. He had to dip between the wooden supports. He made his flame as tiny as he could, slipping it into the center of the candelabra, toward a stumpy wick practically lying on the wax, the candle cupped from above by six slender boughs of wood.
“Thirty seconds.”
Yanko clenched his fists. A few bets and snickers ran through the crowd, but this time, he didn’t lose focus. He lit the wick, carefully extricated his flame, and moved to the next candle. It was just as challenging, but he slid in from the side, lit it, and exited through a gap on the other side. He was veering toward the last one and hadn’t yet brushed the wood with his flame when the timekeeper spoke again.
“Time’s up.”
An instant later, the sixth wick brightened with flame. Yanko looked at the proctor, hoping he had been close enough. Surely he had demonstrated his aptitude? Some stupidity, too, but he could learn to do less of that. If he had a chance.
“The challenge was not completed in the time allotted,” the proctor announced, scribbling on her clipboard without looking at him.
Yanko sat and stared. Did that mean he had failed? Because of one second? Truly?
A snicker came from behind him. “Told you,” Sly Wolf said.
Yanko jumped to his feet, spinning toward the crowd, wanting nothing more than to sprint over there and plant his fist in the man’s face. But someone stirred on the logs. His father. Yanko glimpsed a stricken expression on his face before he turned and walked away from the arena, his shoulders slumped.
All of the fight drained out of Yanko. He had failed his family, his entire clan. Not because he lacked the skill, but because of hubris. No, he had said it correctly before. Stupidity.