Dominicus sat up, awake. Felt for the curtain; slid over to get it until he almost fell out of bed. Remembered there was no curtain; his knuckles hurt. Swung sideways; felt air under his feet, toed out into space, remembered he was high up. Tossed himself at the floor; stumbled, but got to standing, took a couple of steps, wondered what the fuck was wrong with ground, reached again for the not-there curtain, panicked.
Where the fuck was he?
“AH, gran’mas belted… franchee…”
Feichín bolted upright at the noise, peered at Dominicus in the semi dark. Hair sticking up every which way, he swayed gently, squinting one eye.
“’S haunted?”
Ruaridh’s honking snore made Dominicus jump. He remembered where he was. Blue-black light filtering through their extremely inadequate curtain cast everything in the small room in shadows so dark they shattered his sense of depth.
“What are you doing awake?” Feichín asked, rubbing his eye as he came awake for good.
Dominicus ignored him. It had occurred to him that he had no idea where to get water. Even if he knew, he didn’t know what to do with it. Nobody else here would be doing any waking prayers or ablutions. It occurred to him that he didn’t know if he would be doing any waking prayers or ablutions, and he felt suddenly as if his own body was apiece with the black shadows, making him unsure what was real.
Ruaridh honked.
Yawning, Feichín cracked his neck. “Well, good morning, I guess. Do you, by any chance, know if there’s a chamber pot?”
Dominicus shook his head, and his body celebrated its re-inhabiting with a painful twinge of his bladder.
“…Privy?”
“They gave us a tour yesterday,” he said, hoping Feichín’s memory was better than his. They had stuffed so much information into the afternoon Dominicus felt lucky he had made it back to his bed at all (a process he also, at the moment, didn’t remember).
“Not the tour sort,” Feichín said, sniffing wearily, and Dominicus once again marveled, unsure whether every Ainjir was this arrogant or Feichín was just particularly stupid.
“Anyway, I suppose it’s a tad urgent.” Feichín hopped up out of bed, long shirt dangling. He chuckled, pointing at Dominicus’ loose pants, “Between us there’s one whole set! Do say, though, if you have any idea what we’re supposed to do this morning, and, uh, whether we can actually leave?”
He was unsure. The thought hadn’t occurred to him – either thought. Now he was horrified that he might as particularly stupid as his roommate.
“You know,” Feichín said, rocking on his heels, “urgently.”
The door creaked open, startling them both. The very tall man in the very plain gray clothes stood silhouetted in the doorway.
“Ah,” he said gently, “already up? That’s good.”
He raised an enormous cone to his mouth, pointed it at Ruaridh’s head, and shouted, “GET UP YOU FILTHY GRUB!”
Ruaridh rolled right out of his bed, onto the floor, cowering. As the tall man took a deep breath, turning to head to the next room, a slight humming began outside, which soon became a calamitous, reedy, semi-melodic screaming.
“UP, UP, WAKEN, YOU SLEEPING FUCKING FLOWERS, TIME TO WORK FOR THE FIRST TIME IN YOUR LIVES! HARK, THE DAYBREAK COMETH TO WAKE THEE TO THY DOOM!”
A man carrying what looked like a stiff-legged carcass stuck with a dozen slaughtered flutes followed after the tall man to rouse the rest of the dormitory.
Feichín turned to Dominicus, shouting, since both had their fingers plugging their ears, “You know, it’s a good poem, when not at this volume.”
Ruaridh groaned.
“Is there a chamber pot under there?” Feichín asked.
Clay grated across wood, and Ruaridh rolled onto his back. “Be my guest. I think I pissed myself already.”
“Thank you, most gracious, thank you,” Feichín muttered as he delicately tip-toed around him towards the pot and decamped again to his corner of the room.
The light had grown enough Dominicus could see the deep bags under Ruaridh’s eyes as he looked up at him.
“Does your uniform fit?”
Fuck. He had been too tired to fix it last night. He shook his head.
“Well, we can look like fools together, then.” Ruaridh rolled himself up, stretching.
“Fittings aside, I think we should put on some haste, lads,” Feichín said, bustling over to where his lump of uniform sat on top of his still-packed bag. “I don’t mean to be alarmist, but there’s fellows outside of the other dorms with sticks, and they seem very impatient.”
Dominicus started for his uniform, then stopped himself, and turned towards the chamber pot.
It wasn’t that he was shy.
He stalked determinedly towards the pot, and couldn’t help a nervous glanced back at his Ainjir roommates, both of whom were hurriedly dressing, and paying no attention to him. Embarrassed to have looked in the first place, he faced the pot, which gave him a good look out the window.
