Chapter 106

Aria's POV

The institute's first cohort was confirmed in May.

Eight practitioners, as Beth had held firm on. The selection committee had done careful work — the final eight represented six different territories, three different generations of teaching experience, and four distinct pedagogical traditions that had developed independently across the network before the alliance had connected them.

The youngest was thirty-one. The oldest was Gorvan at seventy-one, who had traveled from the confederation in spring and hadn't gone back, which nobody had formally acknowledged and which had simply become a settled fact. He was staying through the institute's opening. He'd taken a room in Fenwick's settlement that Oskar...