Voloére is the rarest form of gemstone in Anglia. A single Voloére can store an amount of Dherak equal to what a hundred Engle produce in an entire lifetime. Who made the first Voloéres, and how, is unknown. The oldest examples are dated to before the time of the War.

Extract from Mineralogy and Magic, standard work, 4th edition

Chapter 12

First Days

Monday morning began with light.

It came in through the narrow window above my bed, grey at first and then white, and spread across the blanket and up the wall, and I woke because of it, because my body felt it through my eyelids and decided it was worth opening my eyes for. The room was cold. The air smelt of lime and of the night that had just gone, and under that of the coppery note that lay in everything at Déynáir.

Alôpex lay curled up on the pillow next to my head, and her fur caught the morning light and shone a faint bluish white.

The other bed was empty.

It was made so tightly that you could have bounced a coin off the blanket. The corners were folded in like the corners of a letter. His boots were gone, and the robe that had hung on the hook the night before was gone. There was only a jug of water on his windowsill and, next to it, the white animal. It sat on its hind legs with its front paws folded, looking at Alôpex.

Alôpex looked back. Neither of them blinked.

He had got up before me. I decided it didn't matter.

I put my feet on the floor. The boards were cold and creaked under my weight. Through the window above my bed I could see the mountain, grey in the morning mist, and below the castle a ribbon of the river lying smooth and still. It was my window. My view. My morning.

I looked up at the wall above my bed. Empty. White lime. School came first.

When I turned round with my robe over my arm, there was a small sign stitched on the sleeve that hadn't been there the night before: a path of three stones. Like the name on the plate. The white animal had gone from the windowsill. I hadn't heard it go.

The school days began at eight o'clock in the dining hall. Bread, cheese, fruit, a jug of something that tasted like tea but was hotter than tea ought to be and kept its temperature for hours. Ahra ate the way he talked, fast and without a pause, and he buttered his bread with a knife he held wrong, crossways, as if nobody had ever shown him the right way.

"My grandmother buttered bread with magic," he said, when he saw me looking. "I never learnt to do it with a knife."

Retia sat opposite us with a cup of tea she held in both hands, with the warmth of the steam against her face. In the mornings Retia was quiet, and her shoulders were up again, that millimetre of guard that was always there when she was among other people. It was only when she was sitting with us, just us, that they came down.

Nihil was sitting at the end of the bench. He ate alone. Will was sitting a little way from him and looked over twice while I was watching.

Dherak was the first lesson.

The room was on the fourth floor of the north tower. There were no desks. No chairs. Just a large, empty room with a floor of dark stone and walls of grey rock, and a single window that looked out towards the mountain in the north. The air in the room was colder than in the rest of the castle, and it had a heaviness you could feel on your skin.

Professor Haltora stood in the middle of the room with his wolf at his feet. Its name was Fenris, Ahra had whispered on the stairs. The wolf lay with its head on its paws and its yellow eyes half closed, but its ears were forward, and it registered every footstep in the room. Haltora wore a black tunic that was plain and close-fitting and left his arms bare from the elbow down. His forearms were covered in scars, small and large, pale lines in the dark skin that told a story he had never shared with anyone.

"Sit down," he said. "On the floor. In a circle."

We sat down. Twenty first years, half the year group, cross-legged on the cold stone, with our Amícûs beside us. Alôpex curled up in my lap, and her warmth was the only warmth in the room.

Haltora walked slowly round the circle, looking down at us. His black eyes went from face to face without stopping, and his footsteps made no sound on the stone.

"Dherak," he said. "You have all heard the word. Some of you think you know what it means. You are wrong."

He stopped. His wolf raised its head and looked with him.

"Dherak is not magic. Dherak is what makes magic possible. It is in everything that lives in Anglia, in the stones, in the water, in the air. But it is in you most of all, because you are Engle and Drúir, and it is what makes you what you are."

He sat down in the middle of the circle. "Close your eyes."

I closed my eyes. Darkness. Alôpex's breath against my hands. The stone under me, cold and hard.

