‘Yeah,’ Kyle said. ‘Congratulations. I won’t say it’s unsurprising that the Greylings would want you in their family, but it’s still quite an achievement.’
‘Thank you,’ Nava said. ‘All of you. This really doesn’t change anything aside from being able to acknowledge my relationship with Suki openly. And my monthly income has risen. I’m not moving out of my current apartment yet. It’s not like I sleep there often anyway.’
‘But it does change something,’ Courtney said, ‘which, I admit, is my ulterior motive for coming over to congratulate you.’
‘Duels?’
‘Yes. Duels. You do have your clan’s honour to think of now. You could get drawn into duels, even if you don’t want to be. How are you going to handle that?’
‘I’ve given it some thought, and I’ve concluded that I lucked out with the family which adopted me. The Greylings are one of the most prestigious families in one of the most prestigious clans in the Alliance. People don’t go around insulting them to their faces.’
‘Partially because the Greylings have a reputation for winning duels,’ Kyle said.
‘And I might have to fight a few to fix my own reputation in that respect. If someone questions my family’s or my clan’s honour in front of me, then I’ll be required to do something about it. You’ll recall that I’m quite capable of fighting a blood duel without killing my opponent, so long as they don’t try to kill me.’
‘But what about personal duels?’ Rochester asked.
‘Again, my new status is of assistance. I can avoid a lot of matters with a show of disdain and a statement that whoever it is is beneath my contempt.’
‘I’d imagine you’re pretty good at showing disdain,’ Courtney said.
‘Exceptional at it,’ Nava agreed. ‘For the rest… I’m not sure it’s going to be a problem. People with high status have more to lose. I might have to humble a few of them to make the point, but they’ll eventually decide not to risk it.’
‘What if they beat you?’ Rochester asked.
‘Then that would be a shame. If someone can beat me in a duel, it’s a shame that I have to find out under those circumstances because that’s certainly someone I’d like to know better.’
~~~
‘Nava Greyling, could I have a quick word before you leave?’
Nava looked down the classroom at Hoshi Horne, giving her a nod before finishing packing her bag. Their metaphysics teacher had been unusually nervous through the class for no reason Nava could imagine. Hoshi had been nervous when term had started, but she had relaxed fairly quickly and turned out to be quite adequate at teaching her subject, at least at first-year levels. Today, she had seemed a little rattled. And Rochester had been with them for lunch… Had they broken up even before they had really got together?
‘Miss Hoshi Horne?’ Nava asked after approaching the teacher. She was aware that both Melissa and Rochester were watching them. Rochester looked nervous too.
‘Uh, yes. Well, this isn’t school business and, considering the circumstances, you can call me Hoshi when we’re not, um, conducting school business.’
‘Thank you, Hoshi. Obviously, I’d be happy for you to call me Nava.’
‘Right. Thank you. I wanted to congratulate you and offer my welcome to the clan.’
‘Again, thank you.’
‘Mm.’ There was a pause long enough that Nava considered asking if that was all. ‘I also wanted to check that there’s no ill will over what happened with Rochester and Melissa.’ The words came out in a whispered rush and Hoshi’s pretty face screwed up into a less-than-pretty grimace.
So, that was it. They were worried that, now that Nava outranked them both, she would use her new position to get at them for Melissa’s benefit. Nava was a little annoyed: she would have thought at least Rochester knew her better. ‘I don’t even think Melissa has much against you at this point, Hoshi,’ Nava said. ‘I’m not the kind of person who would use their status to hound another anyway.’
‘Chess said you wouldn’t…’
So, Rochester had known better, but Hoshi did not know Nava as he did. That was acceptable. ‘If I had a problem with you, Hoshi, you’d know about it. You’d have known about it long before now and you’d still be wearing the scars.’ Hoshi let out a little squeak, her eyes widening into saucers. ‘That was, mostly, a joke. The part about the scars anyway. Frankly, if a young adult male is willing to give up sex with Melissa for you, I’d suggest you may be someone worth getting to know. I’ll speak to Mel and see what she thinks. The two of us are both Sonkeis now. It’s not required that we like each other, but it would be preferable.’
