Flood and Ebb

The east wing gave up its secret on a Tuesday, three weeks before the Spring Trials, and it did so because Caius Wren walked into the Dean's study and gave it up himself.

Tamsin only knew because she was in the corridor outside, waiting to be told for the third time to say nothing about the eleventh stone. The door was not thick. She heard Caius say the words in a voice that did not sound like the boy who had tugged his scarf straight in the assembly line.

"The scorch marks in the east wing storeroom. They are mine, Dean. All of them. I was practising for the Trials. Fire stance, bolt, recover. Nobody was there. It was not a duel."

"I know it was not a duel," said Dean Flint. "A duel leaves two sets of marks. Why there?"

A long pause. "Because that is where the Old Fire started. Because I am Flame and I have a Radiant affinity and I have never once lost control of a bolt, and I wanted to stand where somebody did lose control and prove that I would not. It was stupid. I know it was stupid. I stopped the night Tutor Crane found the marks."

"You stopped the night before the assembly."

"Yes, Dean."

"And the night you stopped, was there an owl on the sill?"

Another pause, longer. "Yes. Professor Marsh's owl. Ashwing. It sat there the whole time and watched me. I thought it would tell him. I suppose it did, in its way."

So that was one door shut, Tamsin thought, standing in the corridor. The owl had not been in the east wing for any reason of its own. It had been there because Caius Wren was there, and an owl that spent twenty years on a water Professor's shoulder apparently had opinions about First Rule violations, and had gone to sit on a sill and stare at one. Marsh would be relieved. Or he would be insulted that his familiar had kept it from him. With Marsh it was hard to tell.

Dean Flint's chair scraped. "Thirty merits, Wren. Not fifty. It was not a duel and you came to me on your own feet, and I take account of both. You will scrub the storeroom floor until the marks are gone, which they will not be, because fire in that wing goes down to the stone. You will do it anyway. And you will duel in the Trials, because House Blaze needs its Flames and because I would rather have you in the Ring under wards than in a storeroom without them."

"Yes, Dean. Thank you, Dean."

"Do not thank me. Thank the owl."

Caius came out with his face red and did not look at Tamsin, and she did not look at him, and that was the end of the east wing. The scorch marks had a name on them now and the name was Caius Wren, Third Year, House Blaze, who had wanted to stand where the Old Fire stood and had been watched by an owl while he did it. Nobody had been hurt. Thirty merits had been paid. The east wing was closed again and the door relocked, and when Tamsin passed the merit board that evening Caius's name had dropped from forty-one merits to eleven, and somebody from House Tide had chalked a small owl beside it.

The Ring was another matter.

Headmistress Grey had kept her word. Every one of the forty white stones had been lifted, cleaned, re-carved and re-set, and the ward-signs painted fresh by Tutor Wick Ambrose, a thin nervous man from the Gale corridor who had been named Ringwarden in Crane's place. He did not want it. He said so to anyone who would listen. He wore Crane's keys on his belt as if they were hot.

Tamsin had told the Headmistress about the cold stone, as she had been ordered, in a room with the Dean and nobody else, and the Headmistress had listened and said, "Thank you, Hollis," and nothing more. Nobody at Ember Academy was told that the eleventh stone had been scraped. The school believed, because it had been allowed to believe, that an old ward had failed. Only Tamsin and the Dean and the Headmistress knew it had been cut. And Pell Crane knew, because Tamsin had broken her promise the same evening, in the Stone corridor, with her back to the wall. Pell had listened without moving and then said, "Then someone killed my father," and walked away, and had not spoken to Tamsin since.

The Old Fire report stayed sealed. Tamsin had asked. She had gone to the Headmistress's door with her library pass in her hand as if it were a warrant and asked why a report on a fire eighty-seven years old could not be read by the Ringwarden who had died under the wards it described, and the Headmistress had looked at her for a long time and said, "Because the man who wrote it asked that it stay sealed for a hundred years, and I keep my predecessors' promises. Thirteen more years, Hollis. Go and pace." Why the Headmistress kept the Old Fire report sealed, and what Crane had thought he would find in it, was a door that stayed shut.

The boathouse, then. It was the only place left that made sense.

"You are still Ember," said Professor Lysander Marsh, when she arrived. "Say it."

"I am still Ember. I have been Ember since autumn."

"Good. Then let us find out whether that is true."

Something was different. He had her stand at the end of the pier with her boots in the lake and the Ashwing feather in her off hand, and he had her cycle with the water, flood and ebb, flood and ebb, and he did not stop her at the point where he usually stopped her. He let her go on. Aurelia Marsh came down the lake path halfway through and stood beside her husband with her arms folded, and the two of them watched without speaking, and Ashwing on Lysander's shoulder watched with them.

On the ninth cycle Tamsin felt the thing she had felt in the autumn, the thing that had carried her from Spark to Ember. The water answered before she asked. Her mana did not run dry at the second exchange or the fifth or the ninth; it came in with the flood and went out with the ebb and there was more of it every time, as if the lake had decided to lend. The feather in her fist was warm. The pier was wet to her knees.

"Stop," said Marsh, very quietly. "Stop now. Hollis. Stop."

She stopped. The lake fell back from the pier and went flat.

"Ember," said Marsh, "to Flame. In March. In her First Year." He sat down on the upturned skiff as if his knees had gone. "I told you not to force it."

"I did not force it," Tamsin said, and found that her voice was shaking. "I paced."

"She paced," said Aurelia Marsh to her husband, and there was something in her voice that was almost a laugh. "Twenty years married and you have never once admitted when a student has done the thing you told them to do. You owe me a wager. I said Tide."

"I said Tide too."

"You said Tide in the autumn. I said Tide in the summer, before she arrived. That is a different wager and you know it."

Tamsin stood on the pier with the lake around her boots and the Ashwing feather in her hand and heard the two of them argue about a bet that was older than her enrolment, and understood, slowly, that she was Flame. Third rung. The same rung as Cassia Wren and Caius Wren, who were Second and Third Years. The rung below Dorian Grey, who was the only Blaze in the school. Three weeks before the Trials, in her First Year, Tamsin Hollis of House Tide had come up the ladder a second time, and she had done it with a dead man's instruction in her ear.

"Crane would have made you walk the stones again before he believed it," said Marsh at last. "Forty warm. He said it the way other men say their prayers." He stood up. "Go and get dry. Tell nobody until the ladder clerk records it. And Hollis."

"Yes, Professor."

"Pace. You are Flame now, and Flame is where people stop pacing. Do not be one of them."