A crack near the torch bracket, the shadow pattern of the light, and the low echo that made privacy a polite fiction: Emma knew this ceiling. She was back.
“Are you all right?” Jowan’s voice on a tight pitch. He was perched on the edge of the bunk across from hers. “Say something, please—”
“Jowan,” she croaked, head pounding. He exhaled. He was breathing very loudly.
“I’m glad you’re back.” He stood, speaking rapidly. “They carried you in this morning. I even didn’t realize you’d been gone all night.”
She sat up slowly. The dormitory was painfully visible under the morning light: rows of bunks, personal chests, and rugs running down the center aisle. Nearly everything under the sunlight, everything but the Chantry statues shadowed in their alcoves.
In a far bunk, someone lay face down, pointedly quiet. She was familiar with that mattress. The indent where someone used to sleep. How the shape became someone else’s.
Emma rubbed her forehead, irritated by the sound of water from the hygiene room. The scrape of a stool and ceramic basin, low voices: normal. All of it ordinary, for a little longer.
“Is it really that dangerous?” Jowan asked. “What was it like?”
Jowan’s face alone was an anxious inquiry, every question obvious before he asked. Not just what’s the Harrowing like but what’s the Harrowing like for someone like me.
“It’s a test of ability,” she said, examining her fingernails. Caked with mud.
“That can’t be all, or they’d just tell us what it involved.” He leaned forward. “I know I’m not supposed to know. But we’re friends. One hint. I’ll stop asking.”
She thought about Mouse, offering just enough information she moved in the direction he wanted.
“You enter the Fade,” she said, fighting the impulse to be forthcoming.
“That’s it?” He leaned closer to her.
“No. You defend yourself from demons,” she whispered.
“They want to see if you can resist possession. Stop yourself from becoming an abomination.” A pause, and then the pivot she’d been expecting, back to conversational volume: “And now you get to move upstairs. Mage quarters. I’ve been here longer than you. I don’t know when they’ll call me.”
“Any day now,” she said flatly, loudly. They both knew it wasn’t sincere.
“Maybe.” He picked at a loose thread on his robe. “Sometimes I think they just don’t want to.”
The Circle’s timeline for Jowan was not a mystery she could solve for him.
“What about the Rite of Tranquility?” she made an unpopular suggestion.
“You’ve seen Owain,” he said. “In the stockroom.”
Emma liked Owain. She was aware this was not the consensus.
“It’s like he’s dead,” Jowan said, “but still walking. His voice. His eyes. There’s just nothing there.”
“He seems alive to me,” she countered. “If monotonous.”
“I don’t know exactly how it works. You’re cut off from the Fade. It takes your magic, your dreams, your—” he pointed at his own face, “—everything, apparently.”
“Owain has things,” she stood, planning to get herself to the water basin. Eventually.
“Arguably. All he does is chores and numbers. He has no emotions, so it hardly matters what he has.”
Owain kept meticulous margins and component lists. He had a memory for details nobody else retained. But tranquilization aside, most apprentices did not wish for a life spent in a stockroom. When Mouse called the Tranquil emotionless freaks, with a specific contempt for someone he couldn’t get into, Emma was rethinking the apprentices’ fear of the Tranquil’s mere existence.
“I doubt that. He seems fine.”
He paused. “They do it to apprentices who are afraid of the Harrowing. Or if sometimes they decide someone isn’t responsible. Or might be too… dangerous, as mages. There’s a list, apparently. I don’t know who’s on it.”
Jowan paced, shaking his head at her. She felt more questions coming, questions she was ready to dismiss. But instead: “I shouldn’t waste your time with this. I was supposed to tell you. Irving wants to see you. As soon as you woke up.”
“What for?”
“Didn’t say.” He smiled, slight and wry, which on Jowan’s face always looked like a small victory over something larger. “The Harrowing, presumably. Though with Irving you never entirely know. You’d better go.”
Emma had never slept in before. Not without being quarantined with a pox, five long years ago. She took the long route to the washroom.
It was mostly empty at this hour. Two apprentices hurried through their washing, half-awake and distracted. She found a free basin and steadied her hands long enough to scrub away the mud and the faint residue of lyrium beneath her nails. She went through the motions: cold water, rough soap, the linen towel that was never quite dry.
The small vanity shelf held the usual accumulation of apprentice life. Emma reorganized it absently and found a vial. It was small, lyrium-folded metal, the kind of charm that circulated through the dormitories as contraband currency.
The apprentices’ conversation about her resolved into something audible. Apparently unnoticed, she slipped the charm into her pocket.
“—didn’t wake up till nearly first bell. Templars brought her in before dawn.” A pause, the sound of water. “Cullen said it was the cleanest Harrowing he’d ever seen.”
“Well he would, wouldn’t he.”
Emma kept her eyes on the basin, watching the water go still.
“He’s not so bad. He’s just—”
“He gets interested,” the second voice said. “In certain ones.”
A silence.
“Isn’t that what happened with—”
“No. Drop it.”
Emma stood suddenly, scraping the stool and making one apprentice flinch. They shushed themselves as she dried her hands.
Cleanest Harrowing he’d ever seen. A templar’s idea of a compliment.
She found him posted by the door, arranged to look at ease.
“Cullen.”
He turned.
“Ah, um, hello.” His voice echoed from within the helm. “Congratulations are in order.”
“Thanks.” She waited to see what he’d do with the silence.
“It went smoothly,” he offered. Less a statement than a question she hadn’t asked.
“You were there.”
“I— yes.” He stood more carefully. “Th-they picked me to — in the event that —”
So they chose him for that. She had wondered who was standing at the door with a drawn sword. Who would be the one. Now she knew.
“You would have killed me,” she said.
“Only if—”
“I know. That’s how it works.” She gave it a moment. “Would you really have struck me down?”
“I pray I never have to.” Cullen reached for steadier ground. “Thank the Maker, it was a clean Harrowing. Greagoir said as much.” He seemed pleased to have found a firm surface.
Clean. That was what Greagoir had said.
“Have you been on other Harrowings?”
“A-a few,” he said.
“And?”
“And.” He was looking somewhere near her left shoulder. “I serve the Chantry and the Maker, and I will do as commanded. At times, I do so with a heavy heart.”
He did sound very serious.
“Whose Harrowing gave you the heavy heart?”
“That was—” He stepped back. “I cannot say. I will say… I would have given anything for it to be otherwise.”
“She was my friend,” Emma said. “I want to understand what happened.”
“I know she was. I know. As she was mine.” That was not what she expected to hear. Perhaps, not what he expected to say, either. He paused. “I should—”
Cullen didn't finish. His hand moved toward the door frame for something to hold, but then away, unbalancing himself. He straightened abruptly and marched down the hall, mail jingling. He did not look back.