Corin Ashby

Castelgard nobility, top of every ranking, and the first person at Solmere who does not notice Arthur exists.

The introduction

Ch. 257, seen across a lecture hall rather than met.

He had not spoken to Arthur once since their arrival, had not, as far as Arthur could tell, even fully registered his existence, and Arthur watched him now with the particular detached curiosity of someone assessing a person he suspected he'd need to understand eventually, without yet knowing how.

He is "holding easy court among a small cluster of others", three rows down.

Yseult supplies the file on him:

YSE: That's Corin Ashby. Castelgard nobility. Top of every ranking they've ever published. Don't let him rattle you. ART: I wasn't planning to. YSE: Good. Most people do, eventually. He has a gift for it.

The courtyard

Ch. 258. He is at the fountain with "a small cluster of similarly well-dressed students", Talon Pryce beside him "as always", and he looks at Arthur's table once.

Arthur [...] caught Corin's gaze resting on their table for a moment before it moved deliberately elsewhere, the particular practiced disinterest of someone who wanted it clearly understood that he had noticed something and equally clearly understood that he did not care to comment on it.

The chapter uses him to measure how far Arthur has come rather than to threaten him:

the old, familiar tightness he might once have felt under that kind of distant scrutiny simply wasn't there.

The duel

Ch. 260. Instructor Sutton pairs him against Arthur for baselines, no abilities and no Alchemy.

His prediction, to Talon:

TLN: That should be interesting. COR: It'll be brief.

His technique has a pattern, and Arthur reads it inside four exchanges:

the particular pattern Corin's technique kept falling into, always three strikes and a reset, always testing the same three angles before committing further.

When Arthur breaks it by stepping into a low strike, Corin gives ground for the first time, and something shifts:

Corin's composure did not crack, but something in his eyes did, a flicker of genuine recalculation.

He cheats

Mid-duel his blade begins to glow along the edge.

ART: That's Alchemy. COR: Is it?

He does not deny it and does not stop. Sutton catches the blade between two fingers and ends it.

Afterwards

The chapter is specific that what he shows is not anger.

There was no anger in it. Arthur had expected anger. What he found instead was something closer to genuine unsettlement, the particular look of someone confronting a result they had not prepared for and did not yet know how to file away.

COR: You should have lost. ART: I know. COR: I don't understand why you didn't. ART: I've spent a long time learning not to break the first time something hits hard.

He walks away "with his shoulders set in a rigid, controlled line that suggested the composure he'd worn into the duel was costing him considerably more to maintain now than it had an hour ago".

His soul ability is still unstated. What he used was Alchemy.

The boy in the window

Ch. 264 is the first chapter to show him with his guard down, and Arthur is not in it. Elsie and Yseult find him outside a bakery on the harbour road.

Corin stood outside the glass, close enough that his breath was faintly fogging the pane, dressed exactly as he always was, the fitted leather armor beneath a dark traveling cape, his sword belted at his hip the way it seemed to be belted at his hip regardless of occasion, and he was watching the trays of pastries through the window with an expression Elsie had never once seen him wear.

He looked, for lack of a better word, hungry. Not for food alone. [...] the specific longing of someone watching an ordinary pleasure from the outside of it, uncertain whether he was permitted to want something so small.

He does not go in. Yseult's reading of why:

YSE: I imagine buying yourself a pastry requires believing you're allowed a small, unearned pleasure. I'm not certain that's a belief he holds.

Elsie buys him one anyway.

COR: I didn't ask for one. ELS: I know. I'm giving it to you anyway. That's generally how gifts work.

COR: I don't need charity. ELS: It's not charity. It's a cupcake. You're allowed to simply want things sometimes, Corin. Nobody's keeping score.

He eats it "in three small, careful bites, standing stiffly in his full traveling attire on the harbor road", pockets the wrapper, and leaves without a word.

