Dawn Academy

The academy trains Battle Power foundations for noble cadets out of Morant. Sedekamp and Patt tour every academy in the city before tavern gossip points them at this one — «nobody knows a Lorister Norton, sir, but ask the south-side taverns».

The Dawn Academy is one of the academies of cosmopolitan Morant, where noble cadets lay the foundations of Battle Power. Morant is called the City of Academies: seven of the continent's ten best schools are here, and the Dawn Academy is one of those ten, jealous of its standing. Cadets train Battle Power and belong, among other things, to the academy's Fencing Club.

It was here, ten years earlier, that the Norton family caravan brought Little Locke and left the inheritance papers in the academy office. At the academy Lorist is a Black Iron third-star cadet when Sedekamp and Patt tour every academy in the city hunting for him; the man they sought was pointed out in the south-side taverns (ch 41, 45). Here too the core of the future House Norton came together — Redi, Yuri, disgruntled veterans and Fencing Club members whom Yuri proposes to call north (ch 47).

Before leaving Lorist buys up a great many books at the academy — travel journals and treatises from which he later draws ideas (snow huts, methods of salt-making, fortress defence). The academy remains for the characters a symbol of the peaceful student life left behind for the harsh North.