Twenty Merits

The boathouse smelled of wet rope and old varnish, and Professor Marsh was already there when Tamsin arrived, sitting on an upturned skiff with Ashwing on the beam above him.

"Tidal cycling," he said. "Tell me what it is before you tell me what you wrote."

"Drawing mana in with the flood and releasing on the ebb," Tamsin said. "So the water does the pacing instead of the caster."

"And why does an Ember need it more than a Flame?"

"Because an Ember holds less. If I pace myself badly I run dry in the second exchange and lose the bout standing up."

"Good." He took a notebook out of his gown. "You came up to Ember in the autumn. You are still Ember, and you will be Ember at the Trials in five weeks unless something unusual happens, which it will not, because I will not let you force it. Forcing the ladder is how First Years end up in the infirmary. Say it back."

"I am Ember and I will be Ember at the Trials."

"Your affinity is Bright. That is the thing you have that most of them do not. A Bright-grade water affinity at Ember rung can beat a Dull-grade fire affinity at Flame rung, if the water-caster paces. That is the whole of your strategy, Hollis. Pace."

They worked for an hour with the lake slapping against the boathouse piles, and when the second bell rang Marsh reached up and drew a long grey feather from the beam where the owl had been sitting. Ashwing had shed it overnight, which happened about once a year and never on request.

"Hold this in your off hand when you cast," Marsh said, and gave it to her. "Not because it is magic. It is not. It is a feather. But it will remind you of the pacing, and you will find that your mana settles when you have something to hold. Tide students have passed Ashwing feathers around for twenty years. It is yours now, until you decide it should be somebody else's. That is how it works."

Tamsin took the Ashwing feather and put it in the inside pocket of her gown, where the fabric lay flat over her heart. Above them the owl turned its head all the way around and looked at her with one orange eye.

"Professor," she said. "Ashwing goes where you go. You said so."

"I did."

"Then why was Ashwing in the east wing the night before the assembly? I saw the owl from the Tidehall window, on the sill of the storeroom. It was past midnight. You were not there. Nobody was."

Marsh was quiet for a long moment. "I do not know," he said. "I had rather hoped nobody had seen that. Keep it to yourself, Hollis. I will find out."

The question followed her up the lake path and into the day. Ashwing never left Marsh's shoulder. Everybody knew it. And yet the owl had sat on a sill in the east wing on a night when scorch marks were being made on the floor behind it.

In the afternoon Tamsin went to the merit board outside the Cinder Library and read her own name. Fourteen merits. She needed twenty for a library pass, and the pass was the only way into the restricted stacks where the tidal cycling treatises were kept. A library pass cost twenty merits. A Ring hour, which bought an hour of sanctioned practice in the duelling Ring with the wards up, cost fifty. A House ribbon, which went on your scarf for life, cost a hundred. The academy counted half-merits too, and called them notches. Two notches made a merit. Tamsin had fourteen merits and one notch, and the notch was for a question she had answered in fire theory that Professor Aurelia Marsh had called "half right, which is better than most."

"Six merits short," said a voice beside her. "I could lend you them."

It was Cassia Wren, grey-blue scarf, black hair to the jaw, and for one moment Tamsin's eye wanted to read the red scarf of her brother Caius onto her, because the face was the same. Then the moment passed. Cassia had a scar through one eyebrow and Caius did not.

"Merits do not lend," Tamsin said. "The board does not allow it."

"No. But Tutor Crane is paying six merits to anyone who will walk the Ring wards with him before the Trials. He wants them checked stone by stone and his daughter has already said she would rather eat the keys." Cassia grinned. "He is in the Ring now. Go."

The Ring stood at the north end of the Founders' Court, a circle of black stone twelve paces across with a ring of white stones set into the ground around it, each one carved with a ward-sign. Tutor Benedek Crane, the Ringwarden, was on his knees at the third white stone with a brush in his hand. His daughter, Pell Crane, stood a few feet off with her arms folded, a Second Year in the brown-and-ochre of House Stone with her father's heavy shoulders and none of his patience.

"I said I would rather eat the keys," Pell said, when Tamsin asked.

"She would, too," said Crane, not looking up. "Hollis. You want six merits."

"Yes, Tutor."

"Then you walk the circle with me, and you put your hand on every stone, and you tell me if any of them is cold. A warded stone is warm. A stone that has lost its ward is cold, and if one is cold on the day of the Trials then a fire-caster's bolt goes through the gap and into the crowd. That has not happened in a hundred years and it will not happen on my keys."

They walked the circle. There were forty white stones. Tamsin put her hand on each one and each one was warm, a low steady warmth like a cup that had held tea. Crane followed her with the brush and renewed the ward-signs where the paint had faded, and Pell followed him complaining, and after an hour the circle was done.

"Forty warm," said Tamsin.

"Forty warm," Crane agreed. He stood up with a grunt. "Six merits, Hollis. I will mark the board tonight. You have earned your library pass."

"The Headmistress wants to see you," said Pell to her father. "She sent a Gale boy with a note. Something about the Old Fire records."

Crane's face went still. "Did she say what about them?"

"She said they stay sealed. Those were the words. The Old Fire records stay sealed, and the Ringwarden is not to request them again."

Tamsin, who was supposed to be leaving, stopped on the edge of the Ring. "Why would the Ringwarden want the Old Fire records?"

"Because the Ring wards were laid in 1410, after the Accord," said Crane, "and they were laid by the same man who wrote the report on the Old Fire, and I have never been allowed to read it. I would like to know what he saw that made him build the wards the way he did. The Headmistress has told me no four times. This is the fifth." He hung the brush on his belt beside the keys. "Go and buy your pass, Hollis. Read your treatises. Pace."

She went. The library clerk took twenty merits off the board with a flick of chalk and gave her a pass of green card with her name on it, and she stood for a moment in the doorway of the restricted stacks with the pass in one hand and the Ashwing feather in the other, and thought about a sealed report and a cold stone and an owl on a sill, and about how everyone at Ember Academy seemed to be keeping a door shut on something.

Then she went in and found the treatises, because the Trials were in five weeks, and she was Ember, and she had been told to pace.