Chapter 5: The Sorting

Fire mages of your kind were not simply forgotten, girl. They were hunted.

The words wouldn't stop circling in Sera's head as she was pushed, gently but firmly, into a line of new students filing into the Great Hall. All of them dressed clean and pressed and calm in a way Sera very much was not. Her dress was wrinkled from the road, the hem still faintly dusted grey, and her hands wouldn't stop finding each other, twisting together at her waist like they needed something to hold onto that wasn't fire.

"Relax your shoulders." Vell's voice, low, close at her side. "Whatever happens in there, you cannot let them see you afraid."

"That's, that's easy for you to say."

"It is not," Vell said, and something in her voice had gone almost gentle, "easy for me to say. But it's true regardless. Fear is a scent in a room like that one. And there are people in there who will hunt it the moment they catch it on you."

The line shuffled forward, slow, unhurried, students ahead of her murmuring to each other in low excited voices, comparing what they'd heard about the Sorting, whose older sibling had gone Blaze in their first year, whose cousin had washed out entirely and been sent home in disgrace. Sera said nothing. She kept her eyes forward and her breathing even and tried very hard not to think about what the fire had done in that wheat field, what it might decide to do here, in front of everyone, with no drought and no wildfire to justify it.

The Great Hall, when the doors finally opened and let the line through, was larger than anything Sera had ever stood inside. Vaulted ceilings lost somewhere up in shadow, so high the candlelight barely reached the stone above, a thousand flames burning steady in iron rings mounted along the walls, throwing long moving shadows across a floor polished so smooth it looked like still water. At the front, on a raised dais, three figures in heavy academy robes sat behind a long table, watching the line of new students shuffle forward one by one, names called, hands tested, ranks assigned.

Sera watched from a distance first, made herself learn the rhythm of it before her own turn came, because rhythm was something she could hold onto when nothing else in this room felt solid. Each student stepped up in turn, held their hands out over a shallow stone basin set into the floor before the dais, and their affinity answered in whatever quiet way it chose to. Water rippled soft and silver in the basin's bowl. A small wind stirred the nearest candle flames sideways, guttering and dancing. Frost crept delicate and lacework-thin across the basin's stone rim, and the boy who'd called it smiled like he'd been waiting his whole life to be seen doing it. Each time, a name was read from the ledger, a rank assigned in a bored, practiced voice, a scattering of polite applause, and the student moved on, folding back into the crowd like nothing extraordinary had happened at all.

Then it was Sera's turn.

"Name," said the woman at the center of the dais, not yet looking up from her ledger, quill already poised.

"Sera." Her voice came out steadier than she felt.

The woman looked up then, and something crossed her face, quick and involuntary and gone almost before Sera could name it, the look of someone who already knew the name on the list and had been quietly hoping, all evening, that she wouldn't actually have to call it out loud. "Step forward. Hands over the basin."

Sera's legs carried her forward though she didn't fully feel them doing it, didn't feel the polished floor under her boots so much as sense it, distant, like she was watching herself walk from somewhere just outside her own body. The hall had gone quieter than it had been for any other student, she realized, a kind of held breath spreading outward in slow uneven rings, starting at Vell, standing tense and still near the edge of the room, and reaching all the way up to the dais itself, where even the bored quill-holding instructor had gone entirely motionless. Word had traveled ahead of her. Of course it had. It had probably traveled faster than she and Vell had ridden.

She held her hands out over the basin.

Nothing happened.

For one long, agonizing second, nothing happened at all, and Sera felt the panic claw its way up her throat, felt every eye in the hall pressing down on her at once, a physical weight settling over her shoulders. What if it doesn't come, she thought, wild and fast and unstoppable. What if it only comes when something's actually dying, what if I stand here in front of all of them and prove every single fear correct, what if there's nothing left inside me at all—

Then the fear itself became the answer.

Fire didn't erupt so much as detonate. A bright violent column roared up out of the basin and clean through the vaulted dark overhead, faster than thought, faster than breath, scorching a wide black ring across the ceiling stone before it guttered and vanished, leaving the whole hall ringing with a silence so total that Sera could hear her own heartbeat pounding in her ears, and the low, settling crackle of smoke curling off the stone above her, and nothing else at all.

Nobody applauded.

Nobody moved.

Sera stood frozen with her hands still outstretched, smoke curling faintly off her own fingers though they weren't burned, weren't even warm, and slowly, slowly, she felt rather than saw every head in the Great Hall turn toward the dais. Toward the man seated at its center, who hadn't spoken a single word since she'd first stepped forward, whose face had gone the color of old parchment somewhere in the last five seconds.

He was older than the other two instructors, silver hair swept back, robes heavier, richer, marked with some kind of embroidered seal at the collar that Sera didn't recognize but instinctively understood meant headmaster, meant the person whose word, in this room, was final.

He rose from his seat without seeming to decide to, one hand gripping the arm of his chair so hard his knuckles had gone white, like it was the only thing keeping him upright, and his eyes never once left Sera's face, not even to glance at the scorch mark still smoking faintly above her.

"Prophecy," he said, and it came out barely above a whisper, cracked and strange, a word that seemed to cost him something enormous just to say out loud.

But in a hall gone that silent, that word carried anyway. It carried to every corner of the room, to every student pressed shoulder to shoulder along the walls, to every instructor seated stiff and pale along the dais, to Vell standing frozen near the doors with one hand half raised like she'd meant to step forward and stop something and hadn't been fast enough. It carried like a shout, that one whispered word, and Sera felt the entire Great Hall shift around her, dozens of faces turning toward her all at once with an expression she was only beginning to understand she'd be seeing for a very long time to come.

Not wonder. Not even simple fear.

Recognition.

"Headmaster." One of the other instructors had half risen from his seat, voice sharp with alarm, but the Headmaster didn't seem to hear him at all, didn't seem to hear anything except the ringing silence of his own single word, still hanging in the smoke-thick air above Sera's head like it might never fully settle.

Sera stood very still, hands slowly lowering to her sides, smoke still curling faint off her fingertips, and understood with a cold, sinking certainty that whatever she had just walked into, whatever door had just opened above her scorched and ringing skull, there was no walking back out of it now.