“Those are not fucking sticks,” he said.
Ruaridh slowed down putting on his jacket inside out and scowled. “What?”
“Those are fucking…” and he forgot the word. Fuck the word. He hoped this was the fastest pee of his life.
“What!? I want to know if I’m supposed to be fearing for my life or not,” Ruaridh stomped over to the window as Dominicus was almost ready to leave it.
“Those are fucking coach whips,” Ruaridh said.
“Yes!” Dominicus said, running to his own uniform. “That is it.”
“Do you think we’re going somewhere?” Feichín asked. “Do you mean to sound excited?”
“Yes,” said a voice from the door – the tall man had returned. He wasn’t using his yelling cone this time, and by the sound of it, the piper was causing hellish mayhem upstairs. He stepped into the room, smiling conspiratorially.
“And I’ll tell you where, since you were the only ones up when I started my rounds, and as the first up have had the most time to get ready, and are, as yet, not so, despite having had more time than anyone – I’ll tell you, that you’re going, STRAIGHT TO THE LONG POLE WHERE EACH OF THOSE NICE YOUNG MEN WILL ROTATE THROUGH WHIPPING YOU RAW SO THEIR PRECIOUS ARMS DON’T GET TIRED ON SUCH A MEANINGLESS TASK, DISCIPLINING A BUNCH OF WASTRELS!”
By the end, of course, they were dressed, and he was yelling at them as the jogged outside, the other dormitories issuing similarly disheveled and stumbling trickles of cadets. The men with the coach whips were, as Dominicus guessed once his mind cleared, mostly for show, although they did occasionally crack a whip close enough to make a flagging cadet jump.
What followed next was what they would come to call standing exercises, or stands, which was, as the officer who arrived to lead them informed them, all that they were good for. What it consisted of was a lot of running, marching, and moving between long and tedious moments being correcting on how they stood, wore their uniforms, and appeared generally. They were given groups, and broken into them, then given more groups, and broken into those, then reconvened and broken up entirely. They were told to run to their groups, then to run with their groups, then to stand with their groups and run away from other groups. They were given innumerable barked commands (in their groups) to replicate, in order, whether they knew what they meant or not, and then prodded and shoved into doing them correctly.
While they were standing still, doing nothing, with agonizing frequency, Dominicus thought of his ‘Guide’, and how the ‘Guide’ was just the right size to fit into the inner breast pocket he hadn’t known – until now – existed in his uniform jacket. He also thought about his schedule, sitting with his guide in the bottom of his poorly packed and extremely jumbled Academy-issue bag, and tried, completely futilely, to remember a single thing that had been written on the first page, with the chart.
But he had neither thing. And could remember nothing. And ached terribly. And could probably have eaten one of the smaller Ainjir nearby, if only he could get away with it.
So, once his blood was moving and his body has ceased to ache with stiffness and instead ached with use, he started feeling angry. Angry and annoyed.
Annoyed because he felt, somehow, that he shouldn’t have been surprised – by what? The difficulty of the first day? The feeling of being utterly lost? The way everything hurt? He wasn’t sure – it seemed logical enough to be surprised but it still annoyed him vaguely.
Angry because he felt stupid – not just early morning, unexpected wake-up stupid, but extra stupid. He had a good memory. He could recall his lessons quickly, and for a long time afterward, but everything from yesterday was jumbled. And now he was stumbling around with these other idiots, failing to understand why the senseless syllables they were barking were supposed to mean something to him.
At least they seemed to be, for the most part, equally bad. And the ones who weren’t bad were made to look bad, rarely being in groups big enough to keep the rest of them in line. How the ones who knew what to do had learned it, he supposed, came somehow from the books. Or being Ainjir.
Well – most of the Ainjir actually sucked at this, so he supposed, the secret Ainjir books must have taught the others. It eased his annoyance that at least, thank God, there were books.
As his stomach rumbled, he also remembered that the rooms – he presumed, because he didn’t see into any but his own – had jugs of water, small beer or watered wine (he wasn’t sure which, just recognized the bottles) and plates of rolls and dried meat, placed there at some point when they were out. Last night Dominicus hadn’t even had the energy to eat, and this morning, no time. He knew this not from memory but because he had seen them on his way out this morning.
Fat lot of good remembering was doing him now, anyway. They didn’t seem to be running them around in those numbered groups, after he had so pressed his schedule number into his memory yesterday – the only definite bit of information he felt he had yet been given, and it wasn’t doing him any good. That was genuinely annoying. And his guide was somewhere tucked in his bag (he didn’t want to lose it, but didn’t know where anything went). As was the schedule book that matched his 4th group number.