‘For two reasons,’ Hoshi said. She appeared to have got over her shock at Nava’s joke, but something else had come to mind.
‘Two?’
‘You know there’s that survival field trip scheduled for before the autumn break?’ Nava nodded. It was a one-week trip into the wilderness – or what passed for wilderness on Shinden – which the whole first year was involved in over the course of three weeks. Nava, Melissa, and Rochester had been put into a group going out on the last of the three trips. ‘Well, I just got told that I’ll be supervising the group you’re in. I guess we’ll have a week of forced getting to know each other.’
‘Pardon me for asking, but how does a metaphysics teacher end up leading a survival course?’
‘Well, it’s a hobby, but I am qualified to lead a group and, since I’m also your teacher, they decided to use me as an extra resource.’ Hoshi was apparently reassured of Nava’s nature enough to relax some because a smirk settled onto her face. ‘Chess is really not looking forward to it, even since he found out he’d be going with me.’
‘Well, yeah,’ Nava said. She turned her head to look across at Rochester as Hoshi did the same. ‘Can you really imagine Chess in a survival situation?’
‘I can. It’s not pretty.’
Across the room, Rochester looked like he wanted to dig a hole and hide in it.
235/10/6.
‘You’re in the gossip feeds,’ Melissa said at breakfast.
‘I’m aware,’ Nava replied. ‘I haven’t actually looked at any of the posts, but I’m aware that there are some posts about me.’
‘No pictures and no real information. It’s just a few reporters noting the new name on the clan rolls. A couple linked you to the school. One noted that you were at the symposium in the summer.’
‘None of them have connected you with me,’ Mitsuko added. ‘That’s only a matter of time, I’d imagine.’
Melissa nodded. ‘When the News Club works it out, it’ll get into the external gossip chain pretty quickly. Then the society channels will pick it up from there.’
‘And then the Sonkei lawyers will pounce.’ Mitsuko looked a little malicious when she said that. ‘Since Nava is a young adult, anyone putting even a toe over the line as far as privacy is concerned will find themselves dragged in front of a judge. Possibly without their toes. We can’t silence all of the coverage, but we can limit it.’
‘So, we get about a year to become boring before they start chasing us,’ Nava said. ‘Perhaps we won’t be a story by the time they can publish anything.’
‘It’s possible. I don’t think we should count on it, however.’
~~~
‘As you should all know,’ Mathias Statham said in his usual authoritative tone, ‘next week we’ll be starting three weeks of survival training. That is to say, all first years will be going out in groups of ten for a week of experience in the wilds of Shinden. I’ll be taking three groups with students from this class among them.’
Nava pitied the students going with him. She did not know what Hoshi was going to be like outside the classroom, but she could guess what Mathias’s attitude would be. It was not going to be a nice week.
‘So, for the next three weeks,’ Mathias went on, ‘those still in school will be spending their tactics lessons on the firing ranges and producing an essay on oper
ational tactics which I will be collecting and marking.’ There were a few groans from the class, Rochester among them. ‘And this week, we’re going to be doing as much practical work as we can to make up for three weeks of easy stuff.’ More groans. ‘Nava Ward, get your team together. We’re going to run some breaching scenarios with you as the defenders.’ Even more groans.
Nava got to her feet, Melissa and Rochester getting up after her. Mathias had worked out that Nava and her team were really good at handling this kind of scenario and that the results would generally be everyone failing to breach whatever fake building the teacher set up. What Mathias had not done, it seemed, was to read the staff bulletin.
‘Mister Mathias Statham,’ Nava said, ‘my name is Nava Greyling Sonkei now, as I’m sure you saw in the Monday bulletin.’
Mathias stared at her for long enough that everyone knew he had not, in fact, known that. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Slip of the tongue. I apologise, Nava Greyling.’
‘Slips like that are to be expected until everyone’s used to it, sir.’
‘Congratulations. The Greylings, huh?’
‘Yes, sir.’ Nava was wondering what he was going to say about that. He was a Mendel, from one of the stronger families in that clan, but that still made him Nava’s social inferior, at least in theory.
After a second, Mathias gave a thoughtful sort of nod. ‘Figures they’d grab you.’ And that was all he had to say on the matter.
