Rem waited his turn and watched the line breathe.
Candidates shifted on their feet. Some bounced like dogs at a gate. Some stared into middle distance and rehearsed failure. A few sat with their eyes closed and counted breaths in a way that looked like prayer and was probably math. Rem felt fine. Head clear. Body awake. The weight of the dagger at the small of his back pulled his stance into honesty.
"Fifteen," called the clerk with the slate. "Measurements."
The medical room smelled like linen and carbolic. A framed chart of bones watched from the wall. Rem set his pack on the bench, unbuckled the sheath, and lowered the black dagger carefully to the floor. The metal touched wood and the boards complained. Two assistants looked at the floor, then at him, and decided to pretend they had not heard anything.
"Height," said the Association medic, already pen in hand.
Rem stood against the rod. The slider kissed his crown.
"One meter ninety," the medic said. "Weight."
The scale read ninety kilos when it stopped arguing.
The medic circled him with the casual speed of someone who had counted too many bodies to be impressed easily. Tape around chest, waist, thigh. Fingers finding old breaks, new scar tissue. Stethoscope cold under sternum. He frowned, not with concern, with curiosity.
"Build is solid," he murmured. "Resting pulse economical. Lungs clear. Old fractures set clean. You carry weight like it owes you respect." He tapped the form. "Very good condition."
Rem dressed while the man finished notes. The dagger went back where it belonged. Muscles said, yes, that is the load we trained for.
"Next," the clerk said from the door. "Gymnasium. Physicals."
The gym smelled like chalk, oil, and decisions. Racks of iron on one side, a sprint lane on the other, rope climbs looped up near the beams. Candidates queued for stations while examiners with clipboards pretended not to be competitive about who owned the hardest test.
"No aura, no mana," barked the woman at the start line. "Human only."
Rem nodded. Human only was his favorite rule.
Sprint, forty meters. He launched from tendon, not anger, and crossed the line in a time that made the examiner look at the chalk and re-draw the mark to see if the world had moved. Vertical jump. His fingertips thudded the highest board, and the man with the stick simply wrote highest. Weighted carry, two sandbags across a marked course. The first bag felt like a friendly handshake. The second asked questions. Rem answered. Rope climb. The rope burned his palms and he burned it back. Agility ladder. Balance beam. Reaction lights. A wall that wanted legs longer than his and got technique instead.
At each station, he listened to the test before he took it. He picked where to put force and where to save it. He breathed in boxes and his heart obeyed.
"Max," said the examiner at the grip dynamometer, as if the device had been rude. He wrote Max again at the deadlift frame. "This is without aura," he said to no one in particular, and then to the woman beside him, lower, "Instructor Leila picked a good day to be strict."
Leila watched from the far end, hand on hip, expression unreadable except for the small, pleased line that appeared when candidates did not waste her time. When Rem finished the last run and returned the tag with his number, she glanced at the sheet an aide handed her, then at him. No comment. A tiny nod that felt like a coin placed where he would find it later.
"Fifteen," called another clerk. "Reservoir test. Mana and aura."
The testing hall was colder, the way official rooms get when glass and crystals have more to say than people. A pedestal in the center held the device: two polished handplates, a circular dial, twin crystal bars, one dyed deep blue, one dyed red. A signboard explained it in verbs big enough for nervous minds.
"Hands here," said the technician, tapping the plates. "Do not force anything. The device reads presence of core, throughput, and stability. Blue registers mana. Red registers aura. The dial displays volume on a scale of one to one hundred. If there is nothing to read, it stays blank."
Rem set his palms on the plates. The metal was clean and unkind. Somewhere inside the pedestal, a mechanism woke and made a sound like coins sorting themselves. The blue bar stayed dark. The red bar lit at the base and climbed one notch, two, then stopped. The dial unrolled a single number and refused to agree to more.
0, said the red, bright as a joke.
The technician leaned in. "That should not show like that," he said, more to the device than to Rem. "If it lights, it means present. If it is zero, it means absent. You have aura, but it says you have zero of it. That is… unusual."
"I have never been able to use aura," Rem said. "Or mana."
The technician chewed that with his mouth closed. "We record what we see." He wrote in a neat block on the form. Aura: 0. He did not look satisfied by the truth.
"Next," called the clerk. "Written."
The written room was warm and smelled of ink. Rem took a seat at a long table while staff set paper into place, one sheet face down for each. Leila walked the aisle and told the room in the careful voice of people who have fought the same war too many times, "No prompts. No whispering. If you copy, I will know. If I know, you will go home."
They turned their papers. Hazard icon identification. Runes and their common misreads. First aid, what you do when a tourniquet will save a limb and what you do when it will cost one. Legal basics, which was more ethics than law if you were honest. Mapping symbols. End-of-run protocols.
Rem did not fly. He did not drown. He wrote what he knew from nights in Livesey's shop and mornings in guild corridors. He got three questions wrong because there is a flavor of question designed to make people miss. He finished with a minute to spare and refused to change an answer he had liked the first time.
