The first thing I learned about general studies was that nobody was going to study anything until they'd finished looking at us.
Our classroom was a long room on the second floor of one of the stone buildings, with tall windows down one side and rows of desks facing a slate board. At the very front, two desks stood side by side with a narrow aisle between them, and both had cushions on their chairs.
Nobody had to tell me whose those were.
Each of them had two plain desks beside it. At the Academy, escorts study too: every lesson, at the desks next to their lord's, so that wherever he sits, they're never more than an arm away. Liesel had found this out from the notice board and been delighted. Apparently a princess with lessons can't be put in a gown.
The boy with the inky fingers had already taken the other cushion. He'd opened his book before he sat down, and he didn't look up when I came in. Everyone else did.
Every head in the room turned at once, like a field of wheat when the wind changes. Then, very slowly, every head turned again, from me to him and back, as if they were trying to decide which of us to look at first.
I sat down on my cushion. Liesel and Wren sat down at the two plain desks on my other side.
I'd counted to three before the first girl arrived.
"Lord Fabian?" She was tall and freckled, and she'd clearly been sent by several friends who were now watching from a safe distance. "Is it true you healed the whole wall at Greymark?"
"Not the whole wall—"
"Most of it," said Liesel.
That broke the dam.
"Is it true you healed Her Highness Cordelia?"
"Well, she was bitten, and—"
"Yes," said Liesel.
"Is it true you were Green before the tide?"
"About a week bef—"
"He's very modest," said Liesel.
"I'm not—"
"Very modest."
A smaller girl edged forward, pink to the ears. "My lord, are you... promised? To anyone?"
"He's spoken for," said Liesel.
"By whom?"
"Three sisters." Liesel smiled pleasantly. "One of them burns letters."
The small girl went pinker and retreated. Somebody else asked whether it was true that Her Highness was my escort, then realized whom she was asking it in front of, and went very white.
"Not today," said Liesel kindly. "Today I'm an escort."
I did try. I really did. But every answer I started, Liesel finished, and most of the time she finished it better. After a while I gave up and just nodded at the right moments, which seemed to be all anyone wanted from me anyway.
Across the aisle, the boy with the inky fingers was having a very different morning.
"My lord?" A pretty girl with ribbons in her braid leaned over his desk. "What are you reading?"
"A book."
"What's it about?"
He turned a page. "Water."
"Is it... good?"
"Yes."
"Would you like to walk in the garden at lunch, my lord? I could show you the—"
"No."
She waited, as if more might be coming. Nothing was. She went back to her friends with the face of someone who has knocked on a door and heard the lock click.
Two more tried. One offered to carry his books. ("No.") One asked whether he liked music. ("Sometimes.") By the time the third gave up, there was a space around his desk you could have parked a cart in.
He didn't seem to mind. If anything, he seemed to read faster.
I liked him already.
When my own crowd finally thinned, mostly because Liesel had started saying "The bell's coming" in a voice so like Lady Severine's that two girls actually said "Yes, my lady," I got up and crossed the aisle.
"Hello."
He looked up. He had a thin, serious face, untidy dark hair that kept falling into gray eyes, and a coat buttoned one hole off all the way down. He looked at me for exactly as long as it takes to turn a page.
"Hello."
"I'm Fabian. Valcrest. From Greymark."
"I know."
"...Does everyone?"
"Board."
Right. The notice board. Of course he'd read it. I suspected he'd read the whole thing, including the part about where to leave laundry.
"And you are?"
"Ambrose."
"Ambrose what?"
"Penhallow."
"What are you reading, Ambrose Penhallow?"
He considered the question. Then he turned the book around so I could see the cover.
On the Proper Management of Ditches.
"Is it good?"
Ambrose thought about it seriously.
"Extraordinarily," he said.
It was the longest word he'd said all morning. I suspected it had cost him something.
Short answers don't bother me. I was raised by a woman whose idea of a speech is "Spar." I'd just spent nine days on the road with Wren. Compared to them, Ambrose Penhallow was practically chatty.
"I'll take your word for it," I said.
He nodded, as if that were the correct response, and went back to his ditches.
Then the bell rang.
Ambrose's escorts slid into the plain desks beside his, two broad, patient women who looked like they'd been carrying his books for years. The crowd melted back to its seats. The door opened.
And the room went a different kind of quiet.
Our class mistress was somewhere in her late twenties. She had honey-brown hair in a loose braid over one shoulder, warm hazel eyes, and the kind of face and figure that the heroines in Hana's storybooks always had. Her gown was plain dove gray, buttoned neatly, and it did absolutely nothing to change that.
In Hana's storybooks, men lined up at the door of a woman like that. Princes fought duels over her. Poets wrote her terrible poems.
In Octavia, men don't line up for anyone. Women do the lining up, and the men pick.
I couldn't imagine her waiting long in a line like that.
Behind me, very faintly, two girls were whispering.
"...five introductions, my cousin said. Five lords. She walked out of every one—"
"Shh."
I didn't hear the rest. The class mistress set down her books and smiled at us, and the whispering stopped as if someone had pinched out a candle.
