Shattered Innocence: Transmigrated Into a Novel as an Extra

Chapter 1243: Older Habits

"Student Olarion. A moment."

Arcten said it without looking up from the slate, and Valeria, already half turned toward the yard gate, turned back.

Behind him the barrier frames were going onto a cart in pairs, and the chalk bend where Reilan’s line had stood had been scuffed to a gray smear. At the far edge of the yard, Reilan himself waited where he had been told to wait, one hand opening and closing at his side.

Arcten turned the slate so she could see it. His entry ran to six lines, in a hand that looked as though it had once signed battalion orders.

"You had the whole lane from where you stood," he said. "What would you add?"

"That Student Reilan relieved his right-hand fighter before the man began to falter." She had not needed to think about it. "It should be in the entry. The line lasted as long as it did because of that change."

"It isn’t in the entry."

"No."

He wrote it into the margin without argument and tucked the slate under his arm. "That will do."

Crossing the yard toward the gate, Valeria had the odd sense of having been consulted.

Consulted. By a man who had once commanded a battalion, about a lane he had watched himself. It would have been strange on any morning, and this was the morning after Gregor had spent an hour explaining, without flattery, why the Committee wanted a first-year’s eyes in the room. Two offices in two days. Each had looked at her and decided that what she said would go into the file exactly as she said it.

’Am I that much of a... ledger with a sword? People look at me and reach for a pen.’

She had earned the reading, which made it harder to resent. The years of reports, the forms recited until her hands knew them, the refusal to be late or vague or wrong: nobody had handed her any of it. She had built herself into someone whose word could be filed.

Last night in the Council corridor, Lucavion had performed her for an audience of one: the lifted chin, the clipped cadence, "State your name and block for the record." She had put a fist into his shoulder and filed the whole act under exaggeration.

She reopened the file now. The chin, she maintained, was slander. The rest was beginning to look like observation.

Among the costs Gregor had listed yesterday was the keeping of evidence that contradicted her first judgment, however much it embarrassed her. She had not expected to put the rule to use before lunch.

Lucavion was propped against the gate post, estoc hung at his hip, with every appearance of not having waited. He let her come within three paces before he spoke.

"Representative Olarion." He gave the title its full weight and then some. "One day in, and the instructors are already asking for your opinion. You work fast."

Valeria went through the gate without breaking stride or turning her head.

The path beyond ran straight for a hundred paces, which promised her a hundred paces of peace. It delivered about eight.

Lucavion appeared at her left shoulder, the scabbard tapping once against his leg as he matched her step. "This is about when you eat, isn’t it?" He said it lightly. "Midday, give or take a quarter hour. Andelheim ran on that stomach of yours. You’d check the light halfway through a drill and pretend you hadn’t."

She had braced for teasing and found something worse: he had it right. A fortnight in Andelheim, years gone, and he still had her hours.

Warmth reached her ears before she could object to it.

"I eat when the hour requires it," she said. "Everyone does."

"Sure. Everyone."

He, of all people, had no standing to speak of appetite. In her experience, which took in barracks mess halls and banquet tables alike, nobody put away more food than Lucavion did.

"It is a coincidence." She lengthened her stride. "The bell rings at midday for the whole Academy. I am not responsible for the bell."

"I never said you were responsible for the bell."

She went faster. Unable to run in front of a dozen students, she settled for a walk with more purpose than it needed, and Lucavion simply lengthened his own stride and kept pace with the idle ease of a man strolling beside a hurry.

"You’re speeding up."

"...I am...walking."

"Hehe...You’re walking like someone who’d like to be somewhere else." He leaned to catch her face, and she turned it away. "Also, your ears have gone pink."

She tried to make an excuse.

"...The sun."

"Is behind us."

Her pace gave out first, since the dining hall stood too close for fleeing it to be reasonable. Somewhere past the second junction it occurred to her that at no point had she told him to go.

The talk turned ordinary after that, which she suspected was his doing. Caeden had him in a yard at first light some mornings now; the first yard, the one with the greatsword, had been claimed by upper-years within a day. He asked about orientation and winced at "procedure and record-keeping" before she finished the phrase. She told him it was necessary. He told her so was sleep.

Neither of them mentioned the yard behind them. She would not discuss an open record, and he, to her faint surprise, did not try.