"Breathe. Deeply. Slowly. And feel for it."

It started as a sensation. Deep inside, behind my ribs, below my stomach, a place that doesn't have a name in anatomy but that every human being knows: the place where you feel the things you can't explain. Nerves. Being in love. Fear. That place.

There was something there. Something that had always been there, but that I had never noticed, because it was too close, too much my own body. It was warm. Not hot. The kind of warmth a fire has when you sit close enough to feel it but not close enough to get burnt.

And it was big.

Not big like a battery. Big like a sea. Deep and wide and dark and warm, and it stretched out in every direction inside me, down into my legs and out into my arms and up into my head, and it pulsed slowly in time with my heart.

"Good," said Haltora's voice somewhere far away. "Feel it. Follow it."

I followed it. Down. Deeper. And it was like swimming in the fjord on a morning when the water is black and still, and there was no bottom, and there was no ladder, and there was just more, and more, and more.

A hand settled on my shoulder. Heavy and warm and smelling of iron and night air.

Haltora.

His Dherak flowed down through the touch, and it was a river meeting a sea, and his river was strong and controlled, but my sea was deeper, and I felt his surprise through the touch, a small jolt, half a second's hesitation, and then he took his hand away.

I opened my eyes. Haltora was standing over me, looking down with those black eyes, and his face was the same flat, unreadable face it always was, but his right hand, the one that had touched my shoulder, slowly clenched and opened again at his side.

"Godrand," he said. "Up."

I got up. My legs were weak.

"Twenty press-ups. Now."

"What?"

"Twenty. Now."

I got down and started. The other students watched. Ahra watched with wide eyes. Retia watched with narrowed eyes. Nihil watched with something that might have been interest.

"When you've finished," said Haltora from above, "you do twenty more."

I didn't understand it. But I did it. And for the rest of the lesson he treated me more harshly than everyone else, gave me more exercises, harder tasks, shorter breaks. Ahra tried to protest, and Haltora gave him a look that made him shut his mouth.

When the lesson was over and we were going down the stairs, Ahra said: "What was that about?"

"I don't know," I said.

I had felt something in Haltora's touch, in that small jolt, in the clenched hand. I just didn't know what it was.

Combat was next. The same room, but transformed. Haltora had pulled his thick combat robe on over his tunic, and at one end of the room stood a rack of wooden swords in different sizes. They were made of a dark, heavy wood that smelt of oil and sweat and something sour, the prints of hundreds of hands.

"Take a sword," said Haltora. "One that feels right."

My fingers stopped at a sword of medium length, with a grip a little slimmer than the others. It sat well in my hand, the balance was right, the weight spread between wrist and fingers in a way that felt natural.

"In rows of two," said Haltora. "Basic stance. Feet shoulder-width apart. Sword hand in front. The other behind your back."

I stood opposite Marcus Eslakrik, who held his sword in both hands and looked at me with the calm friendliness he always carried.

"All right," he said quietly. "I'm not any good at this."

"Me neither," I said.

"The first ten minutes are parries," said Haltora. "Don't attack. Parry only. Learn to feel sword meet sword."

He demonstrated. A single, slow stroke from above, and a parry to the side, and the sound of wood on wood was deep and clunking and satisfying.

Marcus struck. Slowly, carefully. I parried. The vibration went up through my arm and into my shoulder. We struck and parried, slowly at first, then faster. My feet found a rhythm on the stone floor, and it was the same feeling I had had on the slope on the Fjord Run: my body knew something my head hadn't understood yet.

"Good, Godrand," said Haltora as he walked past. That was all he said. I carried it with me for the rest of the day.

A little way down the row stood Nihil. His movements were different from everyone else's. Controlled. Precise. Every stroke landed exactly where he wanted it, and his parries were tight and economical, not a wasted centimetre. He didn't fight by instinct. He fought like someone who has thought about every single stroke before he makes it.

I noticed him. And he noticed me noticing him. Our eyes met for a moment over the wooden swords, and there was something in his look that said: I see you too. And I'll see you again tonight.

