Dominicus had found his Guide. The Guide said fuck-all about what he was supposed to be doing, or how he was supposed to be standing, or where he was supposed to be going. At least, his bleary-eyed quick review of its innards while he sat on the bed in the dorm after being told he was incompetent at standing for more than an hour didn’t reveal any information useful for answering those questions.
His roommates had been torn about their destination after being publicly excoriated for failing at skills they had learned as toddlers – it seemed some of the cadets were wandering towards where they seemed to remember there being showers, while others swore they could smell breakfast, and were pretty sure it was on their schedules for right then. Some very few had limped back to the dormitories – he guessed that some were convinced they could squeeze in more sleep without screwing themselves and some were just too physically overtaxed to do much else. He didn’t stay to figure out what his roommates had decided – it was evident that they hadn’t gone back to the dorms. Dominicus had run back.
He needed time to read. He needed extra time to read Ainjir. Surely he could pick up something from a book – they had been given two already, this was a place of books, how could he be so confused on only the first day with two books?
The tall man who had woken them up cleared his throat from the doorway.
Dominicus looked up, thought about standing up, thought warily about how he apparently wasn’t so good at standing, and ended up remaining where he was.
The tall man held out his hand.
Dominicus cocked his head slowly.
“Where are you supposed to be?” the tall man asked.
After a moment, it made sense. He handed the tall man his schedule book. With some relief, he noted, it took the tall man a few minutes of looking and flipping back and forth before he seemed to draw any conclusions.
“The Guide will tell you when you’re actually in trouble, and when someone has decided you’re in trouble. Ultimately, the ollamh decide you’re in trouble whether it’s in the Guide or not,” he said, handing the schedule back. “But don’t waste time on it yet. Are you a good reader?”
Dominicus didn’t know whether to nod or not – what made someone a good reader at this place? Was it the number of books they read? Because he hadn’t read that many – books rarely came through his home town, but he read all the ones he could. Was it how fast he read? Because he read Midraeic like drinking water, but Ainjir always took a minute a longer. He could barely read any Geronese, but he knew the alphabet, thanks to Auriol and Catillia, and could figure it out. He was a great reader of the books of the Prophet, but somehow he didn’t think that would count.
“You think too much,” the tall man said, sighing. “That’s fine – you’ll figure it out – but speak when you’re spoken to, or they’ll beat it out you.”
“Who will?” Dominicus asked.
“Pick it up quick, you do. That’s good. The ollamhs,” the tall man said. “Your teachers.”
“So you are not an ollamh,” Dominicus replied, tasting the new word. “And the ollamh must not be good teachers, if they beat the thinking out of students.”
The tall man seemed torn between laughing and an angry correction, resulting in a quick, toothy, lopsided grin. “You at least hit upon key information, if not the right questions. A bit too clever, probably. No, I’m the dorm warden – an officer, though, like them all, so be careful. Some officers care more about it than others. And it’s good that you’re clever, but respond like that to an ollamh and they’ll take the skin off your back – those whips aren’t always for show.”
Dominicus could only manage a slight grunt to this. He mistrusted this person who little more than hour ago seemed very keen to see him beaten with those very whips – along with everyone else, of course.
The dorm warden levered himself up from his lean as if preparing to go. “Your schedule doesn’t look bad, but you shouldn’t be sitting here when it’s time for breakfast. Eat when you can, and eat all you can.” He stopped himself, sucking in a breath through his teeth. “Except lunch. Eat light for lunch. At least on Swordplay days.”
“Why?” Dominicus asked, holding up his schedule for a new perusal. If tomorrow was a swordplay-after-lunch day, he could work backwards. Meals, at least, were clearly marked.
“You have Corin. Swordplay will be difficult for you. Be prepared. Light lunches.” He patted his belly for emphasis then refolded his arms.
“Also, you’re going to have to work on your tone, but today it won’t matter,” the tall man said. “Today will be terrible for everyone – lots of tests nobody expects you to do well at. The food will be good, though, so enjoy it.”
