A week later, Dominicus had returned to his still-cramped but at least wind-tight dormitory room, thrown his bag into his chair, thrown his boots – after the necessary careful shimmying required by their being almost too small – off his feet, and thrown himself onto his bed, hands behind his head.
Bivouac was over – had been for a few days – and after the initial shock of being dragged back into the ‘civilization’ of the Academy, Dominicus found himself still very tightly wound.
Of course, most of the other cadets would say he was always tightly wound, but they had all the perceptiveness of a bucket of cabbages. He was not tightly wound – he was very angry. There were hundreds of reasons for him to be angry. He could not possibly list them all. They ranged from the very small, very justified anger that they only let the Midraeic cooks make parts of the mess hall’s offerings and thus he hadn’t had a good, full meal in ages, to the basic premises of Ainjir society, which were, at heart, stupid. Or maybe he should switch those around. A good dish of lupa could possibly solve everything. Tea. Flatbread (with garlic, but the amount his mother used only). Almond cakes. Fine sugar. More bread.
But then he got sad and angry, so maybe not.
He was mad at Cole, obviously, but that was not surprising in itself. It had been at least two weeks since he had seen Cole anything but distantly, but rather than the time away making him less angry, he seemed to have only gotten more angry, and also to have forgotten entirely why they were fighting in the first place (other than the obvious – Cole’s poorly-hidden determination to be First among cadets, which was also Dominicus’ goal, though for much better and more realistic reasons).
He spent some minutes staring doggedly at the wooden ceiling and not seeing it. He was trying very hard to figure out why he was so mad at Cole while simultaneously trying very hard not to remember that Ghent had, in his infinite and insufferable wisdom, told him exactly why he was so mad.
Dominicus was not a good a liar, even to himself, so it was a running battle to see if he churn up enough wild frustration and offense at Cole (of which there was always plenty) to keep the words ‘you need to get laid,’ from echoing through the thunderous emptiness of his head.
He wished he could temporarily rip his own eyeballs out and fling them across the room, so he was keeping his hands under his head and holding very still, to stifle the desire to experiment.
The sheer pressure of the air in the room should have made swirls like smoke around the door when Taig walked in, his face instantaneously struck with regret. Regret that he had walked in? Regret that he lived there? Regret that he lived at all?
He met Dominicus’ gaze, though, and persisted.
“So, what are you up to?”
Dominicus pictured old Ghent, his horrible face red with laughter as he bent over his knees and wheezed, ‘not fucking.’
“Nothing,” Dominicus said, and because Taig reacted to this gentle phrase as if he had hurled a stone out of his mouth, he tried to casually swing himself around to sit up.
When he looked again, Taig had retreated a pace or two further behind the door. Like it was a shield.
“What?” Dominicus said. Fuck it, that wasn’t casual – he wasn’t good at being casual – but he also wasn’t angry at Taig (God, why not? He should be! Thanks to Taig their tent smelled rancid enough the ollamh had forced them to burn it, leaving them sleeping with no shelter the last few days of bivouac), so it was worth trying to tone it down a bit.
“Well, uhhhhh….” Taig replied and then paused, and Dominicus did start to get angry at him.
“Well, uh… well, you know the, um…” Taig fidgeted, “you know that whole, like, campfire story thing at bivvy and all and, uh…” He had tried to laugh as if much more relaxed than he was, which even Dominicus could tell was not all.
“That dumbfuck basement ghost story?”
“I mean, was it a ghost?” Taig responded, narrowing his eyes and nodding, “You didn’t seem so sure then…”
Because, at the time, Dominicus was trying not to expel from the world of the living one of the few tolerable tentmates he had ever had for being ambulatory filth, like an orphaned kitten before it learned to clean itself. Because Taig, like an idiot, had managed to scare himself enough to stay up half the night, as did many of the other First Years, like several idiots, guaranteeing a miserable day of fatigue, contempt from their superiors, and complaining. Because Taig was at least smart enough not to totally swallow Dominicus’ flat out lie that there was no basement in the place the Second Years had set the story, that, in order to get Taig to shut up and go to sleep, he had to spend some time asserting he had seen cheese wheels being hauled in and out of said area (despite cadets not being allowed anywhere near it) and cheese couldn’t realistically be haunted, now, could it?