235/10/13.
Nava took a braced position and aimed her SAH-301 down the range at her target. She squeezed off six Slice spells, checked that she had achieved six ten-point hits, and moved back from the firing line to let the next person have a go. As she did so, she popped the magazine out of her weapon’s grip and began recharging it.
‘Is there really any point in you doing this?’ Melissa asked when Nava got to the end of the queue.
Nava shrugged. ‘Marksmanship is a perishable skill.’ She checked the charge indicator on the magazine and then slotted it back into place.
Melissa pouted. ‘You can do Fast Recharge Cell too, can’t you?’
‘Uh-huh.’ Nava took the magazine from Melissa’s hand and set her mind to channelling quintessence into it.
‘As a cantrip.’
‘Uh-huh. Don’t worry, when you grow up, I’m sure you’ll be able to do it too.’
‘In my dreams. I wish this heat would break.’ Melissa looked up at the cloudless, hot, blue sky. ‘We’re two weeks into October and it feels like July.’
‘The forecast says it’ll be cooler tomorrow,’ Rochester put in from the spot in front of Melissa. Then he looked hopefully at Nava when she handed Melissa’s magazine back.
Nava took the magazine from Rochester because, well, why not? ‘As I recall, they’ve said “cold air will sweep in from the north” every day for the last two weeks.’
‘You’re not wrong. Perhaps they’ll be right this time.’
‘It’s not natural,’ Melissa said. ‘I mean, it must be natural, but it can’t be natural. No one can influence weather on this scale, so it can’t be sorcery.’
‘But it seems like it has to be,’ Nava finished. She handed Rochester’s magazine back to him. He had partially charged it and she had had less to do. Three cells, fully charged, in less than a minute; it was more efficient that way, not cheating. ‘It’s the people out on the field trip I feel sorry for. They’ll bake.’
‘Not from what Hoshi said,’ Rochester replied. ‘They’re mostly going to be outside of the hot area. I mean, that’s another thing that’s weird about this heat. It’s sitting over the school and Alliance City, and the space between, but the weather’s normal outside that area.’
‘It was cool at the Trenton mansion,’ Melissa said.
‘True,’ Nava agreed. She shrugged. ‘Like you said, it can’t be sorcery because there isn’t a magician alive who could do it. Not over this range and not for fifteen days without a break.’
‘Weather is a chaotic system,’ Rochester said. ‘Chaos can, theoretically, produce some very strange, ordered events. If you give them time to do it, obviously.’
‘Shinden’s been around for…’
‘Roughly four point four billion years.’
‘That seems like a long enough time for something weird to show up.’
235/10/14.
‘You had to ask for the heat to break.’ Nava looked up at the once-blue sky and the rain falling from it in a steady, miserable drizzle.
‘This is what Umbrella cantrips are for,’ Melissa replied. Then she shivered. ‘The temperature really dropped.’
‘It feels like autumn now,’ Mitsuko agreed. ‘Just like that. Like a switch was flipped. Maybe we should check the Harbinger artefacts in the research building.’
‘There are no new ones,’ Rochester said. ‘Hoshi is still trying to make anything of the one that was smashed. Oh, uh, the paper is going to be printed in next month’s issue of Advances in Metaphysics.’
‘That was quick,’ Mitsuko commented.
‘It’s not being put in as a peer-reviewed paper because there is no experiment to review. We’re publishing the Ascend spell’s schema so that others can replicate Nava’s trip if they wish.’
‘And if they’ve got the capacity to use it,’ Melissa said.
‘And that. Essentially, what we’ve published is a warning and a set of observations. Something for other metaphysics researchers to discuss and continue.’
‘And you’ll get your name on an article in AiM.’
‘Yes, though not as the principal author. I still think it’s a shame that Nava’s name won’t be on the paper too.’
‘If I’d agreed to that,’ Nava said, ‘we’d just have to contact them to get them to change it.’
‘It’s a valid point,’ Mitsuko said, ‘and yet, I think it’s missing the point.’
‘The point is that I don’t want too many people knowing I can use that spell. At some point, sure, but not right now.’
‘You’re always going to be ahead of the curve, Nava. You’re always going to have more power than you want people to know about.’
