Valens was fairly certain his alumna was up to something. Probably up to no good. He tried to ignore it—what the brat did in his own time didn't interest Valens at all—but now the boy's neighbors in the dormitory insisted on sending complaints. Or rather Ros, the aedificans of several of those obnoxious alumnas, kept passing along his charges' grievances. When Valens ignored the complaints, the whiner shifted his attention to Arbita instead.

He could not believe the man's gall. He hadn't wed the woman yet, and people enlisted her to meddle in his affairs.

"It's nothing alarming," the lifeholder said. The two of them sat beside Valens's rain pool going over preparations for the wedding neither of them wanted while Domi practiced his breathing inside. "Just weird. No one has managed to take an exact head count of how many Pullati he has living with him, but it's a lot. And the kids keep bringing garbage to him every evening. Food scraps and half-rotten vegetables. Someone saw one picking through the trash."

Valens shook his head. "He doesn't understand he's not a Pullatus any longer. I haven't forbidden him from having contact with his family and friends, just told him to do it on his own time." He did not mention his recent deal with Merula. It still rankled that he gave in to a Pyrrhaeus. "Germinating started last week. You know how chilly it gets. My guess is he's offered his fellow sewer rats a warm place to stay."

"And you don't care?" Judging from the scorn on her face, she thought she knew the answer.

Valens shrugged. "As long as they don't burn the dormitory down and cost me money paying for repairs, why should I?"

He should ensure Domi had enough blankets for everyone. If no one was cold, the idiot kids would have no reason to play with fire and damage anything.

Arbita grimaced at him. "Seriously, Valens? Half of them are in all likelihood sick and the others starved. Even with food scraps, he can't possibly feed all those kids. Are you going to ignore that many children in need?"

"Not my problem. I didn't even want a Trueborn alumna. I'm not taking responsibility for a whole nest of little Pyrrhaei rats."

Blankets were one thing. A preventative measure. But food? That would cost as much as feeding a whole household of servants. There were reasons he didn't employ cooks or maids. The expense was fine, he supposed, but he wanted naught to do with the nuisance of managing a staff.

"You're so horrible in the way you speak of them."

He shrugged. "Ask Domi, and he'll tell you I'm horrible in every way conceivable. I'll survive. If you're so concerned, you deal with it."

"Me? He's your alumna."

"We're about to wed. What's mine will soon become yours. Much as we both hate to admit it."

How much did feeding a bunch of miniature Pullati cost? The last thing he wanted was his alumna getting distracted trying to earn coin for such a thing. He sighed. He would need to look into it.

"You're unbelievable," his future wife said, shaking her head.

"Best get used to it."

Domi found it hard to focus on his breathing. His aedificans was talking about him. He made out enough of the worldholder's conversation with Arbita to piece together they were both aware of the Pullati kids at his place. But their voices stayed too soft for him to make out the finer details of the discussion. What did they know?

He exhaled in a sharp hiss, more out of frustration than as part of his breathing exercises, then forced himself to control the inhalation. In for a count of five. Hold. Out for eight seconds. Everything grew hushed with the exhalation, and darkness crept closer. He wondered if this was what sinking into the black, as Valens called it, would one day be like.

A heartbeat later, he had his answer.

The expansive feathered darkness behind his closed eyelids narrowed, and to his inner vision, it was like being yanked to the edge of a shadowed hole. Domi's heart lurched the way it sometimes did on the brink of sleep, but this time he did not startle awake.

Instead, a sensation of falling and folding gripped him. He tunneled through a slick blackness, which engulfed him like mud and compressed him on all sides, twisting him around and into himself.

A metallic whirring grew, becoming a deafening whine as he surged toward something unfathomable and strange. He collided with it in a painful concussion, a white-hot explosion bursting in his head as he rammed into a barrier mind-first.

Sparks fizzled behind his eyes and ignited answering sparks in his veins, all the strangest color: radiant darkness, an inferno so dense and deep it consumed natural light. He shied away from the eerie glow but could not escape it.

An instant later, the shining darkness traveled with him as his awareness shot forth like an arrow. His mind collided with something anew, and pain exploded in his head once more and thundered through his body. He rushed on, until he at last slammed into a deafening wall of sound. The shrieking metallic resonance met him with challenge and then welcome as he unfolded into a shape that fit within it perfectly.

Only it wasn't perfect, not at all. His head hurt, and the light had mouths that shrieked and bit.

Hot liquid streamed from his nose, but it seemed unimportant compared to the unbearable heat in his body. The fever held him in a suffocating grip, like someone strangled him with a rope of Valens's lightning.

Domi clawed at his throat, only at that moment realizing whatever weird hallucination grasped him had at last relaxed, and he could move again. Somewhat. Enough ordinary awareness returned for him to realize something was wrong, and he should do something about it.

He lurched to his feet and stumbled out of the salutatio hall toward Valens. One side of his body dragged, and the meaning of such skimmed his awareness and flitted away, unimportant. A strange watercolor world surrounded him, one thing melting into another as he made his way along the wall. Where did his steadying hand end and the marble begin? He could not puzzle it out.

He didn't see the worldholder, but he felt him, and Arbita too. Each Lightbearer drew the maddening, wavering hum toward them so that its whine tightened and increased in pitch and tempo around their bodies.