He turned, preparing to leave and slapped the doorframe twice before pointing at Dominicus one more time, “Practice not asking questions, unless you’re sure they’re the right ones. Except in Tactics. I’d imagine even you’re safe there. They like the clever ones. Mostly.”
With that, he left, but his voice clattered around the doorframe as he walked away. “And get out of the dorms or I’ll have you beaten for lollygagging.”
Dominicus, shoving his books into his bag, got out. If today would be full of tests, there was one test he wasn’t too worried about – he could eat, if that was all he had to do.
“That was nothing,” Maoilin muttered beneath his breath to Esras as they left Swordplay, each heaving his discarded bag up from the grass onto his shoulder.
“There are a lot of beginners,” Esras said.
But that didn’t really explain it. The class had met at the building indicated on their schedules only to find it was really just a vast equipment shed near some stables. Their ollamh had silently waited for them all to gather, but rather than making them run or fall immediately into exercises, he had drilled into them the order in which they would retrieve and store equipment, how to handle the practice weapons, and how to set up for class before he arrived. Then they had done essentially what they had done that morning, only with swords – lots of standing, gripping, lunging, being lectured on holding tight but not too tight, respecting the wood like steel, thinking about their whole body with every movement.
It was… kind of boring.
“He went soft on us,” Maoilin said, eyes narrowed as he looked back over his shoulder at the field, where the worst performers of the class were being coached into picking up and organizing the practice weapons in their racks and clearing away debris. “He’s got some other axe to grind.”
“Or, he’s getting a feel for us. Letting us lower our guards.”
Maoilin jutted his chin forward a bit, thinking. “Possible.”
Enda, who had been trailing, regretting that last flatbread he stuffed in his mouth on the way out to class, drifted closer. “Probably both, you know.”
Maoilin met Enda’s gaze. The air threatened to boil between them, but only for a moment, as Enda refused to drop away, and Maoilin apparently decided to let whatever it was that had put that disdainful look on his face pass. This was a new development, but Esras wasn’t sure how on-the-spot it was. If Maoilin had casually bullied Esras at Preparatory at every available opportunity – few though they were – he and Enda had something more of real rivalry going. It related to how their families’ lands interacted – but, Esras realized, if they had both landed at the Academy the interaction of estates was no longer their concern. So there was cause for peace, in a time of few and uncertain allies.
“What’s next?” Enda asked, wiping sweat from under his chin.
“Tactics,” Esras and Maoilin said together.
“So we’re full grouping – most of our classes together.”
“Apparently,” Maoilin said, biting off his sarcastic drawl. “So perhaps we ought to stick together.”
This time Enda looked at Esras as if uncertain whether to bite, bully, or ignore.
Esras gave him nothing. This was a game; a game in which, for once, the pieces they brought to the table would be swept aside and replaced with the smooth identical stones of a game of Dún. Esras’ last pieces from his previous life had been played before the gates. He came in with nothing to have swept away, and he certainly wasn’t going to start building walls before he had even seen the full field.
“All right,” Enda said, casually. “Depends on what you mean by ‘stick together’ though.”
This was Maoilin’s moment, and he pulled his shoulders back as they walked towards the buildings that would house their next class. “Nothing too serious. It will be a while until they rank us, officially. Once they do, everyone at the top of the Lists is going to have a target on their backs. We have a chance to change the nature of that target.”
“You seem awfully confident about who is going to be top-ranked,” Enda said.
“The cadets who have gone to Prep are at an enormous advantage in early days; that’s the point of the place. Some of us will end up at the top by accident,” Maoilin didn’t turn his head, but cast his eyes down and back, as if to regard the field behind them, still full of tromping cadets, “and some on purpose. It’s only reasonable to expect high ranking by the first Lists. Those who rise fast will sink fast, though, if they’re not ready for it. I plan to be more than ready for it.”
