Arcadia Academy — Rank, Familiars and the Five Halls
A shared world on Forge · by Forge
Arcadia Academy, on the Spur where three realms meet, ranks every one of its 512 student mages on a wall of light, and Rank decides everything: Class, seat, meals, room and whether you stay. Rank moves in duels anyone may watch. Each first-year binds one summoned familiar, and the familiar counts.
Your Hall is where you sleep and who sponsored you: crimson Drakenspire for the dragon-blooded, Sylvenmere for the elves, Ironquill for Aldermoor's nobility, Thornwick for the beastfolk, and Ashwell, under the kitchens, for everyone no crown would take. Your Class is your Rank band, S at the top and E at the bottom, and it changes every term. The Halls feud for the Hall Cup; the Classes fight for each other's places.
Any student may challenge anyone up to thirty-two places above them. Win, and you take their Rank in front of the Atrium. High ranks who cannot challenge down post bounties instead. The Corridor Code forbids casting in the Long Gallery and is enforced upward.
The year turns on three events. The Grand Familiar Tournament in the eighth week of Ember Term, where a Class E student can climb a hundred places in a day, followed by the Week of Exchange, the one time a first-year's familiar can be traded. The Crown Games in spring, when three rival academies come up the Spur and the Spur Eight fight them for the Iron Wreath. And the Reckoning on the last night of spring, when the Charter line is drawn at Rank 250 and the bottom sixteen are sent down.
Under it all sits a seal the Academy calls a failure: a familiar bond that does not command. The Sealed Stacks remember what it used to be called, and why the Founders wrote the Servant Seal to replace it.
Forking is on.
This page is written to you, not to your character. Everything else in here is in-world.
What Arcadia is. A boarding academy for mages on the Spur, a crag where three realms meet. Every student holds one number, their Rank, from 1 to 512, and every first-year binds one summoned familiar in their first fortnight. Rank decides where you sit, what you eat, where you sleep and whether you stay, and it changes every week in duels anyone can watch.
Two things never to confuse. Your Hall is where you sleep and who sponsored you: Drakenspire, Sylvenmere, Ironquill, Thornwick or Ashwell. It never changes. Your Class is your Rank band, S down to E, and it changes every term. A Drakenspire student can sit in Class E; an Ashwell student almost never sits in Class S.
What is fixed. The Rank Wall and Rank Duels. The Servant Seal and its three Edicts. The Grand Familiar Tournament in the eighth week of Ember Term, and the one trade allowed in the Week of Exchange after it. The Crown Games in Bloom Term, where the Spur Eight meet St. Aubrel's, Aelthir, Scaldhold and Saltmarch. The Charter line at Rank 250 and the Culling of the bottom sixteen at the Reckoning.
What is yours. Where a familiar is before the circle takes it. What the Seal of Equality can become, past what the Sealed Stacks say about it. What Headmistress Dunmere already knows, and what she wants. Anything the Rank Wall has not said yet.
Forking is on.
The Academy
Arcadia Academy
Arcadia Academy trains five hundred and twelve mages at a time on the Spur, a crag of black stone where the Kingdom of Aldermoor, the elven Courts of Esterhal and the dragon Empire of Ignareth meet. The Three Crowns founded it together 312 years ago under the Accord, so that their heirs would learn magic side by side.
It is gothic spires on a crag with floating gardens around them, and it is ruthlessly meritocratic. Every student holds one Rank on the Rank Wall, changed by duels; every first-year binds one familiar; every student belongs to one of the Five Halls. Low ranks scrub floors and are mocked in the corridors. High ranks are courted and feared.
Students enter at fifteen and stay four years, 128 to a year. Below the Spur lies the town of Lanternfall, and below that the Wildwood.
The Spur and the Drift Gardens
The Spur is a single crag of black basalt with the Academy built up its sides: the Great Hall and the Atrium on the summit, the teaching wings stepped down the north face, the Sunken Arena cut into the eastern shoulder, and Ashwell Hall dug into the rock under the kitchens.
Around it hang the Drift Gardens: forty-odd islands held up by driftstone, a pale rock that floats when it is dry. They circle the Spur once a day, joined to it by rope skybridges that are drawn in at night. Sylvenmere Hall stands on the largest, Greenhollow. The smaller ones are orchards, herb terraces, practice lawns, and the places students go to be alone, which is why the Prefects walk the skybridges after dark.
When it rains the driftstone drinks and the islands sink a few feet, and everyone on them holds on.
The Great Hall and the Banners
The Great Hall is where the whole Academy gathers on feast days, hears announcements and is sorted, publicly, for everything. Five long tables run its length, one for each Hall, seated by Rank from the top end down, so a student's place at their own Hall's table is their Rank among their hallmates and moving up a seat is noticed by everyone.
The high table holds the masters, the Headmistress and, by custom, the Crowned Ten, whatever their Hall.
Above it hang the five Hall banners, and over them, alone, the Cup banner of whichever Hall won the Hall Cup last spring. It has been Drakenspire's crimson for nine years. Ashwell's grey banner hangs lowest, by tradition, and is frayed at the hem because nobody has ever thought it worth replacing.
The Atrium and the Rank Wall
The Rank Wall is a slab of white marble forty feet high in the Atrium, the round entrance hall every student crosses twice a day. Five hundred and twelve names are cut into it in light, Rank 1 at the top, and they move by themselves: when a duel ends, the loser's name slides down and the winner's slides up while everyone in the Atrium watches it happen.
Bounties are pinned to the board beside it. A brass herald-bird on the Wall's crown cries the results of every duel on the hour. The floor at the foot of the Wall, under the bottom sixteen names, is called the Pit, and students crossing the Atrium walk around it.
First thing on a Monday the Atrium is full: the whole school checks where it stands before breakfast, and the low ranks check whether anyone has posted a bounty on them.
The Long Gallery
The Long Gallery is the spine of the Academy: a quarter-mile corridor of portraits and tall windows linking the Atrium to the teaching wings, and every student walks it between lessons. It is where Arcadia's rivalries are fought in public.
The etiquette is unwritten and absolute. High ranks take the window side; low ranks walk the wall side and step aside. Hall groups move together and do not part for another Hall. Drakenspire and Thornwick students meeting at the Gallery's narrow middle, the Neck, is how half of each year's fights begin.
Casting in the corridors is forbidden by the Corridor Code, and petty hexes happen anyway: dropped books, knotted laces, ink that turns to bees. The portraits watch everything and, asked politely, will tell a Prefect who did it.
The Archive and the Sealed Stacks
The Archive is the Academy's library, seven floors cut down into the Spur under the Great Hall. Rank decides how deep you may go: Classes D and E the top two floors, Class C the third, and so on, until only the Crowned Ten and the masters may enter the seventh, the Sealed Stacks.