"Good morning," she said. Her voice was soft and clear, the kind that never needs to be raised. "I am Lady Amara. I will be your class mistress this year."
She looked around the room, girl by girl, and her smile was warm for every one of them.
Then it reached the two cushioned chairs by the window.
It didn't change. Not at all. Her smile stayed exactly as it was, which was somehow how I knew that something behind it had.
"We'll begin with introductions," said Lady Amara. "Ladies, your name and your house. My lords..." The smallest pause. "Your name, your house, and your blessing."
The introductions took a long time. One by one, each girl stood, said her name and her house, and sat. I tried to remember everyone and managed about four: the freckled girl, the girl with the ribbons, a very serious girl who announced her house like a battle cry, and the small pink one, who whispered.
Then the introductions reached our corner.
Liesel stood. "Liesel," she said, and sat down again.
Lady Amara didn't ask for her house. Nobody needed her to.
Wren stood next. "Wren. Of House Valcrest." She said it so quietly that only the front row could have heard, and sat down so fast her chair squeaked.
Then it was my turn.
I stood up.
"You may remain seated, my lord," said Lady Amara. "The gentlemen usually do."
"Everyone else stood, my lady."
There was a pause. She looked at me the way Hana looks at a coin from the market when she thinks it might be false.
"...As you like," she said.
"Fabian Valcrest. Of House Valcrest, in Greymark." I took a breath. "Elysia."
A murmur went through the room, the same wind through the same wheat. Two girls near the front touched their foreheads, the way people do at the shrine.
"The Saint of Greymark," said Lady Amara.
"Yes, my lady."
"We've heard a great deal about you, Lord Fabian."
"I hope some of it was good."
"All of it." She wrote something in her book. "That's what makes me curious."
I sat down, feeling as though I'd just taken a test without knowing what it was for, or whether I'd passed.
Ambrose didn't stand. He didn't look up from his ditches, either.
"Ambrose Penhallow," he said. "Nerissa."
"Your house, my lord?"
"Penhallow."
A pause.
"...That's the house," Ambrose added helpfully.
Somebody at the back giggled and turned it into a cough. Lady Amara wrote it down without a flicker.
Nerissa.
I looked at the ink on his fingers. Father's goddess. For no reason I could name, I wondered whether Ambrose could fill two cups at once.
General studies, it turned out, ran all day on the first day of term. The battle class, Lady Amara told us, would start tomorrow.
So we studied. Lady Amara handed out books and explained the rules of her classroom, which were many. Then she began on the history of the Eight, which I mostly knew from Odile already, except with more dates.
I took notes. Badly. Beside me, Liesel took notes the way she does everything, fast and with a great many little drawings in the margins, and Wren wrote down every word Lady Amara said, very carefully, with the tip of her tongue between her teeth. Across the aisle, Ambrose took notes in small, perfect handwriting, very fast, without seeming to look at the page.
About an hour in, while Lady Amara had her back to us, writing dates on the slate, he made a mistake.
I only noticed because I was watching his hand, trying to work out how anyone wrote that small. His pen slipped. A fat blot of ink landed in the middle of a word.
Ambrose didn't sigh. He didn't reach for a blotter. He simply touched one fingertip to the page. Under it, half hidden by his hand, a White circle opened, no bigger than a coin, and the blot lifted. A tiny dark bead of ink rose off the paper, wobbled in the air for a heartbeat, and slid onto his fingertip like a drop of rain onto a leaf.
The word underneath was perfectly clean.
I stared at him.
"That's casting," I whispered.
Ambrose wiped his finger on his sleeve. That explained the sleeve. "Small."
"The board doesn't say except small."
He turned his head and looked at me properly, for the first time all day. Gray eyes, very steady.
"...Hm," said Ambrose.
It was a whole splash, too. A White cast costs the same whether it closes a wound or lifts a blot.
"A whole splash," I whispered. "On a blot."
Ambrose considered his page. "Ugly blot."
Then he went back to writing.
I didn't tell anyone. I'd like to say it was loyalty to my new friend, but mostly it was this: every night that week, I'd lain in my own bed with the door shut and emptied a whole pitcher into my own chest. If Ambrose's desk didn't count as a battle yard, neither did my pillow.
The board doesn't say except small. It doesn't say except at bedtime, either.
Twenty minutes later, I made a blot of my own. A big one, right across Terran. Before I could do anything about it, a thin hand reached across the aisle, touched the page, and a coin of White light flickered under one fingertip. The blot was gone.
Ambrose wiped his finger on his sleeve without looking up.
"That was another whole splash," I whispered. "Thank you."
"Small," said Ambrose.
As far as I was concerned, I had made a friend. I wasn't sure anyone had told him.
The dining hall was full.
On my first day, there'd been room to spare. Now every bench was packed, every voice was talking at once, and the noise rolled up into a ceiling high enough to lose a bird in and came back down twice as loud.
It went quiet when I walked in. Not all at once: the quiet spread out from the door, table by table, like a ripple across a pond.
Then, without a single word, a whole stretch of bench in front of me emptied.
