Glaciana Frostweave wanted to be the first ice mage ever crowned tournament champion. The qualifiers were three weeks away. She had no legal place to train. She practiced where she could. Behind a rented shed, she raised her gloved hands and pulled cold from the air. Frost crawled up a fence post. Then the spell slipped. A jagged spike burst sideways and split a water barrel. Ice water flooded her boots. She had done this for months. Her magic came raw and unstable. Every arena she asked turned her away. Fire warps the floors, they said. Ice cracks the stone and cuts the students. No space for a cold mage. Without a training hall, her spells would stay wild. Wild spells lost matches. She wiped her hands on her skirt and made a decision. She would ask the one teacher who had never laughed at her element. The Arcanum School rose at the edge of town, its spires sharp against the gray sky. Glaciana climbed the worn steps and found the old wizard in a narrow courtyard. Professor Aldric Thornweave stood under a broad maple, its branches heavy with snow that no autumn should allow. He was watering the roots. He did not look up. "You freeze everything you touch," he said. "The fence. The barrel. Your own feet, I'd guess." Glaciana stopped. "You watched me." "I watch anyone who wants to break ground I've spent fifty years cooling." He tapped his staff against the frozen soil. The crystal at its tip glowed faint blue. "This courtyard holds cold. The tree keeps it. A mage trained here years ago, same element as yours. She failed the qualifiers." Glaciana's chest tightened. "I won't." "Then you need discipline, not an arena." He studied her through round glasses. "I have one open spot under my instruction. The arena masters respect my seal. Train under me, and no one bars you again." "What's the cost?" "You obey me. You practice where I say. And you don't enter the qualifiers until I judge you ready." He turned a withered leaf in his fingers. "If I say you're not ready, you don't go." Glaciana weighed it. The qualifiers wouldn't wait. If he held her back, her goal died in his courtyard. But untrained, she would shatter the first stone floor and be disqualified. "I accept," she said. The professor pressed his staff into her palm. Cold ran up her arm, sharper than her own. The crystal pulled her magic outward, then steadied it. The spike she'd failed to cast snapped into a clean needle of ice. It held. "Good," he said. "Now do it a thousand more times." Glaciana had her training ground. She also had a master who could cancel her entire dream with one word. The arena doors would open for her now. Whether she'd be allowed to walk through them belonged to him.