Chương 42: The Same Basket

"Asshole!" Varen's voice carried the length of the hall. By the time I'd pushed off the bench he had the older boy bent all the way back over the table, one big hand fisted in his collar, the other cramming what looked like a whole braised joint into his mouth.

"You want to run your mouth about the free steppes? Huh? Eat. Eat it all, go on—"" Enough." A dozen tables down, a mouth had opened in the side of a serving container, and Chef's voice cut across the room.

"We do not play with the food. Son of Ghol. I can see you. Put the boy down and stop wasting a perfectly good ridge joint or I will note it against your tray for a week." Varen did not put the boy down. Behind him stood the rest of my team, calmly watching the older boy's teammates. Said teammates were shouting — let him go, get off him, you're insane — and pulling at Varen's arm, but accomplishing nothing, probably because none of them quite dared to make it real with those three at his back.

A ring of students had formed around the whole thing, close enough to watch but far enough to deny they'd been part of it. I went through them.

"Sorry. Excuse me. Thank you — sorry, could I just—" I put a hand on a shoulder, eased past a girl with a full tray, apologized to someone I'd nearly elbowed, apologized again to the person behind him.

"Sorry. Pardon. Coming through, thank you." I came out of the crowd at last, a little out of breath and more than a little annoyed.

"Varen. Release him." I kept my voice down, but not so far down he couldn't hear the edge on it.

"You're going to get us all another punishment." Varen looked over. So did the rest of the team, all four heads turning toward me at once, and the older boy — still bent backward over the table with a fistful of ridge joint in his cheek — rolled his teary eyes up at me too.

"He insulted my people," Varen said, as though that settled it.

"... He did?"

"HMMPH!" The boy nodded frantically against Varen's grip.

"HMMMPH!"

"I think he's saying sorry."

"Yeah." Varen's grin came back.

"Yeah, you're sorry now, aren't you?" He gave the joint another shove, and the boy's eyes went wide.

"Next time think before you sit there braggin' how full your plate is and laughin' about famine on the steppes."

"…This is like, minus two hundred points," I said, even though I was unsure how those were decided.

"Minimum." Varen seemed to actually consider it. I could see him counting in his head, working out how close this would put him to being expelled, then…

"Aaaah, fuck it!" He let go instantly. The boy dropped forward onto the table coughing, and hacked the whole half-chewed joint back out onto his own tray. Varen looked down at him for a second, decided the point was made, and spat once on the floor beside his head.

"Coward," he muttered, and walked off toward the far end of the hall without another word, the other three peeling away after him like it had never happened. I sighed again, which I seemed to be doing a lot today. When I turned around, Rael was standing at the edge of the broken-up ring with a grin that took up his entire face.

"... They're nice to be around," I said.

"I promise. Once you get to know them, they're—""Oh, come on."

"No, they are. It's only—""Howl." Rael was laughing now.

"I'm teasing. Relax." He nodded at the boy still coughing on the table.

"And for what it's worth, you shouldn't waste your worry on that one. That's Bryce Nadel. He's a famous ass; genuinely, ask anyone. This is not the first time someone's put hands on him for running his mouth, and it will not be the last. Second-year, and he's already been thrashed by, what, three separate teams? He collects it."

"He still didn't deserve to be treated like this, I think."

"Didn't he?" Rael stepped closer and dropped his voice.

"You do know what your Rothvar is, right? Clan Vharsk of the free steppes were all but wiped out by a famine, years back. It was one of the worst the west's ever seen; whole clans gone, the survivors counted on your fingers. I heard Varen is one of those survivors. One of the very few." He tipped his head at Nadel.

"And that one sat there boasting about how much was on his plate and laughing about his people starving."

"Oh," I said quietly.

"So." Rael straightened.

"You want my honest opinion? Nadel's lucky it was only meat. And you don't need to worry about the points, either; Chef will have heard the whole thing. He hears everything, so he'll corroborate what Nadel said, and the academy takes mockery of that particular kind fairly seriously." He shrugged.

"What they'll do to Varen, I couldn't tell you. He put hands on another student, so it won't be nothing, but whatever he gets, it won't be half as bad as what's coming for Nadel." I looked back toward the far end of the hall, where Varen had already dropped onto a bench and started eating as if nothing had happened at all.

"I should grab my tray," I said.

"Come on; sit with us. I'll properly introduce you this time."

"Mm." Rael glanced down the hall toward the far bench.

"I don't think now's quite the moment, Howl. Let them cool off first. Meeting your new roommates' friend right after one of them force-fed a boy a joint of ridgeboar; not the strongest opening." This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

"... Fair."

"You go, though. Sit with your team. It matters more that you're there than that I am." He clapped my shoulder.

"And we'll see plenty of each other soon enough. Once the missions start, they'll throw the groups together more than you'd think."

"Speaking of, what kind of missions do we—""Ah-ah." Rael held up a finger, and the grin came back, sly this time.

"You'll see."

"You know what mine is?"

"I have a guess. I've heard about your lot, and I'm fairly sure I know what you'll pick." He tapped the side of his nose.

"But I'm not even supposed to know that much, so I'll say no more. Wouldn't want to spoil it."

"That's not fair."

"Almost nothing is." He was already walking backward a few steps.

