Chapter 20: A Student Named Fen Goes Quiet

Fen Aurelius had the kind of laugh that other people's faces responded to before their brains did. It arrived in a room before he did, loud and genuine and slightly too much for whatever had prompted it, and it was the first thing Elliot noticed about him in the third week of term — the laugh, and then the boy it belonged to, small and dark-haired and quick in the way children are quick when they have not yet learned that quickness draws attention.

He was a first-year. He had the Grasp in the way some people have perfect pitch: effortlessly, obviously, in a manner that the faculty noticed and commented on in the dining hall in the way faculty should not comment on students within earshot of other students. Elliot had watched Professor Stroud stop mid-stride in the east corridor to let Fen demonstrate something with a section of loose-jointed wall, had watched Stroud's expression resolve from instructor patience into something more genuine, had watched Fen grin at the response and not yet understand what that grin was recording itself into.

He had been here eleven weeks. He was eleven years old. He was the right age and the right ability and Elliot had known it for three weeks without saying it out loud to Sable or Drift because naming it felt like accelerating it, like speaking the word brought the thing forward in time.