ELS: He didn't even say thank you. [...] Do you think he doesn't know how? Or he simply chose not to? YSE: I think, whatever the reason, it's probably not as simple as rudeness. Nothing about that boy seems simple.

Elsie's own observation closes it:

the particular careful rigidity of someone who did not seem to know how to simply exist without his armor on, in every sense of the word.

Ch. 271 is titled "The Cupcake Conspiracy".

Why he is at Solmere

Ch. 266, at a wall in the Sunspire Gardens, watching a sunset, to Arthur, unasked.

He opens obliquely, on the colour of the light at home:

COR: The air there carries a different color, most evenings. Not gold. Something closer to crimson, though I don't think that's the light either.

Then the whole of it. See ../locations/castelgard.md.

COR: I did not want to come. I want you to understand that clearly. I am not here because I chose it. I am here because my father looked at what's happening on our northern border and decided his heir was worth more locked safely away in a garden than standing on a wall doing something useful. ART: That's not weakness. Wanting to be safe. COR: I didn't say I wanted to be safe. I said I was sent here regardless of what I wanted. There's a considerable difference.

And the question he asks Arthur, which Arthur cannot answer:

COR: I am the heir to a province that is bleeding out slowly at its own borders, and I am here [...] because someone decided I was too valuable to risk and too weak to trust with my own safety. Do you understand how that sits, Arthur? Every single day? ART: I don't think I fully understand it. But I don't think you're weak, if that helps at all. COR: It doesn't, particularly. But I appreciate the attempt.

His intention:

COR: I intend to get stronger. [...] And when I have, I intend to end whatever the Ruined God's forces are doing at our northern border myself, so that no one else's father ever has the option of sending them somewhere safe instead of trusting them to stand.

The rivalry

Arthur answers the intention with his own, which is the same one he made in a classroom at seven.

ART: You won't be the one who defeats him. [...] The Ruined God. You won't be the one who ends it. I will.

COR: You speak like a child. ART: Maybe. COR: An entire province's worth of trained soldiers hasn't managed to hold that border, and you intend to simply walk up and end the thing responsible for it, on the strength of what, exactly? Sword forms and stubbornness? ART: I don't know exactly. But I intend to.

Then he declares it, formally:

COR: You've declared your intention. I've declared mine. We can't both be the one who ends it, so it seems we're at an impasse. I suppose that makes you my rival, Arthur Lyerm. ART: I can live with that. COR: I imagine you'll have to.

The chapter reads Arthur's reaction as "a small, startled pleasure at being taken seriously by someone who had spent months treating him as barely worth acknowledging".

Afterwards he folds it all away completely, "so completely that Arthur might have doubted the conversation had happened at all if he hadn't just been standing inside it".

His father

Ch. 270. A letter from his mother, in "the particular controlled prose of someone determined not to let grief blur the facts she needed her son to have clearly".

Your father was wounded three weeks ago, at the northern line. He will live. The medics are certain of that much. But something struck his spine during the retreat, and he will not walk again. I did not want you to hear this secondhand.

He reads it three times and then cries without making a sound, and the chapter explains why:

the particular devastating silence of someone who had learned, somewhere along the way, that grief witnessed was grief that could be used against him, and even now, alone in his own locked room with no one else present to witness any of it, could not quite bring himself to abandon the habit.

What he thinks about:

He thought of his father the way he had last seen him, upright, composed, sending his only son away to safety with a formality that had felt, at the time, like rejection rather than protection.

He thought, mostly, of how far away he was, and how little that distance had actually protected anyone.

The reply

He writes back the same night. It contains the only description of his time at Solmere he has given anybody:

I am well here. My studies continue. I have made, against my own expectations, something like friends, and something like a rival, and I find both have taught me things I did not anticipate needing to learn.

And one request:

Please write again before then, if you're able. I would rather hear from you directly than continue receiving news secondhand, three weeks delayed, filtered through whatever the household staff decides I'm prepared to hear.

He plans to return home for winter recess, and says he would return sooner if allowed.