"Later, Aridis."

"Later." I exhaled. Across the hall, Nadel had found his feet, sort of. His friends had him under the arms and were steering him toward the doors, and he was crying openly now, not bothering to hide it, his voice cracking up an octave.

"—telling my father, you hear me? All of you! My father sits on the eastern board, he'll have that animal expelled, he'll—" Fortunately, the doors swallowed the rest of it.

"... Well," I said.

"I suppose that went better than it could have. Right?" Tomás didn't answer. So I looked at him. He was still standing where I'd left him, holding his tray in both hands, and there was something hollow in his face, his eyes fixed on the doors Nadel had gone through.

"Tomás? Are you all right?"

"... These guys," he said quietly, "are going to put us in so much trouble." I wanted to tell him he was wrong. I even opened my mouth to do it — but then didn't, because it would have been a lie, and worse, a hypocritical one. I did like them. I found them funny, the whole strange lot of them. But I could see, standing there, exactly why someone else might not, and why someone else might be right. And there was the other thing, the thing I'd been ignoring since the courtyard. The murmuring hadn't stopped all day.

I'd been pretending not to hear it, but it was there, under everything — in the courtyard, on the staircase, here in the hall now, students leaning toward each other and going quiet when I passed, looking at me a particular way. As if he'd heard the thought, Tomás spoke again.

"If it keeps going like this," he said, "they're going to put us in the same basket as them. You and me both." He swallowed.

"I can't— Howl, I think I need to get out of this group. While I still can." That made me quite sad, because. I'd wanted Tomás to stay. But I wasn't going to hold him.

"If that's what you want," I said, "then there's nothing I can do about it. It's your choice, Tomás. I won't think less of you for it." He looked at me for a moment.

"... Are you staying in the group?"

"Yeah." I said.

"It's fun." Tomás frowned at that.

"For now, at least," I added, which was more honest.

"I've never met people quite like them. Then again, I've never met many people at all, so perhaps they're perfectly ordinary and I wouldn't know the difference, hahaha." But it appeared that Tomás did not share my sense of humor. He was staring at me with a look I could only describe as mortified, the last of the colour draining out of a face that hadn't had much to begin with.

"... What?" I said.

"Oh my god." It came out barely above a whisper.

"You're like them." He took a small step back.

"No. No, you're worse." He shook his head slowly, as if the truth were arriving in stages.

"Oh my god." For some reason, I didn't feel insulted by that. Coming from someone else, being called worse than the four most feared students in the academy might have stung. Coming from Tomás, mortified and pale over his tray, it just made me want to laugh.

"Come on," I said.

"Let's go eat with them. We'll try to be friends. Maybe they'll come around." I nodded at the hall, which had filled while we stood there.

"Besides, there's hardly a seat left anywhere else." Tomás looked like he wanted to argue. Then he looked around at the packed tables, had a deep sigh and followed me. We sat down at the far end where the others were eating. And now that I was here, I noticed the seats around us were empty: a wide ring of bench on every side, untouched, while the rest of the hall was shoulder to shoulder. Every few seconds someone would glance over at us, then quickly away. The others didn't seem to notice, or didn't care.

They just ate in silence. Honestly, I didn't mind either. I'd been waiting for this meal since I packed my tray, so I picked up my utensils and got in. The salmon was cured cold and salt-bright, and it fell apart the moment I touched it. The mash was rich enough to make me slow down. And when I finally got to one of the Treyan delights, It was unlike anything I was ever given the opportunity to eat. So cold, soft and sweeter than anything I knew, I had to close my eyes for a second.

"Mmmm…" When I opened my eyes, all four of them were looking at me. Well, not exactly at me, but at the two remaining Treyan delights sitting at the corner of my tray. They were barely blinking, which started to worry me.

"... Did you guys not get any?" I asked.

"Banned," Varen said, with real grief.

"No dessert for any of us until further notice."

"Banned? But the year just started."

"For us it didn't." He gestured vaguely at the four of them with his fork.

"This isn't our first year here, you know? We've got a history with the dessert table."

"Ah," I said, deciding not to ask. They were all still staring with such intensity that it felt cruel to just eat it in front of them. I did want to give it to them, honestly. But at the same time I had exactly two pieces and four of them, and I had a fairly good idea of what happened in this group when a scarce resource met an uneven distribution.

So before anyone could decide to solve that problem themselves, I picked up my knife and cut both delights clean down the middle, four halves, and pushed them out across the tray, one toward each of them.

"Here. You guys can have my d—" The things vanished. I did not even see what happened, as [Greater Focus] wasn't active, but one blink and the four halves were in their mouths, already being greedily chewed, while each of them watched the other three sidelong as if the danger hadn't passed just because the food was swallowed. Then, one after another, all four grabbed their heads.

"Aaah—"" Gh—""Brain freeze," Varen groaned into his palm.

"... Right," I said.

"That's why I ate mine slowly." Then I looked over at Tomás. He hadn't even touched his tray. Instead, he was watching the four of them clutch their heads and groan over dessert, and whatever small part of him had been willing to give this a chance was, I could see, no longer undecided at all.

"It will soon be time for your first mission, Young Lord." I turned and found Gowyn standing at a pace behind me. …Huh, I had forgotten he was there again.