Maoilin readjusted his pack, putting both straps up on his shoulders and shifting to make himself comfortable as they walked. “There is no reason to suppose that we can’t easily make the top of this pathetic group – which could easily put us in or near the top ten of the First Year Lists. The top ten of the Lists will be constantly subject to challenges, and constantly expected to outperform other cadets. They’ll be setting the standard for what rank ten, rank five, rank one, look like. And I don’t believe this bullshit they try to sell us, that there are no privileges and no special challenges issued to the top ranked cadets. A target is a target.”
He said it bitterly, but Esras had made the same assumption – and confirmed it, with a little bit of reconnaissance, and a little bit of the favor of the Families back in the city. Cadets were notoriously close-lipped about the inner workings of the Academy to Capitol folk, but anyone would let a few things slip for some extra attention and discounted drinks in the homes of the Families.
Maoilin was many things, but not stupid.
“What I propose is cooperation.”
“Not competition?” Enda said, clear in his tone that he doubted Maoilin’s sincerity.
Maoilin inclined his head slightly towards Enda – half-bow, half-nod. “Naturally, we’ll compete. Eventually. On our own terms. Until then, we cooperate. Cooperation means control. If we are setting the standard for top-ranked cadets, we can manipulate those standards to help each other stay top cadets. At least for a while.”
“It’s never lasted,” Esras said, and the other two turned to him. He kept his gaze on the grass, the gray stone building rising before them. “The Preparatory cadets always hit the top of the Lists first, but they don’t last there.”
“Oh, yeah,” Enda said, after a silence. “I forgot you’re from the city.”
Now Esras looked at them both, and Maoilin, at least, stared firmly back, his arrogant, half-lidded gaze strangely welcoming. “Idiots will end up at the top by accident. None of us are idiots, and none of us have any intention of ending up anywhere else. Let them apply their rod of equality and we will still be at the top.”
“I’m almost flattered you include me,” Enda said, “if I weren’t so aware that you expect to be ranked First, no matter what.”
“Then defeat me there,” Maoilin said, “on any terms you like – but don’t let any gate-born trash backstab me some day when I’m sick, or haven’t finished the reading, or haven’t perfected the forms, and I’ll keep the same trash for backstabbing you. That’s all there really is to it.”
Gate-born. Braile-breith. A term so particular to the Academy that it had survived the centuries intact. Esras wondered where Maoilin had heard it. Esras had heard it, of course, from those cadets the Families had helped him bribe for droplets of information. It never lasted, the cadets said – the Prep cadets always floated to the top, and were stomped down soon enough, and the distinctions that had been drawn between those born at the gates and those coming in with Preparatory’s wind under their wings flattened out.
But, oh – for the First Year, did it make a difference.
“Sounds a bit…” Enda raised his hands like a scale, “underhanded.”
“Impious love,” Maoilin responded.
“Impious love, faithless war,” Esras expounded for him, “trouble as often as treasure. A moment’s loss is loss forever, as changeable as weather. A lover’s breath, a lawless heart, bleeds as often beats. The spending thrust, the keening rock, in victory and defeat.”
Enda stared – Esras thought, flatteringly awestruck, though he shouldn’t have been – but Maoilin clapped a hand on his shoulder. “And we’ll rely on Esras for charm. By Victory’s Nipples, I haven’t got it.”
“I agree,” Enda said, dropping back to get around him and sidle up to Esras. “Don’t tell me you learned all stuff at Prep? Tits, I had no mind for it at all – I so wanted to learn it, like Brock-Bruin, you know? Warrior poet stuff.”
So, alliance cemented, up the long stairs and into the Tactics classroom, they talked poetry.
The Hall was the center. By lunch, Dominicus had figured it out. The schedule, at least for their ‘Year’ of students, kept them in orbit around the big hall where they had all their meals and had been given their reading test and supplies. The Hall was a kind of distant wing from the main body of buildings, attached by two long open hallways, slate-tile roofs supported with pointed archways of stone. They seemed to cross the main body of buildings only to get to different areas of equipment storage. There were one or two classes which drew them up into the corner towers, but always on the western side, and they were always accessible from outside.
