SLOWLY I DEVOUR THE SKY
Chapter2: First Lesson
The morning after the ceremony, Wren found a dead fish waiting on his dormitory windowsill.
He stared at it for a long moment, taking in the careful placement, the way it had been arranged just so, snout pointed toward his bed like an accusation. Someone had climbed three floors, or bribed someone who could, just to make sure he understood the joke before breakfast.
Slow like your tame, read the note tucked under its tail. Should feel at home.
He didn't laugh. He also didn't cry, which he was starting to suspect was going to be the general shape of his year.
"Bold," said a voice that wasn't quite a voice, low and unhurried, from the direction of his bedside table. "A fish. Original."
Wren turned. Kael had not moved from the exact spot on the windowsill's inner ledge where Wren had left him the night before, shell angled toward the morning light with the patience of something that had never once needed to rush toward anything.
"You talk," Wren said, which was, in retrospect, not the most pressing issue in the room.
"I talk when something is worth saying." Kael's horns swayed, considering the fish. "This was worth saying."
"You could've said something last night. When I was carrying you back here through a courtyard full of people laughing at both of us."
"You seemed to be managing the humiliation adequately on your own. I saw no reason to interrupt."
Wren picked up the fish by its tail and dropped it out the window, ignoring the distant, undignified splash it made in the courtyard fountain below, and told himself he'd apologize to whoever found it later. Probably not sincerely.
"Right," he said, turning back to the room. "Well. We should get moving. First lesson's at the seventh bell and I don't know where anything is yet."
"You go," Kael said. "I'll be here."
"You're my tame. You're supposed to come with me."
"I'm aware of the arrangement." Kael did not move. "I am also aware that the arrangement did not specify a pace, and I have decided mine."
Wren stood in the middle of his half-unpacked room, looking at a snail that was, as far as he could tell, simply choosing not to cooperate out of what could only be described as principle, and felt something in his chest that was almost, embarrassingly, close to a laugh.
"Fine," he said, and scooped Kael into the satchel he'd bought specifically for this purpose, padded with cloth his mother had sewn the night before the ceremony, back when she still thought she'd be sewing it for something impressive. "But you're riding, not walking. We don't have time for your principles this morning."
"Noted," Kael said, entirely unbothered, and said nothing else the whole way to class.
***
The lesson hall for first-years was a wide amphitheater built into the Spire's eastern wing, tiered stone benches curling around a sunken practice floor where, Wren would learn, most of his humiliations for the next several months were scheduled to occur. He found a seat near the back, out of habit more than strategy, and immediately regretted it when Corwin's group filed in and claimed the row directly below him without so much as a glance up.
"There he is," Corwin said, to no one in particular, loud enough for the whole section to hear. "Come to grace us with the world's foremost expert on garden pests."
A ripple of laughter went through the row. Wren kept his eyes forward.
"Ignore them," said a voice from his other side, and he turned to find a girl he didn't recognize settling onto the bench next to him, an open notebook already balanced on her knee, ink already smudged along the side of her hand like she'd been writing since before dawn. "Statistically, they'll get bored by the end of the week. Cruelty this performative usually needs an audience, and audiences have short attention spans."
"That's oddly comforting."
"I study beast behavior, not people." She glanced past him, toward the satchel, where the faint outline of Kael's shell was visible through the fabric. "May I?"
Wren hesitated, then opened the flap. Kael regarded the newcomer with the same unhurried patience he seemed to regard everything, horns tilting a fraction, and the girl went very still in a way that had nothing to do with fear.
"That's not possible," she murmured.
"It talks too, if that helps," Wren said. "Selectively."
"No—" She leaned closer, close enough that Wren instinctively angled the satchel to shield Kael from the row below. "Its shell growth rings. They're wrong. There are too many of them for something this size, and the spacing pattern doesn't match any lineage classification I've studied, and I've studied all of them, I promise you that's not an exaggeration—"
"Iris Marrow," said Instructor Vosh's voice from the practice floor below, cutting cleanly through the amphitheater's noise. "If your enthusiasm for other people's tames could wait until after the lesson, I'd consider it a personal favor."
The girl—Iris, apparently sat back so fast she nearly dropped her notebook, cheeks going pink. "Sorry. Sorry, Instructor."
Wren closed the satchel flap, filing away the name, the flush of genuine fascination on her face that had looked nothing like the mockery he'd braced for, and the fact that whatever she'd started to say about Kael's shell had sounded less like an insult and more like a question she badly wanted the answer to.
Its shell growth rings are wrong. He turned that over for the rest of the lesson, only half listening as Vosh outlined the term's structure, tournament brackets in the spring, individual mentorship assignments to follow within the week. Wrong how. Wrong compared to what.
***
The lesson ended with a demonstration, first-years called down in pairs to have their tames perform some small, basic display of ability, more introduction than evaluation. Wren watched a boy's lynx clear the practice floor in three bounding leaps. He watched Corwin's drake unfurl wings still too small for real flight and manage a controlled hop that drew applause anyway, because applause followed Corwin the way shadows followed everyone else.
"Calder," Vosh called eventually, and the amphitheater's attention sharpened the way it always seemed to sharpen whenever his name came up now, hungry for the next installment of the joke.
He walked down to the practice floor and set Kael on the packed earth. The snail did not move.
"Any time," Vosh said, not unkindly, but with the patience of someone who had a full schedule and forty more students to get through.
"Kael," Wren said, quiet, just for him. "Anything. Small. Please."
Silence, and the low simmer of the crowd's building laughter, and Wren's ears going hot the way they had at the ceremony, the exact same slow-motion humiliation replaying itself for a second audience in as many days.
Then, without any visible hurry at all, Kael extended his stalked eyes, turned them toward Corwin's row with what could only be described as deliberate contempt, and left a slow, perfectly straight silver trail across the practice floor, tracing a shape that took a long, silent moment for anyone to recognize.
A single, unmistakable letter.
W.
The laughter died somewhere in the middle, replaced by a confused, uncertain murmur, because a beast that traced a shape on command wasn't a beast doing nothing, and everyone in the amphitheater understood on some instinctive level that they'd just watched something they didn't have a category for.
Iris, three rows up, had gone completely still, pen frozen above her notebook.
"Interesting," Vosh said slowly, studying the trail with an expression Wren couldn't quite read. "Very interesting."
Wren knelt and scooped Kael back into the satchel, heart hammering, and murmured low enough that only the two of them could hear it.
"You could've done that yesterday."
"Yesterday wasn't worth it," Kael said, horns swaying with something that might have been the closest thing he had to satisfaction. "Today, apparently, was."