Then he rebuilds his composure, "the particular careful reconstruction he had performed many times before, until nothing remained visible".

Finn hears it

Finn is cutting across the courtyard and catches fragments through a partially open window. He does not knock and does not leave immediately.

He thought of every meal since where Corin had seemed, if anyone had bothered to look closely enough, very slightly diminished in some way none of them had properly named. He had not looked closely enough.

FNN: ...oh.

The second cupcake

Ch. 271. Finn, having overheard the letter, organises the whole group into the same bakery and hands him one.

He eats it "standing at the edge of the group, the same rigid, careful formality Elsie had once described, no thanks offered". Elsie watches:

ELS: Eating in complete silence like it's some kind of trial he's enduring rather than a treat someone gave him because they wanted him to have something nice. ART: I think that might be exactly what it is, for him.

ELS: I hope someone teaches him, eventually. That accepting kindness doesn't have to feel like a trial. ART: Maybe that's what we're doing. Slowly.

Then, on the walk back, he asks why, gets an honest answer, and says the one thing he has not said to anybody:

COR: I don't want to discuss it. FNN: I know. You don't have to.

COR: Thank you.

He gave Elsie nothing for the same gesture in ch. 264. That is the arc in two chapters.

He goes home

Ch. 274, first morning of winter recess. He declines company.

TLN: You don't have to do this alone. COR: I know I don't have to. I want to.

Four days east by coach and on foot, "Astoria's gentle, well-tended countryside giving way slowly to something harder and more weathered". The first watchtower is how he knows he is close.

He does not go to the manor first. He walks the lower districts, and stops at a recruiting post in the market square:

the particular urgent language of a province stretched thin, seeking able bodies for the northern watch, offering terms that had grown considerably more generous [...] than they'd been two years before.

His mother

She abandons her formality entirely at the door, which he says is rare.

MTH: You came. COR: Of course I came. MTH: I wasn't certain the letter would reach you in time.

Her account of his father:

MTH: Healing. Slowly. [...] what remains now is simply learning to live with what the injury has left him. He is not the man who left for the northern line eight months ago. I want you prepared for that, before you see him. COR: I understand. MTH: I don't think you do, quite yet. But you will, soon enough.

And her reading of his father, which is also a reading of Corin:

MTH: He's been asking after your arrival for days, though he'd never admit as much directly. You know how he is. COR: I know how he is.

The chapter ends with him outside the east study door, and going in without waiting for an answer.

some doors, however much company one had available to offer, could only ever be walked through by the person they actually belonged to.

The east study

Ch. 276. His father is in a wheeled chair by the fire with a blanket over his legs, and the first thing that happens is a mismatch:

for one brief, disorienting moment, Corin's mind supplied the memory of his father standing, tall and composed, exactly as he'd always been, before the actual sight of him properly registered.

His father refuses to make it comfortable:

FTH: You're staring. COR: I'm sorry. FTH: Don't apologize for it. I'd rather you look directly than pretend not to notice. Pretending helps no one, least of all me.

FTH: I won't walk again. [...] I'd rather you hear it from me directly, plainly, without either of us dancing around it.

The chapter notes that this is Corin's own register, arriving from the person he got it from.

What he says about Solmere

Two sentences, and one of them is about Arthur:

COR: There's a rival there. Someone I hadn't anticipated finding worth the effort of rivaling. FTH: That sounds promising. A good rival sharpens a person considerably faster than easy company ever manages.

The gap

COR: Does it hurt. FTH: Less than it did. [...] What remains is more inconvenience than pain, most days. COR: That's not really an answer. FTH: No. I suppose it isn't. Give me time, Corin. I've had eight months to grow accustomed to this. You've had four days. We needn't arrive at the same place at the same pace. COR: I understand. FTH: I don't think you fully do. But you will, given time.

That is nearly word for word what his mother said in ch. 274, and Corin notices.

