The news had traveled faster than he had.

  Tunde became aware of this the moment he turned onto Petal Street and registered that the street, which should have been moving at the ordinary pace of an evening winding down, was instead moving at the pace of a place where something had recently happened and had not yet been fully processed.

  People looked at him with the specific quality of recognition directed at someone who is also the subject of what everyone is currently discussing, the looks arriving before he had said anything or done anything to warrant them.

  He kept his face even and his pace measured and went through the door of the Red Blossom House.

  The common room went quiet.

  Then a broad-shouldered man with brown hair stood up from the long table, and his hands came together in a slow, deliberate clap, and the sound of it hung in the room for a moment before the other Initiates found their feet and joined it, and the quiet dissolved into something considerably louder than it had been.

  Tunde stood in the doorway and had the particular experience of not knowing where to put his face.

  Lady Ryka was behind the bar with a smile that had the quality of someone satisfied with how an evening is developing, and her kitchen staff moved through the space behind her with the efficient urgency of people who have been asked to produce considerably more food than they were originally prepared for and have decided to meet that request as a matter of professional dignity.

  Someone directed him to the long table.

  Someone else's hand landed on his shoulder in welcome, and he managed not to wince at the contact with the bruises that were still making their presence known beneath the surface of his newly tempered skin.

  He sat, and a plate was placed before him, and the plate contained things that smelled of actual cooking rather than the dried, rationed, and barely sufficient that he had grown up with, and he ate with the sincere and uncomplicated gratitude of someone who has not always had enough to eat and has not forgotten what that was like.

  The meat was in a broth that was light brown and complex, something herbed in it that he did not have the vocabulary for, but that his body received as an unambiguous positive.

  The bread was soft and yielded to pressure rather than requiring it. He stuffed his mouth and someone slapped his shoulder again and he bit back the wince again and chewed.

  A large screen in the corner of the room was showing his fight.

  He looked at it with the particular discomfort of seeing himself from outside himself, the figure on the screen moving through the sequences of the encounter with the efficiency of someone who had not been thinking about what they looked like, which was different from what he had expected and somewhat worse, the movements functional rather than composed, the rolling across cobblestones less dignified than it had felt from the inside.

  Every time the screen showed him take a hit, the room cheered, which he did not fully understand.

  "You look like you've never seen yourself fight before," said a voice beside him.

  He turned. A woman, tall, one eye closed by the neat line of old scar tissue, dark yellow hair, a pair of large circular blades at her waist that caught the light in a way that suggested they had been maintained rather than simply carried.

  "I haven't," he said.

  "Nobody does, the first time," she said.

  "You cringe at yourself. Then you watch what you actually did rather than what it looked like, and it gets better." She tilted her head toward the screen, where the figure of him was in the process of grabbing the spear shaft mid-arc.” She pointed.

  "That, for instance. You read the wrong weapon as the primary threat and then immediately corrected when the swing told you it was the shaft rather than the tip. Most Initiates with your level of training don't correct mid-sequence. They commit to the first read."

  "I'm Tunde," he said.

  "Isolde," she said.

  "Red Blossom."

  "Red Blossom," he repeated.

  "Ryka's custom," she said.

  "Initiates without clan family ties take the name of whatever house they call home. Loyalty made visible." She said it without particular sentiment, the way one describes a fact that has been true long enough to simply be true.

  The large man who had started the clapping materialized on Tunde's other side with the sudden presence of someone who has been wanting to sit there since the beginning and has found the first available moment.

  He was the kind of large that came from years rather than particular effort, the bulk of someone who had spent time doing physical things and whose body had recorded all of it in its frame.

  His gauntlets were worn in a way that communicated use rather than neglect.

  "Draven," he said, dropping onto the bench with a weight that the bench absorbed without complaint.

  "Draven Red Blossom. You are the high ranker of our house now." He said this with the satisfaction of someone who has been waiting for this specific sentence to be true.