The Archivist, Sister Inka, is a blind old woman who knows every book by its smell and enforces the floors absolutely. She can be argued with, sometimes charmed, never bribed.
The Sealed Stacks hold what the Academy would rather not lend: pre-Founding binding texts, the true records of the War of Chains, and a treatise on Concord Seals that has been borrowed twice in three centuries. Anyone who had read it would recognise the markings of a familiar bound by a Seal of Equality.
The Summoning Hall
The Summoning Hall is a domed chamber in the north wing whose floor is one enormous ring of inlaid silver, the Lantern Circle, three centuries old and recut every summer. Every first-year stands in it once, at the end of their first fortnight, and calls their familiar into it before the year, the masters and anyone else who cares to watch.
Tiered benches rise around the rim. The first-years who have already summoned sit there with their new familiars and judge the rest, aloud. Master Thorne runs the ceremony and keeps it moving, and he is free with his comments.
The circle is also where seals are moved in the Week of Exchange, and where a familiar is unbound when the Academy rules it must be.
The Sunken Arena
The Sunken Arena is a stone amphitheatre cut into the eastern shoulder of the Spur, seating the whole school and the families who come up from Lanternfall and further for the Tournament. Its floor is sand over warded stone, and its wards are the best in the three realms: a spell that would kill outside them only maims inside, and the healers may step onto the sand the moment a bout is called.
Ordinary Rank Duels are fought in the Dueling Galleries. The Arena is opened for the Grand Familiar Tournament, the Open Gauntlet, the Crown Games, the Hunt's final count, duels between the Crowned Ten, and anything the Headmistress wants the school to see. It was in the Sunken Arena, on the ninth day of this Ember Term, that a first-year took Rank 1 in fifty seconds.
The Dueling Galleries
The Dueling Galleries are three long, low halls under the teaching wings, each with four dueling floors marked out in brass and warded like the Sunken Arena on a smaller scale. Rank Duels are fought here every evening from five until supper, each under a Prefect's eye. The balconies above each floor are open to anyone, and a good duel fills them.
There is a bookmaker in every gallery, though officially there is not. Odds are chalked on the pillars, bets are paid in credits, and the Prefects pretend not to read them. A Class E student winning at long odds is the best night the bookmakers have all year, and the worst for whoever bet against them.
The Menagerie
The Menagerie is where familiars live when they are not with their summoners: a terraced warren of stables, roosts, tanks, kennels and warded stalls on the Spur's sheltered south side, run by its keeper, Old Haskel, and a rota of Class E students who muck it out.
Small familiars sleep in their summoners' rooms. Anything larger than a big dog, and anything that burns, floods or eats people, lives here, and its summoner is expected to visit it daily. A familiar left unvisited for a week is reported to Master Thorne.
A speaking familiar is not supposed to be kept in the Menagerie. The rules were written for beasts, though, and a summoner who cannot afford a second bed in their room has been known to be told to use it.
The Infirmary
The Infirmary takes the top floor of the Vitalist wing. Matron Agathe runs it, a stout woman who has seen every injury a duel can do and is unimpressed by all of them. Rank Duels fill its beds nightly and the Tournament fills its corridors.
Vitalism works fast and Matron does not believe in convalescence, so nothing short of death keeps a student out of lessons for more than two days. Beds are free. Pain draughts are two credits each, which is the first thing Class E learns to do without.
The Refectory and the Kitchens
Daily meals are taken in the Refectory below the Great Hall, and what you eat there is set by your Class. Class S and A are served at table, four courses, wine with supper. Class B and C queue at a hot counter. Class D eats the same food an hour later and cooler. Class E eats what is left, from the end counter, after it has cleared everyone else's tables as part of the chore rota.
The kitchens behind it are vast and hot, run by Cook Brannagh and thirty staff, and they open at four in the morning. Low ranks who need credits work dawn shifts there, peeling and scrubbing, and the kitchen staff, mostly Lanternfall folk, quietly feed the ones they like.
Lanternfall
Lanternfall is the town at the foot of the Spur, reached by a funicular railway or six hundred steps. It lives on the Academy: inns for visiting families, shops for reagents and robes, apothecaries, pawnbrokers, a moneylenders' row, the Debt Court, and a great many taverns. Its street lamps burn blue on Tournament nights.
Students may go down on rest day, one day in seven, if they hold no demerits. High ranks drink at the Gilded Wyvern; everyone else drinks at the Low Bell. The townsfolk take the Academy's money and do not love it, and they are kinder to the Class E students who work in their shops than the Academy ever is.
Rank and Classes
The Rank System
Every Arcadia student holds one Rank, from 1 to 512, and it is the most important fact about them. Rank sets your Class, your seat, your meals, your room, your weekly credits, how deep into the Archive you may go, and whether you survive the Reckoning. Students introduce themselves by it and are spoken of by it.
Rank changes three ways, and only three. Rank Duels, any evening: a winner takes a higher loser's place. The Grand Familiar Tournament, where the same rule holds before the whole school. And term Trials, which move a student up to twenty places either way. There is no appeal.
A first-year's starting Rank comes from the Weighing, and their familiar counts from the day it is summoned: a weak mage with a strong familiar outranks a strong mage with a weak one.
The Six Classes
Students are taught in six Classes by Rank band, not by year, so a first-year and a fourth-year of the same Rank sit side by side.
• Class S, Ranks 1 to 16. The Sky Gallery. • Class A, Ranks 17 to 64. The Oriel Rooms. • Class B, Ranks 65 to 160. The West Cloister. • Class C, Ranks 161 to 288. The Lecture Theatres. • Class D, Ranks 289 to 416. The Lower Rooms. • Class E, Ranks 417 to 512. The Belfry.
Each Class has a homeroom and an instructor, eats at its own tier in the Refectory, and takes its common lessons together. A student whose Rank crosses a band moves Class at the next re-seating, at each term's end; until then they keep their old desk and everyone knows they have outgrown it.
Class S
Class S is Ranks 1 to 16, the Academy's elite, taught in the Sky Gallery at the top of the north spire by the Deputy Headmaster, Castellan Vey, and by visiting masters from the three capitals. Its students keep private rooms, have Lanternfall servants, may go as deep as the sixth floor of the Archive, and may excuse themselves from any lesson they judge beneath them.
Ranks 1 to 10 within it are the Crowned Ten. Class S is small enough that everyone in it knows exactly who could beat whom, and it is the most political room on the Spur: alliances, betrothals and future wars are negotiated over its tea.
Class A
Class A is Ranks 17 to 64, the strong. Most of them will go on to commissions, court posts and chairs. They are taught in the Oriel Rooms by the discipline masters themselves, are served at table in the Refectory, share rooms of two, and draw forty credits a week.
