Dominicus pushed through the crowd – not that he had to push, the minute they realized it was him they bubbled out, like oil and water splashed together – and to the edge of the clearing, and to the trees he had been (sort of) hiding in, and...
Kept walking.
He was shaking. He didn’t know why he was shaking. He extended and shook his hands fiercely as if he could gather up all the shaking and get it out at once.
He popped out of the other side of the little wood into an open field. Other groups of cadets sprang around in the grass at a distance, looking like little bees, far, far away from him, for which he was unutterably grateful.
Holy shit (eha, Prophet forgive him).
Holy Shit.
He glanced back at the wood, as if worried someone was going to sprint out and tackle him.
Third had looked PISSED.
Granted, he hadn’t been watching that closely, but he had never seen that much emotion on that Ainjir’s face before. It shocked him to think he was capable of it.
Which was really kind of stupid, because every other Ainjir he had ever met was fully capable of being mortally offended that Dominicus didn’t smile enough in their presence, but still. It didn’t feel like a miscalculation that he had based some of the safety of this plan on Third’s inertness, but it wasn’t a pleasant surprise.
And it made him a little sad, which was confusing.
Wynn burst from the trees, swinging Dominicus’ shirt and jacket and whooping, followed shortly (and more calmly) by Teä, then Feichín and Eire.
“You fucked him up!” Wynn called, and Teä threw an arm around his neck, pulling his head down and not quite covering his mouth as they walked towards Dominicus.
“Blood ‘n Death, you’re gonna call the rest down like vultures.”
“That was impressive!” Feichín said in his stroll over, eyes alight. It was good to see him so; the bags under his eyes had only deepened since the Cogadh loss, and it was rare to see him in his old, easy-going form.
Eire nodded his agreement. “That was well-played. I say, even ought to give them a pause before they start messing about with us.”
Dominicus was just glad he had stopped shaking before they had seen him, but saying so would do him no good, so he merely nodded and hoped he looked happy.
“I still don’t quite know that this won’t, ehhh... worsen relations?” Feichín said.
“There are no relations,” Dominicus said, quite before he had thought it through.
Luckily, Eire put up his hands, perfectly willing to take over. “Our last plan rested on the Prep cadets being complacent. We can’t rely on that again, so this time we’re hoping to put them off. The uncertainty will undermine their confidence.”
“Confidence isn’t how they’re winning,” Teä said, keeping the position he had taken since the beginning.
“Yeah, but they’re not better than us,” Wynn said, spitefulness of it reserved not for his teammates but the Prep cadets.
“They’re not better than Dominicus, at least,” Feichín said in a low mumble.
Dominicus had taken his shirt and jacket back from Wynn, but found himself holding them instead of putting them back on, despite the chill of the wind making him want to shiver. His mind kept drifting back to...
“Well, but they’ll be worried about all of us,” Eire said.
“Are you all so effective with those manoeuvres?” Feichín asked, eyebrows raised with anticipatory admiration.
“Well...” Eire said.
“They’re a feint,” Dominicus filled in quickly, unwilling to continue to let his mind remain half-focused on the conversation, half on...
“They will be preoccupied with this skill set, uncertain about who can apply them, how quickly they can turn the tide of battle,” Dominicus said, dabbing at his forehead with his bundled shirt. “They will waste time trying to learn them. Or learn how to counter them.”
“Maybe,” he added hastily.
“It won’t look good,” Teä agreed. He and Wynn had gotten into a playful, slow-paced mime-battle of punch and counter-punch, which he could safely enough look away from as long as he didn’t mind Wynn pantomiming punishing blows into his exposed side. “That we lowly-ranked nobodies know advanced techniques that they don’t, I mean. It will preoccupy them.”
“It will change the field of play,” Eire said, frown crossing his face.
They had debated this enough that even Dominicus knew what he implied.
“It does not matter,” Dominicus said. “They look for excuses to dismiss me anyway.”
Dominicus had been surprised at how seriously his teammates (who counted as teammates) had taken this aspect of their plan. Already under greater scrutiny, they had been deeply hesitant to promote more attention being heaped on Dominicus. In his less certain moods, Dominicus wondered if perhaps they had a point, perhaps they knew something he didn’t, but this was very easily put aside. They had also been uncertain he could beat (or at least, provide a good match against – it wasn’t certain he could win, exactly) Third. They were wrong about a lot of stuff.
