Crownspire woke in thirds that morning: bells, kettles, then Osk. By the time the last echo ran out of the stones, we'd already written Kitchen Trace across a row of jars and Field Trace into my wrist like a reminder. The emberling rode my coat pocket, warm and patient. Sera's pot breathed a modest plume with the self-respect of a small altar.
"Today is for bread and politics," she said, tying off a label with her teeth.
"Bread I trust," I said. "Politics I don't."
"Then we do the first so well the second gets bored."
Professor Quill found us before first drill with his lens already smudged, which meant he had been thinking too fast for handkerchiefs. "Trium Hall. After morning block. Witnesses," he said. "You will not argue. You will demonstrate. Speak to what you wrote and what you can hold. No metaphors unless you are prepared to feed them."
"Fitch's hearing," Sera said.
"Mn." Quill's mouth twisted. "The Council prefers to call it 'inquiry.' They avoid words with teeth."
Osk ground us through ladders and backward writing until even nobles panted like mortals. Concord had to sit without tugging; Trace had to hum even when Marshal clapped behind our heads. "You, bricklayer," Osk said, pointing at me while I tried not to swallow my tongue, "write while your legs lie to you."
"Yes, Marshal," I said, and wrote anyway.
We reported to Trium Hall at late morning with sweat dried to salt on our collars. The Hall was a bowl—tiers of benches climbing around a sunken floor, a table for gray coats at the front, a witness stand in the center. Quill and Jes stood at the shoulder of the floor like pillars that had learned sarcasm. Two inspectors, not the ones from the green, adjusted the neat stacks of slates in front of them with ritual precision. Their lapels looked sharp enough to shave.
Fitch was already there.
He had traded his market coat for something gray-adjacent and respectable, and if he noticed the wards sewn into the hem of the Hall's drapes, he hid it. He watched the room like a fox in a henhouse pretending to be a rooster.
The senior inspector—Councilor Vell, the clerk called him—rapped the table. "We convene to hear matters regarding illicit edits within Academy bounds and neutral districts. We begin with demonstration. Professor Maelis Quill, if you would."
Quill nodded to Jes. Jes set a shallow glass loop on a stand—a model weir, no thicker than my thumb, with a pinch of gray ash at one joint. "For the Council's delicate stomachs," she said mildly, "we use glass."
Quill sketched three runes on a slate: Type, Range, Efficiency. He held them up so the front row could pretend they understood. "Students," he said, and the word carried like a net. "Demonstrate a safe substitution."
Sera and I stepped to the stand. I let the emberling warm the loop with a thread—Steady, low cost, high efficiency. Sera set a Concord so the thread moved with her pot's small motion. Quill tapped Range with the chalk end of his wand—no power in it, just attention. I shifted the base Type from Thread to Shroud and back, contained and vented. The glass's hum twitched then settled. Nothing flared. Nothing cracked. I could have been knitting.
"Now show a scratch," Quill said softly, and the front bench leaned the way people do when they want a mess but would like to blame the janitor when it arrives.
He flicked a second slate: Type: Edge. I didn't write it. I let the chalk kiss the air above the joint and do nothing, then said, "Scratchers change base runes without preparing the lattice or paying cost. The lattice falls to ash and regrows wrong—if it regrows."
Jes raised one eyebrow at Fitch. He kept smiling.
"Enough," Councilor Vell said. "We take the point. Questions after testimony." He turned his polite knife of a face to Fitch. "You offered students—"
"Quick service," Fitch said pleasantly. "The Academy teaches patience. I provide alternatives to children with rent due."
A small stir ran around the upper benches. Sera's mouth flattened. Quill's did not move at all.
Vell tapped his slate. "Testimony from menders suggests you swapped base element on an innate—wind to lightning—"
"A supervised spark," Fitch said. "It is popular. Your own Guard rigs carry—"
"The Guard's coils are framed and licensed," Jes cut in, voice flat steel. "You shoving a lightning base into a first-year's wind wisp in a market alley is not 'supervised.' It is how you boil a child."
Fitch spread his hands. "Everyone wants thunder for the price of rain. I do not set desire. I meet it."
"And who met you?" Quill asked, mild as tea. "Who told you the west weir took kindly to Edge?"
A blink, too slow, crossed Fitch's face like a cloud giving itself away. The gray coats did not move. That was also an answer.
Councilor Vell cleared his throat as if he had swallowed a fly. "Professor, restrain yourself to—"
The Hall cut him off.
Not with voices—with sound. The deep hum every mage learns to ignore changed pitch. The stone under my boots felt wrong for a heartbeat. Quill's head tilted, and Jes was already moving.
"South," she said. "Ringing."
Quill didn't wait for permission. He didn't look to see whether the Council would allow adults to keep a roof from becoming a river. "Students," he snapped. "Ward room. Now."
We ran. Osk met us in the corridor already shouting instructions to people we couldn't see. Sera's pot trundled at a determined clip. Brann fell in with us; Aureline appeared from the left like a dagger that had tired of hiding.
The south anchor's Ward Room was loud. The weir lines around the pillars shone too bright, humming a note that jabbed behind the eyes. Someone had written numbers on a slate by the hearth in neat columns and underlined them twice: adjustments, tidy as a counterfeit ledger. The line we had calmed yesterday had been "perfected."
Jes didn't swear. She simply said, "They sharpened it again."
Quill's jaw went hard enough to crack. "We are alone," he said. "No speeches. Riven—Trace. Tallow—Concord and steady. Belisar—temper. Calder—listen. Neri—air buffer. Osk—keep bodies out of the way."
"I like this plan," Osk said. "It has running."
