The Slate Board and the Second Place

The white pine board had hung on the eastern wall of the cloister for so long that the woodworm galleries along its lower edge formed a detailed map of forgotten defeats. It had survived three floods of the lower river and two arms masters who swore they would modernize the school, but the wood remained there, warped by the dampness of the peaks and held by two forged nails that wept rust whenever the rain blew from the north. On the last line drawn with chalk, the scribe’s firm stroke left no room for pity: Julian Vane, ninety-four point five; Maya Soler, ninety-four flat.

Half a point.

Maya rubbed the index finger of her right hand against the thigh of her training trousers. Her cuticles had ink stains that wouldn't come off even after scrubbing with river sand, the inheritance of the midnight guard where she had transcribed four cartons of cartography just to keep her eyes open. The second place is not a clean defeat; it is a constant reminder that someone else is breathing the exact air you wanted.

"If you glare at the wood with that much malice, you're going to end up setting it on fire," Julian said at her back, in that tone that sounded like a parade ground and clean laundry hanging in an orchard at noon.

She didn't turn around immediately. She preferred to contemplate the speck of dust falling slowly between the ninety-four figure and the chipped frame.

"It smells like rancid tallow," Maya replied.

"It's the breakfast porridge. The cook insists that beef fat keeps the heat in your guts until the great bell. To me, it tastes like a boiled old boot."

"I'm talking about the board, Julian."

"Ah. The board smells like a corpse, as usual. Did you save any bread?"

Maya reached into the pocket of her doublet and pulled out a crust hard as a cobblestone, broken roughly with her knuckles because no one at the table had found the knife to cut the loaf. She handed it to him without looking. Julian accepted it with a short, ceremonious bow that looked ridiculous on a boy with frayed kneecaps and a piece of dry straw stuck in his braided hair.

"Your generosity will go down in the chronicles, Soler."

"Shut up and chew."

It was the inventories of lost things that weighed on the back of her knees—the crosswind target correction in the Grajas gorge where she missed by two inches; the magnetic declination in the tide tables he had memorized the night before; the long-distance run over the scree where she slipped on an alder root. Half a point spread over six months of gray mornings. Julian ate the bread with offensive calm, resting his back against the granite masonry where centuries of novices had rubbed their shoulders until the rock was as smooth as a trout's back.

"Ordoño went down to the cages with three buckets of grease," Julian remarked with his mouth half full. "If we get the ash-gray one, you'll wish you'd come in third. The third-place ones at least go to the pack lizards, who don't try to rip your molars out to check if they're silver."

"The ash-gray one isn't going to bond with either of us," she said, though her fingers tightened over her old leather belt, which creaked like dry bones when she bent it. "That beast has spent two levies eating whole rams and spitting out the harnesses. It doesn't want riders. It wants to be left to sleep."

"We all want to be left to sleep, Maya. But here we are."

The bonding pit opened into the void like a wound on the cliff's edge, paved with large slabs of gray slate that early morning ice had made slippery and treacherous. Meltwater from the perpetual snows came down the back wall through tiny channels that time had patiently carved into the living rock, murmuring with a dry, almost metallic whisper. The air there smelled of soaked stone, beast urine, and that penetrating stench of rancid ox fat the stable lads used to waterproof the breastplates and breeches so they wouldn't rot with the sweat of flight.

Ordoño the instructor waited by the bronze gate, standing on the flagstones with the solidity of a milestone. He had a piece of leather between his teeth and was passing a whetstone along the tip of his ash staff, with a rhythmic scraping that made the teeth of the twelve aspirants standing in a row feel edgy.

"Whoever hesitates a step goes over the bottom with the goats," Ordoño said without looking up from the stone. "And whoever tries to trick the staff with salon fencing moves, I'll break the shaft over their ribs myself. This isn't the harvest dance. People come here to claim a weight, and the beasts know how to tell a muleteer from a bale of straw."

Maya took a deep breath. Her breath came out in thick bursts from her mouth, so white and dense that for an instant it fogged her eyelashes and froze on the rough edge of her woolen doublet's collar. Beside her, Julian adjusted the buckle of his shoulder pad with a finger purpled from the frost. His jaw was clenched, though he tried to smile toward the emptiness of the valley as if someone had pulled back a curtain and the abyss were just an overgrown garden.

The iron bell of the main tower tolled once. A dull sound, flattened by the shroud of fog.

The pit's iron-grate gate gave way. The roar of the iron bolt sliding shut cut off the murmur of the water. No one breathed.

From the gloom of the tunnel emerged a dense mass, the color of the damp ash left in hearths after three days of rain. The great ash-gray reptile didn't come down the ramp with the caution of young beasts: it slithered. Its four hind claws bit into the frozen slate flags with a dry, sharp crunch, splintering the edges of the stone into shards that flew against the novices' gaiters. It brought the fog clinging to its flanks, but from its dorsal scales—earthy, cracked like the bark of a centenarian oak—emanated a living glare, a heavy and dense muscular heat, similar to that given off by a cast-iron stove in a closed room.

Two slow snorts swept the floor of the pit. It smelled of cold sulfur and rotting grass.

Ordoño raised his staff. The twelve apprentices raised theirs in unison, birch staffs polished with ash, tipped with brass rings that jingled with the nervous pulse of twelve tense arms. It was the ritual call, the one academy manuals had prescribed since the dynasty of the Snows—a beat that mimicked the flapping wings of a great blue heron in the reed beds.

The ash-gray stopped. It slowly turned its head, with that ancient disdain of beings that were already watching the mountain before men learned to start fires with flint. It didn't look at the staffs. It didn't hear the brass. It walked right past the third one in line, past the fifth, making the flagstones crunch under a tonnage that seemed to crush the air.

It arrived before Julian and Maya.

Julian raised his staff half an inch higher, the perfect posture of the cavalry manuals. Maya kept hers low, with a rigid wrist and her thumb gripping the wood fibers until her nail turned white. If the animal decided to open its jaws now, there wouldn't even be time to—

The beast didn't roar. It planted its front left claw, wide as a trench shield and armed with curved black nails, directly over the toe of Maya's waxed leather boots, pinning it against the slate without breaking the bone but trapping her against the ground like a stake. At the exact same moment, with a heavy deliberation that made the courtyard gravel tremble, it dropped its right claw onto Julian's boots.

The metallic click of the safety carabiner on Julian's staff hitting his own chest harness broke the silence of the pit.

No one moved.

The animal lowered its back, exhaling a warm puff that melted the frost from both their doublets in a fraction of a second, and lay down on the slabs, crushing the feet of the two cadets under the exorbitant weight of its forelegs.

Ordoño stood motionless with the whetstone suspended in the air. He looked at the ash-gray. He looked at Julian. He looked at Maya, whose boot crunched under the lizard's dull pressure.

"God damn it all," the instructor muttered, and his voice came out hoarse, without a shadow of imperial liturgy.

He turned halfway, walked slowly toward the back wall where the service tack hung, and unhooked from the two iron hooks the double reinforced leather harness, with its four crossed straps and twin rings for two keel riders, which had been gathering cobwebs in the shade for fifteen years.