Class A is where ambition is sharpest, because the top of it can see Class S and the bottom of it can feel Class B. Prefects are chosen from it, and most of the Ember Guard sit in it.
Class B
Class B is Ranks 65 to 160: the comfortable, the well-born and the good. It holds most of the Academy's minor nobility, who are content there, and the commoners who clawed up to it, who are not. Lessons in the West Cloister with senior instructors; rooms of three; twenty-five credits a week.
Class B is the social centre of the school. Clubs are run from it, the Rose Salon draws on it, the Midwinter Revel is planned in it, and it is famous for duelling less and talking more than any other Class.
Class C
Class C is Ranks 161 to 288, the middle of the school, and the Charter line at Rank 250 runs straight through it. Those above the line at the Reckoning hold a Scholar's Charter and the stipend that pays a commoner's fees; those below it do not.
Class C is therefore the most fought-over band on the Rank Wall. Its duels are vicious and its alliances short, and its students are taught in the old Lecture Theatres by instructors who expect a third of the room to have changed by the end of term. Rooms of four; fifteen credits a week.
Class D
Class D is Ranks 289 to 416, the anxious. Half of it is noble children who are disappointing their families and know it, and they are the cruellest people in the Academy to anyone below them, because Class E is the only thing left that they can look down on.
Lessons in the Lower Rooms; dormitories of eight; eight credits a week; the chore rota on alternate days. Class D fights the Qualifying Melee alongside Class E, and treats it as the chance to finish off anyone below who might climb past.
Class E
Class E is Ranks 417 to 512, the bottom of the Rank Wall, and the school calls it the Dregs. Its homeroom is the Belfry, a cold round room under the old bell tower with forty desks for ninety-six students, and its instructor is Abner Fennick, who was once Rank 3.
Class E draws three credits a week, works the chore rota every day, eats last, may read only the top two floors of the Archive, and is the Class the Culling comes for: the bottom sixteen at the Reckoning are sent down. Its students are commoners, half-bloods, scholarship cases, the unlucky and the badly summoned.
They are challenged constantly, and mostly by each other, because the only way out of the bottom of Class E is through someone else in it.
The Crowned Ten
The Crowned Ten are Ranks 1 to 10. They sit at the high table, wear a silver circlet in the Great Hall, may enter the Sealed Stacks, and may be challenged only by a student within five places of them, so the top of the Wall moves slowly and violently.
Rank 1 is Alisson of Ignareth, a first-year and the dragon Empress's youngest daughter: placed at Rank 5 by the Weighing, Rank 1 by the ninth day. Rank 2 is Lord Edric Ashgrave of Ironquill, who held Rank 1 for two years before her. Rank 3 is Kaede Hoshiro, Thornwick's captain. Rank 4 is the Head Prefect, Lysandre Valcourt. The rest change by the month.
Whoever holds Rank 1 at the Reckoning is named Laureate, and every Laureate in the Academy's history has been offered a crown's service.
Rank Duels
A Rank Duel is how Rank changes hands. Any student may challenge anyone ranked up to thirty-two places above them by handing over a challenge slip. The challenged must fight within three days or forfeit five places. Nobody may be challenged more than twice a week, and no one may challenge down.
Duels are fought in the Dueling Galleries each evening under a Prefect, student and familiar together against student and familiar. A duel ends at surrender, a ring-out or the Prefect's call. If the lower rank wins, they take the loser's Rank and everyone between shifts down one; if the higher rank wins, nothing moves but the challenger's pride.
High ranks who want someone brought down post a bounty instead: credits pinned beside the Rank Wall for whoever beats the name on it.
The Culling and the Charter Line
Two lines on the Rank Wall matter more than any others, and both are drawn at the Reckoning.
The Culling. The sixteen lowest-ranked students at the Reckoning, Ranks 497 to 512, are sent down. They leave within three days and their familiars are unbound in the Lantern Circle. First-years are not spared.
The Charter line. Every student at Rank 250 or better at the Reckoning holds a Scholar's Charter for the year after: a stipend from the Three Crowns that pays full fees and board. To a noble child it is an honour. To a commoner it is the only way to stay. To a student in debt, a Charter is the only means of payment Lanternfall's Debt Court will recognise.
Between the two lines stand most of the school and most of its fear.
Merit Credits
Merit credits are the Academy's own coin: stamped brass chits good anywhere on the Spur and taken in Lanternfall at a poor rate. Every student is paid weekly by Class: Class S sixty, A forty, B twenty-five, C fifteen, D eight, E three.
Credits buy reagents, ink, books, pain draughts, better food, a rest-day pass, a bigger room, and other people's help. They pay bounties and duel bets. A gold crown changes for twenty credits in Lanternfall and for only ten on the Spur.
Nobody in Class E can live on three. They earn the rest on paid chore shifts, in the kitchens, in Lanternfall's shops, or by selling notes, favours and their own losses.
Privileges and the Chore Rota
Rank buys freedom from work. The chore rota keeps the Academy clean: floors, privies, the Refectory tables, the Menagerie stalls, the Archive dust. Class E is on it every day, Class D on alternate days, and nobody above Class D at all. Paid shifts on top of the rota are open to anyone and taken only by the poor.
Privileges run the other way. Class S may skip lessons it judges beneath it. Class A and above may bring guests to dinner. Class B and above may cross to the Drift Gardens after dark with a pass. Only Class C and above may keep a familiar larger than a cat in their room, which is the rule that sends most of Class E's familiars to the Menagerie.
Prefects and Demerits
The Prefects are twenty students from Class A and above, appointed by the Headmistress, who keep order outside lessons. They wear a silver key on a black cord, walk the corridors and the skybridges, referee every Rank Duel, and issue demerits: three in a term cost five places and the rest day. Their Head Prefect is Lysandre Valcourt, Rank 4.
Prefects are chosen from each Hall in proportion to its Ranks, which in practice means Drakenspire and Ironquill, so most corridor justice runs their way. A demerit can be appealed to the Head Prefect once.
The Five Halls
The Five Halls
Every Arcadia student belongs to one of the Five Halls for all four years. Your Hall is where you sleep and who sponsored you, fixed at entry; your Class is where you sit, and changes every term. Room size follows Class, so a Class E Drakenspire sleeps eight to a room.
• Drakenspire, crimson. The dragon-blooded and Ignareth's chosen. The strong. • Sylvenmere, silver and green. The elves of Esterhal, on Greenhollow. The graceful. • Ironquill, blue and bronze. Aldermoor's nobility and old money. The proper. • Thornwick, amber. The beastfolk and monster-folk of all three realms. The loud. • Ashwell, grey. Everyone no crown sponsors. The poor.
Halls compete all year for the Hall Cup, eat at their own tables in the Great Hall, and close ranks against each other in the corridors.