He knew this because it was easy to tell who the other new cadets were. He didn’t have to take any time to try to recognize them, as they were as unlike the older cadets as lapdogs to wolves. He could watch them, even those not in his grouping as they bumbled about trying to find their way.
This didn’t make him feel very good.
Nor did the idea that he would need to explore to shed some of the obvious newness to his movements around the campus. There had to be a reason they were always outside, and kept to their own side of things, nearer their dormitories. At least, he suspected there was.
Because it was also hard to tell what was happening by accident.
His history class had provided the first fruit of his hopes in this grim place. It had been boring – even he had some familiarity with the events laid out by the ollamh – but it had been calculated. By the end, he saw that the instructor had paralleled the stories, disguising in the basic introduction to the foundation of the Academy a set of questions about the nature of historical events and those who acted in them. Buried under those was the implied question: Who are you, and What are you doing here?
It was good teaching. Maybe not quite at the level of a skola like his father, but the Ainjir were a faithless and broadly uneducated people, and it occurred to him that maybe they would be encountering such learning for the first time. Weaponry had no such deeper pull; long before he had arrived he had dreaded the time he would have to spend on combat, which interested him not at all. He fought back home because he had to, and he was smart about it because he had to be. They were always outnumbered, always supposed to, ultimately, lose. Fighting was self-preservation. The idea of doing it for fun – to be good at it for the sake of it – made him feel slightly sick.
So it had been hard to pay attention to the catalogue of ‘sharp things and where to put them’ and there was little depth to be found in instructions about how they were expected to appear and prepare for each lesson, but that had given him some time to reflect and observe on other things.
Weaponry had taken him to the other side of the main cluster of buildings, a half-star of long, tall, stone structures of various vintages radiating out from the Tower at the crest of the high hill. The easiest way to get there had been jogging around the outside of the cluster, so he didn’t risk getting lost in the tangle of passageways of building built over building. This at least had the pleasant side effect of taking him close to what seemed to be like barely-tended gardens – several loosely chained large groupings of trees and bushes of varying thickness and seeming wildness. It was undoubtedly the long path, but it gave him a chance to try to map out what the campus actually looked like, and the shorter outside path – the one that took him down the hill to pass between the Tower and the main gate and up again on the other side – he had already divined was Not Done. Not only were there no obvious footpaths in the open plain on that side, but he saw no cadets at any point in that direction.
To be honest, if he thought about it, it made sense; it was something like passing before a formidable elder. There was a sense the Tower watched and judged – or at least saw, and Dominicus was very tired of being seen, thank you.
The staring. That was another reason the History class had been so unburdening. The ollamh noticed him no more than any other student, and the other students, furiously preoccupied with notes or following the lecture, didn’t have the leisure to stare.
It was maybe why the questions of purpose, intent, and identity under the lesson hadn’t bothered him. But, then, what was bothering him now?
Back at the hall, standing awkwardly before the wide windows open now to the kitchens, he caught a thumbnail against an imperfection in the glaze of the plate he held over and over again, as if to pick off what would never be picked off. Gone were the metal dishes that so haunted them last night, replaced with sturdy stoneware. He wanted to wonder why, but instead felt a mild panic about what might happen if he broke such a dish when the ordeal of cleaning up after meals began again (this was frightening at least in part because he knew it would be their task, but couldn’t find it on the schedule – to have an impenetrable schedule was enough, but to also know there were hidden tasks, secret tasks, somewhere under the opaque charts made his heart flutter uncomfortably).
Following the dorm warden’s advice, he had run to breakfast, and copied what the others did: taking up a clean plate, set in dangerously high stacks at intervals along the narrower wall of the hall, he walked past the food set out in impossibly huge portions in dishes arrayed along the now-open windows to the kitchen. It seemed like half the wall folded down, making for a sizeable set of trays to hold food, which were supervised by cooks in loose and faded blue and white uniforms that looked as if they had been boiled daily for the last twenty years.
Nobody from the kitchen stayed very long at the window. They came up to survey, barked orders back into the deep and walked away – but there always seemed to be one or two keeping an eye out, refilling, adjusting, cleaning or turning over food left in disarray.