History was the lesson I had dreaded most. History had always bored me at Fjordskolen, and I had assumed that magical history would bore me in the same way, just with more fantastic details.

I was wrong.

The room was in the east wing, a small room with books along every wall and a table that was too big for it. Professor Vetharin was an elderly woman with short white hair and glasses that sat crooked on her nose, and she smelt of old tea and dust and something sweet like dried figs.

"Open your books," she said. "Page thirteen. The time of the War."

The pages were yellowed and dense with text. Illustrations in the margins showed formations of warriors, maps of states that no longer existed, symbols I recognised and symbols I had never seen.

"The time of the War lasted twenty-seven years," said Professor Vetharin. "It began with a disagreement in the Council about the use of Dherak and ended with the creation of the barrier to the ordinary world. In those twenty-seven years more Engle and Drúir died than in the three hundred years that had gone before." She looked out over us with eyes that were sharp behind the crooked glasses. "Never forget that the world you live in now, with your schools and your paths and your safe walls, was built on top of bones."

The room was silent. Ahra sat beside me looking down at his book. Retia sat up straight in her chair, listening with the intense look she got when something mattered.

An illustration in the margin caught my eye: a wreath of hawthorn with a sword through it. Underneath it there was a caption: "The seal of Section XIII, used to mark protected places during the time of the War."

My heart beat an extra beat. Section XIII. The Thirteen. The voices from the dream round a table.

I turned the page. The text didn't mention Section XIII again, and none of the other students noticed it. I turned back and looked at it once more. The wreath of hawthorn. The sword. The dagger. The same symbol as on my letter. The same symbol as in the cave on the island. The same symbol as on the shield in my bank vault.

I said nothing. But my fingers held on to the edge of the book for the rest of the lesson.

Amícûs was in the afternoon. Professor Gopaltu stood in the garden behind the castle with her long shawl wound round her head and her white eyes turned towards us. The garden was wide and green with old oaks along the edges, and the air smelt of wet grass and earth and the faint warmth stones give off when the sun has been on them all morning.

"Your Amícûs is not a pet," she said. Her voice was soft but carried a long way. "They are an extension of yourselves. What you feel, they feel. What you fear, they fear. And what you hide, they know."

She looked straight at me as she said the last part. Her white eyes held mine a moment too long.

"Close your eyes. Find your Amícûs in your head. And talk to them."

Alôpex was sitting on the ground in front of me, and I didn't need to look for her. She was already there.

"You were punished today," she said.

"Yes."

"Haltora is afraid of you. People who are afraid of something either try to control it or try to destroy it. I think he's trying the first."

Around me the other students sat with their eyes closed. A girl suddenly laughed out loud and said "She told me a joke!" and Professor Gopaltu smiled the small smile you smile when something is going the way it should. Ahra was lying on his back in the grass with Lynx on top of his chest, and the two of them were looking each other in the eye with an intensity that was comic and serious at the same time.

When the lesson was over, Professor Gopaltu touched my arm.

"Godrand," she said quietly. "Stay a moment."

Her scent was there, silvery and clean, and it had a depth that said she felt more than she showed.

"Can you smell people?" she said.

I said nothing for three seconds. Then: "Yes."

"When did it start?"

I thought about it. The envelope on the windowsill. Hanne and soft soap. But those were smells. The other thing, the thing that was more than smell, had come the evening I left.

"At Løverodde. A boy at the end of a bathing jetty who smelt of spring in the middle of November. And afterwards an old woman by a fire on Borgsted Banke. She smelt of sunlight on old stone."

Gopaltu nodded slowly. "That's rare," she said. "Most people can feel Dherak. You can smell it. That's something else." She looked away, out over the garden. "It's something you must learn to use. And something you must learn to protect."

She said no more. I thought about what she hadn't said, which was always more than what she had said.

The next day I understood what she meant.

Potions was on Tuesday morning, in a tower room at the top of the west wing. It wasn't a cellar, but it was worse. The windows were shut against the frost, and there were twenty cauldrons on long tables, and over every cauldron hung a small cloud of steam that had already filled the room before we came in.

