Chương 40: Gossip

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fucking fuck! I kept my face straight while my arms were burning from the shoulders down and the bucket above my head was full to the brim and every step sent a small ripple across the surface of the water that I had to correct with a micro-adjustment of my wrists, which made my forearms burn worse, which made the next ripple harder to control. We were now three hours in and I had not spilled a drop.

My shoulders were on fire and my jaw was clenched so hard I could hear my own teeth, but I had to keep my face even because people were watching. A lot of people were watching. Sartheon was not Valenhall, where magic was studied in lecture halls and students sat behind desks copying theory into notebooks for six hours a day. Sartheon was more like a military academy for mages.

You did not sit in a classroom here unless the professor assigned to your team determined, during a mission or an assessment, that you lacked something specific enough to warrant formal instruction. Class hours existed for remedial work, targeted drills, and specialised seminars, not for general education. General education happened before we joined the academy, and continued in the field, on the walls, and now while carrying buckets of water above your head at dawn in front of an increasingly large audience.

Since this was the second day of the academic year and no assessments had been run yet, nobody had classes. Which meant that every student in the academy who had woken up early enough to see us had come down to the courtyard to stand along the railing and stare. I could see them in my peripheral vision. Dozens of them by now, leaning on the stone balustrade of the terrace above, some still in sleeping clothes, some with breakfast in their hands, a few older students with their arms folded.

I even spotted two professors among the crowd, standing apart from the students, watching with expressions I could not read from this distance. Tomás had already made three trips to the well. The first time, he had spilled on the seventh pass and stood there looking at the small dark stain on the flagstone, muttering oh no. The second time, he had made it to the turn and a gust of wind off the valley had sent a splash over the rim, and he had said a word I did not think Tomás knew.

The third time, he had carefully been walking back from the well with a full bucket, step by step, and had tripped on a loose flagstone near the courtyard entrance, and that time he had cried, his face crumpling for a few seconds before he wiped his eyes with his shoulder and kept walking. Varen was doing the exercise in silence. His jaw was set, his eyes were forward, and the bucket above his head was steady.

Kael moved with discipline, each step identical in length and timing, his face blank while Jaerik was murmuring something under his breath. A prayer, I supposed, though full of obscene words I had never heard before. Dren walked as if he were strolling through a garden on a pleasant afternoon, his bucket perfectly still, his expression bored, and I hated him slightly for it.

"Is that a drop I see, Varen?" Professor Ashara's voice carried across the courtyard from where she sat on a stone bench near the entrance, one leg crossed over the other, a cup of something steaming in her hand. She had been sitting there since the beginning, drinking what I was fairly sure was tea, which she kept reheating with a spell. Varen's arms tensed. He looked down at the rim of his bucket, then back at her.

"No, Professor!"

"Are you sure? It looked like a drop."

"It was not a drop, Professor. It was a shadow."

"A shadow?"

"From the clouds, Professor." Ashara took a sip of her tea and said nothing as Varen''s arms locked tighter and he kept walking. At last, we finished by the third bell. Varen dropped his bucket to the ground with a grunt, rolled his shoulders, and walked off the wall without a word while Kael set his bucket down carefully, flexed his fingers a few times, and stayed where he was. Jaerik placed his on the flagstone, bowed his head briefly toward the professor, and settled in beside him to wait.

Dren had already disappeared. I set mine down. My arms hung at my sides like dead weight and my shoulders felt like they had been pulled apart and reassembled with no consideration about the original configuration. Ding! [Strength: 104 > 106] [Stamina: 102 > 105] [Agility: 98 > 99] [Level Up!] [Tier 2, Level 1 > Tier 2, Level 2] [Mana Pool: 612 > 640] The level-up warmth ran through me and some of the exhaustion lifted.

The burn drained out of my shoulders, my legs steadied under me, and for a moment I just breathed. Tomorrow's soreness was still down there somewhere, waiting for me to sit still long enough to feel it. But right now there was only the relief of being done. Tomás, for his part, was not. He was on his ninth trip back from the well, his face red, his hair plastered to his forehead, carrying a fresh bucket with both hands shaking so badly the water was sloshing against the rim before he had even started walking.

He still had three rounds to go. The crowd on the terrace had thinned since the rest of us had finished, but there were still enough students watching to make it worse, and a few of them were laughing. The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

He made it to the first turn, halfway back, then his left arm buckled as the bucket tipped and the water hit the flagstones in a flat splash that echoed across the courtyard, and Tomás stood there with the empty bucket in his hands, his chin trembling and his eyes filling up again. Someone on the terrace laughed louder than the others. I watched him standing there, soaked, shaking, and I thought about the fact that he had nothing to do with any of this.

He had hidden under his bed during the fight and had lied for us when he could have told the truth and walked away clean. He was being punished for a choice he had made on our behalf, and nobody in Group 7 had asked him to make it. So I turned around.

"Professor." Ashara was still on her bench, her tea finally finished. She looked at me.

"May I take over the remainder of Tomás's rounds?" Varen, who had been halfway to the exit, stopped and looked back, and the others had paused too, somewhere in the periphery. Even Dren, who I'd thought was long gone, stepped out of a shadow by the far wall, where I hadn't known he was. Ashara studied me for a few seconds.

"... You may."

"Thank you, Professor." I walked to Tomás. He was still holding the empty bucket, staring at the puddle at his feet, and when I reached him he looked up at me with red eyes.

"You're done, Tomás. Go sit down."