What his father was afraid of

FTH: I wasn't certain, when I wrote, whether you'd resent the summons. Whether being called back to see this- [...] would feel like one more thing being asked of you that you never chose. COR: I'm glad I came too.

The chapter is explicit that this is not the conversation:

The real conversation, he understood, standing alone in the quiet corridor, hadn't happened yet.

The week at home

Ch. 278. The interlude's actual content is domestic and unglamorous on purpose.

He learns to dress his father, badly at first.

FTH: Not like that. You'll want to support the elbow first, or the whole sleeve catches. COR: I'm sorry. FTH: Don't apologize. You've never done this before. Nobody arrives at competence without first arriving at incompetence.

He learns the manor's doorways were not built for a wheeled chair. He learns to transfer his father between chair and bed:

FTH: You're treating me like glass. COR: I don't want to hurt you. FTH: You won't, if you stop being so careful you forget the actual mechanics of what you're doing. Trust your own strength, Corin. You have plenty of it. Using it properly isn't the same as using it recklessly.

And he reads the province's correspondence aloud when his father's hands tire, which is how he starts learning to govern.

What changes in him

COR: I've spent two years resenting being sent away from anything that mattered, and now that I'm finally doing something that matters, I find I don't resent it at all. FTH: That's rather the trick of usefulness, I've found. It rarely announces itself as important while you're doing it. Mostly it simply feels like work. The importance only becomes visible afterward, looking back.

The chapter states the contrast with everything else he has ever trained for:

It required no audience. It earned no glory. Nobody would ever compose songs about a son learning to properly support his father's elbow while dressing him.

But it mattered, in the particular quiet, unglamorous way that mattering sometimes required.

FTH: I know it's not what you imagined your winter recess would involve. COR: No. It's better than what I imagined.

The promise

Ch. 280, his last evening home, in the same chair by the same fire.

COR: I'm going back to Solmere tomorrow, and I'm going to finish my studies there. Two more years. [...] But when it's finished. When I've completed my third year, and chosen my specialization [...] I'm coming home. And I'm going to drive the Ruined God's forces from our northern border myself.

COR: I mean it as a promise. Two years, Father.

He is seventeen here, which the chapter states directly.

What his father says instead of arguing

First, why he was sent away:

FTH: I sent you away two years ago because I could not bear the thought of losing you the way I nearly lost myself. [...] It wasn't about your capability, or lack of it. It was about my own fear, dressed up as prudent judgment.

Then the thing Corin has wanted since ch. 266:

FTH: I could invoke every argument a frightened father has available to him [...] But I watched you these past two weeks, Corin. I watched you learn things I never expected you to need to learn, and do them without complaint, and grow, in ways two years at Solmere apparently couldn't manage on their own. I don't think the boy I sent away exists anymore. I think a different person came home to me instead, and I think that person has earned the right to make a promise like this one, and have it taken seriously.

And he accepts it formally:

FTH: I accept your promise, Corin. Formally, as your father and as the lord this province still, technically, considers me to be. Two years. Return to us, and end what's testing our border, and know that whatever it costs you along the way, you will have done it with my full faith standing behind you, not simply my fear. COR: I won't fail you. FTH: I know you won't. Or if you do, it won't be for lack of trying with everything you have. That's all any promise like this can honestly guarantee.

They shake on it.

This is a deadline the saga has now put on the page. Corin returns to Castelgard at the end of Year 3. The author's notes have a Finger of Calamity attack Solmere in Year 3 and the four of them leave together afterwards, which is not obviously compatible with him going home.

The shared table

Ch. 282. He arrives back three days early and follows the smell of cooking to Bevan's quarters, where Briar is eating.

COR: I wouldn't want to impose. BRR: You're not imposing. Sit down, Corin. [...] BVN: You're not interrupting anything worth protecting from interruption.

He tells them about his father, unprompted, which he has not done for anybody:

the old careful instinct rising automatically, and [he] found, somewhat to his own surprise, that he did not particularly want to guard this the way he guarded most things.