He turned to see if anyone else had managed to bring their guide, only to get tapped with the whip, since he wasn’t standing correctly.
Standing correctly, it turned out, was immensely difficult. Dominicus resisted the urge to suggest out loud that having a whip cracked inches from your ear didn’t help. Whatever the cause, the officers leading them made sure to let them know that they were being let go (after what felt like endless hours, but probably only functionally took one or two, at most) only because they refused to waste more time with them, not because they had improved at all.
By then, the sun was well over the walls, lightly baking both aspiring cadets and mist into oblivion. In the end, Dominicus’ thoughts became entirely consumed with getting back to his bag and the book and his schedule and studying them all until he was certain absolutely nothing was missed, all crammed neatly into his memory until he could see the book itself before his mind’s eye and turn the pages to read.
So he was perhaps less disturbed than he should have been that the only instruction given with their dismissal from exercises was that they leave their knives in their rooms.
“What is this?”
“What’s your grouping?”
“Ugh, I’ve got all academics at least twice a week…”
“Then you’re reading your schedule wrong.”
Esras wished desperately the benches had back boards, so he could lean back while he pretended to eat. Well – he wasn’t really pretending. He had found a nice early peach in the basket of fruits up by kitchens, and while it had a terrible, hard texture, it also had a delightful smell. So he was kind of eating, having finished breakfast earlier.
The problem was he could have held the peach up, covering the lower part of his face and letting him enjoy that smell, if he was able to lean back, instead of having to awkwardly cradle it at his chest, one hand holding his opposite elbow, as he sat up straight on a bench. He couldn’t imagine he looked relaxed, which was one reason he was still in the hall at all – to look relaxed.
And gather intelligence. One could gather intelligence and look relaxed, he had hoped. Hopes the discomfort of trying to look relaxed on a flat, backless bench was quashing.
Yesterday had been terrible, but really a rather tame kind of terrible, falling below his expectations for the Academy and its fearsome reputation. He suspected it was to do with it being a half day – technically, most of the ollamh put off being involved in the Academy’s doings until the very last second, as if their duties in the field kept them busy. At least, that’s what the officers at Prep had scoffed. So far, the aspiring First Year cadets had been run around, made tired, but not tested – not really, anyway. So all of the tests would come today, somehow, and while he couldn’t predict what they would be, he could get an idea of who was going into them with him.
“I mean, really, what is this?” the same cadet exclaimed, raising his spoon high above his bowl and letting the contents plop back in.
“It’s porridge,” Esras said patiently. He didn’t know most of these peoples’ names – nicknames would do until it was certain any of them were going to stay in his circle. So he nicknamed this one ‘porridge’ – to himself, of course.
“Isn’t that for when you’re sick?” said another, nicknamed Comb for his dire need of one. They would cut all that off, soon. “Though, we always had beef tea…”
“I know what porridge is,” Porridge said, irritably. “This doesn’t look like any porridge I’ve ever had. My horses get better porridge than this.”
“It’s been made with corn,” one Esras decided to call ‘Smart’ said. He unceremoniously dipped a finger in Porridge’s bowl and tasted it. “Oh, and rice – that’s odd, must be time to use them up.”
“You would have a better meal if you got here earlier,” Cruvcrudiach said, having just arrived at the table for a second time. He made space for himself simply by being putting himself between several of the others, who scooted aside. He didn’t say it unkindly, but Porridge got angrier.
“There’s still fruit,” Esras pointed out, holding out his barely-bitten peach.
“I don’t like fruit,” Porridge complained.
“What’s wrong with you?” Smart asked without malice, making Esras especially appreciate his nickname.
“Who cares about the food,” Maoilin drawled. He sat across the table, on Cruvcrudiach’s other side, but since he had refused to scoot, the cadet he had been sitting next to, whose schedule he had been perusing, had been forced to get up and move. “They’ll be giving us scraps until they think we’re broken.”
Esras held the peach up under his nose, taking a deep breath but not biting. Early peaches – fresh fruit of any kind – were hardly ‘scraps’ in the city.
“Why would they want to do that?” Comb said with a slight frown. He had frowned very slightly a lot this meal. Very delicate, noble frowns. “You would think they would want us healthy.”
“Maoilin exaggerates for effect,” Esras said. “We’ll be healthy, but not spoiled – and Cruvcrudiach is right – the earlier you come the more of the popular options will be available.”
“How do you know?” Porridge asked, eyes narrowed menacingly. “At Prep we all got the same meals – it was more fair.”
