Dominicus did not ask Fachtna. He rather panicked. The question (Did he fully appreciate the import of his decision to excel? (Suborned to the less acknowledged question of: Had he decided to excel?)) and the answer(s) (Perhaps not (and unfortunately, somehow, yes)) churned in the back of his mind for short remainder of Groups. Dominicus and his side of the team spent this remainder mostly resting and recovering. Ergamuth and his friend spent it wheedling; Orga and his team spent it performatively fuming and posing.
They should have been planning. It took Orga forever to come up with plans. Wynn, like Dominicus, had quickly worked out that Orga yelled and bullied and insisted on his primacy so much in part because it gave him time to actually think of something to do to demonstrate that primacy. How thoughtlessly he could bully! How laborious was every other thought in his head.
But it did fucking work, Dominicus had to concede. The very thought made him angry. Even Orga, however, made deliberate choices reflecting a larger strategy he thought best exploited his strengths in order to succeed in this place. Even Orga – God’s Own Blessed Idiot – decided to excel, in his own way.
How easily Dominicus could pack away his anger at another, to be exorcised at its proper time. How difficult to ignore how much of an idiot he felt like, for his stupid, half-hearted mission to pretend he shouldn’t be here, for the sake of – what, exactly?
That he wasn’t quite ready to face. So he did something else.
He could not say it was a spur-of-the-moment decision, because it had been many long stressful moments brewing alongside his self-recrimination, but it felt and probably looked very much like one, on account of how little he really wanted to do it.
Dominicus caught Ergamuth as they broke up for the evening.
Ergamuth responded to Dominicus’ calling of his name with something that sounded like ‘Airy’ but not precisely that word in some fine and difficult to imitate way. But he also stopped walking so Dominicus could hobble up beside him (the only thing worse than moving for his back was resting – that was good to know).
“Airy,” Dominicus tried to say.
“Eiruh,” Ergamuth said more deliberately. “The full name’s a mouthful, and anyway, I never liked it.”
Ludicrous, but also none of Dominicus’ business.
“I have a question,” Dominicus said.
Aerie(?) looked at him, as if this were obvious and unnecessary to say, which it was.
Dominicus didn’t precisely know what his question was. Well, he did, but it was embarrassing. But even more embarrassing would be discussing it with Fachtna, the only similarly socailly-clever cadet he knew, who would also need to have its context explained, and who also had no reason to try to keep Dominicus around. So Eary it was.
“I want you to explain the afraidness.”
That sounded stupid, even to Dominicus. He hated Ainjir. He hated having to speak in it. He hated having to try to understand it. The pain in his back was making him really, extraordinarily cranky.
“Explain what?” Eire (he would stick with that, mentally) asked. He had disturbingly clear and placid eyes – a kind of grey-brown. A face that could smooth out like a millpond. Maybe he looked a little like those Ainjir back home.
“You said they dismissed me, now they were afraid of me. What did you mean?”
After a pause, he began to say, “I perhaps overstated, in the heat of argument...”
“I don’t care,” Dominicus said. “Whatever. Explain it more.”
Eire again paused, face absolutely unmoving, before he said, “Shall we walk? I want to stop by the Library before dinner.”
Dominicus grunted an assent, in part because moving would hurt continuously, but it was probably better than NOT moving – he had things he wanted to do before dinner, too, but they were less pressing than the answers he wanted to get (also he could potentially spy on how the Librarian – who treated him extraordinarily suspiciously, like a creature who ate books but only when unobserved – treated other cadets. Whatever else was going on, Dominicus would not be denied The Library).
Eire talked as they walked to retrieve his pack (Prophet be thanked, as he was facing only combat classes for the remainder of his day, Dominicus had dumped his pack back at the dormitory – he still struggled to put his jacket on without making too much of a show of it), and as they very slowly started on the path to the main buildings.
“I perhaps said too much when I said you didn’t matter...”
“I do not care,” Dominicus growled.
“I’m clarifying,” Eire responded coldly. “Dismissed was closer. Cadets didn’t know what to do with you, so they sort of ignored you. Obviously not totally – obviously there are those like Ollamh Corin who disagree with your even being here. I don’t actually think Orga is one of those.”
This surprised Dominicus, if only because he hadn’t given any serious thought to it as a possibility. What did it matter what they thought of him? There was a slot in his mind for assholes, another for non-assholes, and another for assholes-he-had-to-watch-out-for. Orga wavered between the first and third, when he thought about him, which was only when he absolutely had to. Like when Orga stood in front of him. Like an infant playing vidi abdidi.
Maybe it was ungenerous to have everyone else in a slot labelled ‘non-assholes’ instead of something less... well... like... maybe a category like ‘normal people’ would do.
That was a thought for another day.
“Orga is a good example, though. He, on being forced to confront you, tried to dismiss you, but couldn’t. Faced with the fact that he couldn’t, he defaulted to dominating you. Faced with the fact he couldn’t do that either, he settled for controlling you. But now you’ve demonstrated that he can’t even do that, and in the worst possible way.”