COR: My father was injured. Some months ago, at our northern border. He won't walk again.

COR: I learned a great deal, being there. [...] About what actually needs doing, when difficult things happen to people you care about. BVN: Sounds like a hard kind of learning. COR: The hardest, probably. Also, somehow, the most worthwhile.

The smile

The payoff of ch. 264 and ch. 271, and the chapter treats it as the event of the scene.

It was not his usual composed, careful expression. It reached his eyes properly, unguarded, the particular full warmth of someone caught entirely off guard by simple, unearned happiness.

BRR: You should do that more often. [...] Smile like that. Properly, I mean. Not the polite version you usually manage.

[he] felt the old careful composure attempt to reassert itself automatically, and then [...] simply let it be instead, the smile remaining exactly where it was.

COR: Maybe I will.

Elsie hoped in ch. 271 that somebody would eventually teach him that accepting kindness need not feel like a trial. That is ch. 282.

He beats Dane Whitlock

Ch. 292, dueling showcase, weapons only. Dane has not lost a formal duel at Solmere in two years and gives up a head of height and considerable weight.

Corin cannot trade blows, and Elsie spots that he already knows it:

Corin had stopped blocking directly. He was deflecting instead, redirecting each of Dane's heavy strikes rather than absorbing them, and doing it faster with each successive exchange.

Then he accelerates, and Arthur, who fought him in the autumn, has never seen it:

Arthur had seen Corin fight before, had fought him directly back in the autumn, and had never once seen him move like this.

Final exchange, four seconds: a high feint, a drop, and a clean strike across the midsection.

DAN: That was fast. COR: I've been working on it.

This is ch. 280's promise being kept in visible increments.

The qualification

Sutton, overheard afterwards:

SUT: If abilities had been permitted, that boy wouldn't have lasted eleven seconds. [...] Ashby earned that win fairly, within the format's rules, and he should be proud of it. But he should also understand precisely what those rules were protecting him from.

Why he trains at dawn

Ch. 299. Four weeks of it, alone, before Arthur finds him.

He moved through a sequence Arthur didn't recognize, sharp and considerably faster than anything he'd shown in ordinary lessons, his practice blade cutting angles that seemed designed specifically to compensate for reach he didn't possess.

He tells Arthur the promise, plainly:

COR: Two years. When I finish my third year here, I return home, and I drive the Ruined God's forces from Castelgard's northern border myself.

ART: Do you think you can do it? COR: Not currently. That's rather the point of the mornings.

He also turns out to be an exact instructor, "breaking the pivot down into component movements with the particular clarity of someone who had thought considerably harder about swordwork than most people ever bothered to".

The ninety second match

Ch. 311, round three of the Trial. His opponent throws one projected force, stops, stands with an expression Arthur cannot read, and yields.

BRR: What was that? ART: I don't know. BRR: He didn't even look injured. ART: No. He didn't.

Corin walked off the marked ground without any visible exertion whatsoever, and did not explain, and nobody asked him.

His soul ability has still never been stated. Everything he has been shown using is Alchemy or the blade.

His ability is Severance

Named by ch. 319's title rather than by anybody in it. What it does is described by Yseult in ch. 318, having had it done to her:

YSE: I reached for it and it wasn't there. Not depleted. Not blocked. [...] It was that the place I reach into was no longer connected to me.

YSE: I stood in the middle of the marked ground and reached for my own essence and found that I could not find myself.

Duration, in her case: about four seconds. That is enough for him to walk the whole distance and put a blade at her throat.

It is triggered by two whispered words, and the chapter does not give them:

Corin whispered something. It was two words. Nobody heard them. Elsie, forty feet up, saw his lips move and saw nothing else, and afterward could not have said whether he had spoken at all.

It also explains the ninety-second match in ch. 311, where an opponent threw one attack, stopped, and yielded without being touched.