“Not really worried about dismissal, mate,” Wynn said, suffering a devastating mime-blow to the back of the head from Teä for his sympathy.
“Certainly won’t be the case going forward,” Eire said. “Anyway, I can hear a bit of a murmur,” he pointed back towards the trees, where the chatter from the group they had left behind at practice had indeed gotten quite loud, “shall we move along, just in case anyone gets the idea to try to dismiss us right now?”
“Yes!” Wynn threw a fist in the air triumphantly (Teä threw himself slowly backward, as if it had been a devastating upper cut). “We should celebrate! I’m sure Hal has something squirrelled away.”
“And I’m sure Hal’s going to be busy for a minute,” Teä said, with a wink to the group.
“Well, then,” Eire tugged his jacket straight and led the charge towards the dormitories. “Hal will have to restock when he’s done.
“I will...” Dominicus froze. They were all looking at him. He didn’t like that. “...Study.”
Wynn hissed disapprovingly.
“Leave him be,” Teä said. “You know there’s a reason it was him out there. What, are you working on Cogadh strategies?”
No, thought Dominicus. There was no point to that, yet.
“Yes,” Dominicus said, inching closer to damnation.
“We’ll drink to your success,” Eire said, motioning for them all to turn and follow.
The two others, full of their vicarious success, only nodded and continued on. Feichín hung back.
“Are you all right?”
Dominicus nodded, gesturing him forward. “Go. Celebrate.”
“That really was quite good, you know,” he said, fatigue once again lifting from his face as he smiled. “Quite inspiring, really.”
“Nothing,” Dominicus said, feeling his cheeks get hot. “Just a lot of planning.”
“More than that,” Feichín said, and let his smile ease down slightly, in favour of showing concern. “If you’re really all right...?”
Dominicus nodded, gesturing him forward – he didn’t quite trust himself to talk.
Feichín appeared not entirely consoled by this (he, at least, knew how much Dominicus liked to celebrate), but accepted the command.
Dominicus stood, uncomfortably cold, still like an idiot, for several steps of their walking away before forcing himself to pick a direction and go in it. He chose the library, and hoped he would encounter nobody on his way there.
He wanted desperately to be alone. This was very unusual. He didn’t like it.
Then again, he didn’t like the way the wind crawling up the sweat on his back made him shiver, and think of warmth. It wasn’t because he was cold. It wasn’t even that cold outside. This was still summer weather back home. He wanted to be warm in other ways. Ways he neither fully understood nor wanted to fully understand, and refused to contemplate.
His hands felt sticky – not sticky: full. He flexed them around phantom limbs, palms haunted by flesh they had touched.
Not sure whether to gag or shiver, he twisted his shirt in his hands to feel something else, and only felt regret. He did not want to change what his hands remembered feeling. Not even the warm pain of developing bruises rose above the remembrance of the soft slide of skin against skin.
This was horrible. What a horrible way to feel. What a horrible time to feel it. How stupid. How weak. How entirely not the point of anything that had just happened.
Unpromising to come away from such a bout with such a feeling. Other times, these feelings didn’t bother him (or, if they did, didn’t bother him as much). Then again, this had been a very different bout than any of the others. He hadn’t been scared, exactly – not intimidated, either – it was just...
Like with fear, there was an exhilaration. He could take it seriously. He could act seriously. Third was neither going to try to kill him nor was he so delicate as to need coddling. Not coddling, matching. Dominicus hadn’t had to face the additional stress of wondering when the fight would go too far, one way or another, on his account or his opponent’s. So what if Third wasn’t as dispassionate as he had seemed from afar? He acted dispassionately, and was very, very good at what they were doing.
Until he fucked up, and fell for Dominicus’ conditioning him to look for the choke. But the fact that he was clever enough to be conditioned was certainly something.
Something that in this case was stupid, but again...
Dominicus put a hand to the back of his neck as he walked, to try to calm his skin, and realized he had not put his shirt on because he had not wanted to interrupt its memory of the touch there, either.