“It’s a prank,” Dominicus replied flatly, “not a ghost.”
“Yes, well, but,” Taig paused, having gained enough of his confidence back to hold a finger up and stride out from behind the door. “But what if it was?”
“What if it was what?”
“A ghost?”
“It’s not a ghost.”
“So some other kind of spirit?”
“What kind of spirit,” Dominicus asked, absent of all desire to know.
Taig narrowed his eyes, mouth open a moment before speaking. “There are… other kinds?”
Dominicus sighed heavily. “There’s not a…” and then he finally got enough of a lid on his anger (or frustration at sexual frustration) to be suspicious. “Why are you talking about this?”
“Well, it’s a point of interest, just, you know, it’s an interesting–”
Dominicus shut his eyes. “Why are you talking about this to me?”
When he opened his eyes Taig was looking at him somewhat doubtfully, but also, somewhat hopefully. “Do you think you could, y’know… investigate?”
“Investigate?”
“Yeah…” Taig began, but on seeing Dominicus open his mouth (to angrily tell him to do his own damn homework) he went on, “Not alone, of course, you know, that would be silly, I mean – would you be willing to maybe investigate… with me?”
“What.” Dominicus said, enunciating the full stop.
“…With us?” Taig replied. Suddenly, there were three more Ainjir sidling out from behind the door, poking their heads around so they could join Taig in staring at Dominicus with their tea-saucer eyes caught in various stages of hope, credulity, and fear.
“What the fuck,” Dominicus said.
“What’s this?”
The cover-side and pages of the book Dominicus was reading flipped up, nearly hitting him in the face. He had been leaning, chin-on-fist, quite heavily over them as he read the opposite side.
He snapped up to glare only to see Cole stroll around the edge of the table and throw himself into the chair on the opposite side, grinning. He was playing with a ball – a peach? A plum – moving it senselessly between his hands before his chest, and he leaned back in the little wooden chair like it was the most comfortable he had ever sat in, ten feet of cat in a two-inch cradle.
Dominicus was very aware he wasn’t mad at Cole, per se, in this moment. But Cole was still irritating.
“What do you want?” Dominicus snapped.
“To see you,” Cole replied, grin widening ever so slightly.
Dominicus frowned at him, refusing to watch the plum as he gave it a little toss, from hand to hand. “Did Taig tell you I was here?”
“You’re always here,” Cole said. He caught the plum as he sat up, leaning forward to put his elbows on the table, one finger of the hand with the plum-filled palm touching just the edge of the pages of Dominicus’ book. “And I don’t talk to Taig.”
Fuck – he caught Dominicus staring at the plum in his hand. When Dominicus looked up into his eyes, Cole smiled.
Cole was of the astonishing opinion that they didn’t have to like each other to have sex, but of course, Cole was an especially degenerate Ainjir even when amongst a flock of degenerate Ainjir. They had been fighting – technically, they were always fighting – but this rapprochement Cole kept doing… it was something.
What?
Something. A scheme? For what? God knew this didn’t benefit them at all. Well… not, like, professionally. And personally, they found each other frustrating. Dominicus knew that Cole often felt as frustrated as he did because that perfect little wall of a face would slip or he would say or do something that wasn’t entirely in keeping with his idiot persona put on for his idiot friends and then retreat for days to nurse whatever secret ego-wound this slip had caused him.
But then he would come back.
Choosing to come back to Dominicus rather than just… well, just… well, anyone could do that. Would, probably. He was fucking… popular. But it wasn’t… like it wasn’t… great.
Well, it was. That wasn’t why Dominicus was doing it. Well… but… fuck.
Dominicus didn’t know what he was doing, constantly hoping Cole would be coming back.
The grin dropped, and Cole looked down at the book, which Dominicus resisted the urge to instantly shut. “What’s your low-forties friend got you doing for him now?”
