There was really no mistaking it, not when he saw the practice field laid out beside it, with archery targets, pells, and other equipment. Then the lack of ordinary windows, and the placement of clerestory windows instead, made sense.

This was a salle, a building devoted to the teaching and practice of arms. The kind of building that had been home to him for longer than any actual “home”—three years in the little hut he’d shared with his mother, then the rest of the time in the little inn where she worked as a serving girl and cook’s helper.

Indeed, he must have spent half his life in a similar building. As a cadet, he had divided all of his waking hours among formal classes, reading and studying on his own, and weaponswork. He had never really taken any time for the recreation that the others did. As a lowborn bastard, he was not the social equal of any of the others in his year, and he had figured out quite early that if he excelled in fighting, no one would bother him. He had already had a certain advantage in knowing all the dirty tricks he could pick up in the alleys and stables; it wasn’t long before the rest of the cadets knew better than to pick on him. And while no one was particularly friendly with him, they treated him with respect. Two of the weapons instructors, seeing his diligence, actually unbent enough to act as his mentors. It wasn’t exactly paternal, since they were still very strict with him, but friendly, in a distant fashion, and certainly encouraging. When it came down to it, probably he’d spent the best times of his cadet period in the salle…

There was a line of solemn-faced children in gray uniforms practicing archery under the supervision of an older boy. He clearly knew what he was doing, Alberich noted with approval—correcting the stance of one, the grip of another, the aim of a third. But he hadn’t been brought here to watch them; Jadus led him into the building itself without a pause. It was of a pattern with every other salle that he had ever been inside, from the sanded wooden floors to the mirrored wall to the clerestory windows above. It was superior to the salle he had been trained in, for the mirrors were silvered glass rather than polished metal. But the furnishings were exactly the same: dented and chipped wooden benches and storage boxes that doubled as seating. Practice armor, of padded leather, hung on the wall; racks of wooden blades were beside the armor. Even the smell was the same: clean sweat, leather, leather oil, a hint of sawdust.