  "I don't understand what that means yet," Tunde said honestly.

  Lady Ryka appeared at the end of the table, setting a large glass mug in front of him, the liquid inside it a cold golden color that foamed at the rim. She raised it before he could take it.

  "To the high ranker of the Red Blossom House," she said, and the room answered before she had finished the sentence.

  Tunde took the glass, drank, and understood immediately why it cost ten lumens.

  He set it down and looked at Ryka, who was explaining the structure of the lower district houses with the practiced ease of someone who has explained this before and expects to explain it again.

  Ten houses in the lower district. Nine in the higher. The higher district houses operated under the sponsorship of clan elder patrons, their resources and advancement materials flowing through that patronage structure, their ranking determined by the performance of their members.

  The lower district houses competed for position within a system that determined which resources they accessed, which rifts they received priority entry to, and which advancement materials were made available for purchase at subsidized rates.

  "And us?" Tunde asked.

  "The Red Blossom House has no patron in the higher districts," Isolde said.

  "We had one, once. The Crimson Rose. They were wiped out in a rift run."

  The silence that moved through the nearby Initiates at the mention of this had a specific quality, the silence of something that happened within living memory and has not fully settled into the category of history yet.

  "The clan found nothing conclusive," Draven said, with the flatness of someone quoting an official position they do not find satisfying.

  "Another house claims they simply didn't encounter the Rose inside the rift. Rifts are large spaces. It's possible."

  "Lady Ryka believes otherwise," Isolde said.

  Ryka was already moving to another part of the table, distributing plates with the efficiency of someone who has many people to feed and a system for it.

  She did not turn around when she spoke.

  "What I believe is my own affair. What matters tonight is that the Red Blossom House has a high ranker, the first in three years, and that high ranker happens to be the student of an elder." She glanced back over her shoulder.

  "Which is the part that changes things."

  "How?" Tunde asked.

  "The top five lower district houses all have members in the top twenty rankings," Isolde said.

  "That determines their position in resource distribution and rift access. Before tonight, we were ninth. As of the official rankings tomorrow, we will be top five at minimum, depending on how the numbers settle." She looked at him with the clear assessment of someone doing arithmetic.

  "You displaced three members of the Ivory Tower House from the top twenty in a single evening. The Ivory Tower House patron is Elder Moros."

  Tunde considered this.

  "So I made an enemy," he said.

  "You were already an enemy," Draven said, without apparent concern.

  "The moment Elder Joran declared you his student publicly in the warehouse, you were an enemy to every Initiate who had been hoping for that position and every family who had been positioning their child for it. Tonight just confirmed that the enmity was warranted." He picked up his own mug and drank.

  "The difference between an enemy who thinks you're weak and an enemy who has evidence that you're not is significant."

  Tunde looked at the screen, where the fight was still playing, and thought about the initiates who had been sent, and thought about Elder Joran's absence since, and thought about what Moros's involvement meant when placed beside the things Joran had told him about the clan's internal politics.

  "The other houses will come for me," he said.

  "Almost certainly," Isolde agreed.

  "The ranking system is contested. If a house believes a ranking is achieved unfairly or can be reversed through direct challenge, they can initiate a formal challenge. Most of the time, challenges happen in the training hall with witnesses. They are considered legitimate clan activity and the elders do not interfere."

  "Will they send Disciples?" he asked.

  "Initiates challenge Initiates," Draven said.

  "The system has rules. A Disciple challenging an Initiate would be seen as their house conceding the ranking is unassailable through proper means, which carries its own kind of statement."

  Tunde nodded and ate his meat, which was still warm, and thought about the next day and the days after it, and how the distance between where he was and where he needed to be had not changed but the texture of the path toward it had become considerably more complicated.

  The foam on his glass had settled by the time he turned to Ryka with the question he had been carrying since the ship.

  "My companion," he said.

  "The Disciple I came in with. Is there a way to reach her?"

