Shattered Innocence: Transmigrated Into a Novel as an Extra

Chapter 1229: A Wild Senior Appeared ? (2)

What is discipline?

A very simple question. Which is why most people answer it wrong.

For some, discipline is a virtue. A blade kept sharp, a spine kept straight, a rule kept because breaking it would make the world slightly worse. Lucavion knew that kind well. Valeria Olarion was that kind. A knight who treated the regulations like a sword oath, and the sort of friend who would follow Elara into a fire and lecture her about the fire’s safety violations on the way out.

That was the type the book had taught him to expect. Strict woman, armband, rulebook. Cue the honor.

But what is discipline when nobody sees what is under it?

This...

This was the other kind, or at least the kind the book had shown him. Chalk, a slate, and the quiet conviction that the world was a schedule and everything in it was running late. Function, in other words, with nothing beneath it on display. No speeches. No ideals stated aloud. No sword oath.

He could see it in her even now. Valeria enforced the rules because they were right. This woman, by the book’s account, enforced them because it was Tuesday.

At least, that was the impression the book had left him with, back on that bus. A Council officer near the end of the first year, a name, a role, a few lines in a scene crowded with more important people. The illustrations had gone to the main cast, and the rest had been left to the prose, which had been busy elsewhere. He remembered what she did. He had not remembered her face.

He remembered it now. And, looking at it, he remembered something else.

The book had never shown him what lay under her work. That was not the same as there being nothing there. She had simply never needed to announce it. Her job did not ask for speeches. It asked for chalk, and for someone to notice when the chairs were in the wrong place.

’Correction. The novel is a summary, not a personality test.’

It was becoming a habit, this discovering that what the book described and what stood in front of him were not always the same thing. He could not decide whether that was annoying or educational. Probably both.

’Or maybe she is just tired.’

Somebody, after all, had to be the person who cared where the chairs went.

At the end of the day, he was not a philosopher. Not a grand thinker, either. Just a guy who had read a lot of web novels on a lot of buses, and who could tell a knight from a clerk.

The clerk was looking at him.

"If you have finished assessing me," Sera said, "President Selcourt wishes to talk."

Lucavion waited for the rest of the sentence. There was no rest of the sentence.

’Elias. Now.’

The timing dropped into his stomach and stayed.

"Talk," he said mildly. "Is this the kind of talk that ends in a handshake, or the kind that ends in a form?"

"The president is waiting."

"That is not an answer to the question."

"It is the answer to the question I was sent to deliver." She lifted the rod an inch and pointed it, without any particular hostility, at the crowd. "I was told where to find you. I was told to say he wished to talk. I have said it."

It was, he had to admit, an excellent wall. It had no gaps to pry at, and it had not even bothered to be rude. Either she did not know what Elias wanted, or she knew and had been told to carry none of it, and either way the answer was the same. He would find out when he got there, and not one minute earlier.

That did not stop him from working it out on the way.

He had just watched Lucien take House Vayne’s declaration and use it to cut a piece out of Elias’s standing, in public, with very little effort and no visible malice. And now the man he had cut was sending a Council officer across Clubs Day to fetch one particular first-year. Lucavion did not believe in coincidences he would end up paying for.

So, reasons. He had several.

Elias might have seen him watching. Standing near a political disaster with a face that was slightly too interested was a skill Lucavion had never quite mastered, and Elias was the sort of man who noticed which faces did that.

Or it was Lucien himself. Lucavion had, over the past months, stood close to him more often than was strictly healthy, and a man whose scales had just tipped would want to know who was standing on which side of them.

Or it was leverage. Something a president could not get through Council channels, from Council people, on Council paper. A favor, perhaps, of the kind that only exists if nobody writes it down.

Or the summons was older than Lucien’s move, and only sooner. Elias could possibly have shown an interest in him before. Lucien had merely made it urgent.

He could not tell which of them was true. It might be none of them, or some fifth thing he had not thought of yet, which was the option he liked least.

