The smell reached them before the banner did. Browned fat and toasted grain rolled down the row of canopies on a current of warm air, and Aurelian changed direction in the middle of a sentence about the aerial society's entrance trial, following it with the serene confidence of a man who had already lost interest in his own argument.
Selphine watched him go and lengthened her stride just enough to keep pace. Elara followed a step behind, letting the recruitment grounds slide past.
They had been walking for most of an hour, past the fencing circle and its cheering ring and a rune-research table where a student was explaining to no one in particular why her formation would not explode this time, and none of them had signed anything. The aerial society had come closest.
Its members made every applicant walk a painted beam before asking for a name, and the line had stretched halfway to the north wall.
