There are signs beforehand, and the strongest is that sleep goes wrong. Most people who show signs never awaken, and there's never a day when they find out. An awakening is either trained, with a House working on the child beforehand, or wild, with nobody involved, and each has its price. Every practitioner comes out of it carrying three innate workings they can't remember learning, and those three are the deepest thing about them.

The signs

Something happens to a person before their connection opens, and you can see it if you know what to look for.

Sleep goes to an extreme, either far too much of it or almost none, with nothing in between. That's the strongest sign and the one everyone agrees on, and every midwife I asked named it first without any prompting from me.

Past that the agreement thins out, though a few things come up again and again. Appetite swings hard one way. Animals act oddly around the person, dogs especially. There can be a spell of near-clumsiness lasting weeks, when someone usually well coordinated keeps almost dropping things. And there's an absence of surprise, the strangest of them and the hardest to describe, where the person stops being startled by things that ought to startle them, can't say why, and quite often hasn't noticed.

You can't rely on any of the secondary signs, since all of them turn up constantly in children who never awaken. I've written them down because the people who watch children for a living take them seriously, and those people are right more often than the Houses are.

Who is better at spotting it

Village midwives, comfortably.

It's an unpopular finding. A House tender is far better than a midwife at working with one particular child, but a midwife has seen eight hundred children where a tender has seen forty.

The Houses brought rigour to the single case and lost hold of the one figure that really matters, which is how often the signs come to nothing. A tender will give you a considered answer, where a woman who has delivered three generations in one parish will simply give you a number.

Most of them never awaken

About one in forty does, by the folk reckoning, and nobody has a firm figure.

That means most people who show every sign go on to live an entirely ordinary life, and nobody ever comes to tell them it hasn't worked.

I talked with a man of fifty-one in the western stands who showed every sign for two years as a boy and was visited twice by a Vaulin tender. He put it better than I could:

"The worst bit isn't the day you find out, because there isn't one. It just stops being mentioned."

There are a great many people like him. They were watched and hoped over, then grew up ordinary, and nobody has written a word about them.

Trained and wild

An awakening comes about in one of two ways.

Trained means a House has been working on the child beforehand. Someone watched them and took the measure of their temper, then did something to the process while the connection was still opening. The child knows what happened and what it's called, and knows they owe someone for it.

Wild means something broke them open, a fire or a fall or a death, a moment when they needed something they didn't have and got it anyway. Nobody arranged it and nobody explained it afterwards, and plenty of them spend years assuming they were just lucky.

Neither is the better way. Each side has its own account in which theirs is plainly superior, and neither account survives meeting the other.

The three

Every practitioner I've documented can do three things they can't remember learning.

The Lorekeepers call them foundations. I use their word here because it's dull, and because every other word belongs to somebody. Each House has its own name for them: first roots, groundwork, first forms, opening steps, the founding chord.

A foundation is never performed. A House technique has steps in an order, learned from someone, and you can watch the work happening. A foundation has no steps, and the practitioner never reaches for it. I once watched an Ironvale duellist do something I'd have called impossible, and when I asked her to walk me through it she looked at me in honest confusion and said, "Through what?"

They aren't the biggest thing a practitioner can do, either. I had that wrong for a year. They're always there and they cost nothing. They don't fail on a bad day either.

How a House puts one in a child

The tenders are insistent that it puts nothing in, and they're particular about the verb.

An opening that's in the middle of opening has no shape of its own. It's the only moment in a practitioner's life when that's true, and it doesn't last long. During that window a House holds a template against it, the opening grows into the template, and what the child ends up with is as much theirs as their own hands.

Wild against placed

The difference is real.

Wild foundations are shaped by the Source. Every fire-connected wild awakening produces three things that are recognisably fire. They're also stronger than the placed forms they most resemble and reach further, though they're harder to predict. Each one takes something from the person, permanently and without asking. A wild foundation that makes someone impossible to argue with works just as well when they're wrong.

Placed foundations are reliable and easy to read. They do the same thing every time, which is the whole reason a House would place one, and they take nothing.

So placement leaves a practitioner no more powerful than they'd otherwise have been. It makes them steadier and safer, and readable to the people they'll work beside. What it costs them is the ceiling. I've never heard a House explain it to a child in those terms.

When the House aims wrong

It happens often. Ironvale aims highest and misses most, and does so on purpose.

When it happens the form changes, bending over the years toward the person actually carrying it, until it does something that person needs.

Those years aren't comfortable. While the form rebuilds itself it's unreliable and answers wrongly. Some carry that badly and spend a decade sure they were handed something they weren't good enough to hold, while others take it entirely in their stride. The difference seems to come down to whether anyone explained the process to them beforehand, and the Houses vary enormously in whether they bother.

It's slow and it's nobody's fault, and the practitioners it happens to are some of the most inventive people I've written about.