Chương 12: Conflict

Thirty minutes in, my head was starting to hurt. [Focus] was doing exactly what I'd wanted it to do, which was the problem. Every sweep came back cleaner than the last, more detail resolved, the signatures separating more easily from each other, and somewhere around the third pulse I'd begun noticing things I hadn't known were there to notice. The proficiency climbed with each sweep, seven percent, then twenty-two, then forty, then sixty-nine, and the ache behind my eyes climbed with it.

On the fifth, the gold text flickered again. [Focus: Level 2 (100%) > Level 3 (1%)] Hah! But that was the good news. The bad news was that each sweep cost me twenty mana and a small but real piece of whatever held the inside of my skull together. I'd been pacing myself, walking twenty or thirty paces between pulses to let my head clear, but the clearing was taking longer each time. And the map had started to move. The terrain was still terrain, but now there were numbers on it.

Three of them drifting slowly across the parchment, each one at the centre of a small coloured pulse. Team six, team eleven, and team twenty-two. Three flags claimed. The three numbers sat on our map and on the map of every team that didn't yet have a flag, while the three teams who carried them could see nothing of each other, nothing of us, nothing but terrain. Rael wouldn't stop pointing out the cruelty of it.

"Rael, stop looking at it."

"I'm not looking at it!"

"You're looking at it."

"I'm appreciating it. The map is a work of art, Eydric. I've never seen ward work this fine in my life. I should thank the Sartheon cartographer personally when we get out of here."

"You were swearing at the map four minutes ago."

"I'm allowed to do both?" We'd had one useful encounter in those thirty minutes. About twenty minutes in, we'd crossed paths with team eleven, two boys and a girl I vaguely recognized from the plaza, the flag already in the taller boy's hand. Seeing us had caused a short tense standoff, the sort where every hand was halfway to a casting and nobody knew whether the next three seconds were going to be a conversation or a fight. It had turned out to be a conversation.

The girl had been the one to lower her hands first. She'd glanced at me, recognized me in the same silent way everyone seemed to, and said very quickly that they'd found their flag in a hollow at the base of a grey stone ridge about five minutes back the way they'd come. Maybe, she said, we'd have better luck over there. The two boys with her didn't object.

They didn't do anything, really, except keep glancing past our shoulders into the trees behind us, their hands still casting ready, their eyes moving constantly. The whole exchange lasted maybe forty seconds and every one of them was thinking about the ambush that could be coming at any moment from any direction, including from us. Rael, to his discredit, was looking at them like the villain he was.

I was about ninety percent sure the only reason team eleven made it out of that clearing with their flag and their faces intact was that Eydric was standing between Rael and the nearest direction team eleven could run in, and Rael had clocked it and decided not to test the alignment. They left at speed anyway. And when we had gone and searched at the hollow, there was nothing there but a faint residual trace of mana that belonged to the flag.

Six minutes after we started walking away from the empty ridge, I glanced at the map and team eleven had now become team seventeen. Rael had looked at the map and said, quietly, "See? I told you." Nobody had argued. Two fights had fit themselves into the gaps. A trio of small low-slung things that Rael had dispatched with a clean pair of wind cuts, and a single larger creature that Eydric had managed by letting it charge, pivoting at the last second, and putting a glyph into its side as it passed.

Two points for Rael, one for Eydric. I hadn't contributed to either fight because I'd been halfway into a sweep both times and couldn't have shaped a glyph if my life had asked it of me. Both of them had been unreasonably understanding about it. So that was the state of things: thirty minutes, five sweeps, one level of [Focus], two fights and sadly, no flag at all. I sat down on a flat stone at the edge of a small clearing and put my elbows on my knees, letting my head hang for a minute.

"Aaaaaaah, you two are killing me." Rael sat down on the stone beside me, and put his head in his hands.

"It's not even virtuous. I want to be clear about that. Nobody is testing your virtue out here. There is no old woman in the trees keeping score of which of us has the purest soul. There is a forty-point assessment and a fourteen-hour clock and two of you being allergic to the only strategy that actually works, and I—" He lifted his head.

"—I understand Eydric. Eydric I understand completely. Eydric is straight the way a donkey is straight. You ask him for a shortcut and he walks into the wall the shortcut was avoiding."

"Thanks, Solenne."

"You are welcome, Vael. It's one of your better qualities and also the worst thing about you." Eydric sat down on my other side.

"But you," Rael said, turning toward me.

"I don't get you."

"There's nothing to get." The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation. I was so confused….

"Sure there is. You just said stealing a flag was, what, not good. That was your whole answer. Come on."

"It wasn't. It isn't." I said Yes, it's not good, to be precise.

"Stop it. You are the last person in this forest who gets to frown at a clever ugly plan, and we both know it."

"What?"

"You were smiling, Howl."

"Me? When?"

"When you launched at those creatures. Back in the first clearing. I saw your face." I blinked.

"No, I wasn't." Eydric cleared his throat.

"You were." I turned to look at him.

"When I was calling your name," he said.

"The second time. Howl, are you even, and I stopped because your face wasn't doing what I expected. It was red, your eyes were wide and your breath was short. And you were smiling. It wasn't a big one, but it was there." I did not remember it like that?

"That's what I was going to ask you," Eydric added.

