They came at noon, when the yard was hottest and the sun made the pale stone wink like a blade. The second-years arrived not in a single tide but in a deliberate wave, filling the spaces between drills, gathering in the shadows, adopting the look of predators who have learned patience. Today the silence was not passive; it hummed with purpose.
At the edge of the circle, Serene watched them with gloves clenched. Her ribs burned with a memory of yesterday's strikes, but the ache had become part of the background noise of her body—something she could carry and still think. She moved like that now: thinking through pain, calculating cadence, mapping consequence. Around her, Lira's hands trembled as she closed and reopened a small book of herb notes. Taren rubbed his knuckles raw on a practice post. Alden washed the edge of his practice spear with slow, precise motions as if each stroke could file away the humiliation of the day before.
The first shove came soft and trivial enough that someone might have laughed it off if they had not already been hollowed. A second-year boy with a mouth full of arrogance walked past Taren and clipped his shoulder with the side of his spear. "Move aside, scrub," he said, as if that explained everything. Taren stumbled. He spun, eyes bright with insult, and the second-year shoved him again, harder. Taren hit the ground with the short, breathless sound of someone who hadn't expected the push to have weight.
The ring went still.
Someone from the older group—taller, broad-shouldered—stepped into the sudden quiet and stamped the muddy ground, making the first-years flinch. "This is how you learn to hold position," he announced, voice loud enough to echo. "By remembering who's above you."
Lira bent, gathering spilled notes; a senior girl laughed and swept their scattered parchments underfoot before any of them could reach. Alden moved to pick up a page and had the paper snatched from his fingers by a pair of older hands. One of the second-years ripped it, a clean tear that made a sound like a verdict.
Serene went forward before she knew she meant to, not in a rush but in the same calm line she used for every diplomatic negotiation—step, weigh, speak. "Return those," she said. Her voice was low, not pleading. When a second-year laughed and tossed the pages into the mud, the act itself was its own answer.
A shove sent Serene stumbling back against a practice dummy. The second-year captain—pale hair, hawkish smile from the day before—leaned on his spear and said, as if reciting a lesson, "You put yourself in the wrong ring, Valehart. This yard belongs to those who make it belong."
Alden pushed forward, a measured movement that told the older cadets he would not be bullied without consequence. One of them slammed a spear butt into Alden's forearm. The crack of wood on bone wasn't loud but it landed like an accusation. Alden's hand recoiled, the spear clattering. A bruise bloomed at his wrist. He didn't shout. He had never been the type to make scenes; he only steadied his jaw and said, "We came to train."
"You came to learn your place," the hawk-smile said, and his laugh scattered like stones.
Kael's temper, always a quick fuse, flared. He shoved forward with a snarl and knocked a second-year back; the older boy answered with a shove that sent Kael stumbling into a line of first-years. A second-year girl stepped in front of Kael with a precise, mocking bow. "Control your pet," she said. "We're watching you. Show your growth."
Rowen's hand closed around Kael's shoulder—not to strike, but to hold—and when Kael jerked, Rowen held firmer. "Not here," he said, voice even. "Not now."
That restraint did not calm the air; it made it heavier. The second-years loved the tableau: a first-year who tried to fight, another who was held, an older crowd who could savor the spectacle. There were no instructors nearby who would break the tableau. The academy allowed this kind of sharpening: cruel, public, practiced. It was a pedagogy as old as their stones.
They turned the day into a curriculum of humiliation. Water barrels were edged away from the first-years' paths in the midday heat so they had to wait and watch older faces drink. Blades reserved for practice were carted off to a high terrace where the second-years lounged and tossed them like spoils. The first-years were made to stand in the sun and recite the motions of a drill that the older cadets then performed with exaggerated grace, smirking as if the act demonstrated the futility of their juniors.
By the third hour the first-years were exhausted in ways that training hadn't caused: not muscle exhaustion but a raw, widening fatigue that came from being watched, dismissed, and boxed in. The second-years cornered them into the narrow service passages and announced new "rules" invented on the spot: more laps, heavier packs, points deducted for the smallest missteps. They barked orders like masters and punished small disobediences with a push, a mockery, a snatched cloak.
When Alden stepped between two older cadets who were about to shove Lira, a broad hand shoved him instead, harder than it needed to be. He fell back against the wall and the wind left his lungs for a second. "Alden," he murmured, tasting the backstage quiet of someone who'd been threatened. He stood—but his hand shook as he took up his spear again.
Rows of faces watched. Some of the junior cadets' eyes widened behind the numbing fog of endurance, others became blank, the reserve of people trying to preserve themselves.