“What worst way?” Dominicus objected.
“It would have been better to go along with the current,” Eire said. “You didn’t have to be dominated, but you could have just done well in classes and protected your rank that way.”
“Some classes,” Dominicus said.
“We’ll get to that,” Eire replied, ominously. “Instead, you refused to be controlled and won the Cogadh match. Very splashy.”
“Eha, yes, I won the Cogadh match!” Dominicus cried, throwing his hands out. “We won the Cogadh match!”
“Well, winning isn’t everything.”
“Here, it is,” Dominicus said.
Eire actually looked slightly embarrassed. “Well, yes, maybe – but not exactly. Not now, anyway.”
“Now now? Or NOW now?” Accompanying one with a gesture of straight hands held parallel, pointing at the ground, and the other with a broader, stirring motion.
“Like, at this point in our careers,” Eire said, quickly calming his fluster (Dominicus didn’t understand why he would be flustered, but decided not to be insulted by it), “as cadets. Look, I’m not an expert, it’s not like I can explain it all...”
“Lies,” Dominicus said – not because it was true, but because he knew Eire DID think he was an expert and could explain enough of it competently, and such faux-modesty annoyed him. One had to actually be modest for it to count (it was not his specialty, so he knew very well faux modesty didn’t count in the eyes of the Prophet).
Eire seemed uncertain how to take this interruption, a few reactions flitting over his face before he smoothed it out again, and simply went on.
“There’s a certain type of person,” he said, “who if they can’t ignore something they don’t understand, or don’t know how to account for, will be afraid of it. And when they’re afraid, they react very violently. You’re upsetting people like that, in particular, with these victories.”
Dominicus first scowled because he thought Eire was trying to puff him up, multiplying his victories, but then he scowled because he was perhaps not understanding Eire’s description of the situation.
“Victories?”
“You won the Cogadh match,” Eire said blandly. “You won the loyalty of parts of Orga’s team. You apparently punched Ollamh Corin in the face and weren’t immediately expelled. You’ve been doing well in your combat classes. No one enjoys arguing with you in Academic classes, except Ollamh Hammerlyn, who gets after you for stuff we’ve never even thought about.”
There was a bit much emphasis on that ‘no one’.
“Those are all victories, in a way. In a way, they mean that the plans all of these cadets who had plans have been working on since the start of the year must change in the face of an unaccounted-for variable.”
“It was stupid of them not to account for it,” Dominicus said, rather more grumpily than was strictly appropriate. He was trying to be strategic and attentive and kept feeling like it was losing out to more petulance.
“Are you saying it wasn’t your plan to lull everyone into a sense of security by pretending to be mediocre for so long so you could upset all the rankings later?”
“Uh,” Dominicus said, feeling very intelligent (that is, not at all). “No.”
Eire’s turn to grunt non-committally and lapse into silence.
He didn’t think Eire believed him.
“I changed my mind,” Dominicus said, by way of explanation.
“...About what?” Eire seemed suspicious that Dominicus might be about to attack him somehow.
“What I was doing here,” Dominicus said. “I changed my mind.”
“About what? Achieving rank?” Eire looked baffled. “What else is there to do here?”
Dominicus felt suddenly VERY stupid.
It had not occurred to him to think – or, to think more than ever so briefly – about what attendance at the Academy meant to his Ainjir classmates. To him, it was very clear – what he was doing here, what it meant – but to them?
“What are you doing here, then?” Eire’s question came out of a several seconds of open-mouthed, head-cocked silence. It did not seem like a ruse, or even a particularly well-thought out response. His sophisticated positioning, careful management of tone, had turned fully to perplexity.
“Well,” Dominicus said, confidently enough.
But then, nothing. Well.
Well, ...
Well...
Well, he knew, didn’t he? He did. There had been many late-night, all-day, deep conversations about History, the Academy, Midraeic principles, his education, his role in society, his duty not just to family but to the wider Midraeic community, with his father on the many weeks’ voyage down to take up his post.
Dominicus had mostly sulked through them. Or listened mostly the parts he wanted to hear. Or tried hard to imply that this would all be accomplished on the way to the thing he really wanted to do, which was to become a teacher, like his father. Or, he had schemed about which parts of his Academy education could be turned to such a goal.
He had... well, maybe he had not understood. His father had said that Dominicus could do very well at the Academy. He said that a lot. Though it wasn’t in his nature to be overly complimentary, Dominicus had perhaps misinterpreted... or interpreted in a way that conformed to what he wanted to hear. Dominicus had thought that his father was complimenting his ability to learn, to adapt. He thought his father was maybe insisting on some kind of equality with the average Ainjir, who also ‘did well’ at the Academy. He had taken all that talk of earning recognition for his people, demonstrating their worth, showing loyalty to the nation, as insistence on participation.
