“We’re sitting here,” Laure said, stalking past me and plopping herself down in a seat near the middle of the class.
I supposed it could’ve been a worse selection.
More students filed in after us, alone or in groups of twos and threes, filling up the empty seats and setting out their books, ink bottles, and pens. I did the same for myself as well as Laure, to keep her from getting ink on her fingers and touching her face as she had proved prone to doing in our formative schooling years. Even worse would be spilling ink down the front of her dress. Seeing as how we were not studying to become artists, such a detail would be unforgivable.
I tugged my pocket watch from its hiding place, checking the time. It was only a few minutes until half past the hour; I did hope our professor wouldn’t be late. Then I arranged my pens in order from smallest to largest on the desk in front of me before deciding it would probably be better to group them by color.
At half past, the professor entered the room. He was on the tall side, with a ferocious red mustache that looked like the brush Gaeth had used to unstop my chimney. I could feel Laure staring at him, and under any other circumstance I might have done the same, were it not for the younger man he’d approached to confer with beside his lecturer’s podium—someone who’d been sitting there all this time, I realized, and I’d been too caught up in trying to choose a proper seat to notice him right away.
He had dark hair that fell into his eyes, and freckles all over his cheeks and nose—something I had always been disappointed that Laure had never exhibited, not even in the height of summer. (Laure did not freckle; instead, she burned.) The young man in question was clearly older than the rest of the first-years, though not so old as to be a professor, and when he turned his head to pick up a sheaf of notes I could see a darling thumbprint of ink against his pale neck.
Somehow, it was more endearing to me on him than it ever was on Laure. I could imagine him resting his hand there dreamily, and I tugged at the collar around my own neck at the very thought.
“Well, I see that most of you are here already, so why don’t we get started?” the professor with the red mustache said, wringing his large, meaty hands together and leaning back against his podium instead of taking his place behind it. “This here’s theory and history of the magicians, so if you’re in the wrong place, feel free to leave now. No harm done; I won’t take it personally. Nor will I even remember your faces as you file out, I’m sure. I’m Professor Ducante, and this is my lecturer’s assistant, Hal, and the answer to the question that’s burning in your fresh little minds is yes, I will be requiring you to take notes. I don’t care how good your mind is; memory’s no match for a pen and paper. I’d best hear you all scratching away mightily for the next hour and a half, and if your hand’s not cramping by the end of each session, you’re just not doing it right. I hope that’s clear.”
Hal, I repeated privately to myself, the name thoroughly unremarkable and somehow perfect all the same. He’d given a shy little wave upon being introduced, and I’d felt my pulse speed up in reply. It was a reaction he’d never know he’d inspired, of course, but it was there all the same, unmistakable to me. I drew in a deep breath, no longer prepared or even listening remotely to what the professor was saying, outlining the basics of the course we were to be taking, no doubt.
And I usually so enjoyed outlines.
I was in the middle of observing the way Hal drew his thumb nervously up and down a crease in one of his papers when Laure elbowed me sharply in the ribs.
I turned to her, distraught and also a little indignant. She couldn’t have known already what I was thinking. It was just too unfair.
“That’s Hal,” she whispered, eyes wide as though she thought that meant something to me. A little of what I was thinking must’ve shown on my face, too, since she rolled her eyes and looked as though she wished to elbow me much harder. “The Hal. Are you even listening? The one who came here and saved the city, not to mention all the magicians?”
The gears in my brain began to click and whir once more—clogged as they’d been by Hal’s freckles and the gentle manner in which he stood to one side observing the rest of us, even making his own notes from time to time. This simple soul was the man who’d saved Thremedon? That made him a hero, on top of being everything else, which added up to a great deal in my eyes.
It was almost too much to bear, really.
“I just want to say that I’m looking forward to getting to know you, and that if you ever have any problems, I’m … that’s what I’m here for,” Hal was in the midst of saying, obviously picking up on a cue from the professor that I’d missed simply because I hadn’t been paying attention to him. His voice was gentle. If Laure had made me miss some of his speech with her gossip, I would—well, I wouldn’t be able to do anything to her in revenge, but oh, how I would sulk! “Other than that, I hope that you enjoy the class and—if you don’t mind my saying so—welcome to Thremedon.”
Something loosened in my chest, like a whole host of doves being set free at a king’s coronation, when Hal finally smiled at the class. He was a far cry from the statues outside, a thin coating of snow now frosting their austere features—hard men carved from hard stone and ranged together like the Cobalt Mountains themselves to ward against any invading danger. Hal was small, his nature warm and inviting. His wrists were delicate, and he was the first person to welcome us to Thremedon without also trying to relieve us of our valuables. Besides which, it was thanks to him we were even here in the first place.
Now that my gratitude had become more personal in nature, it was stronger than ever before. All the awfulness of my cramped little room, the dust in every corner, the taffy on the dresser handle, the pot in the chimney, and the foul man who had attempted to steal my things seemed insignificant in the face of this new life I was starting.