Rowen made an error of mercy—one tiny human error. He shoved a second-year pushing a first-year and the older boy turned and, without ceremony, drove Rowen's face into the stone steps. The sound that came from Rowen was not a cry of pain but a sound like someone having a place in the world rearranged. He tasted copper, touched the stone with numb fingers, and pushed up again. He did not storm off. He did not challenge in rage. He only wiped at his mouth and refolded his blade into perfect calmness as if the instructors or the walls demanded it.
One of the older boys spat at Rowen's boots as he rose. The action was small enough—unclean yet not punishable—but it carried an old weight: we own your blood now. Rowen's jaw worked. He wanted to answer with a hundred different blows, but his gaze slid to Serene, who had dust on her cheek and a ribbon missing from her wrist. She looked at him, and in the silent exchange was the recognition that neither would be allowed to unmake the day with force without consequences that would box them both.
The seeded cruelty took on new forms when the younger cadets tried to share the sparse training implements. A wooden sparring sword that might have been used in rotation was taken by a second-year who, with theatrical patience, snapped it over his knee and held up the two halves like trophies. "You can all collect the shards at dusk," he announced. The first-years looked at each other—someone had to say something, but who? They had been trained to obey and not to rally in a show. Taren's face grew hot, his mouth working, and he looked like he might break into a shout. Instead he swallowed and went to the far wall and started swinging his fists at the air as if the dummy might answer his anger.
Words became a weapon. A senior girl tracked down Lira after a small mistake in a healing lecture and laughed in her face about "useless remedies for scrapes" while performing a fake compounding of a salve that might have burned. She told any junior who would listen that Valehart girls were fit only for court and ribbon-tying. The barbs were surgical—the deeper cuts were the ones that mirrored the grayer truth of the houses' reputations.
At midday a second-year surgeon came by and, for sport, insisted a first-year carry a heavy pack across the field as part of a "test." Taren accepted it defiantly and almost made it two-thirds across before the pack tore a strap and the load dumped, knocking him to ground and snagging his ankle. They laughed—some soft, some venomous—and then pulled the pack away so he could not fetch it and show his endurance. Taren crawled out, face smeared with dust and anger.
The humiliation spread into meals. In the dining hall the second-years took the central tables, the high benches endowed with shade and a breeze; their laughter was loud, their spoons clanged, and shades of old jokes were traded. The first-years were left to the outer benches that stuck like bands of hot air. They ate quickly, the food sitting like ash. Someone—an older cadet who had been watching like an executioner arranges his knife—said loudly, "If you want to be a knight, you will learn how to be ignored, Valehart." The hall fell into a murmur; someone stamped; an instructor, near the front, only said, "Keep voices low," and turned back to his stew.
Late in the afternoon the older cadets used an old game to humiliate they knew would sting most: the "court parade." They had the first-years line up and forced them to recite orders of precedence—houses, crests, names—while the second-years sat and rated every answer, marking slips with a slow, scornful clap. Each error earned a roll call: more laps, more drills, more being paraded through the yard beneath the gaze of the upper years. The exercise was small, petty, pedagogical—but each small event pried open whatever reserve the first-years had left.
When Lira's voice broke during a recitation, when Alden misremembered a minor crest dash and the second-years howled, it wasn't just embarrassment. It was a slow peel away of dignity. Serene steadied them as best she could with a line of command or a quiet correction, but the second-years would take the correction and turn it into another weapon, repeating it in mocking cadence, and the laughter would echo too long to be harmless.
By late afternoon a crowd had formed at the terraces. The second-years performed their versions of training with exaggerated ease and sardonically offered "lessons" to any first-year who stepped out of rank—lessons that were essentially public shaming. They made the juniors perform drills while an older cadet called out mistakes with the precise cruelty of someone reading an execution list.
The first-years fractured: some pressed close together for comfort; some tried to disappear; a few, like Taren, were on the edge of anger that had nowhere to go. Alden's jaw had a thin bruise above the cheekbone where someone had deliberately flicked a staff. Lira's hands had small cuts; she kept them hidden in the sleeve. Rowen walked in the center of the small pack, like a stone that drew wind around him, not stopping a single shove, not giving a single answer—but his eyes watched every older face with the cold intelligence of someone cataloguing threats.
It was in that undertow of petty cruelty that something changed, small and sudden: a senior boy took a ribbon from a girl who had been weeping, crushed it in his fist, and snapped it in two. He threw the halves down like dead leaves. The sound, tiny as it was, landed like a final verdict. It was the kind of small, intimate violence that severs something deeper than skin: not the body but the contract of dignity. The first-years had been willing to be pushed; they were not willing to have the artifacts of their houses ruined before their eyes.
Serene moved forward. Not quickly. Not loudly. She moved like someone who knew a word needed to be said in a court and that the cadence of it mattered. "That was not necessary," she said simply.
