Chapter 6:The Fractions

"You cannot be serious." A woman's voice, sharp, cutting through the door before Sera even reached it. "You want to enroll her? Openly? After what happened in that hall tonight?"

"I want her trained, Instructor Renna, not hidden in a cellar until she burns her way out of it." That voice Sera knew now. Master Oren, gravel-rough, unbothered. "Which is what will happen if you leave a fire mage untaught out of fear."

Sera had been marched straight from the Great Hall to a small stone antechamber and told to wait, and waiting had turned out to mean standing outside a heavy door listening to five raised voices argue about her future like she wasn't fifteen feet away and perfectly capable of hearing every word.

"The prophecy is a legend for frightening novices," said a third voice, thin, precise. "It has no bearing on academy policy."

"Tell that to the Headmaster," Oren shot back. "He said the word himself, in front of the entire school. You think that stays quiet? By morning every noble house on the ridge will know exactly what we have inside these walls."

"Which is precisely why she should be removed. Quietly. Before the houses decide to remove her themselves."

A long silence followed that one, heavy enough that Sera found herself holding her breath on the other side of the door.

"No." The Headmaster's voice, finally, tired but final. "She stays. She trains. Whatever this becomes, it becomes inside these walls, where we can shape it, not outside them, where we cannot."

"And if the prophecy is true?" Renna's voice had dropped, quieter now, almost afraid to ask it out loud. "If she is what the old texts warned us about?"

"Then better she learns control from us," Oren said, "than learns nothing at all and proves every fear you have correct."

The door opened before Sera could step back from it, and the Headmaster stood in the frame, robes still heavy on his shoulders, face still pale from whatever he'd seen in her fire an hour ago. He looked at her for a long moment, and Sera made herself meet his eyes instead of looking away.

"Come in, Sera," he said. "It seems we have decided your fate without asking you a single question about it. That was poor manners on our part. Come in, and tell us what you want."

She stepped inside, and five sets of eyes settled on her at once, Oren's steady, Renna's wary, the third instructor's outright cold, and the Headmaster's, tired but not unkind.

"I want to learn," Sera said, before anyone else could speak for her again. "I didn't ask for this fire. I don't understand it. But it's mine, and I would rather learn to hold it than have someone else decide what to do with it for me."

Oren's mouth twitched, almost a smile. Renna's didn't move at all.

"Then it's settled," the Headmaster said. "Master Oren will take personal responsibility for her instruction in fire affinity. She will room in the east dormitory, with the common-born students, as scholarship policy requires."

"East dormitory." Renna's voice had gone flat with disapproval. "Headmaster, with respect, if the noble houses believe we're granting her equal footing—"

"She is on equal footing, Instructor Renna. That is, in fact, the entire point of a scholarship." The Headmaster's voice hardened, just slightly, just enough. "This meeting is finished."

Sera was halfway out the door, the cool night air of the courtyard already reaching for her, when Oren's voice stopped her.

"Sera."

She turned. He'd followed her out, and up close, away from the others, his face had lost the gravel edge it carried in the meeting room. He looked, for just a moment, almost gentle.

"Whatever you heard in there," he said, "whatever any of them believe about prophecy or fate or the end of the world, hear this instead. Your fire isn't a curse. It's the Founder's fire. And they've been lying about that for a thousand years."

Sera's breath caught. "What does that mean?"

Oren glanced back over his shoulder, toward the closed door, toward Renna and whatever cold calculation was happening behind it, and when he looked back at Sera, something in his expression had gone careful, guarded, like a man deciding how much truth was safe to hand over on a first night.

"It means," he said quietly, "you should get some sleep. Because tomorrow, I start teaching you the truth nobody else in this academy is willing to say out loud."