None of them told him what Elias was going to ask, only that a question was coming.

Before he could decide whether to follow, Isolde decided it for him.

She turned to Lucavion first and inclined her head, the depth owed to a fellow student and not a hair more. "Mister Lucavion. Thank you for your time." Then she turned to the Council officer, and the courtesy shifted. It was lower, slower, and perfectly correct, the sort of bow that would have satisfied a court chamberlain. "Senior Sera. Please forgive the delay I have caused you."

Sera gave her a single nod with no warmth in it, and it seemed to satisfy both of them.

Then Isolde was gone, folding into the crowd as though the crowd had been arranged to receive her.

Lucavion watched the gap in the crowd where she had been until it closed.

He followed Sera through the tables, and the thought would not leave him alone. Ten minutes ago that woman had held a threat in one hand and a form in the other. Now she was a diagram from an etiquette manual titled How To Leave A Room. The seams did not show. That was what unsettled him. He had spent years learning to spot a mask, and hers had never once slipped where he could see it.

Sera stopped.

A Council runner had appeared at her elbow, breathless, with a report that began three sentences too early. She let him reach the end of it, then answered in a handful of words. The stall by the east arch was to move two paces back. If its owners objected, he was to tell them she had measured. The demonstration at the fountain would be pushed to the fourth bell. Someone named Corin was to be found and asked, politely, to return what he had borrowed. Then she made a mark on the slate with the chalk, and the runner fled, relieved to have been dismissed.

Sera did not so much as glance at Lucavion while she worked. For the first time since they had left the table, nothing was asking anything of him, and his mind took the opening.

"Then I will try to look more carefully."

It could have been an apology, dressed as a promise. It could have been a promise to watch him more closely, dressed as an apology. It could have been both, folded so neatly that neither showed its edges.

What bothered him was the possibility that she had meant it. A knife was not any less a knife for being handed over politely.

He tested the thought once, found nothing to grip, and let it go.

Sera had finished with the runner. She tucked the chalk behind her fingers and started walking again without announcing it, and he fell in beside her.

"I have seen armies take orders more slowly," Lucavion said.

"Armies have more to argue about." She did not look at him. "Students have a lunch bell."

That was, he suspected, the closest thing to a joke he was going to get.

The walk to the Council grounds became a lesson in how the day actually ran. An officer stepped into her path with an armful of ribbons and a problem about the Halven table wanting extra ground. "No. Give them the corner by the well." "Yes, Senior." A second fell in at her shoulder to report that the arch was blocked. "Then unblock it." A third simply showed her a page, and she initialed it without slowing. Not one of them asked what the president would think. Not one of them mentioned him at all.

Lucavion had assumed she was Elias’s messenger. A messenger carried decisions from one place to another. This woman kept making them on the way.

The noise of Clubs Day thinned behind them, and a denser quiet took its place.

The Council premises did not shout. They hummed. Schedules had been pinned up, crossed out, and pinned up again beside the crossings. Officers passed between rooms with sealed reports held flat against their chests. Doors opened and closed at a pace that suggested no one had stopped moving since morning. Twice he caught the words northern grounds through a doorway, and once, faintly, Vayne.

Whatever Lucien had set in motion that afternoon, it had reached here first.

A broad young man with a crooked armband stepped out of a side room, took one look at her face, and visibly began to expect trouble. "Sera. The north field has gone strange again. Two stalls are claiming the same patch, and I have a bad feeling about the rest."

"Gregor. Take the second detail and hold the north arch." She kept walking. "And fix your armband."

Gregor glanced down at it, sighed, and did not fix it.

She brought Lucavion past a landing, down a short corridor, and to a door with nothing written on it. She did not explain, and he did not ask again. She knocked once, opened it, and stepped aside.

Elias was already working. Three neat stacks of documents waited on the desk in front of him, each squared to the edge, as though they had been prepared some time ago for this very hour. He did not seem to have looked up when the door opened. He did now.

"Lucavion."

Sera closed the door behind him.