Something dropped against my desk and I looked over at it to find a crumpled ball of paper. Its inelegance told me at once it was a present of some sort from Laure, and I nervously unfolded it, spreading it out beside the rest of my notepaper, attempting to smooth the wrinkles.
CUT IT OUT!!! it read in Laure’s unmistakable hand. To emphasize her point, she had even underscored “out” three times, and employed a matching three exclamation marks.
“You up there,” the professor said, pausing midlecture, with a voice so sharp it commanded all our attention. I swallowed miserably, stomach swooping in terror. Was it possible he had noticed Laure’s indiscretion, and we were in trouble on our very first day, not even halfway into our very first hour?
I waited for the blade to fall, but somehow, it did not.
“I’d like to see your pens moving,” Ducante continued. “That goes for all of you. Since this is history of the magicians, I daresay the history I’m giving you might just be the most important part.”
My fingers twitched and began moving of their own accord, neatly marking down the date in the top right corner of my paper before I began to copy down, word for word, everything our professor was saying. At that moment, somehow, Hal looked up into the audience of the lecture hall and met my eyes—as though he had sensed my fear and sought to ease it somehow.
Only a bare moment later he looked away, but I was content in knowing he had seen my face even if he would not remember it.
That evening, when I pulled out my notes to look them over just before tucking the sheets around myself in bed, I would not remember a single word written there, in my spindly writing, as it had been said. My mind—and my heart—were far too full of other things for that, I was afraid.
And so began my first love in Thremedon.
ADAMO
I wasn’t in a good mood at all that morning. Part of it was because it was the start of a new term, and, even though I hated leaving a job unfinished, I hadn’t managed to teach my class from the previous term anything worth a damn. I guessed that was weighing on my conscience just a little bit, not to mention how much the idea of doing it for anot
her two months was sticking in my throat like a fish bone.
Another part of it was the dream I’d had in that weird part of dawn when dreaming gets a little too keen and a little too detailed for a man’s liking—about the day we’d received word from whatever lackey was in charge that day that the dragons, our dragons, were being disassembled, and no, we wouldn’t be seeing what remained of them again.
But never let it be said Owen Adamo spent his time lingering over dreams. He just took his crankiness out on the poor cannon fodder first-years in his lecture room, instead.
My lecturer’s assistant was a Margrave’s son who’d gotten out of joining up for the war effort because of some loophole about the importance of his studies meaning he was needed more at home than out there on the field. It’d worked out well for him to exploit it because it was doubtful he’d have been able to find the balls to actually kill a man in real combat. He was obsessed with strategy nonetheless and considered himself something of an expert on the matter, which meant he didn’t like my style of teaching one bit. His name was Radomir—not Radimor, as I’d called him for the first two-thirds of our first term together because I didn’t have room in my head for the names of people I didn’t like or trust—and I found that ignoring him worked best.
I cleared my throat. It was one minute before the lecture was supposed to start, and the last of the lost, lonely little stragglers were filing in and taking their seats. I could feel a few of them staring at me, no doubt taking this class so they could gossip about the man teaching it rather than discuss the fine art of war or anything. Anyway, it was obvious that near to none of them had the head for any decent thinking. There was one in the back who was already asleep, and I didn’t know if I was more or less disposed to liking him than I was to the few who’d crowded around the front row, leaning forward like so many carrion birds, ready to eat up what I said and never once question any of it.
But it wasn’t too fair-minded of me to judge them before they proved they were the idiots I suspected, now was it? There were a few keen faces among the rabble—a girl with red hair and sharp green eyes and some ink on her nose being one of them, as well as a towhead who might’ve served himself none too bad in the war itself if he hadn’t clearly missed the age of conscription by a year. Maybe these ones could prove me wrong, and I welcomed the challenge. If you could call it that.
“Right,” I said. “Get all those papers and pens and inkwells and the like off the desks; there won’t be any note-taking in this class. Not today, and not for the next two months.”
I enjoyed the moment of shock they all displayed at that, then waited for the chaos of paper being shuffled and inkwells being bottled up to calm down, so I could have the rest of their full attention, or whatever half attention passed for it.
“I’m no professor,” I said. “If you learn only one thing this term, which you just might, I’m certain it’ll be that. I’m going to be calling on the lot of you at random, and the way you pass is through contribution. Thinking, then saying something. Extra points for anyone who says something not necessarily smart, but interesting. So I’m expecting you all to listen. You lot in the back, tell me to speak up if you can’t hear anything.”
Out of nowhere, a hand lifted. It was the first willingly raised hand of the term, and I quietly said a prayer that it wasn’t some know-it-all looking to impress the rest of the class while fluffing up his own ego. I took the owner of the hand in.
It was the girl I’d had hopes for.
“Well,” I said. “You there. Speak.”
“If you want us to think before we say something, wouldn’t it be better to call on those of us who’ve volunteered, instead of picking us out at random?” she asked. “Thinking on our feet, is … difficult, for some people, and it might be kinder to help them get the knack of it first.”
