Chapter 17 CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: A Letter from Home
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: A Letter from Home
A letter arrived from my parents on the eighteenth day.
I knew it was from them before I opened it. My mother's handwriting on the outside. Small and careful, every letter fully formed, the way someone writes when they learned late and never stopped being grateful they could.
I sat on my cot, took a breath, and opened it.
She wrote the way she talked. Steady. No big words. She said the house was quieter but the gate still worked because my father checked it every morning, which she did not understand but did not question. She said the forge was busy and my father had taken on an apprentice, a boy of twelve from the south quarter, and was teaching him with more patience than she expected. She said the woman at the market had asked about me and she had told her I was doing well, which she hoped was true.
Then she wrote: We think about you every day. Your father does not say it but he does. I know because he sits at the table in the evenings now instead of working late. I think he is waiting for something and I think the something is you.
I read those lines twice.
Then I folded the letter and pressed it flat and put it under the training manual with the first note from Sera.
I let it sit for a full moment, long enough to feel the weight of it properly.
Then I put it away and went to find Ren.
He was in the study room on the second floor, which was technically for all students but in practice was used mostly by low and mid-rank students because the upper-rank students had private study spaces in their wing. Ren was at the far table with three books open and a look on his face that said the books were winning.
I sat across from him.
"Letter from home," I said.
He looked up. Something in his expression shifted. "Good or bad?"
"Good," I said. "My mother."
He nodded. He looked back at his book. Then he said, "I got one last week. My aunt. She runs the food stall on the east side of south Croft. She wanted to know if the food here was better than hers." He paused. "I said yes. I feel bad about it but I also was not going to lie."
I almost smiled. "Is it?"
"The warm food is," he said. "When we actually get it warm." He looked at me. "How is the courtyard thing going."
I had not told him details. But Ren was not a person who needed details to understand the shape of what was happening.
"Progress," I said.
"He is still alive," Ren said, which was not a question.
"Yes," I said. "And aware that something is off, even if he does not know the full picture yet."
Ren turned a page without reading it. "The staff woman. The silver-haired one. I have been watching her the way you asked." He kept his voice even and quiet, which I appreciated. "She does rounds every three days. Same path. Same timing almost exactly. Main corridor, east wing, the upper dormitory hall, and then the part of the building the students do not use."
"The sub-level," I said.
"I do not know what it is," he said. "I just know she goes there and she goes alone and she is always calm when she comes back. Too calm. Like nothing costs her anything."
That matched what Davan had told me about the extraction process. Something that had been done enough times that it no longer registered as difficult.
"Did anyone go with her?" I said.
"Not a student," he said. "One staff member. Short.
Grey coat. I do not know his name but he carries a case. Metal. Locked."
A case. Metal. Locked.
I thought about cores. About extraction. About what you would need to store something like that safely after removing it from a living person.
My chest felt tight for a moment.
"You are sure about the timing?" I said.
"Every three days," he said. "I have counted four cycles. It does not vary by more than ten minutes."
Four cycles. Twelve days of watching. He had started paying attention before I even asked him to.
I looked at him.
"Ren," I said.
"Do not thank me," he said. "It is weird when you do it." He turned another page. "Just tell me when there is something I can actually do and I will do it."
That was the thing about Ren Ashby. He had tried to get into Ironspire twice before and been sent home both times. No family reputation behind him, no strong core reading, no name that opened doors. He had finally gotten in on the third attempt only by stopping the effort to look like something he was not.
And he was using everything he had to watch a staff member's routine for twelve days on behalf of a friend who had given him almost no information.
The loyalty of people like that was not something you earned. It was something they decided to give. And once they gave it, they gave it completely.
I looked at the books in front of him.
"What are you reading?" I said.
"Aether circulation theory," he said. "It is very boring. I hate it. But Proctor Senn said it would help with the midterm assessment and I am not going back to south Croft because I failed a midterm."
"I can help," I said.
He looked at me. "How much do you actually know about Aether theory."
"Enough," I said.
He pushed one of the books across the table.
We stayed in the study room until the dinner bell sounded. I explained circulation theory in plain direct terms while he asked exactly the questions that needed to be asked, and somewhere between chapter four and the evening bell I realized this was the first time in either of my lives that I had sat at a table and just helped someone without any strategy behind it.
Just helped.
It was a genuinely strange feeling. A good one.
I was still thinking about that when I went back to my room that night and found a new note waiting on my shelf.
Not from Sera this time.
Different handwriting. Sharper. More controlled.
It said: I already know about the courtyard meetings. We need to talk. Tonight. The same place.
And it was signed with just one letter.
S.