He wins the Trial without drawing

Ch. 319. He takes the marked ground with his blade at his hip and never draws it.

Dane closes immediately, correctly, to put him deep in the field. Corin severs him mid-approach, ducks the strike at full speed, and puts a heel into his jaw.

the whole arena registered the wrongness of it in the same instant, that a man inside Dane Whitlock's field had just moved like a man who was not inside anything at all.

DAN: What did you do..?

Then he explains Dane's ability to the entire academy, at a volume chosen to reach the top row.

COR: I'll tell them, since you never have. He stops things. That's the whole of it. Anything that moves toward him arrives slower until it stops arriving at all, and nothing you throw and nothing you swing and nothing you are ever reaches him.

COR: Four years of standing still in the middle of a marked ground while people who have worked for every scrap of what they have run themselves to pieces against something they cannot even see, and then walking off and letting them believe they were simply not good enough.

COR: A boy stood eleven feet from you for twenty-four minutes. He had nothing. He has never had anything. He got up nineteen times, and you asked him to yield because you were tired, and when he would not you froze him where he stood and threw a punch at his face.

COR: You are not the strongest thing in this academy. You are the luckiest. You were handed a gift on the day you were born that makes effort irrelevant, and you have spent four years trampling people who try harder in a single morning than you have in your entire life, and you have called it strength.

And then, when Dane will not get up:

COR: STAND UP! I did not take this from you so you could lie down. Stand up and lose properly, in front of all of them, the way every single person you have ever beaten had to.

He ends it with a hooked ankle and the base of his hilt pressed between Dane's shoulder blades, blade still sheathed.

COR: You are a loser. [...] Not today. Not at this tournament. In every regard, in every way that has ever mattered, you are a loser, and I want you to lie there and understand it properly.

Sutton stops him:

SUT: You've won. There's nothing further to be taken here that's worth what taking it will cost you.

The arena does not cheer.

several hundred people arriving separately at the conclusion that they had just watched the Trial of Power be won and had not enjoyed watching it.

Afterwards

Ch. 320. He stops coming to the dawn yard for three days, appears at lessons, answers when spoken to, sits at the table's far end and leaves.

On the fourth morning he is back, and he and Arthur train fifty minutes in complete silence.

COR: Your left shoulder's dropping. ART: I know. COR: It's going to keep dropping if you keep favoring it. ART: I know. COR: Right.

What Beckwith does to him

Ch. 323, by the window at The Turning Wheel, after two days of sacks.

COR: I've been sitting here for forty minutes and I have thought about the mill for thirty-eight of them.

COR: That the eastern platform will fill again by autumn. That Odell Crane will be fifty-nine next year and still carrying more than I can. That his daughter has been doing four years of accounts at midnight and nobody has ever once told her the conversion table should be written down.

COR: My family owns considerably more land than this village sits on. I have never once, in my entire life, thought about who carries the sacks.

Arthur says nothing, because there is nothing useful to say to it.

Ch. 324 has him take it further, to Rufus Hale, a stranger with his feet in a stream.

COR: I've a great many plans. I've had them since I was twelve. I intend to go home, and I intend to hold our northern border, and I intend to be the sort of lord that people are glad to have. RUF: And? COR: And I have never, in a single one of those plans, included a person like Odell Crane. Not once. I have thought about soldiers and borders and the men who would ride with me, and I have never thought about the man who grinds the flour that feeds them.

COR: I've been planning to protect a province I have not, until this week, actually looked at.

That is the ch. 280 promise being enlarged rather than abandoned.

Later, from the author's notes

Marked as planning rather than text.

• He advances deep into the Trial of Power.
• His father is injured, and a flagged interlude follows his winter homecoming.
• Ch. 323's summary has him admit to Arthur that "he has never once thought about who carries the sacks", which reads as the far end of an arc that starts here.
• He is one of the four who leave Solmere together at the end of Acts 12 to 14.

See ../volumes/09-the-scholar.md.