He also noticed that the older cadets were very, very careful not to spill or drag food from plate to another or put the wrong serving utensil back in the dish. And they didn’t linger, unlike the other new cadets, who hung back in clusters constantly pushed ‘out of the way’ but never seeming to actually make it there.
Dominicus felt foolish to be stuck in the same place, but now that he had time something had churned up from the bottom of his awareness, yet still too covered in mud to see. And he wasn’t hungry, but he should be.
“They’ve really gone all out early this year,” said a (very tall) cadet, who had pushed past Dominicus with his friends moments ago.
“I’ll not complain,” said another, expertly stacking sausages on his plate.
“Some of those little biters will,” the tall one said to a disdainful grunt from his colleague, gaze sliding back over his shoulder to Dominicus, neither particularly interested nor threatening. “Don’t know how to work a plate?”
Before Dominicus could respond, he unceremoniously upturned his empty plate onto his companion’s pile of sausages (ignoring hearty objections) like one might hang a hat, crossed the space between them in two steps of an abnormally tall person, and fixed a hand across the back of Dominicus’ neck.
It all happened quite quickly, but Dominicus wasn’t sure what he could have done about it anyway. So he let himself be drawn up to the platters of a food like a puppy and dropped before an enormous plate of chicken surrounded by an equally enormous array of sauces. But as soon as he was stationed, the other cadet almost pushed him out of the way.
“Oh! Is that the fig stuff…” but he soon shoved Dominicus back into place to get to the next platter. “Oh, this is the one that’s stuffed with that stuff…”
“Things that don’t get eaten don’t get made again,” the tall cadet said, coming around behind him to follow his friend, now absconded with his plate. He stopped only long enough to seize a large, dripping, firmly tied piece of stuffed chicken and drop it on Dominicus’ plate (almost causing him to lose it as it wobbled under the weight). “And they don’t make the fancy stuff often. So, eat up.”
He chased his friend down to retrieve his plate and begin his own selection, but it took Dominicus a long moment to let his shoulders back down. Couldn’t stop moving though, now that he was actively in the line of those taking food – he might get eaten himself. Stuck with an enormous helping of pol’ fusilis, he mechanically walked down the line adding the smallest possible portions of other things to his place to accompany it, before equally mechanically taking the right selection of utensils and turning away from the tables to find a place to sit well away from any other Ainjir.
This was more difficult than at breakfast, but not impossible, as the whole of the rest of the hall was crammed with long tables and somewhat less long benches; seating for hundreds, it seemed. Only dozens ever seemed to be inside, despite a steady stream incoming, not only because many groups arrived and fiercely clustered together in the smallest possible space, but because an even greater number took their food, ate with haste, and left.
Was this smart? For a Reason? He stayed well the fuck away from the clusters; that was for a fucking reason. But he had been told to go to meals and eat, and could not yet divine a purpose for the rush. But then, there was a small pile of mysteries building in his brain, like scum and leaf litter collecting around a twig stuck in a stream. They couldn’t all be explained by ‘the Ainjir were weird, as a people,’ and more importantly, he needed to actually figure out what really was weird and what made logical sense, however tenuous the foundations of that logic might be.
He was halfway through stuffing bites of a really quite well prepared pol’ fusilis into his mouth before the fog cleared from his brain and he thought about the fact that it was pol’ fusilis. He almost choked. What little of his resuscitated appetite remained departed almost as fast as one of the cadets bolting down lunch.
There were two halves to the realization that had just struck him. The first was that there was probably less malice than he had thought in his roommates mistaking him for a servant (everyone else – pure malice, probably, though he could picture his father and hear his distant voice pleading with Dominicus to at least leave a little space open for other interpretations).
The second half of his realization hurt a little. It wasn’t the most tedious dish to make, but pol’ fusilis was one of those only for special occasions dishes – usually a rare guest, one they wanted to impress – not just because stuffing chicken this way was a tedious process but because it was stuffed usually with more expensive meats (no matter how adulterated by oats).