We set to our tools. I wrote Field Trace low and shallow on the sink; the emberling answered like a horse that had just been asked to do what it already wanted. Sera stitched Concord so the pot's steadiness fed the room's brick. Aureline's salamander toned itself down from hero to craftsperson and exhaled a consistent orange. Neri's wisp spread like soft hands, catching the draft's rude edges.
Brann crouched at the node with his ant. "There," he said, mandibles clicking in rhythm with the ring. "The ring's clean, but it's feeding a knife. Left of the second join."
"Can't see it," Jes said, squinting. "Feel it."
I couldn't see it either. The weir glowed even, and yet the hum told on it like a lute with one string tuned for stabbing. I needed something not to fix but to show.
"Kael," Sera said, reading the crease in my forehead. "You're going to be clever."
"Small clever," I said, and the emberling—bless it—tensed without flaring.
Fire spits ash when it remembers it's also earth. The Cinder Veil caught it so we didn't sneeze ourselves to death; Trace kept it polite. I sketched a small formula in the emberling's lattice—not a tool yet, a whisper: Element: Fire. Type: Drift. Range: Handspan. Cost: Low. Efficiency: High. Strength: Gentle. Wrapper: Contain. Intent: ash motes that cling where flow is wrong.
"Drift," I murmured, and fed a thread.
The emberling shed a tide of fine gray that didn't blow, didn't blind, didn't gather—it simply drifted to the weir and rode the flow. Where the line ran smooth, the ash didn't stick. Where the line stumbled, it eddied. Left of the second join, a faint knife of motion showed itself: the motes made a thin V where they should have made a lazy arc.
"There," Brann said again, triumphant this time, and I loved him for hearing rather than just seeing. "A notch."
"Baffle," Quill said.
I placed it where the ash showed wrong, not where my pride wanted to show right. The hum dropped a fraction. The ash stopped making a V and started making a curve. "Stitch," Quill said, and I laced the scar again. The room sighed—the right sigh.
The emberling shook, not from strain, from humility, the way spirits do when they learn a new habit and live through the learning. I touched its core through the Veil and fed it a pinch of iron sand and memory. "Good," I said, and meant the work, not the praise.
Osk looked up as if remembering he was in a room with politics and therefore doomed to say something appropriate. "Next time," he rumbled, "the person who wrote the tidy numbers comes to hold the barrow while you lot fix the spill."
No one argued.
We returned to the Hall with ash on our cuffs and the steady practiced boredom of people who had just kept a city from ringing itself apart. Councilor Vell tried to reassert ceremony and failed; the room had seen the wrong kind of music and preferred silence.
Fitch smiled at me as if I'd helped insult his case. "A boy who can make ash useful," he said. "You'd make a fortune."
"Not with you," I said.
He shrugged, and for a breath the easy charm dropped. What looked out of his eyes was raw and much older than swagger. "I didn't sharpen your weir," he said, low. "I couldn't get within a drape of it if I begged. You know who can."
He glanced, just once, toward one of the gray coats—not Vell, the other—and it wasn't theatrical. It was a reflex he tried to swallow. Then the smile came back, and I hated it because it made the room go simple again.
The Council scheduled his hearing's second half for next week, which is another way to say we don't know what we're doing yet, please don't make us admit it. Jes pretended her hammer was too heavy for court. Quill pretended not to be furious. Osk pretended not to want a run.
Sera and I did not pretend to be hungry; we were. We ate bread sitting on a low wall that had never been allowed to become a bench, and I sketched Drift into my ledger with its right size and wrong to avoid. The emberling basked in modest sunshine and, when I asked it to dim, held a thread of Trace without my hand for five counts. Five. Not three. Progress writes itself in small numbers.
"Useful," Sera said, nodding at the Drift diagram. "Show me later. I want to catch drafts under the oven door."
"It's pitifully domestic," I said.
"It's the only kind of magic that keeps a roof up," she said.
Afternoon drills were almost restful after Council noise. Osk made us write while sidestepping; Quill made us Audit our pride; Jes sent me a wrapped sliver of slag with a note—Drift is fine. Don't try to paint murals.—which meant she had already heard and already decided how I would avoid being stupid.
Brann found me between blocks, ant clicking like a metronome. "That ash-trick," he said, grudging and curious, not smug. "You'll teach me?"
"Yes," I said, because what's the point of a roof if your neighbor drowns. "It's called Drift. Gentle. Contained. Don't sneeze."
He laughed, a real one, and for a heartbeat I saw the boy he might have been before his father learned to turn pride into armor.
At dusk I took the tram home and walked the last two streets with the emberling in my hands. Lark chimed from the sill. My mother set a bowl on the table and looked at my cuffs and did not sigh. "Wards," she said.
"Wards," I said. "We stitched a knife out of a river."
She shook her head. "People who think rivers should be knives never had to feed an orchard."
We ate. I showed Lark the Drift motes—tiny ash feathers that gathered where the draft misbehaved under the door. Lark leaned, interested, and exhaled a smell of green that made the emberling hum a polite chord. When I banked a thumb of Trace into the hearthstone, the old brick answered like a drum remembering its hands.
Before I slept, I wrote a small thing at the top of the day's ledger page and boxed it the way Quill would: Hearing Harmonics—don't let numbers deny sound. Under it I copied three runes—Baffle, Stitch, Drift—and a circle around Listen, which is not a rune and not something I can hold, except that we do.
I dreamt that night of a river teaching me its own song, and of a clever man in a clean coat trying to sell it a knife. In the dream Quill didn't shout; he placed a Baffle in the man's mouth and said, "We'll hear you when you breathe."
I woke laughing. The emberling warmed my ribs. The day would bring drills and foundry and ledger and the small work that keeps a city from becoming a headline. We wouldn't be spectacular. We would be trustworthy. And the next time someone tried to sharpen a ward, we'd see it—ash clinging to the wrong place like conscience.