Vitl, whose grades had improved thanks to sitting next to Ortahn, became the link between him and the rest of the class. Ortahn suspected that his distance from the others wasn't because of his appearance or his knowledge, but because of Yaron. Everyone knew about their feud, and there had been no visible consequences for Ortahn. And in the male hierarchy, that meant only one thing: victory for the silent giant. From this, it followed that Yaron could take revenge on anyone close to Ortahn who wasn't constantly by his side. They didn't understand the history of spell creation or the colonization of the Outer Contour, but they understood their own hierarchy intuitively.

  So it was no surprise that the negotiations went through Vitl, and soon he brought most of the class to the archive to prepare for the big exams. The men who had previously despised him now followed him because, thanks to Ortahn, he had shown them a path to survival.

  Gron, who had joined their group for some reason (though Ortahn considered him a "half-Yaron"), immediately stared at Esh and licked his lips.

  "I heard they give out rewards for correct answers here."

  "Vitl!" Esh exclaimed indignantly, having already learned the male language.

  "I specifically stated that it was food!" Vitl defended himself.

  "Well, I like my meat lightly smoked," Gron declared brazenly.

  Esh reached for something on her belt.

  "Leave, Gron," Ortahn said with irritation and pointed him to the door. "Tulila will somehow survive one extra failure on the exams."

  "I'm just kidding, just kidding," Gron raised his hands placatingly. "Well, not kidding about the meat. Everyone saw my little ball become smoked meat. I'm from Silterr, a town on the coast. That's what we eat there."

  Ortahn stood in the middle of the archive, which now resembled a strange lecture hall. The group of men and the woman were gathered in a bunch, sitting on chairs that were terrible in every respect, or standing. Esh-Faya sat with her notebook, ready to take shorthand. Vitl was beaming, nervously rubbing his hands in anticipation of either great success or an equally great failure.

  Ortahn needed to explain to them the philosophy of their magic—not just how to move air or push objects, but how to think in its terms. The difficulty was that the language he was used to thinking in sounded to the others like a set of made-up words designed to confuse them completely.

  "Alright, girls," Ortahn began, but immediately choked and corrected himself. "Alright, men. Magic is the interaction of complex aetheric flows, substructures of conscious will, and hyperstructures of subconscious will. A psycho-energetic synergy for transcendental processes in the bio-magical continuum, heh," he said, and in response saw pairs of dutifully attentive but empty eyes."Imagine the aether is fat," he tried to explain in a more accessible language. "It's everywhere. You can heat it, knead it, cut it with the knife-of-will. It's dull for most, but if you sharpen it and shove it where it needs to go, it cuts straight." Ortahn, seeing the faces of his students, felt pity for Tulila for the first time. "And farts..." he resorted to such words in desperation. "We clench our butt to not let them out, right? That is will... So clenching those muscles... is like a spell... our... and the farts... are the aether... kind of... you see?"

  A great failure. It seemed he had lost even Vitl and Esh.

  But then, things got better. Ortahn looked deep inside himself and found what fueled his magic. Viya's "Live." But that was his personal, sacred formula. He couldn't copy it and hand it out to others. But he could help them find their own "Live."

  And he did. For each of them, he found their own anchor, their own "I will not surrender," their own meaning.

  Lun— sickly, quiet, with dead eyes. He was afraid to speak aloud, lest he show intelligence and become a target. Ortahn became his anchor, a living example that one could stand firm. Sometimes Ortahn would deliberately make a mistake in a lecture, and Lun would quietly fix him. And so, Lun himself become fixed.

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  Gron— coarse and combative, but desperately diligent. In every movement, there was a desire not just to crush and break (though there was that too), but to get it right. He trained with ferocity. Ortahn taught him to channel his rage into form, not into a blind, destructive impulse.

  Torb— the clumsy metal-mage, who sculpted stable furniture for them (though also of mediocre beauty). For Karbo, he made a chair with spikes—"so he can feel something"—but Esh made him redo it. Ortahn taught him to see the target, not just flail about in different directions.

  Karbo— the man without pain. He felt neither heat, nor blows, nor the softness of a bed (if it had been soft). He sat on the floor because "it doesn't matter." Esh made him sit on a chair because "just because you can't feel it doesn't mean you're not harming yourself." Karbo just shrugged but never sat on the floor again. His painlessness was both his weakness and his shield.