The noon bell rang while the last papers were being stacked.
Leila stepped to the front. "Lunch," she said, and her voice had somehow learned to be heard without being loud. "You have one hour and thirty minutes. The Association refectory is open on our account. Water, carbohydrates, fruit, nothing foolish. Then back here for combat. The field is decisive and no one will coddle you. Eat accordingly."
Her eyes passed over the room and stopped for one fraction on Rem. The fraction came with a smile that could have meant two different things. He decided to take it as the kind one.
Harry found him at the door, breathless with relief, clutching a token like it might leave. "Can I eat with you. If that is not weird."
"Not weird," Rem said. "Food is food."
The refectory was noisy in the good way of places built to feed nervous bodies. Trays slid. Water clinked in glasses. Candidates tried to pretend bread and stew were not turning into bricks in their throats. Rem chose simple: rice, roast roots, a portion of meat that looked like it had told the truth. Harry picked the same because following is easier than deciding when the stakes are high.
Rem ate until the hunger became warmth, then set his spoon down. "Are you from the Royal Academy," he asked. He realized he had not actually asked earlier; he had only assumed.
Harry brightened as if someone had opened a window. "Yes. Royal Academy, second cohort. Why."
"Curious how this exam ties to the Academy."
"It ties tightly," Harry said. "We are required to pass the Association test before our final year. Different written and physical sessions so the proctors do not have to fight a hundred noble teenagers at once. But for the combat exam, our entire year attends to watch. Parents, sponsors, instructors. They say it builds discipline. I think it builds nerves."
Rem's spoon paused halfway back to the bowl. "Your whole year is here today."
"Yes," Harry said. "Seventeen-year-olds, like us. They are in the stands for the bouts."
A beat. Rem's heart did a small, ugly skip. "Is Evelyn Verran here."
Harry huffed a laugh at himself. "Of course. She is here. She is the best of us, which she will not say out loud because she is civilized, but it is true. I am trying very hard not to humiliate my ancestors under her gaze." He leaned in, curious. "Do you know her."
"Sort of," Rem said.
Harry blinked, put the obvious pieces together, and decided not to pry. "Then you will have a better story than mine after we pass."
"After we pass," Rem said, letting the line settle like a promise.
They finished eating in practical silence, refilled their water, and followed the signs to the Grand Coliseum, a ring of stone older than anyone willing to tell its exact age. They did not enter the stands. Candidates were led down a side stair into the underworks, where corridors curved under the arena like veins.
Down there the air was cool and smelled of chalk and old victories. Torches burned behind grates, their light steady and unromantic. Doors with iron grilles marked numbered holding bays. In each, a bench, a cask of water, a rack for personal gear, and a square of floor painted with a blue marker where you stood when they called you. Above, muffled, came the distant murmur of a crowd filling stone with attention.
Leila met them at the junction, a clipboard in hand and a small piece of charcoal behind her ear. "Listen up. The combat exam is one at a time. You will step out into the Coliseum alone. You will face an instructor. We will call a bout on a strike that would have ended you. We score footwork, timing, control, creativity, and whether you stop doing something stupid when the world tells you to stop. If you swing at the audience, you are done forever. If you injure a proctor on purpose, I will end your exam personally."
Nervous laughter tried to start and thought better of it.
Leila ran a finger down the sheet. "Order is posted on your bay doors. Check your number. Hydrate. Breathe. When the bell rings, door one opens. When I wave the flag, the bout starts."
Rem found Bay Fifteen. The door bore a slate that read: Order: 1, 2, 3… 14, 15. Below the numbers, a neat hand had added: Opponent assignment: Fifteen vs. Instructor Leila.
He let his breath go once, long and even. Being last meant the room would be hot with other people's nerves by the time it was his. It also meant the sand would be marked with the day's lessons, if he paid attention.
Harry's bay was Twelve. He leaned across the corridor, eyes wide in the way of people who feel their future sharpening. "We are near the end," he said. "Plenty of time to make mistakes in our heads first."
"Make them now," Rem said. "Not later."
They settled. Time stretched and folded in the peculiar way it does in places designed for waiting. Rem checked the strap across his chest, then checked it again because hands like doing things. He rolled his shoulders, boxed his breathing, and felt the coal under his ribs stay quiet. He did not try to listen for names above. The crowd's voice came down as a single creature, too large to parse.
Somewhere farther along the corridor, a door thunked, bolts drawn. The first candidate stood on his marker. Leila's footfalls crossed the sand overhead, firm and measured. A bell rang, clear and ceremonial. The great stone above them absorbed the sound and gave it back larger.
Rem looked at the blue square painted on his own floor and thought of a girl with cold, precise hands in a room that had tried to make itself a grave. He did not know if she was up there in the seats yet. He did not need to know.
"I will give my all," he told the square, very softly, "to not show myself as a burden anymore."
Iron scraped. Wood shifted. The first door slid up into the wall, and the noise of the Coliseum came in like weather.
The exam began.