Professor Meriken was a small man with big hands and a stained apron. He stood by the blackboard and waited until the last of us had sat down.

"Craft," he said. That was the whole speech. He tapped the blackboard twice with a bony finger, where the recipe was written in small, close letters, and looked round at us one at a time, as if he were counting cauldrons. "The first time, you follow the book. The second time, you follow the book. When you have made it twenty times, you may ask me something."

Nobody asked anything.

The recipe was simple. A clear potion for headaches. Three herbs, cut in a set order, water that had to boil and then not boil, a spoonful of crushed chalk, stirred seven times clockwise.

I got as far as the second herb.

It wasn't one smell. It was twenty. Rosemary from the cauldron on my left, something bitter and green from the cauldron on my right, sulphur, warm mint, burnt sugar, iron, wet earth, something that smelt like Ahra's bark but wrong, sweet and rotten at the same time. They came in through my nose and piled up on top of one another, and I couldn't separate them. I couldn't even find my own cauldron in it. I leant over it to smell whether the water was ready for the herb, and there was nothing to smell, only everything.

I put the herb in too early. Then the chalk. I couldn't remember whether I had stirred five times or seven.

The cauldron began to foam. Quietly at first, a grey layer on the surface, then faster, and then it surged over the edge and down the sides and hissed against the flame, and the smell that rose from it was the worst of all of them.

My stomach turned over.

I made it to the door. I made it to the corridor. I made it to the window ledge by the stairs, and was sick there, on the cold stone under a frosted pane, holding on to the ledge with both hands and hearing someone laugh behind the door and someone else say "Quiet."

When I came back in, Meriken was standing at my cauldron. He had put the flame out. He looked at me, not angrily.

"You can smell too much," he said. "It isn't a talent yet, Godrand. It's an injury."

He opened a small black book he kept in his apron pocket, wrote something next to my name and shut it again. I saw it before he shut it. Two words.

Not passed.

It was the first time. I hadn't thought about it before it happened, but it was the first time in my life anyone had written that next to my name. Not in PE. Not in maths, where I was somewhere in the middle. I hadn't had a surname, but I had always had that: that I could. And now it was written in a small black book in an apron that I couldn't, and the book was in the pocket of a man who had moved on to the next cauldron as if it were nothing special.

It wasn't, either. Not for him.

I sat for the rest of the lesson looking at my cauldron, and I didn't feel it as shame. I felt it as nothing. Like when you climb out of the fjord on a February morning and can't feel your feet.

When the others left, a boy stayed behind. He was small for his age, with dark hair that fell into his eyes, and he smelt faintly of earth and herbs. He took a brush from the shelf and a bucket of water and sat down next to my cauldron and began to scrub without saying anything.

"You don't have to," I said.

"It burns on if you wait," he said. "Jorin." He went on scrubbing. "I was sick into my first one at home. I was six. My mum was brewing something for head lice."

It wasn't the same. But he said it, and we scrubbed, and the grey foam came off in flakes, and afterwards the cauldron smelt of nothing, and that was a relief.

Gopaltu found me that same afternoon in the corridor outside the library. I don't know how. She walked straight up to me, as if she had been following a string.

"I told you that you had to learn to protect it," she said.

"I didn't know how."

"No. You don't." She laid two fingers lightly against the bridge of my nose. They were cold. "You must be able to close it. The way you close a door. Not lock it. Just close it. Breathe through your mouth. And think of cold water. Have you got any cold water to think of?"

"Yes," I said.

"Then think of it."

I tried. I breathed through my mouth and thought of the ladder at Løverodde and the water round my legs. The corridor smelt of old stone and of her and of something burnt from the kitchen far below, and none of it went away.

"I can't," I said.

"Not yet," said Gopaltu. She took her fingers away. "Practise in the mornings, before the others are awake. And not in a tower room."