‘Is the weather bringing out your negative side?’
Mitsuko grinned. ‘Ha! Well, maybe. But you know it’s true.’
‘All the more reason to enjoy anonymity while I can.’
‘The society channels are reporting that you and Suki are an item,’ Melissa said.
‘All the more reason to enjoy relative anonymity while I can.’
Jukai Forest, 235/10/26.
The name, according to Mitsuko, meant ‘Sea of Trees,’ and it was named for a forest on the flanks of Mount Fuji in old Japan. It was a fitting name; from the air, Jukai looked like a huge inland sea of green some one hundred kilometres by sixty. The northern edge trailed off into one of the planet’s low, weathered mountain ranges while there was a band of grass leading down to the ocean to the south.
Nava and her classmates were going to trek from the western edge to the eastern edge. Well, not everyone in the group was a classmate, exactly. Each group was made up of five combat students, five support students, and one teacher. Nava was unsure who Mitsuko had sold her soul to to get into the group Nava was in. Maybe it had actually been a purely random selection. Whatever the case, five students from Mitsuko’s class 113 had been grouped up with five from Nava’s class 12C.
The combat students did not seem especially pleased to have Hoshi as their supervisor, except for Mitsuko, who had been told about Hoshi’s qualifications by Rochester. Then again, Melissa was not entirely pleased to have Hoshi guiding them; she had theoretically forgiven the woman for stealing her boyfriend, but there were still a few unresolved bad feelings. It was, Nava thought, going to be an interesting week.
They were dropped off by a contragrav transport, a sort of anti-gravity minibus which waited for them to unload their gear and then flew away, leaving them in the middle of nowhere. They would be picked up again at the other end of the fo
rest in five days. A hundred kilometres in five days was not going to kill them, though it might make some of them think that they were dead. From the grumbling, you would have thought some of them were about to engage in a forced march to battle.
‘Why do we have to carry our own gear?’ one of the combat students asked. ‘We could use a contragrav platform and just push everything along.’
‘This is supposed to give us a basic appreciation of wilderness survival, Moritz Evered,’ Mitsuko said. ‘Do you expect to have something like that with you in an emergency?’
Moritz was a bulky sort of young man. Big shoulders which, unfortunately, made his head look a little too small. He was a Garavain, so he had the benefit of a slightly higher class of genetic work than some. He was not in the least bit ugly because of that, but you could not say he was handsome either. Mid-brown hair did not make much of a splash. Hazel eyes did not make him stand out. Moritz was a perpetual wingman and he did not have the best of attitudes. ‘Well, can’t the support streamers carry the gear? Isn’t that what–’
‘Finish that sentence and you’ll find this week a lot more disagreeable than you thought it was going to be.’
‘More importantly,’ Rochester said, stepping up beside Mitsuko, ‘this is a graded exercise and counts toward our year-end exam scores. One of the major marking criteria is teamwork. Dumping your gear onto someone else without good reason is not good teamwork.’
‘Personally, I’m perplexed,’ Nava said. ‘All that muscle and you don’t want to use it?’ She was settling her pack and adjusting the straps. Along with the pack, she had her SAH-301s in a shoulder rig and she wanted to make sure everything fitted without any problems. ‘If anything, Moritz Evered, I’d have thought you should be carrying gear for your physically weaker teammates. Now that would demonstrate teamwork.’
Apparently, Moritz had no quick answer for that. ‘Why are you carrying extra?’ he asked. ‘It’s not like we’re going to need weapons.’
‘More realistic. And you never know when you might need a weapon.’
‘All right, everyone,’ Hoshi called out, putting an end to further discussion. ‘This is not going to be an enormously strenuous hike, but we should get moving. The first piece of advice I’m going to give you is to make sure your pack is secure and comfortable. If it’s loose, you will find this harder. If you want me to check anything, just come to me and I’ll help. Second, everyone is to stick together as we move into the forest. Conditions are not the best in there after the disturbed weather two weeks ago. Don’t lose sight of the rest of the group and if you think someone is missing, speak up. Does everyone understand?’
Bitter Wind (Death's Handmaiden Book 2) Page 11