At the next court Lucavion glanced along the rail, quick and without commitment, over the faces at the weapon racks. Farther on, the covered walk passed a side door of the Sword Hall, and he slowed half a step to look inside. Whatever he wanted was not there. He looked a moment longer anyway, then the half step closed and he was beside her again, talking about nothing.

She had seen him search before. He was looking for a person; the height of his eyes said as much, level with faces and not with exits. She did not know who, and she did not intend to guess. Guesses made on thin evidence were how a report got twisted before it reached a tribunal, and she had paid for that lesson once already.

The dining hall’s doors stood open ahead of them, warm with noise. She kept her eyes on them.

By the time they had worked through the tray line, the Grand Dining Hall had sorted itself into its noon geography: upper-years under the tall windows, first-year clusters loud in the middle, and, against the east wall beside a pillar, the table everyone else seemed to have agreed to leave alone.

Two tables on either side of it stood empty every noon, a gap exactly as wide as the Academy’s opinion of the man who sat there. Students angled their trays past it and found reasons to study the ceiling. Valeria no longer commented. She took the bench across from him, where she always did.

His tray held three bowls and half a loaf. She counted without meaning to.

He had finished the first bowl and started the second when a tray touched down beside his.

Jesse did not ask whether the seat was free, or look at either of them first. She set the tray down, drew her sword out from under the bench and propped it against her leg, and sat with the finality of a person who has never waited for an invitation.

Valeria knew how seldom anyone crossed that gap. Most students needed a reason, and a few needed a dare.

Lucavion’s spoon stopped halfway to his mouth. His eyes lifted, found Jesse, and stayed, level with her face. The rest of him remained as careless as before, which was how Valeria knew.

On the walk over, that same look had swept the rail and the Sword Hall door, always at the height of a face. It had stopped sweeping.

’He was looking for her.’

Something under Valeria’s ribs shifted, the small tight thing she kept near Jesse and had never given a name. She set her spoon down and squared it to the tray, since nothing else within reach could be handled so carefully.

Returning the nod Jesse gave her across the table, Valeria kept her face where it was; she had had the practice.

Valeria waited for the line. With Lucavion there was always one, some remark that turned a seat at his table into a joke about the seat, and she had her answer half assembled behind her teeth.

It did not come. Jesse’s elbow had landed in the narrow space between his tray and the edge of the bench. Lucavion glanced at it, set down his spoon, and moved. He slid along the bench by a full hand’s width, hauled the second bowl and the loaf after him, and opened the room.

Valeria was watching for a joke.

She had seen him turn aside questions from nobles, instructors and herself without once appearing to move. Making room, plainly, with nothing said to cover it, was a thing she had never seen him do.

Jesse took the space without comment. Valeria picked her spoon back up. The soup had cooled while she was busy keeping her face.

Jesse did not look at his bowl when she spoke. "You’re still picking the peppers out."

Lucavion’s spoon stopped above the small red heap he had built along the rim. "They bite back."

"They’re peppers."

"He did that at Andelheim as well," Valeria said. She had meant it as an observation. Her voice had gone formal around it, as it did when she read a finding aloud, and Jesse’s eyes stayed on the bread. It came out closer to a claim.

"Longer than that," Jesse said, and tore a piece off the loaf.

She gave it no weight at all. Valeria looked at the red heap on the rim of his bowl, whose whole history she had believed she knew, and kept her spoon where it was.

"I am sitting right here," Lucavion said.

"Then eat."

He picked up his spoon. He did not argue, which Valeria had never once seen him manage with an instruction, and the peppers stayed where they were.

Three people ate, each busy not saying a different thing.

Valeria had her own share of it. At the banquet Jesse had pressed her until she called him a friend, hesitating over the word, and then offered her own description of him, one she had carried ever since: "Always half out of reach." After the diagnostic Jesse had added a warning. "Just don’t mistake being seen once for being understood."

She knew something had happened on the Western Terrace, and she had chosen not to ask.

’What kind of past teaches someone to say that?’

Longer than Andelheim, by Jesse’s own account. Valeria had the length of it now and nothing to put inside. She could wait. She did not reverse decisions for the sake of her curiosity.

From the next table a voice rose over the clatter and failed to lower itself in time. Valeria heard it before she meant to.

"—was Reilan, apparently."

"Reilan? Who did he—"

"Vaulden."

At the hearing of those words, Jesse’s spoon stopped.