  Ryka raised an eyebrow in the particular way she had of communicating entire assessments through small facial adjustments.

  "Companion," she said.

  "She is exactly that," Tunde said.

  "I want to know if she is well. We were separated."

  "The higher districts are restricted to Initiates not affiliated with a higher district house," Ryka said.

  "Which means you, as a lower district Initiate even with an elder's sponsorship, would need either a letter of introduction or a direct escort from someone with higher district standing." She paused.

  "Elder Joran could arrange it."

  "Would he?" Tunde asked.

  The question contained more inside it than its surface suggested, because Elder Joran's absence since the evening's events was a specific kind of absence, not the absence of someone who did not know but the absence of someone who knew and had calculated that their presence was not what the situation required.

  "Who can tell," Ryka said, in the tone of someone who has been around the elder long enough to have opinions about him but has also been around him long enough to know that those opinions are not always reliable predictors of his behavior.

  "Ask. The worst outcome is that he says no, and then you know where you are."

  Tunde paid for a second glass and sat with the Initiates of the Red Blossom House until the evening settled into something quieter, and he let the noise and the warmth and the particular fellowship of people who have decided to claim something together wash over him.

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  He thought about Elyria in whatever part of this compound she occupied, and about Thorne wherever he was, and he held the thought and released it and went upstairs.

  His cycling was running before he reached the top of the stairs, the imbuement pattern Joran had set him maintaining its steady draw on his heart as he crossed the threshold of his room. He lay down without removing his robe.

  Sleep found him before he finished the thought he had been thinking.

  *****

  The wing of Elder Celia's estate that Elyria occupied was larger than the entirety of the Red Blossom House.

  She had walked its perimeter twice to confirm this, and the confirmation had not made her more comfortable, because large spaces with many rooms and a maid she had not hired and walls she had not chosen were not a configuration she associated with safety.

  She had spent forty minutes going through every room methodically, checking wall surfaces for gaps or inconsistencies, pressing floor boards, running her metal Ethra along the concealed structures within the walls in the way that her affinity made easy and that she had been doing since she was old enough to understand that the people who did not do this kind of thing were the people who eventually were surprised by the things they had not been looking for.

  She found nothing.

  Which was either because there was nothing or because whatever was there was above her ability to detect, and she filed both possibilities and decided that she would simply behave as though the space were observed regardless of which was true, because that was the consistently safer assumption.

  The maid she sent for metal, which she had asked for because she needed it and because the maid's response to the request would tell her something about the estate's relationship to unusual requests.

  The maid had gone without visible surprise and returned sweating and burdened and was paid more than she had expected, which Elyria calculated would produce the specific loyalty that comes from being treated generously by someone who did not have to be generous, which was a more reliable loyalty than the loyalty that came from obligation.

  She sat on the mat in the center of her large room with the sack of metal beside her and closed her eyes and let her Ethra heart find its rhythm.

  The rhythm was the specific rhythm of a metal Ethra user at the Disciple stage, the particular quality of drawing the ambient metal Ethra from the environment and cycling it through the body, and Elyria's version of it was the result of years of practicing it without instruction.

  Which meant it was efficient in the ways she had discovered efficiency and inefficient in the ways that the absence of instruction leaves gaps that the practitioner does not know are gaps because they have never seen a comparison.

  She was aware of this about herself, and it was one of the things she intended to address.

  The metals in the sack dissolved into ambient Ethra under the gentle, comprehensive touch of her affinity, the solid state of the material becoming the Ethra that had constituted it, the energy flowing into her body with the ease of something returning home.

  Her heart received it and processed it, refining the metal Ethra through the purification that her body had developed as an automatic function, the process working alongside the cultivation rather than requiring separate attention.

  The rust was what she expelled.

  Most metal Ethra users at her level were not aware that rust was a sub affinity rather than a waste product.