"Before the creature moved. I was going to ask if you were alright." I tried to remember my own face in that moment, but I couldn't. I had been sure I was scared.

"And after that," Rael said, "when you came out of your sweep and said you hadn't found the flag. You smiled before you told us." That was because Focus levelled up, I almost said. The words were halfway up my throat before I caught them and put them back, because neither of them had any way to know what that meant, and the explanation would have sounded like an excuse even if I'd given it. Rael watched me close my mouth, and the expression that crossed his face wasn't the grin or the villain smile.

"Here's what I think," he said.

"I think you have a righteous streak in you, Howl. It's real. But it isn't Eydric's. Eydric's is bedrock. He'd starve on a moral principle before he touched a crumb that wasn't his, which is more or less the job description. House Vael traditionally produces knights. Has for generations. You raise a boy from birth on stories about swords and oaths and holding the line and you end up with this —" he gestured at Eydric without looking at him "—and honestly, I respect it. I just wouldn't want to be it." Eydric tsked.

"See? He doesn't even argue."

"Finish your point, Rael."

"I'm getting there. Yours bends, Howl. You have rules, sure, but the rules are suggestions once the situation pulls hard enough. So I've been sitting here trying to figure out why, specifically, you're saying no to my plan, and the flag isn't the reason. I've watched you for one morning and I already know it isn't the reason." He leaned forward, elbows on his knees.

"You're enjoying yourself. That's what's happening. You wanted to find a flag, track it, fight for it, earn the thing the hard way. Every hour of this exam has been a thrill for you, and I come along with a shortcut and it feels like someone skipping to the last page of a book you're reading. That's all the objection is. You dressed it up as honour because dressing things up as honour is what people from houses like yours do when they want to avoid saying they're having fun."

"Rael—" Eydric said.

"Let me finish. If it came down to midnight and we had nothing and the only way to pass was to take a flag off somebody else, you'd do it. I'm sure of it. You'd be the one who did it, actually. Eydric over here would sit down on a rock and fail the exam rather than touch somebody else's flag, and he'd be at peace about it, and his family would write a song. You wouldn't. You'd take the flag, because the worst thing in the world for you isn't losing a principle, but sitting the fight out." He spread his hands.

"So all I'm asking is, why not admit that now? We pick a team. We set the ambush. We take the flag. And then — and this is the part you should actually like — we spend the rest of the day defending it. Every team in these grounds without one comes for us. Our number on every map. A fight an hour until midnight. You tell me honestly that doesn't sound like the best day of your life so far." … I didn't answer right away.

Something had turned over in my chest while Rael was talking, and I was trying to identify it before I opened my mouth, because I had a strong feeling that whatever came out of my mouth first was not going to be the thing I meant to say. My jaw was tight. My hands were on my knees, and my fingers had curled into the fabric without me noticing. I made them uncurl. The heroes in Nana's books had been heroes because of honour, not because of a trick they played on themselves to look nobler than they were.

Honour was the thing that held them upright when everything else fell away, and I had read those books under my blanket at night for years and decided, somewhere along the way, that I wanted to be the kind of person those books were about. And Rael had just sat there and told me, calmly, that my version of honour was a costume. He had turned the part of me I was proudest of into a lie I was telling myself. How dare he? I looked at him, and he was waiting, eyebrows slightly up.

"That's not true," I said.

"Oh?"

"That's not true." I was already on my feet. I didn't remember deciding to stand. Eydric and Rael came up too, a half beat behind me, and Eydric's hand came up in a small calming gesture.

"Howl, just—""I heard him, Eydric."

"Yes, but—""I heard him." Rael had his hands up now, palms out, the grin gone.

"Alright. Alright. If I'm wrong, tell me where."

"You don't know me. You met me this morning. You've been with me for a couple of hours, most of which I spent silent, and you've decided you've got me figured out, and I'm supposed to sit here and nod along while you tell me what's actually going on in my head?"

"I didn't say I—""You absolutely said that! You just said that! You said the flag isn't the reason and that you already know it isn't the reason. You said I was dressing things up. But that's not reading me, Solenne, you're just guessing at me and being proud of how clever the guess sounded." My voice was louder than I wanted it to be. I could hear it.

"I don't trust you." There. I said it. The words came out before I had decided to say them, and once they were in the air I kept going.

"I haven't trusted you since the circle this morning. You almost made me look like a fool in front of everyone with one smile and two questions, and it took me about half a second to understand what you were doing, and I've been watching you ever since. Everything you've said to me today has been you taking notes. The jokes were notes. The plan was notes. This whole conversation is you running a test to see how I react when you push, and I am done being the experiment."

"Howl—""Oh, and I'm supposed to just skip to agreeing with you because you told me a nice story about how much fun I'm having? No! That isn't how this works. That isn't how any of this works." Eydric had stepped between us without either of us really noticing.

"Both of you. Sit down."

"I'm not sitting."

"Howl."

"Solenne, if you're so certain you understand me, congratulations. Write it down. Put it in your house archives. I'm going to go look for a flag."

"Howl, wait—" I didn't. I turned and started walking, and Rael was still talking behind me, the beginning of some sentence about come on, that's not what I — and I let the rest of it disappear into the trees behind my shoulders, because I was done listening to it.