The second-year who had snapped the ribbon looked up, eyes narrow with the amusement of a man who thinks he wrote the law. "Oh? And who will make us pay for it?" he asked, as if asking for a witness.
"You," Serene said. "If you believe you're above the rules, you should show where the rules say you are."
A silence fell. Small as a breath, but honest. The second-years exchanged glances—one that said we can make this go ugly. Another that said we probably shouldn't escalate before the instructors. The older cadets liked to walk the line between cruelty and allowed cruelty; some of them avoided the line by leaning toward spectacle instead.
An older woman—one of the second-year girls who'd been particularly sharp—stepped toward Serene and lowered her voice. "You'd make us explain ourselves to you? Lily girl, you're cute when you think you can bargain."
The look in her eyes said the truth: there were no advocates in the wings. The academy's teachers would not intervene unless the rulebook was dragged out. The older cadets knew how to craft pressure so the junior ranks would fold. That knowledge was a weapon.
When Serene left the field at dusk, she felt hollow in a way that training could not explain. The day had not produced a single real blow to the body, yet everyone carried shame like a real wound. Lira's shoulders sagged. Alden's hands trembled. Taren's eyes were flat.
Serene did not go to the infirmary. She did not want pity from the healers—pity that would be whispered in halls she could not control. Instead she walked to the library in the academy's quiet wing, the place where versions of the past were kept in brittle books. The lamp light made the edges of pages glow like small bones.
She knew rules. That was a diplomat trait baked into her youth: know the laws, know the margins, know the footnotes where decisions hid. She leafed through doctrine and cadet manuals, older logbooks and patchy minutes from council meetings and then something older—bound in cracked leather, the kind of book clerks thought no one would read.
A line in a brittle table made her pause. It was a reference to a custom, not a law—one of those things recorded once and then taken to the dust. A notation in the margin: Rite of Challenge—see Appendix VII, Codex of Order.
Her pulse picked up, not with hope but with precise interest. If the academy had a Rite of Challenge, then perhaps there was a way out that ran through form not force. If she invoked it correctly, in view, according to the old formula, the hierarchy would have to respond. It was never used now; it had been a relic, a ceremonial thing, until someone had turned it into the instrument of grudging equality.
The problem was clear: the book referenced an appendix that was missing—torn out or misplaced long before. The Librarian, a thin man who moved like paper, said, "Those appendices were lost in the last rebind. I wish I could help."
Serene closed the book and held the binding to her chest for a heartbeat. She could almost taste the logic forming: a law that required the challenge to be invoked publicly, a form that had to be followed precisely, witnesses that had to be present. If she could find the text, follow the form, and force a public ritual, she could make the second-years accept an official test. The Rite offered the right to challenge authority—if you used the older rules.
It would not stop the daily torment. Not yet. The next day might be worse. But it would be a sword made of statute: a public instrument that could make the academy enforce its own wording, and force the seniors to answer in an arena where their cruelty would be visible under formal rules.
She did not sleep that night. She sat at the little lamp with the thin book spread before her and planned. She noted names, remembered slights, catalogued injuries. She detailed who had pushed whom and when; she wrote it as if drafting a treaty. The list became a ledger, precise and cold. She would not be swept away by broad emotion. She would use the academy's forgotten form.
Before dawn she rose and placed the book back and walked through the sleeping dorm to wake Lira and Alden quietly. "There may be a way to stop them," she said in a voice that did not tremble. "But it will be seen as a challenge."
Lira's eyes filled with a fear that was sudden and immediate. "They'll tear us apart."
"They'll try," Serene said. "But if the rite is valid, they must meet us in the ring."
Alden was quiet, the thin bruise on his face still stinging like an oath. "If you invoke it," he asked, "will you fight alone?"
"No," Serene said. "We will do it together. They humiliate all of us. All of us must answer together."
They looked at her then, the small group of first-years who still had enough dignity to listen: Lira, Alden, Taren, Kael and Rowen—quiet Rowen who walked in as if the night were another test. Kael's fist clenched. "If we do this, there's no turning back."
Serene's answer was not loud. It was precise. "Then we will not turn back."
They moved like that—together—knowing the days ahead would be carved into memory. The academy's stones would remember their challenge. The second-years would not end the harrying tomorrow because she had thought to read an old page. They could escalate. They could try to crush them first. But Serene took the knowledge like a blade—sharp, cold—and hid it beneath her chest.
At the center of that night, when the dorm was a dark belly and Lira slept like a girl who had been given permission to trust, Serene sat and rehearsed the words. She would invoke the Rite publicly. She would not ask for pity. She would demand the old form.
If the academy was a place of stone and iron, then tomorrow they would strike the stone with law.
And law, if used justly, could echo louder than any laughing crowd.