The Eleventh Stone

The demonstration was Dean Flint's idea. Four weeks before the Spring Trials, every First Year was marched to the Ring to watch a Tutor and a Professor exchange three bouts under full wards, so that nobody would step onto the black stone on the day without knowing what a warded bolt looked like when it struck a shield. It was a tradition as old as the Accord. Tutor Benedek Crane, the Ringwarden, set the wards himself, as he always did, and Professor Aurelia Marsh took the far side of the circle with her sleeves pinned back.

Tamsin stood in the front row with the rest of House Tide. Cassia Wren was beside her. Across the circle, in the red block, Caius Wren was standing with Dorian Grey, and Tamsin saw Dorian say something that made the Blaze students laugh. Dorian Grey was the captain of House Blaze, had been since his Second Year, and was Blaze on the ladder as well, which the Blaze students found endlessly funny and nobody else did. He was the only student in the school on the fourth rung. The Headmistress, his aunt, watched from the Founders' steps with her hands folded, and did not laugh at anything.

"You are still Ember," Cassia said to Tamsin, quietly. "Marsh told you to pace."

"I am still Ember," Tamsin agreed. "I have been Ember since autumn and I will be Ember when I walk in there. I know."

"Good. Because I am Flame, and I am a Second Year, and I will still lose my first bout if I am drawn against my brother, so being a rung higher is not the thing that matters. Caius has a Radiant affinity. It is the only thing about him that is any good."

Crane walked the forty white stones one last time with his hand on each. Tamsin counted with him. Forty warm; she had checked them herself four days ago and had the merits to show for it. Crane stepped back off the circle, raised one hand, and the ward-signs on the white stones lit up one after another in a wave of pale gold, until the whole Ring was closed under a dome of light so faint it could only be seen at the edges.

"The Ring is warded," Crane said, in the old form of words. "No duel outside the Ring. No harm inside it."

Professor Aurelia Marsh cast first. A fire-caster's bolt was a narrow thing, white at the heart and orange at the edges, and it crossed the circle in less than a breath and broke on Crane's stone shield with a sound like a slammed door. The First Years flinched as one. Crane returned a shield-push that rocked the Professor back a step, and the Blaze block cheered, and the Tide block cheered louder because Aurelia Marsh, whatever House she had worn as a girl, was married to their Professor and that made her theirs.

The second bout went the same. The third did not.

Crane's shield came up. Aurelia's bolt went out. And at the eleventh white stone on the north edge of the circle, where Tamsin's hand had rested four days ago and felt a cup's worth of warmth, the ward-sign guttered and went dark.

The dome tore. Tamsin saw it tear, a seam of nothing opening in the pale gold between the tenth stone and the twelfth, and she saw the bolt bend. It should not have bent. A fire bolt went where it was thrown. But the wards had been laid to catch what missed and throw it back into the circle, and with one stone dead the catch became a hook, and the bolt curved out of its line, skipped off the dying ward, and came back across the Ring at the height of a man's chest.

It struck Tutor Benedek Crane under the right arm, where his shield was not.

He did not fall at once. He stood for the length of a breath with his hand still raised and a look of complete attention on his face, as if he were checking a stone, and then his knees went and he sat down on the black floor of the Ring and tipped onto his side.

Aurelia Marsh reached him first. Dean Flint reached him second. Pell Crane, who had been in the Stone block with her arms folded, reached him third and did not scream, which was worse. The Headmistress came down the steps at a walk that became a run halfway. Professor Lysander Marsh pushed through the Tide block with Ashwing clinging to his shoulder, and when he got to the circle he stopped at the edge and did not step in, because the Ring was still half-warded and nobody knew what the broken dome would do.

Tamsin did not know how long it was before Dean Flint stood up. He had blood on his gown to the elbow. He looked at the Headmistress and shook his head once, and the Headmistress closed her eyes.

Benedek Crane, Ringwarden of Ember Academy for twenty-two years, was dead on the floor of the Ring he had warded that morning. He had died in front of six hundred students, under his own dome, of a bolt thrown by a Professor in a demonstration that had been run every spring since 1410 without a single injury. His was the first death on the academy grounds since the Old Fire of 1402.

Pell knelt by her father with her hand on his chest. Nobody moved her. After a while Professor Aurelia Marsh knelt beside her, and Lysander Marsh came and stood behind his wife with his hand on her shoulder, and the three of them stayed like that while the Dean cleared the Ring.

Tamsin went to the eleventh stone. Nobody stopped her. She put her hand on it the way Crane had taught her and it was cold, cold all the way through, the way the lake was cold in the first week of spring. The ward-sign on its face was not faded. It was gone. The paint had been scraped off down to the white stone, in the last four days, by somebody with a blade and the patience to do it so cleanly that from a standing height it looked like it had never been there.

"Hollis." Dean Flint was behind her. "What are you doing?"

"It is cold, Dean. The eleventh stone. I checked it with Tutor Crane four days ago and it was warm. Somebody scraped the sign off."

Flint crouched beside her and ran his thumb over the stone. His face did not change, but his thumb stopped. "Who else checked these stones with Crane?"

"Nobody. His daughter would not. I did it for six merits."

"Then you will tell the Headmistress what you just told me, and then you will tell nobody else. Nobody, Hollis. Not Marsh, not Wren, not your pillow."

"Yes, Dean."

The Ring was closed that night by order of the Headmistress, its keys taken from Crane's belt and locked in the Dean's study. The Spring Trials were not cancelled. Headmistress Grey stood on the Founders' steps at dusk and said so to the whole school, and said that Tutor Crane would have been the first to insist on it, and that the Ring would be re-warded stone by stone before anyone stepped onto it again.

She did not say who had scraped the eleventh stone. Tamsin, who had been told to say nothing, said nothing, and lay awake in Tidehall with the Ashwing feather in her fist and the one question she was not allowed to ask going around and around in her head. Somebody had broken the Ring wards. Somebody had done it on purpose, with a blade, in the four days between her hand and Crane's death. Who had scraped the eleventh stone, and had they meant to kill the Ringwarden, or had they only meant to break the Ring?

In the bed across from hers, Cassia Wren was awake too. "Four weeks," Cassia said to the ceiling. "Four weeks, and we are going to walk into that circle anyway."

"Pace," said Tamsin, because it was the only thing she had left that Crane and Marsh had both told her, and she held onto it until morning.