Low forties was quite a good rank in a class of a more than a hundred, but, of course, not good enough for Cole. Unless it was just for sex. One of his less appealing features, and one which Dominicus suspected was a bad habit left over from last quarter more than his real opinion. Or maybe Dominicus wanted to think of it that way.
He grunted as a thought struck him, flipped the book around and pushed it before Cole.
Cole read the title and laughed. “Ghost stories?”
“Yes,” Dominicus said.
Cole glanced at him, but one thing Dominicus knew was that it was better to wait for your enemy to make a fool of himself than do anything to prove yourself a fool first.
“Why are you reading ghost stories?” Cole asked, in a decidedly less I-know-you’re-looking-at-me fashion.
Dominicus was tempted to stay silent for longer, to see if Cole would start trying to work out how ghost stories might give him an advantage in their next intellectual bout, but he didn’t really have time for that.
“Taig said there is a ghost.”
“Taig has probably said bivouac food isn’t that bad,” Cole replied, but he was looking at the book, flipping it open with his free hand while the other dandled the plum. “Why is Taig talking to you about ghosts?” – and turning a page – “Do you even believe in ghosts?”
“Do you?” Dominicus asked.
Cole snorted. “As much a figment as gods.”
Cole wasn’t even looking up, so he couldn’t see Dominicus’ sharp frown, but Dominicus wiped it away, anyway. It was utterly foolish to think they would do anything but fuck and fight. Fighting would probably be how it would end up either way. But this was also precisely the weakness Dominicus had been hoping to exploit.
He had worked out that Cole knew a lot more about gods – about Ainjir’s old ways in general, most likely – than he liked to let on. Feigning ignorance was never Cole’s favourite tactic, and when he did it, he did it to get something. Of this, as far as Dominicus could tell, he feigned ignorance about all the time. He slipped, of course, but his friends were fools, and if those fools had noticed, they at least weren’t so stupid that they would go against him, so Dominicus didn’t think that anybody else actually paid attention to it.
Most cadets were fools. As he resisted the urge to watch the plum, he noticed he was kind of a fool.
Whatever. Humility wasn’t Cole’s best skill, so he sometimes forgot to pretend like he knew nothing about Ainjir’s old ways. So he was vulnerable.
“Taig and some others apparently went in the cellar beneath the Tower,” Dominicus said, “and now they are frightened.”
Cole snorted again, but looked up without raising his head, an absolutely devastating perspective to have on his face. “That old saw – but good on them for getting in, I guess.” Then he raised his head. “What’s it got to do with you?”
“They want me to do something about it.”
“What?” Now, Cole actually sat up, pushing the book aside and pulling the chair closer. “What do you mean?”
Dominicus shrugged, very naturally forming a frown because it was equally mysterious to him. “I don’t know. We were told the story at bivouac. They went to test the story. It is now tested, and they think they are…” he really wasn’t sure of the Ainjir word…
“Haunted” Cole offered. “Cursed?”
Dominicus shrugged again. “I don’t know. I don’t know what they want.”
He gestured to the book – obviously, not pleasure reading (so it was better than tomes about logistics, that didn’t make it for-fun reading).
Cole absently brought the plum to his cheek, rubbing against it for a second. It was terrible.
Suddenly, he smiled. It was also terrible.
“What?” Dominicus demanded.
“I know what they want.” He leaned back in his chair again.
“What.” Dominicus said, leaning forward and hating that he sounded so stupid saying ‘what, what, what’ all the time. Hating the Ainjir language for making ‘what, what, what’ sound so stupid in the first place. Hating the table between them. Hating the plum. Jealous of the plum.
“You, my friend,” Cole said, even though they were not friends, “are Midraeic.”
“I am aware,” Dominicus said, absolutely hating that he liked looking at Cole so much, on account of Cole’s tragic stupidity.
“Oh, come on,” Cole said, scooting closer over the table, just as Dominicus had. “They don’t know anything about this stuff – about spirits and ghosts and curses and things. Those are for,” he raised his chin and grinned at Dominicus, “believers.”
“What,” Dominicus said, again, with more direct hatred of all of the above.