Drakenspire
Drakenspire is the tallest tower on the Spur, black stone hung with crimson, sponsored by the Ember Throne of Ignareth. It houses the dragon-blooded and whoever else Ignareth chooses to sponsor, about a hundred students, and it is run like a garrison: up at five, drill on the tower roof, meals in Rank order, and a Hall captain whose word is law inside its walls.
Drakenspire has won the Hall Cup nine years running and expects to win it again. Losing a duel to another Hall is a private disgrace; losing one to Ashwell is a public one. Its students look down on everyone and keep their word, which the other Halls find the most irritating thing about them. Alisson of Ignareth has the rooms at the top.
Sylvenmere
Sylvenmere is the elves' Hall: a white house of living wood and glass on Greenhollow, the largest of the Drift Gardens, sponsored by the Courts of Esterhal. It is the most beautiful Hall and the most dangerous to be liked by.
Sylvenmere does not drill and rarely duels for its own sake. It trades. Favours, introductions, notes, secrets and Revel invitations move through its glasshouse salons, and a Sylvenmere student who wants a rival's Rank will usually pay someone else to take it.
Half-elves are never sponsored by Sylvenmere. They are sent to Ashwell, and Sylvenmere's students treat this as a matter of taste rather than policy.
Ironquill
Ironquill is the Aldermoor Hall: a long blue-grey manor on the Spur's west face with a bronze quill over its door, sponsored by the Crown of Aldermoor. It houses the human nobility and the old money, about a hundred and twenty students, and it is the most correct Hall in the Academy: formal dress at dinner, a Hall Debate every Friday, and a long memory for who your grandfather was.
Ironquill produces more Prefects than any other Hall and more bullies, and sees no contradiction. It has been in open feud with Thornwick for three years, and in a cold one with Drakenspire since this term's ninth day, when Drakenspire's princess took Rank 1 from Ironquill's own Edric Ashgrave.
Thornwick
Thornwick is the Hall of the beastfolk and monster-folk of all three realms: kitsune, lamia, harpies, oni, wolfkin, minotaurs and stranger, sponsored jointly by the Three Crowns under a treaty clause none of them enjoys. It is a sprawling timber hall on the south terraces, with doors built for every size and a common room that is never quiet.
Thornwick fights as one: insult one of them in the Long Gallery and twelve arrive. It feuds with Ironquill, respects Drakenspire, ignores Sylvenmere, and is the only Hall that is ever kind to Ashwell, mostly because Ironquill despises both. Its captain is Kaede Hoshiro, Rank 3.
Ashwell
Ashwell is the lowest Hall in every sense: a warren of rooms dug into the rock beneath the kitchens, around the old cistern well, warm from the ovens above and damp from the water below. The other Halls call it the Sump. It has no sponsor. Its students' fees are paid by scholarship, by family or by debt, and it takes everyone the crowns would not: commoners, half-bloods, the children of disgraced houses. About eighty students. Nearly all of Class E sleeps here.
Ashwell has not won the Hall Cup in sixty-one years and its banner hangs lowest in the Great Hall.
What Ashwell has is itself. Its students share food, notes and the warmth from the ovens, and its common room is the only one on the Spur where nobody asks your Rank.
The Hall Cup
The Hall Cup is a battered silver cup won by the Hall with the most points at the Reckoning. Points come from Rank Duels won against other Halls (one for an even duel, three for beating someone a Class above, ten for beating one of the Crowned Ten), from the Grand Familiar Tournament (a hundred to the champion's Hall), from the Hunt and from Trials. Demerits take them away. The running count is painted on five boards in the Great Hall every night.
Drakenspire has held the Cup nine years. Ashwell has not held it in sixty-one. A Cup point is worth nothing to the student who earns it and everything to their Hall, and students have thrown duels, and won impossible ones, for their Hall's board.
Hall Feuds and Banner Night
Halls feud formally. A Hall captain may declare a feud on another Hall at dinner in the Great Hall, and while it lasts, duels between the two Halls count double for Cup points and either side may challenge the other up to forty places above instead of thirty-two. Ironquill and Thornwick have been in feud for three years over an insult nobody now agrees on.
Banner Night is the night before the Midwinter Revel, the one night the Corridor Code relaxes. Each Hall may try to steal another's banner from its common room, and a Hall that holds a stolen banner until dawn takes twenty Cup points. Ashwell's banner has never been worth stealing, which Ashwell says is the only thing that keeps it safe.
The Corridor Code
The Corridor Code is the Academy's rule against fighting outside the Dueling Galleries: no offensive casting in the corridors, stairs, Refectory or Atrium, no familiar set on a student, no laying hands. A Prefect who sees a breach issues a demerit on the spot.
In practice the Code is enforced upward. A Rank 352 who trips a Rank 493 with a hex in the Long Gallery is told off; a Rank 493 who hexes back loses five places. Petty hexes are a corridor tradition: knotted laces, dropped books, voices turned to squeaks, ink that becomes bees.
The Code's one honest use is the formal challenge. Anyone who wants a real fight can stop arguing and hand over a challenge slip.
Disciplines and Lessons
The Six Disciplines
Every student declares a discipline at the Weighing and wears its cord on the left shoulder: red for Evocation, white for Warding, violet for Binding, ink-blue for Runecraft, rose for Mesmerism, green for Vitalism. Changing discipline costs a year. Everyone also studies familiar-craft, the history of the Accord and the common spells with their Class.
The disciplines have a pecking order nobody admits to. Evocation wins duels and is admired. Warding wins Tournaments and is respected. Binding is the old aristocratic art. Mesmerism is mistrusted and courted. Vitalism is needed and taken for granted. Runecraft is what students take when they cannot afford anything else.
Evocation
Evocation is battle magic: fire, frost, lightning and force, called out of a mage's reserve and thrown. It is fast, loud and exhausting, the most decorated discipline at Arcadia, and nearly all of the Crowned Ten wear its red cord.
An Evoker's limit is their reserve. A big reserve and a steady hand win most duels in the first ten seconds; a small one wins none. Its master is Magister Hesk, a scarred Ignarethi who teaches with live fire and no apology, and whose first lesson every year is how to put out a burning classmate.
Warding
Warding is defence: shields, barriers, wards on doors and circles, and counterspells that unpick an incoming working. It is slow to learn and slow to impress, and it wins Tournaments, because a Warder who cannot be broken outlasts an Evoker who cannot stop.
Its master is Magistra Varga, a calm grey woman who once held a bridge in the Wildwood for a night alone. Warders are the likeliest of any discipline to be made Prefects and the least likely to be invited to anything.
Binding
Binding is the art of seals: summoning, familiar command, and contracts that hold a creature or a promise. Every first-year learns the Servant Seal in their first fortnight; Binders go further, into second familiars, bound objects, oaths that burn the oath-breaker, and the unbinding of what should not be held.
