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do we stay here?” Leona asked.
    “After you’re training you can choose your assignment. We may have suggestions based on your skills, and there might even be special cases and ventures you’re needed for, but that will be determined when you complete your training.
    “Your training doesn’t stop here. Once you’ve mastered your skills here, you will go out on circuit with your mentor. For a year you will be gone, and they will teach you without the safety of Haven to live as a harbinger. We will see then how well your training has taught you.”
    “And what will we be doing in that year?” Abagail asked Fen.
    “Tending to outlying villages, hunting for more plague bearers, putting down darklings and killing whatever harbingers of darkness you run across.”
    “That’s a lot,” Leona said. Her face was pale and her hands balled together in her lap.
    “But we don’t let you go out on circuit until we are sure you are ready,” Rowan told her.
    “You’ve come here on your own, you’ve faced many things,” Fen said. There was a note of wonder in his voice that they’d made it at all. “If it wasn’t for the fact that you are untrained and Leona didn’t even know until last night that she was a harbinger, I would think you could go on circuit now.”
    “But you can’t,” Rowan said as if she were cutting off any argument before it could start.
    “You can’t,” Fen nodded with a smile. “And you have much training ahead of you. Please know that my door is always open to you if you have anything you need to ask, or anything you want to report.
    “I wish you luck with your studies, and welcome to Haven.”

    It was indeed a busy day. Abagail learned the middle section of Haven, where it seemed most populated, was where the trainees and their mentors lived. The top level was designated for official buildings: homes of the council members and even the council hall.
    The second level was more functional. This was the level where they dealt with the day to day upkeep of Haven. There was livestock kept there for food. The level served other functions as well, like the storing and chopping of wood for heating. Rowan took them over to a large brick building with a glass roof and many windows through which Abagail could see all kinds of plants; vents along the walls helped to keep the flow of air into and out of the greenhouse in check.
    While they didn’t actually go into the building, they got a really good feel for it just from peeking through windows. Before they left the greenhouse, Gil joined them.
    “Where is Rorick?” Rowan asked.
    “I left him at the barracks, he wanted to get started, so they are setting him up with a trainer today and maybe even some guard duty shifts.” Gil shrugged. “I don’t really know. You know how that place makes me feel. When Ephram said he’d take over showing him the ropes, I hightailed it out of there!”
    Rowan nodded and turned back to Abagail and Leona.
    “And now the classrooms,” Rowan said. “While we don’t teach like regular schools, we do have specific buildings for the different kinds of training we do here.”
    The classrooms were individual round buildings called yurts set around a circular courtyard. The noise of students sparring in the central courtyard under the watchful eye of a gnarled looking man and snippets of conversation and laughter from students sat around on benches between buildings was near deafening here.
    “How do you ever concentrate enough to get any work done?” Leona wondered.
    “The actual buildings are wyrded to be soundproof.”
    “There’s no specific function to any building,” Gil said, brushing a lank lock of brown hair from his eyes. “But some of the buildings have kind of gravitated toward one purpose or another over the years. Some teachers prefer one spot to leave all of their work supplies, so you have this building closest to us that’s for wyrded working. That building on the other side is where Huginn