It decidedly was not. They all got the same meals, but could only eat what they could defend from rapacious tablemates and upperclassmen. Esras had lost many parts and all of more than one meal to tolls set by bigger, older, and meaner schoolmates. He had already decided that if such a system was in place at Academy, he was going to change it; it was another part of why he had gotten to the hall so early, and stayed so long.
“It’s a sideboard, idiot,” Maoilin said. “At least you should know how servants filling a sideboard works and reason from there.”
It wasn’t quite, and Esras resisted the urge to argue, because the arguing would be petty. Where Esras had arrived the hall as soon as he could – without looking rushed – and sat back to observe, Maoilin had entered a few minutes after, wordlessly sat down with his porridge – which he had at least added fruit to, and it looked like some shredded meat – and started evaluating everyone’s schedules. He was keeping the evaluations to himself, but sparing slight explanations, dropping small readings of the meaning of the complicated schedule books and their groupings the way a fortuneteller might drop the suggestion of oncoming doom when selling their services, or the way a bird of prey might scatter feathers, to be pecked at by lesser scavengers, as it ate its meal.
Esras was thoroughly annoyed that Maoilin’s approach was giving him far more concrete intelligence, without making him look nosey or desperate, the very qualities Esras had constructed his plan to avoid. He tried to console himself that he was getting a different kind of intelligence, one he thought would be more useful in the short term, by getting to observe the way the new cadets interacted.
These were, for the most part, former attendees at Academy Preparatory, though some were of slightly different vintage than Maoilin, Cruvcrudiach, and Esras – or had run in very different circles. They had gravitated together as a set of familiar faces who at least had notes to compare if no superior knowledge about the Academy functioned. They had been given precious little of that, and Esras – as did, he suspected, the other cadets from Preparatory – assumed that would be part of the tests of the day.
A number of other floaters – not cadets from Preparatory – had also gathered round, drawn either by the sense of community or the sense of superior knowledge the group of Preparatory cadets gave off. These, however, were usually muscled out of the center by other Preparatory cadets sliding into place among semi-familiar faces. Esras took note of the one who fought to hold their position, and the ones who wandered away – some disappointed, but some determined to find other sources of potential support.
Anyone who was just eating was too stupid to attend to.
“Well, it’s almost up, anyway,” Esras said, leaning forward over the table towards the middle, where several of the thick books overlapped each other. “Is anyone else headed to Swordplay?”
“How can you tell?” piped up a smaller cadet, further down the table. Esras decided to call him Stone, like the tiny stone in his ill-ripened peach.
“I’ll bet you’re headed to Foundations,” Maoilin said.
“I have Foundations,” Comb said – delicate frown.
“We all have Foundations,” Cruvcrudiach decided to intervene, raising his head from his own massive serving of porridge. It wasn’t his first, but he was a big guy.
“I asked the Minder at the dorm,” Esras said. “It is part of what they’re there for – to answer questions.”
“Oh, bullshit,” Maoilin said, then seemed to think better of challenging Esras on his gentle lie, extending insistent hands over the table to request his schedule. “They’re not called ‘Minders’ here – that’s Prep bullshit. They call them wards or something – already heard someone drop it in conversation earlier. They’ll sniff you out in a second if you call them Minders. Give me your bullshit schedule – I want to see whether I need to tolerate you at breakfast, Esras Cole.”
“What do you mean sniff you out?” Stone asked.
Grinning as if this were a joke between them, Esras handed his schedule book over. “I’m afraid you do – we’re both at Swordplay first, same group, same ollamh.”
“Ah, well, das bratar, as they say in the South,” Maoilin said, scrutinizing the book.
“We do not,” Porridge grunted.
“If you’re from the South, I would think you would recognize corn and rice porridge,” Smart observed.
“Look at this!” This one, Esras knew the name of – Enda, another familiar face, though not a friend, from Prep – and he held before his face a steaming, shiny piece of flatbread almost as big as his head, like a clothier checking the threads of a fabric sample. “Just came out fresh.”
Several of the cadets, including Cruvcrudiach, got up immediately to retrieve their own.
“What’s that?” Porridge asked, leaning back to glare at the kitchen. “Who’ve they got working back there?”
“Midraeics, obviously,” Maoilin said, not taking his eyes up from Esras’ schedule.
“Is this part of that stupid trick they’ve pulled this year?” Porridge asked. “Admitting a Midraeic student?”
“Midraeics always work in the Academy kitchens,” Stone said, but he was sinking back into his seat, rather than striding off with Cruvcrudiach to get a piece of flatbread.
“You know it’s all a prank by Seolgaire,” Comb said. “We just can’t tell who it’s a prank on, yet. With them, it could go either way, you know. Whole family is touched.”