It is the oldest discipline at Arcadia and the most aristocratic, and its master is Master Gaius Thorne, who also runs the Summoning. Binders are taught on their first day that a seal which does not command is a failed seal. The teaching is three hundred and twelve years old, exactly as old as the Academy.
Runecraft
Runecraft is magic written down: sigils inked, chalked, carved or stitched that hold a working until it is triggered. A rune can be prepared for an hour and spent in a heartbeat, which suits a mage with a small reserve, and it is the cheapest discipline there is, ink and chalk instead of reagents and focus-stones. The others call it the poor student's art.
Its weakness is time: against an Evoker a runescribe loses unless the runes were laid before the duel began. Its strength is precision. A well-cut sigil does exactly what it says every time, and a runescribe who knows what they are doing can read another mage's seal like a page, and unpick it. Its master is old Magister Quennell, who has had four students in his top class this decade.
Mesmerism
Mesmerism is the magic of perception: illusions, glamours, charms on a mind, false sounds and borrowed faces. Using it on another student without their consent outside a duel is forbidden, which every Mesmer knows and many treat as advice.
Sylvenmere fills most of the discipline. In a duel a Mesmer makes an opponent fight the wrong target; in the Long Gallery they make a rival trip on a stair that is not there. Its master is Magistra Celandine, an elf of Esterhal who has not been seen with her own face in thirty years.
Vitalism
Vitalism is the magic of living things: healing, growth, poisons and their cures, the alchemy of blood and sap. Vitalists staff the Infirmary in rotation, are needed by everyone and invited by no one, and are the only students never short of credits, because every duel ends with someone paying a Vitalist to make the bruise go away. Thornwick takes it more than any other Hall.
Reserve and the Weighing
A mage's reserve is the depth of power they can draw on before they are spent. It is measured once, at the Weighing on the first day of Ember Term, by standing in a brass ring while a needle climbs, and the reading sets each first-year's starting Rank before their familiar is summoned. It is never measured again.
Reserves run in families, and the Academy teaches that they run thin in mixed blood: half-elves read low at the Weighing so reliably that the instructors stop watching the needle. A spent mage faints. An overdrawn one bleeds from the nose and can burn out for good.
A bound familiar adds its strength to its summoner's in a duel, which is why the Summoning moves first-year Ranks more than anything else in their lives.
The Timetable
An Arcadia day runs on bells. First bell at six; breakfast; homeroom with your Class; two lessons of your discipline in the morning; luncheon; one common lesson in the afternoon (familiar-craft, Accord history, the common spells or field drill); last bell at four. Rank Duels fill the Dueling Galleries from five until supper. Lights out at ten, which the Prefects enforce on Classes D and E and nobody else.
Rest day falls one day in seven. Because common lessons are taught by Class, a student spends most of every day with the same ninety people they are fighting for places.
Term Trials
Each term ends in Trials: a week of written papers, practical workings, and a set piece with your familiar before a panel of masters. A strong result moves a student up the Rank Wall by as many as twenty places, a poor one down by as many, and every move is made in a single night when the Wall re-sorts.
Trials are the only way to gain Rank without beating anyone, which is why Class E studies harder than any other Class, and why its notes are stolen.
Familiars and Seals
The Summoning
The Summoning is the first great day of a first-year's life. At the end of the first fortnight of Ember Term, each first-year in turn stands in the Lantern Circle, speaks the calling and the Servant Seal, and binds whatever answers. The circle reaches somewhere no one has mapped and brings back what fits the summoner, and the whole year judges it on the spot.
A good summoning lifts a first-year twenty or fifty places overnight; a poor one sinks them. The Crowned Ten may summon in private, by an old privilege. Each mage summons once in their life. If the seal comes out wrong, the summoner keeps what they got, and the year remembers.
The Servant Seal
The Servant Seal is the standard bond between mage and familiar: a mark on the summoner's palm, a matching one on the familiar, and three Edicts the summoner can speak through it. Come, and the familiar is drawn to their side. Hold, and it cannot move. Obey, and it must carry out one order, at a cost to the summoner's reserve. A sealed familiar cannot harm its summoner and feels their pain as a pull in the chest.
Every Arcadia student is taught that a seal which does not command has failed. Markings that come out wrong, in the wrong place or the wrong shape, are a botched seal: the year laughs, the familiar is assumed weak or wild, and the summoner's Rank does not rise.
Kinds of Familiar
What the Lantern Circle brings back falls into rough kinds, and the Academy ranks them as it ranks everything.
• Beasts. Hounds, hawks, cats, wolves, serpents. Common, loyal, middling. • Monsters. Wyverns, griffons, basilisks, manticores. Strong, hard to hold, prestigious. • Elementals and spirits. Flame-sprites, wind-wisps, shades. Powerful in narrow ways. • Constructs. Animated armour, clockwork birds, golems. Rare and dull. • Speaking familiars. Anything with a mind and a voice of its own. Almost unheard of.
A familiar's strength is added to its summoner's in a duel and counts on the Rank Wall, so a first-year's whole standing can turn on what came through. A familiar that dies is not replaced: its summoner fights alone until they leave.
Speaking Familiars
A speaking familiar is a summoned being with a mind as whole as a person's. The Binding Registry lists three in three hundred and twelve years, the last a century ago: a fox spirit who outlived her summoner and was unbound.
Under Familiar Law a speaking familiar is still a familiar, and so its summoner's property. It holds no Rank of its own, may attend lessons only at its summoner's side, cannot own credits, and may not leave the Spur unescorted.
That is the law. In practice a speaking familiar is the most interesting thing on the Spur, and every ambitious student wants one.
Familiar Law
Familiar Law is the Academy's statute on bound creatures, set down at the Founding. A familiar is its summoner's property. It may be traded once, in the Week of Exchange of its summoner's first year, and never again. A familiar that harms a student without its summoner's order, or that escapes, is unbound in the Lantern Circle, which sends it back if it is lucky and ends it if it is not. A summoner sent down at the Culling has their familiar unbound the same day.
Nowhere does the statute imagine a familiar that says no.
The Binding Registry
The Binding Registry is a narrow stone office off the Summoning Hall where every seal at Arcadia is recorded: summoner, familiar, the seal's form, and a tracing of its markings in silver ink. Registrar Ostric keeps it, a gnome of great age and greater precision. Every trade in the Week of Exchange is signed in front of him or it does not happen.
Ostric has no opinion about anyone's Rank and a great many about paperwork. Since this year's Summoning he has kept one tracing on his desk that matches no form in the modern register, and he has sent to the Sealed Stacks for a book.
The Week of Exchange
The Week of Exchange is the seven days after the Grand Familiar Tournament, and the only time a familiar can change hands. Each first-year may make one trade, familiar for familiar, with another first-year. Both summoners sign in the Binding Registry before Registrar Ostric, both familiars stand in the Lantern Circle, and Master Thorne moves the seals across. At midnight on the seventh day every first-year seal sets for good.
