Corvath's workshop met in a room I had not been in before, on the ground floor of the oldest section of the building, through a door that was not marked and was easy to miss if you did not know to look for it. I arrived two minutes early and stood outside it for a moment listening to the silence on the other side before pushing it open.
Six students. All third years except for one, the girl with red hair from the channeling workshop who sat apart from the others and worked in focused silence and did not appear to need Farren's corrections because she was not making any. She was already seated when I came in, her notebook open, and she looked up when the door opened and took me in with one clean sweep before returning to what she had been writing.
The other five were third years I knew by sight from the dining hall and corridors. All of them were above [D] grade. One of them, a broad-shouldered boy with the pale complexion and light hair common to families from the Sovereignty's interior provinces, was [C+] and wore it with the comfortable certainty of someone who had never been the weakest person in a room.
He was looking at me now with an expression that occupied the specific middle ground between hostile and welcoming, the look of someone who had just been told something surprising and had not finished deciding what to do with it.
I sat down at the end of the table.
Corvath came in a minute later, set his notes on the table without looking at anyone, and said, "We have a new member this term. Second year. Before anyone wastes time on that, let me tell you what I told him, which is that the workshop is not about grade and if you make it about grade I will ask you to leave." He looked around the table once. "Questions?"
Nobody had questions.
"Good," he said, and opened his notes.
****
The workshop was nothing like Farren's sessions.
Farren taught method. This is how you draw energy through your channels. This is what output looks like at each grade. This is how you measure it and what the measurement means. Clean and systematic and complete within its own limits.
Corvath taught problems.
He put a scenario on the table and asked what you would do and then asked why and then asked what assumptions you had made to arrive at that answer and then asked what happened if those assumptions were wrong. He did not tell you whether your answer was correct. He told you whether your reasoning was sound, which was a different thing and considerably harder to fake.
The scenario today was a field encounter with a mid-grade threat in confined terrain, specifically a narrow ravine with limited exit options and a group composition of mixed grades and expressions. He wanted to know how you allocated roles, how you sequenced engagement, and how you adjusted if the first thirty seconds did not go as planned.
The [C+] student, whose name was Harren, went first. His answer was technically correct, a clean Force-dominant engagement strategy that used the highest-grade members as a forward line and everyone else in support. It would work in most versions of the scenario.
Corvath asked what expression type the mid-grade threat was most vulnerable to.
Harren said Force.
Corvath asked how he knew that.
Harren said it was a reasonable assumption given the threat type.
Corvath asked what happened if the assumption was wrong.
Harren worked through it. His answer adjusted for the error and recovered the strategy. It was good. He was good. I could see why he held the position he did in the room.
Then Corvath looked at me.
"Same scenario," he said. "Different answer."
The room was quiet. Six people looking at me with varying degrees of assessment in it.
I thought about the scenario. The ravine, the confined terrain, the mixed group. Harren's answer had been built around the assumption that the highest-grade members led the engagement, which was logical and conventional and produced a strategy that was robust against most variables.
The problem with it was that in confined terrain with limited exit options, the highest-grade members at the forward position were also the first ones to absorb any variables the initial read had missed. If the threat behaved unexpectedly, the people best equipped to adjust were already committed to a position they could not easily leave.
"I'd put the Sense-dominant practitioner at the forward edge instead of the Force-dominant ones," I said. "Let them read the threat before the engagement commits. Thirty seconds of information is worth more than thirty seconds of early output if the terrain means you cannot reposition once you've started."
Harren looked at me. "The Sense-dominant practitioner takes the threat contact."
"The Sense-dominant practitioner is at the forward edge, not in contact range. There's a difference. You're using them to gather information, not absorb damage. The Force-dominant members are staged to engage the moment the read comes back, which means they're committing to a position they already understand rather than one they're discovering under pressure."
Corvath said nothing. He looked at me for a moment and then at Harren and then back at his notes.
"What expression type is the threat most vulnerable to," he said again, this time to the room.
Nobody answered immediately.
