The bracelet was the first insult of the day, and Ragna hadn't even made it through the gate yet.
It was a plain iron band, unremarkable to look at, the kind of thing you'd assume was decorative right up until Instructor Hale clasped it around his wrist and five circles of perfectly good magic simply... stopped answering, like a conversation cut off mid-sentence.
"Standard for trainees," Hale said, not unkindly, though not particularly kindly either — a man who had clearly explained this exact bracelet to exact this exact expression of betrayal more times than he cared to count. "Magic-resisting. Keeps things fair, keeps you from cheating, and keeps the rest of this yard from finding out what you can do before you've earned the right to show them."
"I wasn't going to use magic."
"No," Hale agreed. "You weren't. That's rather the point of the bracelet."
Ragna looked down at his own hand, suddenly foreign-feeling, the familiar warm hum he'd lived with since before he could properly remember reduced to a flat, dead silence under his skin. He had not realized, until that exact moment, how much of his confidence had been quietly resting on the assumption that if things went badly, he could simply fix it. Apparently today, things were going to go badly entirely on their own merits.
"Welcome to the yard," Hale said, and walked him toward the others without further ceremony, which Ragna would come to understand was simply how Hale did everything — without ceremony, and usually without warning.
There were nineteen of them already gathered when he arrived, and Ragna's first genuine surprise of the day was that none of them looked particularly like nobility, and none of them looked particularly like peasants either, because the distinction had apparently been beaten, sweated, and bled out of all of them somewhere over the months of trials it had taken to get here.
A boy with a farmer's sunburn stood shoulder to shoulder with a girl whose posture screamed expensive childhood tutors.
A pair of twins who looked like they'd been raised in a smithy were comparing forearm calluses with a thin, quiet boy whose family, judging by the cut of what remained of his travel clothes, had clearly once had money and just as clearly didn't anymore. Whatever doors these nineteen had walked through to get here, they'd all apparently closed the same way behind them — hard, and without looking back.
Which made Ragna, despite every effort he hadn't actually made, the only one who'd walked through a door that hadn't closed at all. He'd simply been handed the key.
He felt it the moment he stepped into the group. Not hostility, exactly — nothing so honest as that yet — just a particular quality of silence, the kind that happens when twenty conversations all quietly decide, without consulting each other, to pause at once.
"That's him," someone murmured, not especially quietly. "The Queen's one."
"Adopted," someone else corrected, in the specific tone people use when a word is doing a lot more work than its definition strictly requires.
A boy near the front — solid, sandy-haired, with the kind of easy, settled confidence that suggested he'd never once in his life had to wonder whether he belonged somewhere — looked Ragna over with the unhurried thoroughness of someone appraising livestock.
"Nineteen of us spent two years getting here," he said, to no one in particular and everyone at once. "Trials. Tests. My cousin didn't make the cut and he trained harder than half the people in this yard." His eyes flicked, deliberately, to Ragna. "Funny how some people just get parachuted straight to the front of the line."
"I didn't ask to be parachuted anywhere," Ragna said.
"Didn't say you did." The boy smiled, the kind of smile that wasn't actually friendly and had simply never needed to be, because confidence like his rarely had to try. "Ronan," he added, by way of introduction, the way one might introduce a fact rather than offer a name. "And don't worry. Nobody here's going to hold the Queen's favor against you." A pause, perfectly timed. "We're just going to make very sure you've earned the rest of it yourself."
Several of the other trainees laughed, not cruelly exactly, but with the easy, communal relief of people who'd found, on their first miserable day of formal training, a target that wasn't each other.
Ragna decided, privately, that he hated Ronan immediately and completely, and that this feeling was likely to be extremely useful later.
Hale split them into pairs for the morning's first sparring drills with the brisk efficiency of a man who had long since stopped expecting first days to go well for anyone.
Ragna drew Ronan.
He suspected, strongly, that this had not been an accident.
"Wooden blades only," Hale called out, tossing Ragna one that felt, in his unfamiliar hands, roughly as useful as a particularly aggressive plank of wood. "Three points. First to land them wins. Try not to break anything important."