“The Academy doesn’t participate in pranks,” Esras said, still seated only because he was still trying to appear relaxed. The very smell of the flatbread made his stomach rumble. “Are you getting one?”
To be under the direct gaze of one of the central conversationalists of the table made Stone shrink. “Uh…”
“Would you pick me up one?” Esras asked.
“Me, too,” Maoilin said, not looking up. “Cruvcrudiach’s going to have an armful but you know he’ll be planning to eat them all.”
“Well,” Esras said, shrugging. “Growing boy.”
“Wish I was growing like that,” Comb observed.
After a silence, Stone looked over his shoulder, “Will they let me…?”
“Who’s going to stop you?” Maoilin said, looking up sharply, deep frown so general it was hard to tell whether he was disgusted by Stone’s timidity or the idea he might not be allowed more than one piece of bread. Whether it was resolved for Stone was unclear, however, as he got up and walked towards the windows by the kitchens.
“The Hall’s master might,” Porridge said, watching Stone walk away. He let out a sort of mirthless chuckle, “You remember when the Prep kitchen ran out of joints that one night?”
Esras did. An entire class – some twenty students who had arrived late due to their ollamh keeping them over time – had nothing but bread and beans. At Prep, meals were supposed to be identical – fair and even, to encourage no complaints. When one student asked the master of the Kitchens about their meals, they learned that the important bit was in fact the ‘no complaints’. The entire class of twenty had gotten a beating for his audacity. The class ostracized the student for earning them all a beating, which drove the ollamhs to intervene when it got too bad. The ollamhs had the entire year of students receive a beating, including Esras, Maoilin, Cruvcrudiach, and apparently, Porridge. It was a logistical nightmare arranging it – they lost class time to the sore arms of ollamh – but it was the principle of the thing.
Such was the fairness and evenness of Academy Preparatory.
Esras had just meant to encourage Stone to do as he wished and get bread – well, and get some bread himself, without ruining his ease – but this was a good reminder that he needed to be more wary. Too bad it had come from an idiot.
“We’re really going to have to watch it with who we associate with,” Maoilin said, tossing Esras’ schedule back to him. “There’s no overarching order to the schedule groups that I can see, so we’ll have to build our way up to the top again.”
This ‘we’ and ‘our’ caught Esras’ attention the way a fishhook caught in a thumb.
Maoilin was looking at him eyes bright under half-closed lids, managing to pull off a posture far more relaxed than Esras had been.
“They haven’t even separated out the cadets who went to Preparatory?” Comb asked, dismayed, looking over the pile of schedules remaining in the center of the table. “Seems short-sighted, at least.”
“They know we’ll do better,” Maoilin said, still watching Esras. “So they’ve mixed us in. Maybe they hope we’ll drag a few untrained ones with us towards the top.”
“It isn’t like Prep, you know,” Esras said. “it could just be they’ve assigned lots randomly. They mean for there to be no incoming advantages.”
“They might mean for it, but it won’t be true,” Maoilin said. “There is always advantage to be had. And I doubt they did things randomly, like you doubt they admitted a Midraeic student as a prank. They don’t do things that way.”
“And they’ll have to be careful about it, or their pet will get squashed,” Porridge said, earning him a sliver of Maoilin’s attention.
“Honestly, admitting Cruvcrudiach was a bit of a tip of the hat to managing advantage,” Comb observed morosely. “I couldn’t grapple him at Preparatory and now he’s grown a foot I doubt I’ll do better against him.”
“Yes,” Maoilin said. “Some advantages are natural, an accident of birth, but they’re no less advantages. And we would be fools not to exploit our advantages while we have them. Best not to dilute them until it’s necessary.”
The others were returning with their armfuls of fresh bread – Cruvcrudiach did, in fact, start passing out his bounty though he kept more than a few, and likewise, Stone gave one to Esras and – slightly more nervously – another to Maoilin.
“I think after today we’ll have a better idea of what our advantages are,” Esras said. “You know, that’s part of the point of this place. It’s supposed to take everyone as they come, and let them demonstrate their level, not assume a level going in.”
Maoilin rolled his eyes, but indicated capitulation to the table with a sigh and ferocious tear at his piece of flatbread. “Ever the idealist, Esras Cole. It’s a wonder you survived Academy Prep with such ideals intact. The rest of us probably better hope it’s not an even playing field out there, or just start saluting Cruvcrudiach right now.”
“Feel free,” Cruvcrudiach said, mouth full of bread. “But do it fast, or you’ll be late.”
He stuck one oily finger out to point at one of the schedules on the table. “Class is starting halfway across campus.”
Regardless of whose schedule it was, they all said ‘Fuck’ simultaneously.