"You don't know," he said. "None of you know, because I didn't tell you, because in a real field encounter you frequently don't know before the engagement starts. The question is not what answer you chose. The question is whether your strategy accounts for not knowing." He looked at Harren. "Yours assumes knowledge you don't have. It works if the assumption is correct." He looked at me. "Yours delays commitment until you have better information. It costs thirty seconds." He looked at the room. "Which costs more. The thirty seconds or the wrong assumption?"
The discussion that followed ran for an hour and covered ground that Farren's curriculum would not reach until the end of the year if it reached it at all. Corvath pushed every answer until it broke or held, and the ones that broke he left on the table for the room to look at, and the ones that held he pushed harder to find where the actual limit was.
By the end of it I had a considerably clearer picture of the six students around the table than I had arrived with.
The red-haired girl was named Sera. She said almost nothing during the session and when she did speak it was precise and slightly sideways, arriving at correct answers through a route nobody else had taken. Her expression type was Binding, which was rare enough that the workshop's practical exercises were not really designed for her, and her assessed grade was [E], which meant about as much for a Binding dominant practitioner as [G+] meant for a Form dominant one. She was from the Free Reaches
Harren was exactly what he appeared to be, which was either reassuring or limiting depending on what you needed from him. Strong, technically sound, built for conventional engagement. He had adjusted his initial answer well once the assumption error was pointed out, which meant he could work within a framework even if he was slow to question the framework itself.
The other four fell somewhere between those two. I noted them and moved on.
After the session ended and the others were leaving, Corvath stopped me with a look as I reached the door.
The room emptied. He sat at the table and looked at his notes for a moment.
"The Sense-forward answer," he said. "Where did that come from."
"It seemed obvious given the terrain constraints."
"It is not the answer the curriculum produces."
"I know."
He looked at me. "You know the curriculum well enough to know what it produces and well enough to work outside it. At [G+] in your second year." He paused. "I am not asking you to explain yourself. I am telling you that the people who will notice that gap between your grade and your thinking are not all going to be as patient about it as Orvyn."
I said nothing.
"The Field Trial," he said. "Your group assignment comes out next week. Come and tell me who you're with before you start preparing."
"You think the assignment matters."
"I think most things matter more than people assume." He looked back at his notes. "Go."
****
The corridor outside was empty in the specific quiet of late Tuesday evenings, the building settling into its nighttime routines, a few lamps burning low along the walls. I walked back toward the dormitory block and thought about Corvath and what he was doing with his Tuesday workshop and why a man who had spent eleven years being used by people who found his ability convenient had decided to spend his evenings teaching the students who reminded him of himself before that happened.
It was not altruism exactly. It was a specific kind of investment, the kind you made when you understood a situation clearly and wanted to influence how it resolved.
He was building something with that workshop. I did not yet know what.
I turned it over as I walked and added it to the pile of things I understood partially and needed more information to finish with, and then I went to bed and thought about the Field Trial and the group assignment and what six and a half months looked like from the inside.
****
The group assignments went up on the faculty board outside the main hall on Thursday morning.
I checked them before breakfast, standing in the corridor with a small crowd of second and third years pressing around the board and reacting to what they found there. Some of them were pleased. Some of them were not. The social arithmetic of who had been grouped with whom was apparently a significant event in the Academy's calendar and the corridor had the particular energy of people recalibrating around new information.
I found my name.
Group Seven. Four students.
Cael Dawnridge. Mira Solent. Fenn Ardal.
And Everyn Hast.
I stood in front of the board for a moment and read the four names again to make sure I had them right. Then I stepped back out of the crowd and stood in the corridor and thought about the specific shape of this particular problem.
Mira and Fenn were people I knew, people whose capabilities and habits I had been cataloguing for weeks. Mira's [D] grade Sense expression was an asset in exactly the way I had described in Corvath's workshop, her perception range was the best in the group by a significant margin, and she moved through difficult situations with the same composure she brought to everything else. Fenn was [E+], Force dominant, reliable and uncomplicated, the kind of person you wanted beside you when something needed to be hit.
