The walk back to Ivory Village was the quietest Aaron had ever experienced in a group.
The other children had done well enough — two had shown affinity for earth and wind, respectively, and would be attending the Earth Spirit Academy in the spring. By the village's historical standards, this was an excellent result. The elders were already doing the mental arithmetic of how this reflected on Ivory Village's standing among the surrounding communities.
No one was talking about any of that.
They were talking about Aaron.
Or rather, they were very carefully not talking about Aaron while talking about everything adjacent to him, in the precise way of people who have decided that addressing the obvious directly would somehow diminish it. Every so often one of the elders would glance at him and then glance away. One of the other boys — Ren, who had been the most confident before the test and had come out having failed the affinity test entirely — had said nothing since leaving Eskra and was walking with his gaze fixed on the path.
Aaron felt bad about that. Not guilty — there was nothing to feel guilty for — but bad in a human way, the way you feel when good news for you lands badly for someone else and the universe doesn't seem to care.
He let the procession carry him up the mountain path and kept his expressions carefully neutral.
"The boy who failed," Sirath said.
"Ren."
"He will be all right."
"Probably," Aaron agreed. "People are mostly all right, eventually."
"That is either a very optimistic statement or a very bleak one, depending on how you define 'eventually.'"
"I know which one I mean."
— — —
The village chief was waiting at the gate with the parents.
The moment they saw the group's faces — the elder's barely-contained expression, the particular posture of someone carrying news they've decided is too significant to shout — the parents began to cluster. Ren's mother moved to her son. The other children dispersed into embraces.
The chief — a broad-shouldered man named Edren, with a practitioner's hands and the steady eyes of someone who'd managed a third-rank mage's responsibilities for twenty years — stepped forward.
"Report," he said.
The oldest elder looked at Aaron. Then at the chief. Then he said: "Elder Thorn of the Five Elements Academy was present today."
Edren processed this without visible reaction. "And?"
The elder pointed at Aaron.
The chief looked at Aaron. Aaron looked back at him.
Edren was not a man who lost his composure visibly. But something moved through his face in that moment — something that Aaron recognised as the same kind of dissonance he'd felt looking at his mother's eyes this morning. The gap between the expected and the actual, too wide to cross without vertigo.
"Five Elements," the chief said.
"Yes," Aaron said.
A silence that lasted perhaps four seconds and felt considerably longer.
Then the chief laughed — not the controlled administrative laugh of a village leader, but the genuine laugh of a man who'd heard something impossible and found himself believing it — and clapped Aaron on the shoulder with a hand that could have felled a moderately sized tree.
"Get inside," he said. "Tonight we celebrate. Tomorrow everyone goes back to work."
— — —
The celebration ran until the second hour past midnight, fuelled by the village's better stores and an atmosphere of collective joy that Aaron found, to his own surprise, genuinely moving. He wasn't attached to Ivory Village the way someone born here would be — it was, for him, a place he'd happened into rather than a place he'd chosen — but it was the only home he had in this world, and the faces around the fire were the faces of people he'd grown up alongside. Seeing them happy required no particular loyalty to make him feel something.
His mother sat next to him for most of the night, not talking much, their shoulders almost touching.
At one point she said: "You knew."
He looked at her.
"Before today," she said. "You knew."
He considered lying. He considered deflecting. He said: "I suspected."
She was quiet for a moment. "I'm not asking how. I'm just saying — I know you well enough to know the difference between hoping and knowing." She looked at the fire. "You've been preparing for a long time."
"A few years," he said.
She nodded slowly. She had the particular quality of a person who had accepted that her child was operating on a level she couldn't follow and had made her peace with this years ago. He loved her for that, in the way you love a person who makes room for you to be what you are without needing to understand it.
"When do you leave?" she asked.
"A year. I have to learn the first spell before I go."
"Will you come back? After?"
"Yes." He meant it completely. "After I graduate, the first place I go is here."
She leaned her head against his shoulder for a moment. Then she straightened, picked up her cup, and went back to talking to the woman beside her, and Aaron let the noise of the celebration wash over him and watched sparks rise from the fire into the dark mountain sky.
— — —
He climbed to the summit at dawn.
The village was still, the celebration long over, the cold coming back in earnest. He sat in his usual spot and looked at the horizon — at the distant smudge of Eskra, and beyond it, further than he could see, the direction the Five Elements City lay in.
"A year," Sirath said.
"A year," Aaron agreed.
"We'll need to make progress on the Spatial Gate technique before you arrive. The academy will test your development when you enter. If you haven't advanced the spell, you'll be placed in the normal class. The resources in the normal class are insufficient for what we need."
"I know. That's not why I'm up here."
A pause. "Then why?"
Aaron looked at the mountain range around him — the shoulders and ridges of Four Gods Mountain, which he'd spent nine years on. In a year, he would leave it. He didn't know when he would return.
"What does 'four gods' mean?" he asked. "The mountain's name. Where does it come from?"
Sirath was quiet for an unusual moment. Then: "That is an interesting question to ask now, of all times."
"I've been curious for years. I just never asked."
Another pause — longer. When Sirath spoke, his voice was careful in a way that Aaron had learned to pay particular attention to. "In the empire's recorded history, Four Gods Mountain is simply a geographical designation. A name on old maps, origin unknown." A beat. "In records that are not available to the empire's historians — records I have access to — the name is older. It refers to four spatial formations embedded in this mountain by the ancient mages. Formations designed to..." Sirath stopped.
Aaron waited.
"Formations designed for a purpose I will explain properly when you are ready," Sirath finished. "I'll say only this: you did not find that cave by accident. The formations in this mountain are keyed to the space element, and they have been waiting for someone with the right resonance since they were placed here."
Aaron looked at the mountain with slightly different eyes.
"So this was all deliberate," he said. "Someone set this up."
"Someone set a great many things up," Sirath said, and his voice carried the particular quality of a man describing events in which he himself had been complicit. "The question of whether they set them up correctly is one we are still in the process of answering."
The sun cleared the horizon. Cold light poured across the ridge.
Aaron sat with the mountain beneath him and the future in front of him, and let the space element settle through his meridians in clean, steady currents, and thought about all the questions he didn't yet know how to ask.
One year.
He had a great deal to do.