He put his shirt on. Jacket over. Tugged down firmly.
How disappointing.
Now, two loomed on the rock outcropping, like a matched pair of mantle-sitting elves, long faces drawn longer in contemplation.
Kiso made a joke about whether there would be owl turds or socks made of golden thread under them in the morning, and Aspen knocked him over. There would be no such joking. They were still Second and Third, after all.
Or, rather, Cole was still Third. Aspen had been heaved down to Twelfth. Rather than adjust the rankings, there were, at the moment, simply two cadets ranked at Twelfth, one of whom was already calling himself Thirteenth. It didn’t make sense to disturb all the rankings above that when they could just wait a few days for Cogadh to again unsettle everything.
Because, indeed, Cole’s team would be facing The Midraeic’s team in the next round. At this point, Cole was thinking of it as The Midraeic’s team, and conferring with Aspen had only made the assumption more sure. Cole getting his ass whipped in a practice bout had brought them closer together, and the matter was much clearer now (with some time between him and his defeat, and the faint hope that his team might still be called up, if they needed some extra matches to even out the rounds).
Aspen had come to think that while not changing his signals was a mistake, it was only one out of many small mistakes that had led to his team’s defeat. After all, it wasn’t the only weakness of his team that The Midraeic’s team had managed to exploit. The other weaknesses Cole would have attributed to individual team members, but Aspen had a point that as the main strategist, it was his duty to account for them. A larger mistake had been that Aspen had been preparing to beat Cole and his team (apologies to Cole on this revelation were unnecessary – of course he was planning to defeat Cole), and not attending to other opponents as well. The Midraeic, he concluded, was simply a better strategist in this moment, that an approach designed to work towards defeating Cole and his team was not useful for The Midraeic and his team – The Midraeic was too adaptable.
This was embarrassing for Aspen, but he wouldn’t make such a mistake again. That made it a useful lesson.
Would Cole make such a mistake?
Well, he had at least been clever enough to challenge The Midraeic when his rank wasn’t at risk. Though Cole, like Aspen, believed an approach tailored to his team should work as just as well against lower-ranked teams (his team wasn’t, after all, made up entirely of winners). He also – privately – wondered if he was less adaptable than The Midraeic, and if, indeed, that was something that could make the difference. So, it was a little more up in the air than he liked.
Cole had made a show of looking pleased after the practice fight. He even went so far as to ask where The Midraeic was so he could bestow upon him his hearty congratulations, and have a talk about the fight (perhaps wisely, The Midraeic had disappeared immediately, sparing Cole the task of enduring being friendly to his face). Very impressive display! It wasn’t often Cole got beat so handily! My, what an impressive thing those joint-locks were! Did everyone see how impressively they allowed the fight to be controlled when implemented correctly?
Impressive!
Good! Great!
Wonderful. Fuck.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
Cole was going to murder someone.
Agonizing to have to stick around after that. Cole thought he might have put so much work into burying his feelings about it that he even fooled Hal, usually so unhelpfully perceptive. Cole had lingered for the rest of the practice. Watched a few demonstrations. Practiced with other partners. Didn’t even actually break anyone’s arm perfecting the manoeuvers, though he often had to skip the lead-up fighting because otherwise he would defeat his opponent before they even got a chance to practice.
It was almost a waste of time, except he couldn’t call it a waste of time, having been beaten. So he ground his teeth through the rest of the practice, and eventually the rest of the day (did the ollamh seem glad he wasn’t fucking about in class as usual? Was that insulting or complimentary?).
At dinner he had been forced to be cheerful again, recount his loss like it didn’t make his heart want to leap out of his own chest, develop arms, and individually and personally choke everyone talking to him to death. He lingered and conversed. He even made time to talk to Hal, whose nervousness about Cole’s response to being beaten with techniques he was supposedly teaching needed assuaging. Piet, perhaps jealous of Hal again receiving devoted attention, had interrupted to suggest lurid uses of the sundry submissions they had practiced, and Cole did his best to hide how much more tiresome than usual this made him.