Transformation was on Wednesday morning, in a room on the second floor that smelt of old wood and metal and something sweetish I couldn't identify. Professor Canthara was a woman in her fifties with short grey curls and hands that were never still. While she talked, they transformed things on their own, without her looking down. A teaspoon turned into a little bird that fluttered for a moment and became a teaspoon again. A pen turned into a flower that smelt of summer and wilted and became a pen again. She laughed at herself when she noticed, a loud, warm laugh that filled the whole room.

"Transformation isn't changing what you see," she said. "It's persuading a thing that it was something else all along. Some of you do it with your eyes. Some with your hands. Find your own way into the thing."

She handed out buttons to all of us. Small, brown wooden buttons that lay in our palms.

"Transform it into metal. Not the look of it. The material."

I closed my eyes. I tried to picture metal, and it kept on being a picture, flat and far away. So I smelt the button instead. Dry wood, warm from my hand, a faint trace of oil. And I thought of metal, not what it looked like but how it smelt: the handrail of the ladder on a frosty morning, iron and salt and cold. I held the two smells in my nose at once and let one slide into the other.

The button grew heavier in my hand. The colour was still brown, but the surface was smooth now, metal-smooth, and it was cold.

"Halfway," said Canthara, taking it from me and weighing it. "The material is transformed. The colour isn't." She looked at me with her head on one side. "You did it with your nose."

"Yes."

"Hm." She gave it back. "Good."

Ahra was sitting next to me with a button that was shiny and silver-coloured and perfect all the way through. He looked at it as if someone had put it in his hand. "My grandmother wouldn't let me eat until I'd transformed the fork," he said. "Every evening. For three years. I thought everyone did that."

Retia was sitting on his other side, and her button was still wood.

She tried again. Her jaw was tight, and her knuckles were white round the button, and I could smell her Dherak getting sharp, like when you hold a match too long and it starts to burn your fingers. The salt wind in her scent turned into something burnt.

There was a small crack. The button had split right across.

Canthara was standing behind her. She didn't put a hand on her.

"You're forcing it," she said quietly. "Let go."

Retia said nothing. She put the cracked button down on the table and looked at it for the rest of the lesson, and she didn't look at me or at Ahra, and when the bell rang she was the first out of the door.

I didn't say anything to her about it. I knew what nothing felt like.

In the afternoon there was a long parcel on my bed. It was tied with leather straps, and it smelt of charcoal and oil and of the smithy in Tés Aváir.

I undid the straps. Inside the cloth lay a sword in a scabbard of dark leather. I drew it halfway out. The blade was smooth and grey and so sharp that the light from the window lay along it like a thin line, and along the edge, all the way from the hilt to the point, ran a line that was white. Not painted. Inside the metal, like a vein.

Nihil was sitting on his bed with a book. He hadn't said a word to me since he came back from the island. His own sword was leaning against the wall by the head of his bed.

He looked at the blade over the edge of his book.

"Mine hasn't got a line," he said.

Then he looked down at his book again.

Healing was on Thursday, in the little room by the infirmary. It always smelt of freshly baked bread in there, because Professor Solveig baked every morning and brought it to his lessons. He was a big, gentle man with a voice so calm it was almost sleep-inducing, and his hands were broad and warm and smelt of the herbs he always carried in the pouch on his belt. He had been a field healer once. You could see it in his hands: the hands of a man who had learnt to hold together things that were falling apart.

"Healing isn't repair," he said. "Healing is a conversation. You ask the body what is wrong. And then you help it do what it already knows it has to do."

He put us in pairs. I was with Retia. We sat facing each other, cross-legged on the floor. She hadn't said much since the day before.

"Put your hands on each other's wrists," said Solveig. "Close your eyes. And feel."

Retia's wrist was narrow and warm under my fingers. Her pulse was beating fast, faster than mine, and her skin smelt of salt wind and wild roses, and under the scent there was her Dherak, not burnt any more, just warm and sharp and moving.

"Follow what is under the pulse," said Solveig.

I followed. And there was something. A small warmth in her left shoulder that was different from the rest. Not pain. Something old. Something that had healed but that the body still remembered.

"Your shoulder," I said, opening my eyes. "The left one. Something that happened a long time ago."

Retia looked at me. Her eyes were wide.

