The Quiet Year

Note: The story has not gone through thorough screening yet. Limited screening caught some issues that have not been resolved yet.

Kimi’s father worked the refineries — the long sheds behind the eastern docks where raw ore came off the ships and left as ingots, or didn’t leave at all if the buyer was local. It was hot, steady work, and it paid enough to keep a family of three in a two-room house near the harbor, which in Tollman meant you could hear the gulls and the dock foremen shouting at roughly the same volume.

Her mother took in mending. Between the two of them they managed. Not well, not poorly. They managed.

The sorcerer school sent word in early spring, the way it did every year — a notice posted at the harbor gate and read aloud by a clerk who clearly wished he were somewhere else. The school was accepting new students. Initiation would begin in the autumn. The terms, the clerk recited, had been adjusted for the year.

What he didn’t say, because it wasn’t his job to say it, was that the school had taken fewer students than expected the year before and fewer still the year before that. An institution that shrinks is an institution that weakens — and sorcerer schools, more than most, cannot afford to weaken. The adjusted terms were the school’s way of filling seats without admitting it needed to.

Kimi’s mother heard about it from a neighbor whose cousin had looked into it for her own son and decided it was still too dear. Kimi’s mother was not the kind of woman who heard about things and let them sit. By that evening she had walked to the school, spoken to a clerk, and come home with a number that was large but not as large as it should have been.

Her father said very little. He held the number in his head alongside what he earned and what her mother earned and what it would cost them for years. Then he said: “If she wants it.”

Kimi was fourteen. She wanted it the way fourteen-year-olds want things — fully and without understanding the cost.

She entered in the autumn with eleven others. Most were older — sixteen, seventeen, one as old as nineteen. Most came from families who could afford the full terms.

The headmistress addressed them on the first morning. She was a tall woman with short grey hair and the kind of directness that made you feel she was already disappointed in you and was waiting to see if she’d been right.

“Most of what you do here will not work,” she said. “That is not a failing. That is the process. A relic will respond to you, and it will take years before it does. When it does, you will continue doing exactly what you were doing before. You will do it until it responds every time. Then you will be useful to someone.”

She did not say what happened to those a relic never responded to.

Two years passed the way institutional years pass — slowly in the living and quickly in the remembering.

The routine was fixed. Mornings were physical: running, lifting, combat forms. A sorcerer who couldn’t stay on their feet was a sorcerer who dropped their relic, and a sorcerer who dropped their relic was no sorcerer at all. Afternoons were relic sessions. The school kept a stock of replicas — silver rods, mostly, a few copper discs, and one battered iron ring that pinched. Each student was assigned a relic for the session, performed the forms they’d been taught, and waited.

Nothing happened. Session after session, nothing happened.

The instructors circulated. They corrected grips and stances and breathing. They never explained why a particular correction mattered. “Lower,” they’d say. Or “Again.” Or simply “No.” The headmistress appeared occasionally, watched without comment, and left.

Kimi’s cohort shrank. A boy left after the first winter — his family needed him back. A girl from the southern quarter stopped coming in the second year and nobody said why. By the time Kimi was sixteen, the twelve who had entered were nine. The ones who remained had each decided, in their own way, that leaving now would mean the investment had been wasted, and none of them could afford that.

Her father wrote when he could. Short letters, practical in tone: the harbor was busy, the refinery had taken on new work, her mother’s knee was better. Her mother added lines at the bottom — a neighbor’s wedding, a ship that had arrived with unusual cargo, a cat that had taken up residence on their roof and would not leave. Kimi read these in her bunk and felt the distance between the harbor and the school grounds, which was short in steps and long in everything else.

She sent back what she didn’t spend, which wasn’t much.

It happened in her fourth year, on an afternoon that had nothing to recommend it.

She was in the practice yard with six others, each spaced apart, each holding a replica. Hers was one of the silver rods — the same one she’d used the week before, and the week before that. She settled into the form. Feet apart. Rod held at the center, angled down. Breathe. Hold. Release.

The rod warmed.

Not much. Not dramatically. The kind of warmth that could have been her own grip, her own body heat returned by the metal. But it wasn’t. She knew it the way you know when something has shifted under your feet — not because you saw it move, but because the ground feels different now.

It lasted two breaths. Maybe three. Then the rod was cold and ordinary and she was standing in the yard holding a piece of silver that had briefly been something else.

Edrin — the instructor on duty, a lean man who had been guard-core before a bad knee retired him to teaching — had looked up from across the yard.

He said nothing during the session. Afterward, as they filed back inside, he stopped her.

“Note the day,” he said. “Keep doing what you were doing.”

“Was that —”

“Note the day.”

She didn’t write home about it. A fluke reported as progress was worse than no news at all.