Domi noted the shadows had changed and realized he had made it out of the hall. Good. That was good, but what came next?

Ah yes, a name. He found his voice. It came out distorted to his ears, and half of his face didn't want to work. He hoped Valens heard him past the shrieking hum. "Aedificanti."

Valens frowned as his alumna's figure appeared at the edge of his vision. "Aedificanti," the boy mumbled.

"Alumna," he said, not glancing up as he added another person to the list of wedding guests he was reviewing, "didn't I tell you to—"

Arbita gasped and jerked to her feet. He followed her gaze over his shoulder, and his jaw dropped.

"What happened?" he asked, rising and going to the boy.

Domi looked as though he had drifted off to sleep while practicing his breathing and fallen flat on his face. Blood streamed from his nose, and burst vessels reddened his unfocused eyes. But that was not what drew Valens's attention.

"Dunno," the alumna muttered. One of his eyes drooped. "Head hurt. Then blood."

Valens grasped the boy's chin, tilting his head back to examine his throat. "I don't care about that. You have..."

"Not now," Arbita said, pushing his hands away and grasping Domi's shoulders. "Come here," she said, leading the dazed kid to the chair she had occupied. She tilted the boy's chin up as Valens had, but only guided his hand up to pinch his nose like there was nothing more important to deal with than a nosebleed. "Put pressure here. What were you doing?"

Domi blinked at her. "Um..."

"Are you inventing a lie," Valens asked dryly, "or having trouble understanding us?"

His alumna offered him an even more blank expression than usual. "My head hurts."

Well, that was helpful.

"Let me take a look," Arbita said in a soothing murmur. Promenia gathered around her and then seeped into the boy.

Who watched it. To Valens's astonishment, the boy's bleary dark-brown eyes tracked the wavering distortion in the air as the particles disappeared into his body.

"How the heck has he kindled so early?" Valens asked.

Arbita shook her head, confusion on every line of her face. "Don't ask me," she said, her eyes distant as she gazed at something only lifeholders perceived. "You're his aedificans, not I. Is he really this advanced?"

"Advanced? The idiot's still learning how to breathe." Domi had the basic technique down now, but it was not yet second nature to him. He remained vulnerable to distractions, a distinct danger to any Lightbearer but in particular to worldholders, whose mishaps tended to reverberate across several miles. It was far too early for him to even be able to see promenia. The boy passed Valens's earlier raindrop test—to check if his worldholder senses were developing—by only a hair-thin margin. The boy was growing attuned to humidity and wind but needed more time before he would be ready to sense the magic particles that one day would let him wield such forces.

The physician sighed, flicking him a scornful glare before returning her gaze to the boy. "He's not an idiot, Valens, he's new to all this." She tilted her head, nibbling her lip in the way she sometimes did when concentrating. He did not find it attractive. People over the age of twenty should not look adorable. It was undignified. "His prometus seems fine, but his prometarium isn't anywhere close to being ready to carry kindled prometus yet. No wonder his head hurts."

Without warning, Domi's eyes rolled back, and he flopped sideways. Only Arbita's quick hand, which darted out to catch him, prevented the boy from tumbling out of the chair.

Heart leaping into his throat, Valens hurried forward. "What—"

Arbita waved him back. "He's fine."

She guided Domi's head to rest on the table. His nose no longer bled; she must have spared the promenia to heal whatever caused the vessels to burst. Most days, she would use mundane means to treat something as minor as a nosebleed. Valens frowned. How injured was his alumna?

Arbita glanced at him and shook her head with a small smile. "I'm just making him sleep while I fix the damage, Valens. Or it would hurt." She turned back to the boy and sighed. "What a mess. You're a bit young for a stroke, Domi." A moment later she straightened and the promenia floated up out of the boy and drifted away. "All right, there."

The alumna regained consciousness with a gasp, jerking upright and blinking at them. His eyes were clear again, though confused as he reached a hand up and dabbed at the blood on his face.

This idiot. Valens grabbed his arm and pulled him up out of the chair. "Come with me."

His alumna, of course, promptly resisted and began questioning him. "What happened? Where are we going?"

Valens ignored him, dragging the boy through the courtyard, into the hall, and to the lavatory, leaving Arbita to roll her eyes behind them.

"I thought you didn't like me looking in the mirror," the boy said with a teasing smile as Valens pulled him in front of the polished glass.

"I don't. This is a special case. Look." He pointed at the boy's reflection.

Domi's gaze lifted, and as his eyes locked on his throat, his mouth dropped open. Valens would have found the kid's face hilarious if the whole situation were not so disturbing.

For several seconds, Valens allowed the alumna to gawk at the iridescent, glittering black lines woven around his neckline. Reminiscent of a leafy crown in shape, the curls of prometus flared along his collarbones, trailing off where his neck met his shoulders. The tracings throbbed with a strange shimmering darkness. It radiated out to brush his jaw and chin, a sleek, shiny black that glossed all it touched in faint, inky shadow.

Domi's mouth opened and closed three times before he managed to speak. "That... It..."

"You have a laurel, Alumna," Valens said. The boy likely thought he was hallucinating; Valens understood the feeling. Not for the first time, he wondered with unease where the kid came from and why he had been suppressed and abandoned. "I'm not sure how, but you've somehow kindled your prometus. You can use promenia now."