"Y-you don't have to—""I do though. Give me the bucket, please." He handed it over. His hands were shaking badly enough that he nearly dropped it during the transfer, and when I took it from him he stood there for a second longer, his mouth working around a word of gratitude he wanted to say but could not find, and then he walked off the wall and sat down on the courtyard steps to put his face in his hands. I then turned toward the well for the three rounds.

It was half a mile away and the walk back was uphill, so each trip to refill cost about thirty minutes, and I dropped the bucket twice. The first time was on the second round, a lapse in my grip where my left forearm simply stopped responding for a second then the bucket tilted and the water went. The second time was on the way back from the well, when my foot caught a root on the slope, then I stumbled and the bucket hit the ground before I could correct.

Both times I picked it up, walked back to the well, refilled it and resumed. Gowyn was in the crowd, standing apart from the students, closer to the courtyard wall than anyone else. He did not cheer, react, or nod. Only stood there with his hands behind his back and watched me carry the bucket, and for reasons I could not explain, the watching helped. The rest of Group 7 had stayed as well. I had expected them to leave immediately after they were done, but they had not.

I finished the last round a little past midday and set the bucket down on the flagstone, then stood there for a moment, breathing. [Stamina: 105 > 105 (34%)] [Strength: 106 > 106 (12%)] … Huh, I had expected as much. The gains from repeating the same exercise without rest were always diminished; the body needed time to recover before it could be pushed further, and the System reflected that. It was fine. The morning had not been about the numbers.

"Good." Ashara rose from her bench.

"You may go to the healers' wing and request recovery potions. After that, eat. The dining hall is on the third level of the central tower. You have three hours." She turned to leave, then stopped.

"Varen. Malkai." They both looked up.

"You began walking toward the exit earlier without me dismissing you. Minus five points each." Varen's face went red.

"What? Professor, we were just stretching our—""Minus one point."

"How's that fair?! You never t—""Minus one point." Dren stepped forward.

"Professor, with respect, that seems—""Minus one point."

"But—""Minus one point." The two of them looked at each other. Something passed between them, some shared calculation about the diminishing value of the next word out of either of their mouths, and they both closed their eyes at the same time.

"... Yes, Professor," they said in unison.

"Good. Three hours. Then back here, all six of you. You will receive your first mission assignment." Ashara left through the courtyard's eastern gate, her footsteps unhurried, and the moment she was out of sight the crowd on the terrace seemed to decide that the show was over and the socialising could begin. They came down the steps in twos and threes. A boy from the tour yesterday whose name I had already forgotten reached me first, looking at my eye with open curiosity.

"Aridis, what happened to your face?"

"Oh, I fell."

"You… fell?" I looked at him, in a way I was hoping would convey to not press further.

"... Right. Right." He glanced at the four retreating backs of my roommates, who were already crossing the courtyard toward the healers' wing without waiting for me.

"Is it true you're actually rooming with them?"

"I am." A girl I half-recognised from the staircase yesterday appeared at his shoulder.

"You should petition the rector for a transfer, Aridis. Those four are dangerous. I heard the last captain one of them had nearly died, and that the academy had to pay his family a fortune to keep them from going to the Crown with it."

"Where did you hear that?"

"Everyone knows. They also say the tall one, the barbarian, killed a man before he came here, and that the one with the rat is from a fallen treacherous house, the kind that used to do contract work for the old courts before the purge. And the big one, the praying one, he was in some kind of cult, and—""I see." I looked at her, then at the three others who had gathered behind her and were nodding along.

"What are your names again?"

"I'm Deren, of House—""And yours?"

"Lira. Lira Venn, I told you yesterday on the—""Right. Deren, Lira. Why don't you come with me to the dining hall? My roommates should be there soon, and we can sit together and ask them directly whether any of that is true. If those are the kinds of things being said about them, they deserve a chance to respond, don't you think?" The nodding stopped.

"I— well, I actually need to go find my team, we have missions soon."

"Me too, actually, we were just stopping by to say hello, and… well, warn you."

"Of course. Another time, then." They dispersed quickly and as I watched them go, I realized I was… angry. I had never heard people do that before, stand in front of you and tear apart someone who was not there to defend themselves, and expect you to nod along as if it were conversation. It reminded me of something, and it took me a second to realise what: the instructors at the estate, the servants, the attendants who watched everything I did and reported it to the elders in rooms I was not invited into.

People talking about you to people above you, shaping a version of you that you never got to contest. But… and I hated thinking so, but looking at the empty courtyard where Deren and Lira had been standing, I realized I may have been too severe with them. Perhaps they might have been genuinely trying to warn me, and I had responded by putting them on the spot because my anger had made the decision before my head could.

My politics Instructor had spent an entire year drilling the same lesson into me: emotion is a poor counsellor. I would need to be better about this, if I was going to spend four years surrounded by people I did not yet know how to read.

"Good morning, Young Lord." Gowyn was at my shoulder, hands behind his back, his face carrying its usual expression of polite neutrality.

"Good morning, Gowyn." I looked at Tomás, who was still sitting on the courtyard steps, his elbows on his knees, staring at the flagstones between his feet.

"Tomás. Let's go eat, then the healers, then back here. Three hours is not a lot of time." He looked up at me and nodded.

"Right. Yes. Food. I could eat a horse, honestly." We started walking and I looked around the courtyard as we crossed it, scanning the faces still lingering on the terrace and along the balustrade, but I could not find Rael or Eydric among them. They would turn up eventually, I supposed.