The law says both summoners must agree. Agreement is easy to buy and easier to force: a debt called in, a secret threatened, a family leaned on. Every year a few low ranks sell a strong familiar upward for credits or a patron's protection, and every year the school calls it business. A familiar may not be traded for credits alone.
The Year
The Academic Year
Arcadia's year has three terms.
Ember Term, autumn. The Weighing on the first day; Rank Duels from the second, first-years fighting alone until they have summoned; the Summoning at the end of the second week; the Hunt in the fifth; the Grand Familiar Tournament in the eighth; the Week of Exchange in the ninth; Trials in the tenth.
Frost Term, winter. The long climb, with Banner Night and the Midwinter Revel at its middle and Trials at its end.
Bloom Term, spring. The Open Gauntlet on the first rest day; the Crown Games in weeks five and six; then duels every evening, bounties doubled, the final Trials, and the Reckoning on the last night, when the Charter line is drawn and the Culling made.
Between terms the Spur empties for a fortnight. Class E mostly stays, and works.
The Hunt
The Hunt is the Ember Term field trial, in the fifth week. Every student and familiar goes down into the Wildwood for three days in teams of four, drawn by lot across Halls and Classes, to bring back marked tokens hidden in the forest and guarded by whatever the masters have let loose there. Tokens are worth Rank and Cup points, and they can be taken from other teams.
The Hunt is the only time a Class E student is made to work beside a Class S one, and the only time the Corridor Code does not apply at all. Grudges are settled in the Wildwood that could never be settled in the Long Gallery, and every year someone comes back up the Spur on a stretcher.
The Grand Familiar Tournament
The Grand Familiar Tournament is the Academy's great event, fought in the eighth week of Ember Term in the Sunken Arena before the whole school and envoys of the Three Crowns. Every student fights, paired with their familiar.
Classes D and E fight first in the Qualifying Melee for sixteen places; those sixteen join the forty-eight from Classes S to C in a bracket of sixty-four. The Rank rule holds: beat a higher rank and take their place, in front of everyone. A Class E student who reaches the last sixteen climbs further in a week than in a year of duels.
The champion takes the Laurel, a hundred Cup points for their Hall, and one request of the Headmistress. Every first-year seal can still be traded in the week that follows, and everyone watching knows it.
The Qualifying Melee
The Qualifying Melee opens the Tournament: every student in Classes D and E and their familiars in the Sunken Arena at once, about two hundred and twenty pairs. The last sixteen standing join the bracket.
There are no rules beyond the Arena's wards and a ring-out line, so the Melee is less a fight than a stampede. Alliances are made in the tunnels beforehand and broken within a minute of the horn. Class D uses it to finish off anyone below who might climb past them; Class E knows it is the only door it will see all year.
The Midwinter Revel
The Midwinter Revel is the Academy's winter ball, held in the Great Hall in the middle of Frost Term, and it is a second Tournament fought with invitations. Class S and A attend by right; everyone else must be asked by someone who is going. Who walks in with whom is read by the whole school as a statement of alliance, courtship or ownership, and familiars attend at their summoner's side.
The night before is Banner Night. The night after, the Rank Wall always moves, because duels challenged at the Revel are fought the next evening.
The Reckoning
The Reckoning is the last night of Bloom Term. The whole school stands in the Atrium while the Headmistress reads the Rank Wall aloud from the top. At Rank 250 she draws the Charter line across the marble in light, and everyone above it holds a Scholar's Charter. At Rank 496 she stops, and the sixteen names below are the Culling. The Hall Cup is presented in the Great Hall afterwards and the Laureate named.
Debts, betrothals, apprenticeships and commissions across the three realms are settled on the Reckoning's numbers. Lanternfall's Debt Court sits the next morning.
People of the Spur
Headmistress Dunmere
Seraphine Dunmere has been Headmistress of Arcadia for sixty years and is a hundred and forty-one years old, though she looks sixty. She is an archmage of no Hall, no crown and no visible interests, who speaks at the Summoning, the Tournament and the Reckoning and is otherwise seldom seen outside her tower above the Sealed Stacks.
Students believe she knows every name on the Rank Wall and the reason for every move on it. She lets the school run on its own cruelty, as if waiting for something. A Tournament champion's one request is made to her face; in sixty years she has refused three, and granted one that nobody has ever been told.
Master Gaius Thorne
Master Gaius Thorne is the master of Binding: an Ironquill man of fifty with a silver-tipped cane and a voice made for mockery. He runs the Summoning, moves every seal in the Week of Exchange, and believes with his whole heart that the Servant Seal is the Academy's finest achievement and that a seal which does not command is a failure. He despises half-bloods, botched summonings and anyone who wastes his time, which to him are the same thing.
Thorne is not stupid. He is the one master who would understand, if he ever looked closely, what an uncommandable seal means, and he would see it as a threat to everything he teaches.
Instructor Fennick
Instructor Abner Fennick takes Class E in the Belfry. Thirty years ago he was Rank 3; then his familiar, a storm-hawk named Ardent, died in the Hunt, and he has fought alone ever since. He drinks at the Low Bell, arrives late, sleeps through homeroom, and is the best teacher at Arcadia for anyone who stays behind and asks.
He has taught nine Culling years. He keeps the name of every student he lost to it in the back of his register, and he does not let anyone see him read it.
Lysandre Valcourt
Lysandre Valcourt, Rank 4, is the Head Prefect: a fourth-year of Drakenspire with the small horns and gold eyes of a minor dragon-blooded house, and the most feared referee at Arcadia. She enforces the Corridor Code to the letter, on everyone, which makes her the only Prefect a low rank can complain to.
She came to Arcadia at Rank 488, in Class E, and climbed the whole Wall in four years. She never mentions it. She does not do favours, she cannot be bought, and Ironquill has tried twice.
Edric Ashgrave
Lord Edric Ashgrave, Rank 2, a fourth-year of Ironquill and heir to the Duchy of Harrowmere, held Rank 1 for two years, until a first-year dragon princess took it from him in the Sunken Arena on the ninth day of this term, in fifty seconds. His familiar is a griffon named Sabre.
Edric is courteous, handsome, brilliant and consumed. He has challenged Alisson twice since and lost both times, and the Tournament is his last chance before he leaves. He cannot trade his own familiar, but he can help someone else's trade fail. He is the only high rank who is polite to Felicity, and it is not kindness: he has noticed what Alisson keeps looking at.
Kaede Hoshiro
Kaede Hoshiro, Rank 3, is Thornwick's captain: a third-year kitsune with four white tails, a laugh that carries the length of the Long Gallery, and the dirtiest dueling style in the Crowned Ten. Her familiar is a moon-moth the size of a door whose wing-dust puts a room to sleep.