Everyn Hast was [C-], the highest grade in the group by two full tiers above me, Sense dominant, from a family with connections to people who were already paying attention to unusual development in Academy students.
He had been watching me for six weeks.
Now we were going to spend three days in the field together.
I went to breakfast and thought about it over food and by the time I had finished eating I had arrived at the same conclusion from four different directions.
I needed to talk to Everyn Hast before the trial began.
Not because I trusted him. Because I needed to understand exactly what he knew and what he was going to do with it, and the only way to do that was to give him a controlled opportunity to show me.
I found him after lunch, in the corridor outside the library, alone for once, carrying a single book and walking with the unhurried ease of someone who had nowhere to be and had decided to make that look intentional.
"Hast," I said.
He stopped. Turned. The expression he wore was the neutral one, the one he used when he was deciding something.
"Dawnridge," he said.
"We're in the same Field Trial group."
"I know. I checked the board this morning."
"I thought we should talk before it starts."
Something moved in his expression, the specific reaction of someone who had been expecting to initiate a conversation and had just had the initiative taken from them.
"Alright," he said.
"Not here," I said. "Tonight. After ninth bell. The east courtyard."
He held my gaze for a moment. Then he nodded once and said nothing else.
I walked away and did not look back.
****
The east courtyard was empty at ninth bell, which I had known it would be because I had been mapping the Academy's quiet spaces for six weeks and this was one of the quietest. A small enclosed square between the oldest and second oldest sections of the building, stone benches along two walls, a dead fountain in the center that had not worked in decades. No foot traffic after the evening meal. No sight lines from the dormitory windows.
Everyn arrived two minutes after me, which meant he had come early and waited somewhere nearby to see if I had come alone. I noted that and said nothing about it.
He sat on the bench across from the fountain. I sat on the one opposite.
For a moment neither of us said anything. The courtyard was cold and still and the lamp in the archway above the entrance threw just enough light to see by.
"You've been watching me since the first channeling workshop," I said.
"You noticed."
"Week two."
Something shifted in his expression. "I've been watching you since before that," he said. "Since the first week of term. You walked into the dining hall on the second day and spent the entire meal looking at people you had known for a year like you were trying to remember their names."
The courtyard was very quiet.
"What do you want," I said.
He looked at me for a long moment. In the lamplight his face was sharp and still.
"I want to know what you are," he said. "Not what you're pretending to be. What you actually are."
"And if I don't tell you."
"Then I spend three days in the field with someone I can't read and a group that deserves better than that." He paused. "I'm not threatening you. I'm telling you the practical problem."
I looked at him across the dark courtyard and thought about what I knew about Everyn Hast and what the world had added to that and where the line between useful and dangerous sat in the person currently looking back at me.
He had a letter at the bottom of his trunk from the Vennick family. The seal was unbroken. He had been at this Academy for three years quietly trying to put distance between himself and a family connection he had not chosen. He was sharp and careful and he had noticed things about me that nobody else had noticed in quite that way or quite that early.
He was also the highest-grade practitioner in our Field Trial group and we were going to be in the Verath Lowlands together in less than two months.
"I'm not going to tell you what I am," I said. "Not tonight and probably not for a while. What I will tell you is that whatever you think you've observed about me, I'm not a threat to you or anyone in that group."
"That's not especially reassuring coming from someone who won't explain themselves."
"No," I agreed. "It isn't."
He looked at me. "Then what are you offering."
"Three days in the field where I do exactly what I say I'll do and nothing I don't. You're Sense-dominant. You'll be able to read whether I'm operating straight or not." I paused. "After the trial you can decide what you think."
The fountain stood empty between us. Somewhere in the building above, a window opened and closed.
Everyn looked at me for a long moment.
"If anything you do in that trial puts the group at risk," he said, "I will report everything I've observed to Orvyn the same evening we get back."
"That's fair," I said.
He stood. Looked at me once more.
"Dawnridge," he said.
"Hast."
He left through the archway. I sat in the empty courtyard for a while after he had gone and listened to the building settle around me in the cold.
Six months had become five and a half.