Girls picked up their plates and shifted down, and down, and down, until there was a gap on the nearest long table as wide as a cart, with a wall of politely averted faces on either side of it.
"Not a problem," said Liesel, and sat down in the middle of it.
I could have gone up the three steps to the young lords' table, behind its carved screen. Nobody would have stopped me. But I'd sat at a long table on my first day, and I didn't see why a full hall should change that.
Wren sat down on my other side. A moment later, a book landed on the table at the far end of the gap, followed by Ambrose, followed by his two escorts. He didn't say why. I didn't ask.
The food was good. The company was a hall full of girls pretending very hard not to listen.
"Keep your voice down," Liesel murmured, barely moving her lips. "Half this hall can read lips. The other half can read me."
So we talked quietly.
"What do we know?" I said.
"Cassian." Liesel tore her bread in half. "Blue fire. Throws hard. Likes an audience. Hates being laughed at." She dipped the bread. "He goes red, and then he throws harder, and when he throws harder, he throws worse. Angry men miss."
"He didn't miss me."
"He'd have hit you if I hadn't been there. That's not the same as aiming well."
Fair.
"His second escort," said Wren.
We both looked at her. Wren had been eating in silence, the way she always does, and I'd assumed she was mostly thinking about her stew.
"Spear, Young Master. Left-handed." She speared a carrot, very precisely. "Favors her right knee on the stairs. Old injury."
There was a pause.
"Wren," I said. "That's more words than you've said since Greymark."
Wren went pink and hummed at her carrot.
"And Ilse?" said Liesel.
Nobody answered for a moment.
"She won't want to, Young Master," said Wren quietly. "She'll do it anyway."
I didn't ask how she knew. I had a feeling every escort in this hall knew.
"We don't know Dame Valeria's rules yet," Liesel went on. "Whether it ends when someone yields, or falls, or the sand runs out. Whether you're even allowed to heal in the middle of it."
"Then we ask her tomorrow."
"Then we ask her tomorrow. And until we know—" Liesel pointed her bread at me. "You stay at the back."
"Cassian wants me. If I stay at the back, he'll go through you to get to me."
"That's what escorts are for."
"I'm not going to hide behind—"
"Saint."
"Young Master."
They said it at exactly the same moment, in exactly the same tone. It was like being scolded in harmony.
"...Fine," I said. "The back."
Liesel narrowed her eyes.
"Mostly," I added.
At the far end of the gap, Ambrose didn't look up from his book.
"Fire mages always go for the healer first," he said.
All three of us turned.
Ambrose turned a page. "Everyone knows that."
Then he went back to his ditches, as if he hadn't said anything at all.
"That," said Liesel, after a moment, "is the most words he's said all day."
"He's right, though."
He was. Which was exactly why the back wasn't going to be as safe as everyone wanted it to be.
And then there was the other problem. The one we couldn't talk about with Wren sitting right there.
I looked at Liesel. Liesel looked at me. Then she very casually took another bite of bread, and I heard her voice in my chest instead.
(You know what I'm going to say.)
(You can't hit him the way you hit the oak.)
(I know.)
(And if you get burned—)
(It'll close.) A pause. (In front of the whole Academy.)
That was the trouble with 「Covenant」. Liesel had the bond's strength and the bond's regeneration, and a battle yard full of watching girls was the worst place in the kingdom to show either.
(So I cast on you,) I said. (Every time you're hurt. Even if you don't need it.)
Liesel stopped chewing.
(Especially if I don't need it,) she said slowly. (A White circle, and the whole yard sees the Saint healing his escort. Nobody counts how fast.)
(It's a splash every time.)
(It's cover. Cheap cover.)
(Good,) said Naomi.
Of course she was listening. Everyone bound hears every word.
(And hit him,) said Marika. (Not like the oak. But HIT him.)
(Don't let him burn you,) said Hana. (Either of you. Any of you. Are you eating?)
(We're eating, Sis Hana.)
(And if they're both hurt at once,) I said, before I could lose my nerve, (I could do them both in one cast. Like Father's cups.)
The bond went quiet.
(That's new,) said Naomi.
(...It's new.)
(Then you know the rule.)
I did. New things on a full pitcher. With Liesel in the room. And I tell her first.
(I'm telling you first,) I said.
Another pause. A longer one.
(Tomorrow,) said Naomi. (In the yard, where it's allowed. Full pitcher. Liesel watches.) A beat. (Then tell me how much.)
(Yes, Big Sis.)
Across the table, Wren looked from me to Liesel, the way she does whenever the two of us go quiet together and stare at nothing. She never asks. She just went back to her stew.
I was halfway through mine when Liesel put her spoon down.
She was looking past me, at the tall windows at the end of the hall. Outside, the sky had gone deep blue, and somewhere past the long stone buildings, something flashed in the dusk.
Blue.
Then again. Blue.
Somebody was in the battle yard after hours, where casting was allowed. Somebody who threw hard.
Behind the carved screen at the top of the three steps, nobody had complained about their coat all supper. Nobody had said anything at all.
Now I knew why.
Three days. Lord Cassian had already started counting.