Over the months that followed, it came back. Once every few sessions at first, then every other, then — by the end of her fifth year — most times she picked up the rod and settled into the form. Not always. Not reliably enough for anyone to call it finished. But the nature of the work had changed. She was no longer waiting for something to happen. She was learning to make it happen when she needed it to.

The headmistress spoke to her once during this stretch. She stopped by mid-session, watched Kimi work through the form three times — twice with response, once without — and said: “Good. Faster.”

That was the whole conversation.

The guard-core took applicants from the school each spring. The positions were good: steady pay, meals, a bunk in the barracks, and the weight of the city’s sorcerous authority behind you. For most students, the guard-core was the point of all of this.

Kimi put her name forward in her sixth year. She was twenty, competent, consistent enough. So were others from what remained of her cohort, and several more from the years above and below.

The list went up on a morning in late spring. She read it the way everyone read it — starting at the top, scanning down, and either stopping with relief or reaching the bottom with something heavier.

She reached the bottom.

She could wait another year. The school permitted it. But another year was another year of cost, and her parents were not young, and the refinery work was not getting lighter, and six years of adjusted terms was still six years of terms that someone had paid.

She left the school at the end of the month. They let her keep the silver rod — her rod, by then, in every way that mattered.

The harbor inns in Tollman served two purposes: drinking and hiring. The drinking was nightly; the hiring was done on boards near the entrance where anyone with work to offer could post a notice.

The one she found was written in neat, small script on good paper, which told her whoever wrote it had standards but not money. It read: Party of three seeks sorcerer for contracted field work. Clearance and recovery. Must be willing to travel. Inquire at the Three Keels, evening hours, ask for Aldric.

Clearance and recovery. That meant monster hoards — the kind of work that had multiplied since the Lapse left things in places they shouldn’t be and creatures in ground they wouldn’t have chosen. It was dangerous, irregular, and it paid a sorcerer better than it paid a swordsman, because a sorcerer could reach what blades and prayers could not.

Aldric turned out to be the priest — a man of middle years with a close-trimmed beard and the unhurried manner of someone whose faith included patience as a formal requirement. He sat at a corner table with two younger men who shared the same jaw and the same way of watching the room.

The conversation was short. How long had she been active. About a year of consistent use. Had she done field work. No. Did she have her own relic. Yes.

He nodded, which she later learned was the closest he came to approval.

“We leave in four days,” he said. “Bring boots that dry fast.”

Their first contract was a nest of burrowing things in a collapsed root cellar two days east of the city. It was wet, dark, and the things bit. Kimi learned more about field sorcery in that cellar than in six years of school — specifically, that a relic which responds cleanly in a lit practice yard responds less cleanly when something with too many legs is lunging at your face.

She managed. The brothers — Hale and Dorin — handled the close work. Aldric maintained his rites at the entrance. Kimi used the rod for what blades couldn’t reach and prayers couldn’t affect. She was not good at it yet, but she was necessary, and in a field party that counted for more than grace.

They took more contracts through the season. Each was harder than the last, and each taught her things the school hadn’t bothered to. She learned to work the rod quickly, under pressure, in poor light. She learned that Aldric’s quiet was not coldness but economy — the priest spoke when speech mattered and was silent when it didn’t. She learned that Hale was faster and Dorin was stronger, and that they knew this about each other and fought accordingly.

The contract that changed things was their seventh, or their sixth — she’d stopped keeping close count.

Something had nested in old mine workings east of a settlement half a day from the coast. Livestock dead, a boy nearly dragged in. The settlement’s merchant collective posted the work and the four of them took it.

The mine was dark and partially collapsed. The things inside moved wrong — not fast, exactly, but in directions that didn’t follow the tunnels. The brothers went in first. Aldric held a ward at the junction. Kimi worked from behind the front line, the rod doing what it did.

It was bad work. Close, loud, longer than expected. But they finished it the way they finished everything: messily, completely, and on their feet.

Afterward they picked through the hoard. Creatures like these accumulated things — dragged objects back to their nests for reasons nobody understood. Most of it was debris: broken tools, animal bones, torn cloth. Some of it was worth carrying out.

Kimi found it near the back of the deepest chamber, half-buried in packed earth. An amulet, small enough to sit in her palm. The material had a depth to it that caught the torchlight wrong — not silver, not bronze, nothing she could put a name to.

It was glowing. A gentle blue, steady, faint enough to almost miss in the flicker of the torch. Not reacting to her. Not responding to her grip the way a replica did. Just there, the way a coal stays warm after the fire has gone quiet.

She knew the broad shape of what she was looking at. Sorcerous — no question. But not a replica. Replicas didn’t glow on their own. They sat inert until you used them and went inert again when you stopped. This thing was doing something all by itself.

She stood in the dark with the amulet in her hand, the sounds of the brothers shifting debris behind her, Aldric’s ward still humming at the junction. She didn’t know what she was holding.

She knew it was not nothing.