  She had discovered it by accident in her fourteenth year, during a training session in which she had pushed her purification beyond its usual parameters and found that what came out the other side was not the clean refined metal Ethra she had been producing but something older and more corrosive, the Ethra of decay rather than of the thing that decayed.

  She had spent six months determining that it would not poison her. She had spent the subsequent years determining what else it would do.

  The arm came next.

  Her old one had been left behind with the Verdan clan's transport, which she had not objected to because the old one had been a hasty construction, built in the wasteland cave with the metal that was available rather than the metal that was ideal, the arm's function acceptable and its craft a necessary compromise.

  She would not compromise now.

  She opened her palm and let the refined metal Ethra pool in it, shaping it with the attention she gave to things she intended to keep for a significant amount of time.

  The shoulder joint first, because everything downstream of it depended on the shoulder being correct, the articulation range matching her own shoulder on the other side.

  Then the upper arm, the forearm, the wrist.

  She built the hand last, the five fingers individually articulated, each joint responsive to the Ethra flow she would maintain through the arm, the nails shaped from a slightly denser material that she had laced with the rust Ethra in concentrations sufficient to be useful without being visible.

  She etched the surface, it was a self indulgence, and she allowed it without apology.

  Branches, native to the forests of Silvershade, the kind that grew in the triple canopy and were never seen from the ground because they only existed where the light was consistent, which was a considerable height up.

  She had grown up near trees like those, in a stronghold that was built around them rather than beside them, and she had not thought about those trees in months, and she let herself think about them now while her hands shaped the metal and the room was quiet enough that she could hear her own breathing.

  The finished arm hummed when she fused the purified Ethra into it, a low sustained note that her affinity heard rather than her ears, the Ethra settling into the metal with the particular resonance of something that had been made for a specific purpose and recognized that purpose.

  She attached it at the shoulder with the practiced motion of someone who has been performing this attachment since the shoulder first required it, and flexed the fingers one by one, and was satisfied.

  The blade she forged from the remaining rod was simple and utilitarian, the opposite of the arm, a thing that was exactly what it needed to be without addition.

  She stood with it and moved through the stances she had developed, the sequence that began as a pattern she had read in a manual from Silvershade and had become, through years of adaptation.

  Something that was no longer quite that and not quite anything else, a fighting method built around the specific capabilities of metal Ethra and a single arm and a set of floating blades that were the expression of the affinity rather than the instrument of it.

  She thought about Rhyn while she moved, because thinking about a potential opponent while practicing was productive rather than personal, and Rhyn was the most technically competent ranker at her level she had encountered since leaving Silvershade.

  His blade technique was formal, the product of structured training in a system that valued precision over creativity, which was a strength and a predictable quality.

  She would not fight him the way she had fought the wasteland Disciples, the improvised urgent efficiency of someone managing chaos.

  She would fight him the way she fought things she had had time to think about.

  The knock at her door was loud enough to constitute a statement.

  She took her time.

  When she opened the door, Rhyn was on the other side in the exact configuration she had expected him to be in, which was standing with both hands at his sides and his expression carrying the controlled neutrality of someone who has decided that showing anything else would give her information she should not have.

  "The main house," he said. "Rankings."

  "What rankings?" she asked, knowing the answer.

  She saw him process the decision to answer rather than point out that she had asked a question she already knew the answer to.

  "The Argent Rose House, which is where Elder Celia has placed you as an honorary member. The deadline for the ranking cycle is today. You are required to present yourself for assessment."

  "Assessment," she said.

  "A duel. To establish your rank among the clan's Disciples."

  She looked at him for a moment with the look of someone deciding how long to take to do something they have already decided to do.

  Then she closed the door and freshened up with the deliberate pace of someone who has correctly identified that taking their time will be experienced as a provocation by the person waiting outside the door, and has decided that this is acceptable.

  Rhyn was still standing in the same position when she emerged.

  "Keep making that face," she said, as they began walking, "and no one will marry you."

  He placed one hand on his sword and said nothing, which was several things simultaneously.