“Guess that all depends on how much of the class you want to take with you,” I said, not chewing on her question too long before firing back a proper response. If you gave some of these whelps an inch, they’d take the whole ’Versity Stretch. “A lot of strategy—good strategy—means knowing when to scrap your plan in the field and come up with something new. Something better. That kind of recalibration takes tactical thinking, and it’s not something you can learn by gnawing on your books and writing neatly in the margins.”
“So it’s a part of the class, then,” the girl said. “As much as anything else?”
I thought about that one for a minute myself, allowing a quick look around the room to see if the others were paying attention. It was about the ratio I’d expected, some listening in and others taking advantage of the distraction in order to do whatever they damn well pleased. That didn’t bother me, so long as they kept it to themselves and didn’t distract the rest of the class with it.
My expectations weren’t very high, and my hopes were even lower than that.
Time with the airmen had taught me that you had to pick your battles. And sometimes, having the attention of, say, no more than one-third of the class was better than trying to wrangle all of them at once. Divide and conquer. That was tactical thinking in practice.
“I guess that’s about right,” I conceded. “Maybe the most important part, even. Curriculum says you’ve got to take at least two exams to make up a proper grade, but the rest is up to me, and I’ve had enough classes now that this shook down as being the best way for going about it. Any better ideas?”
“It just seems a little different from everything else we’ve done,” said the girl. I was beginning to get tired of thinking of her as the girl, too, but I wasn’t the sort of professor who passed around a seating chart and made all the good little boys and girls write their names in their places so that I’d know who was who and who was showing up. That seemed like the mark of a doddering old fool who’d been teaching so long that his blood had turned to chalk and ink.
“There’s times when different’s bad, I’ll give you, but this isn’t one of ’em,” I reasoned back, settling into the discussion now. “I hate to keep harping on this one point, since it means you’ll figure out that’s my only point sooner rather than later, but in the heat of battle, adapting quickly to the differences that crop up—and bastion knows, they will—can mean you staying alive one more day ahead of everyone else.”
“What if you come up with a really good plan in the very beginning, though?” the girl asked. There was a skinny little scarecrow sitting next to her, I’d just noticed, and he’d begun to tug on her sleeve. Probably trying to get her to shut up, for all the good it’d do him. He looked like one swift right hook’d take care of him then and there, and something told me the redhead had at least one swift right hook in her. “Isn’t that the point of strategy? Planning ahead so that you’ll have the upper hand when it comes to dealing with your enemies?”
Somehow, against all odds, I found myself smiling as I leaned back against my desk, arms crossed like I was addressing a much smaller room of much larger personalities.
It’d been a long while since anyone had engaged me in anything close to what might be called a good debate—given me a reason not only to tell ’em I was right but to explain the reasoning behind it so that they believed it, too.
That was the only kind of teaching I’d ever wrapped my head around, and I’d managed it with loads more stubborn folk than this one. From somewhere behind me, I could hear Radomir give a slight, dry cough. He was always complaining about his constitution in winter, so I didn’t pay him any mind.
“Things always go to shit after takeoff,” I explained, and there was a collective creak of the desks as students either leaned forward or back in their chairs, depending on how they felt about colorful language. Some of the ones sleeping in the back had actually woken up from their dreams of being swaddled babes in arms, and they looked kind of regretful they hadn’t chosen a seat closer to the center of action. “The reinforcements you’re depending on don’t arrive in time, for any number of reasons that don’t matter because
what counts is you’re fucked now. Or some idiot overslept and forgot to give your girl—your dragon—a good once-over before you left at night, leaving her harness loose. Little mistakes, the small things you don’t even think about—say the weather changes and all of a sudden the battlefield’s a mud pit, or you’re flying sideways through sheets of rain. You can’t always avoid ’em, but what you can do is train your mind to be ready. Keep calm in the face of everybody else feeling fucked sideways. That make sense?”
The girl sat back in her chair, silent, but I could see the cogs turning in her head, unlike some of the others who just looked dumbfounded, or a little too pleased by the naughty words I was using. She really was thinking it over.
Radomir cleared his throat again. I invoked the professor’s right of ignoring his lecturing assistant and kept my eyes on the girl instead.
“That does make sense,” she said finally. “Only … This doesn’t mean you’ll be moving the class unexpectedly to another room or—I don’t know—making it rain just to see what we do in a crisis, right?” She almost sounded disappointed, too.
I was surprised into laughing. She wasn’t making fun of me—at least I didn’t think she was, mostly because of the look of pure suspicion on her face, like she wanted me to know I wasn’t going to get the jump on her and she’d show up to class in a coat and tall rubber boots every day for the next two months if she had to.
The boy sitting next to her hid his face in his hands.
Little did he know he had a real firecracker to contend with. Or maybe he did know, and that was why he looked so close to crying.
“No,” I said, once I’d finished laughing. “They’re pretty understanding here at the ’Versity that I don’t have the same training as the other professors, but I think they’d be mad as hogs before feeding time if I pulled a stunt like that. Not because of how much they care about you lot, of course, but out of respect to your parents, most of whom’re paying your way through this and don’t want to buy you any new clothes on top of every other expense.”
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