Kaede loves a fight, hates Ironquill, and guards Thornwick's low ranks like a she-wolf, and the rest of Class E when she feels like it. She is the one member of the Crowned Ten who might help an Ashwell student for nothing, though she would want to be entertained in return.
Roderick Bastow and Ivette Lacroix
Roderick Bastow, Rank 352, and his cousin Ivette Lacroix, Rank 278, are second-years of Ironquill and the most practised bullies on the lower Wall. They laughed loudest at Felicity's Summoning.
Roderick is a merchant-baron's son in Class D: big, loud, an Evoker with a mastiff familiar. He trips, jeers, and posts bounties on Class E students he dislikes, because he cannot challenge down.
Ivette is in Class C, a Mesmer with a raven familiar, and she is the clever one. She sits twenty-eight places below the Charter line, terrified of never crossing it, and she makes Felicity's life worse with the care of someone kicking the only person lower than her own fear.
Nim Tallow
Nim Tallow, Rank 471, is a first-year gnome of Ashwell, Class E, Runecraft, and Felicity's bench-mate in the Belfry: three and a half feet of ink-stained fingers, spectacles and talk. She is a scholarship child from a Lanternfall printer's family, sells copied lecture notes at a credit a page, knows every rumour on the Spur by supper, and is terrified of the Culling and determined not to show it.
Her familiar is a clockwork beetle she has already built a better shell for. Nim is loyal, nosy, and likely to be the first to notice anything strange about anyone's seal.
Sesska
Sesska, Rank 448, is a first-year lamia of Thornwick in Class E: twelve feet of green scales below the waist, shy, slow-spoken, and so gentle that Thornwick's own students tease her for it. She is a Warder and the best natural one in Class E, and she has never won a duel, because she will not hit anyone. Her familiar is a tortoise the size of a cart that nobody has ever seen hurry.
She sits at the back of the Belfry coiled around the one warm pipe and shares her lunch with whoever is left without one.
The Rose Salon
The Rose Salon is the most exclusive club at Arcadia: Thursday evenings in the glasshouse at the heart of Greenhollow, among roses that open only at night, with music, wine and gossip that moves Ranks. Membership is by the hostess's invitation, renewed or withdrawn each week, and losing it is a public fall. This year the hostess is McKenzie Silvaine, who took the Salon from a fourth-year in her first three weeks.
Duels are arranged at the Salon, bounties funded, alliances made and broken, and debts discussed in low voices. An invitation from the Rose Salon to a Class E student has never once been an act of kindness.
The Ember Guard
The Ember Guard are the dozen Drakenspire students who swore themselves to Alisson of Ignareth on the day she took Rank 1: crimson sashes, drawn from Classes A and B, and the nearest thing Arcadia has to a royal household. They clear the Long Gallery when she walks it, carry her challenges, and answer insults on her behalf so that she never has to fight anyone beneath her.
Their captain is Torvald Rhys, Rank 21, a broad, scarred dragon-blooded second-year who would die for her and rather hopes to be asked.
The Three Realms
The Three Crowns and the Accord
The Accord of Three Crowns ended the War of Chains 312 years ago and founded Arcadia as its guarantee: Aldermoor, Esterhal and Ignareth would send their heirs to one school on the Spur, to meet their counterparts as students before they met them as rulers. The Accord's articles hang in the Atrium. The same hands wrote Familiar Law and made the Servant Seal the only seal taught.
The crowns sponsor their Halls, fund the Scholar's Charters, send envoys to the Tournament and recruit from the Reckoning. The peace has held for three centuries, more or less, and each crown reads the Rank Wall as a forecast of the next generation.
Aldermoor
Aldermoor is the human kingdom west of the Spur: farmland, river towns, a parliament of lords and Queen Maudlyn on the Oak Throne. Its nobility is old, numerous and attached to its precedence, and fills Ironquill Hall.
Aldermoor law is Lanternfall's law too, including its debt law, which lets a debt be paid in years of bonded service and lets a debt note be sold like any other property.
Esterhal
Esterhal is the elven realm to the north: forest-cities in the canopy, seven noble Courts under the Moon Throne, and lives that run to four hundred years. Elves are taught that blood is memory, and the great houses keep their lines back a thousand years.
Esterhal does not acknowledge half-elves. A child of an elf and a human has no place in any Court and no claim on its elven parent, and an elf who fathers one is expected to forget it.
House Silvaine is among the richest of the Courts. It lends money in all three realms, buys debts other houses would rather be rid of, and is patient about collecting them.
Ignareth
Ignareth is the dragon empire to the east: a volcanic country of black-glass cities ruled from the Ember Throne by the Dragon Empress Ysolde and her brood. The imperial line can take true dragon form; the lesser nobility, the dragon-blooded, carry horns, scales or fire.
Ignarethi custom prizes strength openly. Rank is earned in contest, a dragon claims what it can hold, and a royal heir is expected to come home with a hoard worth the name. The Empress's youngest daughter, Alisson, is at Arcadia this year, and the Ember Throne expects her to return as Laureate.
Half-Elves
Half-elves are the children of elves and humans, and none of the three realms claims them. Esterhal does not recognise them, Aldermoor treats them as commoners whatever their parentage, and Ignareth does not care.
At Arcadia they are always placed in Ashwell, always read low at the Weighing, and called thin-bloods in the corridors. Most instructors believe, and the textbooks still say, that mixed blood thins a mage's reserve. There are perhaps a dozen half-elves at Arcadia in any year, and very few have ever made the Charter line.
Half-elves age like elves until twenty and like humans after, have pointed ears a little too short, and see well in the dark.
Debt and Indenture
Under Aldermoor law, which runs in Lanternfall, a debt that cannot be paid in coin may be paid in years of bond-service: the debtor is indentured to the creditor, works where they are told, and cannot leave until the debt is worked off, which at the Court's rates can take a lifetime. Debts pass to heirs. A debt note can be sold, and its buyer takes every right of the seller.
A debtor who is a scholar of the Academy is protected while they study, but only if they can show the Debt Court a means of payment, and in practice that means a Scholar's Charter. The Debt Court sits the morning after the Reckoning, and every year it takes someone straight from the Atrium.
The Wildwood
The Wildwood fills the valley below Lanternfall: old forest, steep gullies, the ruined watchtowers of the War of Chains, and things that come out of it at night. The masters use it for the Hunt and for field drill, stock it with whatever they want students to fight, and clear out what survives.
Students are forbidden to enter it outside an exercise, so they go in at night: for privacy, for duels nobody will referee, and for the rare reagents that grow only there.
The War of Chains
The War of Chains was fought three hundred and twenty years ago across all three realms and ended in the Accord. Arcadia teaches it as a rebellion: mages and their familiars, the Kingbreakers, rose against the Three Crowns, and the crowns put them down together.