"I broke it when I was nine," she said quietly. "Fell out of a tree. How did you know?"

"I could feel it."

Solveig was standing behind us, nodding slowly. "Godrand has an unusual sensory sensitivity," he said. "Use it responsibly."

Retia was still looking at me. Her wrist was still lying in my hands. Neither of us pulled away.

"It's a bit creepy," she said.

"Sorry."

"No." A small smile, the first since Wednesday. "It's a bit nice as well. That somebody can feel it."

When I came up to the room after lessons, the window above my bed was ajar, the way I had left it. On the ledge lay a feather.

It was big and black, longer than my hand, and it shone bluish in the grey light. It lay in the middle of the ledge, not half over the edge, like something the wind had left there. Laid there.

"There was a raven sitting in your window this morning," said Nihil from his bed. He didn't look up from his book. "After you'd gone. It was looking at your bed."

I picked up the feather. It was light and smooth and cold from the window. I held it up to my nose.

Dry leather. Old metal. And under that something I couldn't place.

It was the vault in the bank. It was exactly the air that had rushed out at me when the ancient door opened in Tés Aváir. I stood with the feather under my nose for a long time, and Nihil turned a page, and his ermine put her head out of his sleeve, opened one eye and closed it again.

Sera Ventris sat down beside me in the First-Year Room that evening. It was the end of my first week. I knew the names of most people in the room, but I didn't really know any of them apart from Ahra and Retia. She was the girl with the knitting from Sunday evening, and she came over with two cups of tea and a smile so uncomplicated that it was almost shocking.

"I'm Sera," she said, and put one of the cups down in front of me. "And you look like you could do with some tea."

"Thanks," I said.

"Camomile and honey. My mum's recipe. She's got a herb stall in Tés Aváir." She sat down and pulled her legs up under her and began to knit. The yarn changed from blue to green between her fingers. "You're the one who walked on the water, aren't you?"

"Yes."

"And the one who ran out of Meriken's." She went on knitting without looking up. "That's pretty wild, both of them. But don't let either of them go to your head. My roommate can move things with her eyes, and she's still annoying."

I laughed. It was the first time I had laughed that week. And Sera smiled her freckled smile and drank her tea, and it was the first time anyone I didn't know had given me something just because they wanted to.

Maka had come down to see how Ahra was getting on. He was sitting in an armchair with his legs over the arm and a thick book with its spine to the fire, and Ahra was lying on the rug with Lynx, trying to get him to roll over onto his back. Lynx refused with a dignity that was impressive for a lynx cub. Retia was sitting on the windowsill with Fulmen, looking out at the river, which slid past black just outside the pane. She had a book in her hand, but it was closed. By the door the board said River: 87 m.

I was sitting in a chair by the fire with Alôpex in my lap and the feather in my hand. It caught the light from the fire and glinted bluish in the yellow.

"What sort of feather is that?" asked Maka.

"It was lying in my window," I said.

Maka looked at it. His eyes narrowed. "A raven's feather. A big one." He shut his book slowly. "Ravens are Engle Amícûs. If a raven leaves a feather without a message... that's rare. It means someone wants you to know they're there, but not who they are."

He said it quietly enough that only Ahra and I heard. Then he opened his book again and went on reading, and his face said he had said everything he meant to say.

I looked at the feather and thought of the raven that had sat on my windowsill at Fjordly and taken off without a sound.

Later, in the room, I fixed the feather to the wall above my bed with a pin that had been in the collar of my robe since Miss Hartia sewed it. It hung there, black against white lime. The first thing on the wall.

It wasn't a picture of a family. It wasn't a great-great-great-grandfather in oils over a fireplace. It was a feather from a bird that belonged to someone I had never met, and who knew who I was.

Nihil watched me from his bed while I did it. He said nothing.

And in the dark, when the lamp was out and the ermine was a pale smudge at his wrist, where she had put her head out of his sleeve:

"Why a feather?"

I thought about it.

"Because it was for me," I said.

Nihil didn't answer. But he didn't turn to the wall until I had fallen asleep.