He was barely interested in any of it. So much so that he may have been too hasty in putting Piet off – he did better with Hal, but he suspected it was because he wanted to know what Hal’s connections to the Third Year joint locks really was. Had The Midraeic taken Hal with him to see the practice? Was it Hal who made arrangements for them to be taught? Why had The Midraeic taken the lead then? But also – Hal was simply more resilient; Piet wanted something like a deeper relationship, which Hal didn’t bother with wanting. So he was left with irritation and questions.
It got bad enough that Cole did end up volunteering for slopping out the food leavings – of the post-meal jobs First Years performed, a job no one wanted, which involved a lot of back and forth tromping alone with heavy tubs to the pig wagons – and heading back to his dormitory by himself.
He promised himself he could feel his rage once he got back to his room, but surprised both one of his roommate and that roommate’s lover, both of whom passed him embarrassed greetings and decamped when he threw himself on his bed, ankle-crossed-over-knee, arms behind his head. With a silent room to fill with his thoughts at his leisure, his rage dissipated almost as soon as he felt it.
Rage was useless. It did no work for him. Naturally, it came and went.
Emotions were all well and good until they got in the way. He had been foolish to let them waste so much energy today, and he would not be foolish. This was another of his hard-earned lessons – to keep his feelings close, to keep everything wound tightly up, under cover, protected and protecting in equal measure.
His foot, which had been tapping in the air, he stilled. He let himself smile, and started it again in a more deliberate rhythm.
The very act of revealing himself, of risking Cole getting angry, told him things he wasn’t sure his opponent wanted him to know. The Midraeic had been much more protected by his semi-anonymity – a mistake not to keep it really. Cole might not have made the same mistakes as Aspen, but he would have had nothing new to work with.
Commiserating with Aspen was the start; they both had an interest in sharing information now. Aspen could confirm or deny some of Cole's assumptions. His opponent had shown, not all, but some important features of himself and his tactics, and, with an opponent like Cole, that was always a risky proposition. Riskier than he imagined his opponent could know.
'Defeat, the soldier's constant foe/ oft teaches him what he would not know.'
Until Cogadh, Cole sat with Aspen on the rock, and made plans.
Until Cogadh, Dominicus jumped at every new voice.
They had matched his team to Third’s. As predicted.
That didn’t make it better. It seemed to make Orga even more angry, and to make things worse, Orga went silent.
Dominicus didn’t think that was a good sign. None of them did. Wynn, any time they brought it up, started pacing, like a mouse running individual pieces of grain back to its den.
That was not the worst of it, though.
The change in the cadets around him was immediate.
If there had been any illusion that the Prep cadets could keep Third’s loss at practice quiet, it was utterly shattered by the speed with which the news traveled the grounds. Snakes struck with less speed than this gossip spread. Dominicus probably reached the library that very day AFTER the news that he had beaten Third in combat practice did.
There had always been a little skittishness. A little uncertainty. There was a lot of staring (less, Dominicus felt these days, than he had felt like there was upon arriving; at least part of that had to be in his imagination, didn’t it?). Sure, certain cadets were by default hostile, and the license ollamh Corin’s hatred gave his classmates in Swordplay made that a particularly hostile crowd. Even most of them just ignored or sneered at Dominicus outside of class (cadets not in his Swordplay class, and not predisposed to disliking him did the ignoring without the sneering – or the staring. Less, maybe, but there was still a lot of staring).
“I hope you’re happy with what you’ve done,” Ruaridh said to him that very evening as he unpacked his bag, breaking the thin air of avoidant peace that had pervaded their dormitory room for the last few weeks with a stony and certain anger.
And that was it. They no longer spoke.
Everyone else’s speaking, however, had just begun.
It had been too dangerous to talk about his punching an ollamh (and it had happened during combat demonstration in class, when such might be expected). Whatever the rumors, the main understanding had been that Orga had conceived of the plan that led to their team’s victories at Cogadh. It was perfectly possible, in a class of this size, to pretend Dominicus didn’t exist at all.
That was... an annoying thought. Dominicus didn’t know why it annoyed him – maybe because to so many it was so God-damned important that his unimportance and misplacement be rigorously asserted to him – but maybe not. It felt more annoying than that.
Either way, there was no ignoring Dominicus now.