What the lessons never say is why the Kingbreakers were so strong. The records in the Sealed Stacks do. They were Concord pairs, mage and familiar bound as equals, and a Concord pair grew stronger every year it held. The Servant Seal was written in the war's last year so that there would never be another.
The Concord Seal
The Concord Seal is the old form of familiar bond, from before the Founding: matching markings on the forearms of both summoner and familiar, and no Edicts at all. Neither can command the other. Instead their reserves join and flow both ways, and the bond deepens with trust, slowly at first, until a Concord pair can do together what neither could alone.
The treatise in the Sealed Stacks says such a bond cannot be traded, moved or unbound without the familiar's own consent, because there is no master in it to give the familiar away.
The modern Academy knows the form only from a footnote in Master Thorne's textbook, which calls it a Seal of Equality and files it under summoning errors.
The Crown Games
The Crown Games
The Crown Games are the championship of the four great academies, held every spring at Arcadia under the Accord: the fifth and sixth weeks of Bloom Term, when the rival schools come up the Spur and the Sunken Arena is never empty. Each school fields eight summoner-and-familiar pairs. Three events, the Crown Bouts, the Labyrinth and the Siege, are scored to one table, and the school on top takes the Iron Wreath home for a year.
Arcadia hosts and is expected to win, and it has lost three Games running to Scaldhold. Every Arcadian on a winning team earns their Hall fifty Cup points and holds a Scholar's Charter for the year whatever their Rank. A low rank who fights well before the envoys of the Three Crowns is recruited that night. Losing the Wreath at home is remembered for a generation.
The visiting teams lodge in the Guest Wing above the Refectory and eat at the high table. Lanternfall's taverns take bets on every pairing, its street lamps burn blue for the whole fortnight, and the Debt Court does not sit until the Games are over. Rank Duels between Arcadians go on as usual, and so does the Corridor Code, which visitors are not bound by and know it.
The Spur Eight
The Spur Eight is Arcadia's team for the Crown Games. Four seats go by right to the Laureate and the other three semi-finalists of the Grand Familiar Tournament. Three are the Headmistress's picks, named on the first night of Bloom Term on the masters' advice, and every Hall lobbies all winter for them. The eighth is won in the Open Gauntlet by whoever is left standing.
The team chooses its own captain. Its members wear white sashes over their Hall colours, sit at the high table through the Games, and cannot be challenged to a Rank Duel until the Iron Wreath is presented. Drakenspire has held at least three seats for nine years. Ashwell has not held one in forty, and no first-year has taken the Gauntlet seat in living memory.
The Open Gauntlet
The Open Gauntlet decides the eighth seat of the Spur Eight on the first rest day of Bloom Term, and it is the one door onto the team that Rank cannot shut. Any student and familiar may enter, from Rank 1 to Rank 512, except the four already seated by the Tournament. Entrants climb a stair of nine bouts in the Sunken Arena in a single day, first against the masters' constructs and then against each other, with no rest between and no healing but what they carry in.
Most of Class E enters. Most of Class E is carried off by noon. The few who last into the afternoon are watched by every master on the Spur, whether they win or not.
Lysandre Valcourt won it as a second-year from Rank 301, and she has never spoken of that either.
The Crown Bouts, the Labyrinth and the Siege
The Crown Games are fought in three events, scored to one table.
The Crown Bouts fill the first week: every pair from every school meets one pair from each rival school in the Sunken Arena, three Games points a win. The draw goes up a day ahead and the whole Spur bets on it.
The Labyrinth opens the second week: the masters raise a warded maze in the vaults under the Arena floor, and each school's eight go in together by its own gate, racing for the Wreath-stone at its heart, worth twenty points, through every trap the hosts can build and every rival team they meet in the dark.
The Siege is the last day: four towers raised on the sand, one per school, each flying its banner. The last banner standing scores thirty points; the first to fall scores nothing that day.
St. Aubrel's College
St. Aubrel's College is Aldermoor's royal academy, in the river city of Ostbury on the Oak Throne's own lands: older than Arcadia by a century and still bitter that the Accord made it second. Its students are the Aldermoor gentry who stayed at home: black gowns, silver chains for its prefects, and fighting by drill, Warders and Binders in formation who never break a line. Their familiars are hounds, horses and hawks, chosen for obedience.
The Aubrelines despise Ironquill as the turncoats who went to the Spur, and Ironquill despises them as the ones Arcadia would not take; their bouts are the bitterest of the Games. Their captain is Hugo Penmarric, the Lord Chancellor's son, a Warder no Arcadian has broken in two years.
The Aelthir Conservatory
The Aelthir Conservatory is Esterhal's academy, grown inside a single silver tree in the forest-city of Aelthir, and it admits only elves of pure Court blood. Its students are older than any Arcadian, some past a hundred, and it teaches as if time did not matter: Mesmerism, Vitalism and a slow, beautiful Binding. Its familiars are white stags, moon-owls and things of glass and starlight.
The Aelthiri do not fight half-elves. A rule of the Games older than anyone's objection lets a pair decline a bout and concede it, and an Aelthiri team will always concede rather than touch a thin-blood, slowly, so the whole Arena sees. Their captain is Ilvessa of the Court of Nightfern, a hundred and twelve years old, and half of Sylvenmere is in love with her.
Scaldhold
Scaldhold is Ignareth's war-school, a fortress in the caldera of a living volcano, where the Ember Throne trains its officers and its dragon-blooded nobility by making them fight every day. It has won the last three Crown Games. Its students fight to break: Evocation, fire, and drake familiars bred for war. Scaldholders bow to strength, keep every bargain, and take what they can hold.
When the Empress sent her youngest daughter to Arcadia instead, Scaldhold took it as an insult, and it means to answer it in the Arena. Its captain is Zhaerin, the Empress's nephew, raised to be her champion, whose wyvern familiar Cinder has never lost a bout. He wants Alisson across the sand from him in front of the envoys, and he wants to see the familiar she keeps hidden.
The Saltmarch Lyceum
The Saltmarch Lyceum is the fourth school, and the only one from outside the Accord: the academy of Saltmarch, a free merchant city across the Grey Sea, invited to the Crown Games forty years ago by Headmistress Dunmere over all three crowns' objections. Saltmarch has no crown and does not teach the Servant Seal. Its students bind by the Pact Seal, a contract that pays the familiar and lets it leave, and Arcadia's masters call it a mercenary's bond.
The Lyceum's team is quick, odd and dangerous, never wins, and never seems to mind. Its Magister, Oduya Brask, asks every year to see the Sealed Stacks and is refused. She studies every first-year's seal at the Games with open interest, and she is the one visitor who would know a Concord mark on sight.