  ****

  The main house had arranged itself for occasion.

  Ten Disciples sat on the ground in the formation of people who have been placed rather than choosing where to sit, their postures carrying the self consciousness of being observed by an elder they respected or feared or both.

  Elder Celia sat facing them with her pipe, which she was not yet smoking but holding in the way of someone who has decided it is the appropriate accessory for the current situation.

  Behind her and to either side, at a respectful and not accidental distance, Elder Joran stood with his hands behind his back and his customary smile, and Elder Moros stood with his rings in orbit and his expression performing neutrality with the effort of someone who is not naturally neutral.

  Elyria assessed the ten Disciples in the time it took her to cross from the estate entrance to the seating area.

  Rank, by the quality of Ethra in each body. Three were clearly at the upper range of Disciple capability, their hearts dense and well organized, the signature of people who had been at this rank for some time and had used that time productively.

  Four were in the middle range, solid and competent. The remaining three were recent advances, their hearts still settling into the new rank, the Ethra not yet fully at home in its configuration.

  She sat, and Rhyn sat beside Elder Celia, and she felt the ten Disciples look at her with the specific quality of people who have been told something about someone and are now assessing whether the something is accurate.

  She returned each assessment with the direct, unhurried attention of someone who has decided that the baseline for every interaction is that she is not interested in performing inadequacy for anyone's comfort.

  Elder Joran waved at her. She found this enormously unsettling and looked away.

  Elder Celia began speaking with the warm precision of someone who has conducted many of these sessions and has determined the most efficient form for them.

  "The lower districts have had a day of surprises," she said, and something in the composure of the ten Disciples shifted slightly, the surprise not yet having reached them all or the implications of it not yet having settled.

  "An Initiate, the student of Elder Joran, moved from rank one hundred and fifty to rank sixteen through a single evening's events. The highest single session rank movement in the clan's recorded history."

  Elyria absorbed this.

  She kept her face still and absorbed it and thought about the person who had survived the pit and the ship and the wasteland and a body tempering conducted by a Revenant of uncertain ethics, and found that she was not surprised, and found further that she was not able to immediately identify whether what she felt about it was pride or something adjacent to worry, and decided that both were probably present and that this was acceptable.

  "This outcome has prompted me to ensure that my own student is given proper opportunity to demonstrate her place in the clan's ranking," Celia continued, and her eyes moved to Elyria with the soft smile that carried its own category of assessment,

  "Rather than simply being assigned a position by my authority. I prefer demonstrated placement to assigned placement, where the conditions allow."

  She let this land among the ten Disciples with the patience of someone who has said a thing and is waiting for the thing to do its work.

  "Anyone who believes they can contest her ranking is invited to do so now," Celia said.

  "Should you succeed, you have my word that I will release her as my student and consider the winner for the position."

  Elyria got to her feet before the invitation had fully settled in the air, because remaining seated while the invitation was active communicated a hesitation she did not have.

  "One additional condition," she said, to Celia, and the elder inclined her head in the precise way that communicated permission to continue.

  "Whatever is in the void rings of any Disciple who steps forward becomes mine if they lose."

  The ten Disciples looked at her.

  She looked back at them with the calm of someone who has made a business proposition and is waiting to hear whether it is accepted.

  Elder Celia's smile did not change.

  "The terms are acceptable," she said.

  Seven of the ten stood up.

  ****

  The battles were not long.

  Not because they were easy, which was a distinction Elyria was careful to maintain in her own assessment of them.

  The Disciples of the Verdan Clan were trained, genuinely and well, in the particular style that a blade and jade Ethra tradition produced, the technique precise and the power behind it honest.

  They were not the bandits of the wasteland or the first chance Disciples of a desert fortress. They were rankers who had survived a selection process and been invested in by people with resources to invest.

  They were not Elyria.