Cole laughed, and Dominicus felt a thrill as he was torn between enjoying the sound, wanting to strangle him, and wanting to tell him not to make so much noise in the library (which could be solved with strangling). Then Cole leaned forward again over the book on the table, resting his chin in the hand that held the plum so it rested against his cheek, this time not absently at all.
“They want you to go down there and pray or something – do a ceremony of appeasement, or some kind of ritual, call on your god or your Prophet to save them. They don’t have anyone to call on – they don’t think gods are real; they don’t know anything about them.”
Dominicus only let himself get a little distracted by the idea of Cole biting into the plum – he wouldn’t do it in the library, or if he did, Dominicus would stop him. No eating in the library.
Maybe eating other places.
“…What is a Midraeic prayer supposed to do about an Ainjir god?”
“Oh, it’s not a god,” Cole said lifting and letting the pages of the book rifle back down against the edge of his thumb.
“So, what is it?”
“It’s a cave,” Cole said. “Surely that’s how the story starts – with the old basalt caverns under the Tower’s foundations, the first Academy building and all that. They didn’t even start the tower until after, I think, Founderhall had been built for like twenty years…”
“You haven’t heard the story?” Dominicus asked, brows furrowing in spite of himself.
Cole smiled at him – he did delight in being asked to make himself sound superior. “No. They tried to scare us with other things than ghosts. But I know it – it’s a tradition.”
The OTHER thing Cole didn’t like admitting was that he knew a lot of the Academy’s history because he had been born in the Capitol. Having seen how the other cadets born in the Capitol were treated, Doninicus understood that one. But that meant he had to get Cole back on target or there would be some kind of stupid, face-saving exercise to be handled.
“A tradition for what? To scare the Second Year with… a cave?”
“No, it’s to get them in trouble, of course, and it pays off every time, because even if they do make it down without getting them in trouble, like your little friends, then they’ll get scared shitless, and do something stupid about it.” Cole turned his chair so he sat facing out, towards the library shelves, and crossed his ankle over his knee, but he was still touching the plum against his cheek, handling it so softly his hand hardly moved, so he was still caught up in thinking.
“They did not have Midraeics to ask before me,” Dominicus pointed out. “How is that supposed to work?”
“Yeah, so it must be something else,” Cole agreed. “I would suspect it would be something to get them back down there – you know, double the chances of a beating.” He glanced over the plum to look at Dominicus again. “Did they say how they were cursed?”
“They said they had been touched.”
Cole’s grin broke free again, but he said nothing.
“What?” Fuck you, Ainjir language.
Cole scooted forward over the table again, holding the plum out between them, looking at Dominicus over it with half-lidded eyes and twisting it back and forth in the library’s light. “They were touched – so they have to touch back.”
Dominicus was physically uncomfortable for obvious and potentially enjoyable reasons. “Touch… the cellar?”
“No,” Cole chuckled, and folded his forearms, still leaning forward over the table. He had looked away when he laughed. It, for one, meant that Cole wasn’t laughing at him; and, two, Dominicus, close as they were, got a nice look at his neck, under his collar.
“It means,” Cole said, smiling benignly at him again, “that they have to find whatever dead thing they think touched them, and touch it back. It’s bad luck to see a corpse and not touch it.”
Dominicus, though he wanted desperately not to look like he was anything but the utterly focused master of this conversation, felt his mouth open a little, and hang there. “We… would have to touch so many corpses?”
Cole did the whole gentle laughing thing again, only looking up, which was just as nice. “Battle is different.”
“What?” Dominicus asked. “Why?”
“Well, for one,” Cole replied, “it’s not in a cave. Not usually,” he said, seeing that Dominicus was about to tell him about a battle in a cave (skirmish, anyway, since it was a small cave). “Caves are places of spirit – they’re always prone to being strange. They touch the underworld, if deep enough, and catch and hold things – running water, sound, air, and spirits. Can’t open a window in a cave.”
That last was utterly nonsensical to Dominicus, but he didn’t bring it up. Cole smiled. They were both leaning slightly across the table (Cole was leaning more). For a moment, they said nothing.
That was really all the information he needed.
Dominicus grabbed the plum as he stood up, and, grinning, Cole followed him out.