And at breakfast, inexplicably, they had globulli. Now, this wasn’t difficult, as much as rich – a very special treat, unless you had the goats or cows to make the cheese and even the goat and cow owners didn’t seem to make it that often though it only required a little frying (or didn’t brag about having made it, Saints’ love for the humble). They had globulli and taganitai – again, not so much rare as kind of finicky, or, at least, he always screwed up getting them the right thinness and once had made the batter himself and ended up with unfoldable bricks somehow. With them, a mixture of fruits, honey, and nuts to spoon over them and wrap up in the center (this he was perfect at – flawless unmessy wraps), with absolutely no need to worry about getting slapped with a spoon because he didn’t leave any for his siblings.
He had grabbed them, as if compelled, and regretted it immediately because the richness was going to give him a stomachache, but had wasted so much time he hadn’t had time to think about it (and wasn’t about to put anything BACK, Prophet’s Words upon him).
A stomachache also hadn’t happened; there hadn’t been time to notice, or it hadn’t broken through the background noise of his extant stress-stomachache. He had eaten so quickly he hardly tasted the meal, in a rush to get anything down before finding his way to class.
All to say, the older cadet had not been threatening him (though he was realizing he was going to have to register something other than ‘tall’ when he met an Ainjir for the first time, or he would recognize nobody. They were almost all taller than him). Like an idiot, he had forgotten, or at least, not considered this – the food his family made, Midraeic food – might not be normal fare for Academy meals. Or if it was normal, it might be being presented differently. It had just looked like breakfast.
Of course the older cadets would notice immediately. But what were the older cadets to him?
His father had tried, falteringly, to call upon his memories to give Dominicus some idea of what a school with more to it than the intermittent attendance of the other village kids would be like. Dominicus had almost suffocated himself, lest a too-loud breath disrupt the fragile moment, but his father had never gotten far regardless.
Those were the days of Geron; those were the people who were no longer.
In the end, his father had given him a sense that the more experienced students were an important consideration, though the application of that importance was a mixed bag.
If he surveyed the Hall, which he was extremely reluctant to do (because the staring – dear God, he could almost ignore the staring if he didn’t ever look up from the ground but that was obviously not going to work forever), he could tell that very few of the older cadets took notice of the younger. There were exceptions, though. The very oldest, like the cadet who had enforced lunch on him, were at ease, or at least, purposeful, and paid attention mostly to each other, or their own business. His classmates looked scared or scattered, grouped together for safety or trying, it seemed, to be unnoticed and isolated. They always seemed to stare at him and stop, as if confused, only to be rushed off by some other anxiety.
As for those in-between… he stuffed another bite of chicken into his mouth and had to look down again at his plate. Those disconcerted him. Not all of them, but enough. They stared and it was obvious enough that some were hostile to him, particularly, but it was even more unsettling that they stared and seemed hostile also to his classmates.
If he ate any more of this chicken he was going to be sick. This was not a light lunch. It was a very filling dish and he hadn’t been hungry when he started. He wished Ursula was here to take some off him, which dulled his desire to eat even further.
But God could stamp him out of existence to the cheers of his own mother if he ever left anything on his plate, so he ate.
After this was Swordplay, but then something called ‘Foundations’ which meant nothing to him, and ‘Groups’, equally opaque and which he had little hope for. Even if Swordplay was difficult, as the dorm warden had promised, tomorrow he could at least look forward to Ancient Languages (by what logic that made sense to teach them he couldn’t fathom, but he was weepingly grateful. There was no language more ancient than his own, and though he doubted that’s what they would be learning, he wasn’t scared to learn another).
He looked forward to it. And he looked forward to it helping him feel less stupid and adrift. And he looked forward to the promise of no more fights once he got through the next hour and a half (a shorter than usual class), as he wasn’t sure what ‘Groups’ would entail, but they hadn’t learned enough about fighting for it be fighting, so he was cautiously hopeful there, too.
He would later reflect that he should have known better than to hope.