  She had grown up on Silvershade, which was the specific thing she had told Celia and which Celia had correctly understood meant something, because Silvershade's continent was not kind to anything that was not sharp or fast or both, and the clans that produced Disciples who could survive in it were producing something different from what the Bloodfire continent's more structured and organized training systems were producing.

  She had also been rejected by her own clan, which had produced in her a specific kind of training, the kind you do when you have no one to teach you and so you teach yourself, which builds different gaps and different strengths from the structured kind and is in some ways more dangerous because its gaps are unknown until they are tested.

  The first Disciple had range advantage and used it well, the blade technique building the same kind of controlled spatial management that Oram had used against Tunde, the available positions for her shrinking as the Disciple worked through the geometry of the fight.

  She had gone through it differently than Tunde had gone through Oram's version, sideways rather than directly, using the metal floating behind her to redefine the angles from the Disciple's perspective and closing the distance when the redefinition had done enough work.

  Her metal arm had performed exactly as designed.

  The second Disciple had been stronger and more creative, adapting faster than the first when her initial approach did not produce the expected result, which she respected.

  She had used the rust sub affinity twice in the five minute exchange, neither time in a way that caused permanent harm, both times as a statement of what she was choosing not to do.

  The third and fourth had come together, which was not within the stated terms but which Celia had allowed with a gesture that suggested she was interested in the result, and which Elyria had accepted because the addition of a second opponent changed the problem in ways that were interesting rather than merely harder.

  By the seventh, she was sweating.

  She took a moment at the end of it, breathing through her cycling, the metal arm's Ethra warm from sustained use, the blade nicked in two places that she would address later.

  Seven void rings, which she had collected with the matter of fact efficiency of someone executing the terms of an agreement.

  The Disciples around her were in various states of having encountered something they had not expected, the expressions of people who had calibrated their expectations to the setting and had discovered that the setting was not the whole picture.

  Celia reached into her robe and held out a badge.

  It was small and flat, the clan crest on one side and a number on the other. Elyria looked at it.

  "Fifth among the clan's Disciples," Celia said, with the satisfaction of someone watching something they had predicted come true.

  "Among the top five, you are the only one without a defined concept, which is a gap that we will address before the surge." The soft smile had a warmth in it that was not the performed warmth of strategy but something more genuine.

  "You fought well."

  Elyria turned the badge in her fingers. Fifth. Among a clan whose Disciples had just demonstrated themselves to be genuinely capable, which meant that fifth here was not the same as fifth somewhere less formidable.

  She thought about the Technocracy and the Aspirant Trials and the year she had given herself, and about how the month or two or three that the surge would cost her was not a loss if she used it correctly.

  She thought about Tunde, rank sixteen among the clan's Initiates after one evening, and about the look Joran had given her as she walked in, the wave that had been entirely too cheerful for the context.

  She thought about Rhyn, who had watched the seven battles from a position at Elder Celia's side with the focused attention of someone taking detailed notes, and whose face had produced several things she had found interesting to observe.

  She put the badge in her robe.

  "What comes next?" she asked Celia.

  "Rest tonight," Celia said.

  "Training begins at first light. We have a month before the surge, possibly two, and in that time I intend to see what happens when someone with your foundation is given the conditions she needs to close the gap between what she is and what she is capable of being."

  Elyria nodded.

  She found Rhyn on her way out of the main house, standing at a point that was technically not waiting for her but that produced the same result.

  "Five," she said.

  He said nothing.

  "You watched all seven," she said.

  "I watch everything that may become relevant to the clan's security," he said, with the composure of someone who has decided on a framing and is committed to it.

  "That's a very specific way of saying what you actually mean," she said.

  He looked at her with the look that was not quite a challenge and not quite an acknowledgement, the look she had seen several versions of since the transport vessel, and turned and walked toward the towers.

  She watched him go, assessed the information the walk contained about its owner, and turned toward the wing that was hers.

  She had seven void rings to catalogue and a new arm to fine tune and a training program to prepare for, and the night was running and she did not intend to waste it.