  Gartan— gray-haired, with a burned-out mouth, could only grunt, but he always did it at the right moment. There was a strange calm about him, as if fear had long since left him. He couldn't speak, but his gaze was more eloquent than words.

  Krel— unremarkable, he simply followed the crowd. And the crowd, to his surprise, led him to knowledge.

  Taut— he just was. Their living talisman, their "fortunate misfortune." When he was nearby, the magic seemed to become smoother and more obedient, as if the aether pitied him.

  "We need a secret name!" Vitl suggested one day, seizing a moment of universal high spirits. "Like, 'The Male Mages!'"

  "What's the point of a secret name if it reveals everything?" Esh snorted. "That's like calling yourselves 'The Secret Club That Meets in the Archive'."

  "The Clenched Butt Club!" someone from the crowd suggested, provoking a universal fit of laughter.

  "The Wild Roses," Ortahn said unexpectedly.

  "What?" Vitl's eyes widened. "That's... that's really girly! No offense, Esh."

  "Exactly," Ortahn replied. "No one would suspect a group of grim-faced blokes under such a name. And most importantly... roses have thorns. And that's what we are now. We are what grows through the cracks in the stone. Hopefully, straight."

  "In stone? Where did you find roses like...?" someone asked, but from the sound of it, he was stopped by someone's elbow to the gut.

  "'The Wild Roses,'" Gron tried the name on for size. "Not 'dragons,' of course, but still spiky."

  "Yeah, besides, we're Tulila's 'girls' after all!" shouted the one who had proposed "The Clenched Butt Club."

  And so they became "The Wild Roses." Ridiculous. Dangerous. Vulnerable. Strong. Now they were bound not only by their preparation for the exam, but by a shared secret, a shared growth, and a shared name.

  Time, with its characteristic ruthlessness, delivered the day of the exam to everyone. Ortahn sat at his desk, breathing in the ritual solemnity of the moment. Even though he answered all the questions with the speed of ordinary writing, inside his large body, everything was clenched into an anxious knot. This time, he didn't correct the questions but answered exactly as the Chancellery wanted him to. He was confident that his "Wild Roses" would also manage, as long as panic didn't send them into a sudden madness.

  The reason for his nervousness had a familiar name—Ildara—and she was seated in the teacher's spot. Her gaze tried to incinerate every student (metaphorically, of course, otherwise the exam would have to be interrupted). Next to her sat MelLandra—a listless and plump teacher from a junior class in a faded dress, about whom Esh had said, "the only thing she cares about is the end of her shift." This was confirmed (if Ortahn had for some reason decided to doubt Esh's words) by the fact that MelLandra was propping her head up with her hand, and her homunculus-like gaze was as diffuse as light in a cloudy glass of jelly. Tulila, deprived of her teacher's seat, was semi-reclining, semi-standing on an improvised couch of her own magical hands, her real hand supporting the back of her head.

  The stylus in Ortahn's hand left crimson marks on the paper—ink mixed with his blood. Esh had suggested finding a way to cheat them, but Ortahn (from his intellectual side) had deemed honest preparation the simpler path. Now, however, he felt as though this blood on the paper was binding him hand and foot.

  MelLandra yawned, stood up, and, without looking at anyone, walked out, presaging the end of the exam. Tulila also stood, and her hands, like a flock of obedient birds, quickly collected the papers. She gave a few of the answer sheets a cursory glance, neatly stacked them in a special box that toothy snapped shut, and turned to Ildara, gifting her a satisfied smile that warmed everyone else but left her rival cold.

  The Black Blood, who had been expecting a different outcome, shot to her feet and rushed after her indifferent colleague. At that moment, she resembled a well-fed predator, ready to kill simply by nature. At the threshold, she stopped, turned, and for a moment her gaze crossed with the mutual glance between Ortahn and Tulila, creating a dangerous perpendicular.

  The results were promised to arrive later. Classes were canceled—officially, to "not waste resources on those who failed." But Ortahn understood the true reason: it was a pause to let fear ripen, to keep the men in The Scar from being distracted from slowly cooking in their own anxieties.

  After the exam, The Scar seemed to have exhaled. The light-lines in the corridors seemed to doze, the homunculi moved more slowly, and the icy jets of the morning spell crashed down on the beds with a duller thud. The men, even the most incorrigible baresteethers, walked about subdued, not knowing what to expect—praise or punishment. All of them, the "Wild Roses" and the rest, were in this trap together.