She took the paper, her smile now brittle. “I see,” she said as she put it in her satchel. “Well, thank you for your advice and your advocacy, Captain Augustin. I will do as you suggest.”

“Splendid!” he said, and clapped her hard on the back, making her stumble. What a curious habit, she thought, but at the moment she didn’t care. As she made her way through the echoing lecture theater and out to the cool morning air, her heart swelled until it was all she could do to keep from jumping up and down. She was in!

But moments later her excitement waned. See a tutor? Back home it was she who tutored her younger cousins. Yet, in the end, this was just why she’d come, was it not? To learn something new? What was newer than pulling ach’e through words and theories? She sighed and took out her map, then took off for the building marked Student Services.

This time the student services building was much less crowded, and Yenni simply made her way to the long counter at the back of the room. She ran a finger along the edge of the wood, tracing the leaves etched there. Students sat on long, cushioned benches that ringed the room, reading or talking, and tall shelves stretched from floor to ceiling, full of books. There was a little silver bell perched on the smooth wooden countertop. Yenni picked it up and gave it a ring, high and tinkling.

A silver-haired Creshen woman rushed out from a door behind the counter. “Hello-oh!” She brought a spotted hand to her bosom. “And what can I do for you today?”

After over an hour discussing her options, and her runes, with the woman, Yenni paid her fees and received her identification chit—a flat oval slab the size of her palm carved with the school’s crest of a river running beside a castle.

“Only students and staff can make the river flow,” the woman said, and recited something. The water etched at the bottom of the crest seemed to shiver and undulate before her eyes.

“Oh!”

“You try,” said the woman.

“Oh yes, I will, later,” Yenni said, and shoved the chit into her shoulder bag.

They also sorted out her schedule. The woman said the average student took eight classes a year, so Yenni signed up for ten. Among them were Foundations of Magical Theory, Defensive Strategies for Dragon Combat, An Introduction to Dragon Psychology, Dragons in Religion and History, and Basics of Runelore. But the classes she really wanted, the ones pertaining to healing, she was not yet allowed to access. She had to pass something called prerequisites before she could be admitted to those. So she pushed down her frustration and took the classes available to her. She was here, a student of the academy—by the Sha she would find a way to heal her father, one way or another.