Ronan settled into a stance that looked, even to Ragna's untrained eye, like it had been drilled into muscle memory through sheer repetition until it had stopped requiring thought at all. Ragna copied what he remembered from watching the yard through the wall five years' worth of curiosity ago, which turned out, in practice, to be approximately as useful as he'd feared.
"Begin," Hale said.
Ragna lasted, by his own later and somewhat generous estimate, nine seconds.
Ronan's first strike came in low and fast, and Ragna's block was a half-second late and entirely the wrong angle, which meant the wooden blade skated past his guard and caught him solidly across the ribs hard enough to drive the breath clean out of him. He staggered.
Ronan's second strike, which Ragna genuinely never saw coming, swept his legs out from under him with the casual efficiency of a man clearing dishes off a table, and the third point landed flat against his chest while he was still mid-collapse, more formality than necessity at that stage.
Ragna hit the ground hard enough that the sky did something briefly interesting and swirly, and lay there for a moment cataloguing, with detached scholarly interest, every part of himself that currently hurt.
"Three points," Ronan said, not even slightly out of breath, looking down at him with an expression that managed to be both unsurprised and deeply, thoroughly satisfied. "That's a record for fastest first match this season, by the way. Congratulations."
Several trainees laughed again. Fewer this time — enough of them had been on the receiving end of their own first sparring losses, recently and badly enough, to remember it wasn't actually that funny from the ground.
Ragna stayed flat on his back a moment longer than strictly necessary, partly because his ribs had filed a formal protest against further movement, and partly because Lady Sentel's voice arrived in his memory with extremely unwelcome promptness: you will start exactly where every other boy on that field starts. Flat on your back, most likely, within the first hour.
"You said most likely," he muttered at the sky, with no small amount of betrayal, as though Sentel could hear him from the manor and was, even now, somewhere finding this hilarious. Knowing her, she probably was.
The afternoon match against Hale himself was, if anything, worse — not because Hale hit harder, though he certainly did, but because Hale didn't bother hiding how little effort the whole exercise was costing him. He corrected Ragna's footwork mid-strike, twice, with the same flat patience a man might use to point out a typo, and disarmed him three separate times using what looked, infuriatingly, like roughly a third of his actual attention.
"You think too much," Hale said, after the third disarm, tossing Ragna's wooden sword back to him without much ceremony. "You're used to magic. With magic, thinking is the doing — you decide, and the world rearranges itself to agree with you, more or less instantly. The sword doesn't care what you've decided. It only cares what your body's already trained to do before your brain's finished having the opinion." He nodded at Ragna's stance, currently somewhere between exhausted and openly accusatory. "Right now your body has no opinions at all. That's not an insult. It's just Tuesday. Everyone starts there."
"Ronan didn't look like he started there."
"Ronan's been training here since he was seven," Hale said, "and has spent every one of those years being told that hard work is the only honest currency that exists in this yard. Which is mostly true, and also mostly why he's going to have a difficult time, later in life, around people who got handed things he had to earn." He considered Ragna for a moment, not unkindly. "You'll want to remember that about him. It'll matter more than it does today."
Ragna, lying once again on his back — a position he was beginning to suspect he'd be intimately, personally acquainted with for the foreseeable future — decided he didn't have the energy left to ask what Hale meant by that, and simply lay there a while longer, staring up at a sky that had, over the course of one extremely long day, gone from morning gold to the deep bruised orange of evening without his noticing the hours pass.
Somewhere across the yard, Ronan was demonstrating his third-point disarm technique to a small, appreciative cluster of the other trainees, clearly enjoying himself.
Ragna watched him for a moment, ribs aching, pride aching considerably worse, and felt something settle into place in his chest that had nothing to do with magic at all — a small, quiet, entirely unmagical decision that he intended to keep entirely to himself.
Fine, he thought. Flat on my back today. Not tomorrow.
He was wrong about tomorrow, as it happened. But he was right, eventually, and that — Hale would later tell him — was the only part of the promise that had ever actually mattered.