He had perhaps not – except to insult them – considered that there were few, if any, other places Ainjir received education. Every Midraeic community had their skola, if not battling flocks of several; it was simply something they did. One had to, to understand the Books, to learn the Words of the Prophet, to understand their history, to be among the people.
The Academy was the foremost school in Ainjir (his father had said that). There was no single foremost teacher among the Midraeic, only big meetings with Arguments and occasionally famous commentators. It was actually well-regarded among the Six Nations for the quality and well-roundedness of the education it provided – though solely Ainjir were admitted (his father had said that). There had been a great many interviews and tests – first among the foremost skola of his and the surrounding communities, and then before Baron Seolgaire’s advocate, and even one before Baron Seolgaire, who was, after all his patron – before they left on their journey. A great deal of campaigning had gone on. He had been...
Well, there was a lot going on. Paciano wanted very desperately to start taking on heavier chores but had to be talked out it for fear of his illness worsening (admirable, but ill-advised). Ursula – who he suspected was the unacknowledged cause of Paciano’s sudden turn to developing physical strength – had developed some kind of informal blood feud with a local Ainjir boy (a delicate situation to untangle with minimal violence). Not to mention Auriol’s polite but staunch refusal to recognize a suitor who seemed on the verge of making himself ill to achieve her attention (foolish young man). His mother hadn’t much cared for the suitor, who she called a poetry-affected actor, in love with love and not her step-daughter, but she wasn’t going to let him die in the yard, all the same, and Auriol’s tendency to act as if he was merely visiting the neighborhood drove her mad. Abban, at seven years old, had decided he was ready to be a wandering bard and swordsman, and could only be prevented from losing himself in the woods by the promise of training (MUCH better swordplay practice). Laeta had become nearly a recluse, attempting to listen in and participate in their father’s campaign, and had to be distracted (sweet – also stubborn).
And Catillia. Naturally, Catillia had been hounding him, equal parts entangling him in hours-long debates and jumping out from behind bushes to test his reflexes (Paciano and Abban helped with that part – Laeta kept score during debates). She only stopped getting him into fights because Ursula’s situation overtook the need. It took weeks before he figured out she was running her own battery of tests, as she often did, to judge his fitness and prepare him for his mission.
Eha – his family. He missed his family. He also missed the point of what his father had been trying to tell him.
His father had been very specific. Very clear. Dominicus had... refused to hear.
Well, that he knew. His problem was that he seemed to be able to ignore so many things he knew.
Maybe that was the thing he had to decide to confront – not the decision to excel, but a broader decision he had made about who he was, and who he would become.
That fucking sucked.
“Galen,” Eire interrupted his reverie, “do you realize many of us are merely struggling to survive?”
“Well,” Dominicus said again, but nothing else. Yes and no. Did he know? Sort of. Abstractly. Like he knew things about the ancient empire of Comidras. Had he ever actually thought about it? No.
“Galen,” Eire said, as if he needed to start the conversation anew, “are you aware that half of the other cadets, at least, aren’t deciding to do anything, they’re just trying to keep up, to keep their place here and not get kicked out?”
“I...” Dominicus said, then much less certainly, more acknowledgement than confirmation, “yes.”
“Galen,” Eire said, this time as if gently remonstrating with an inattentive pupil, “I don’t think you know who you have started fights with.”
Dominicus was about to deny this, deny that he had started fights at all, but that would be very foolish. Instead, he said something only a little foolish.
“Orga?”
“Once you pass a certain rank – or stand out in a certain way,” Eire said, mercifully as if Dominicus had said nothing at all, “you become the enemy not only of every cadet below that rank, but every cadet seeking to keep their rank above you. The broader the disturbance, the wider the group of enemies. Every success that upsets more than a few ranks becomes the concern of everyone it could possibly reach. That is, if you jump five ranks, then you have ten enemies, five above, five below. That’s normal – everyone expects those sorts of things, and the lower the rank the less it matters. But if you jump twenty ranks, then you don’t just have enemies twenty above and twenty below, but the twenty above the top twenty, who fear you accomplishing the same feat again. If you cannot be placed, and your place safely predicted, then you are everyone’s enemy – whether you are Midraeic or not.”
Into the following silence he added, “That you are only makes it more noticeable. Orga is really the least of your problems.”
“His solution,” Dominicus said, pacing furiously in front of Quartermaster Ghent, who had sat quietly on the stumps by which they usually met, holding the long garden hook he had brought with him, as he was borrowing it for some work by his actual abode.
“... was for me to seek protection,” it was difficult to properly load this word with the freight of disgust it deserved.
“I should seek protection,” Dominicus spun back onto his trail, gesturing as if trying to figure out a way to lift a delicate cake larger than his body, “from an appropriately-ranked and -skilled Ainjir cadet.”
Turning back. “So that this Ainjir cadet could manage the inevitable challenges that my too-prominent actions would attract.”
Sensing a pause, Ghent grunted. “And that cadet was him?”
“That cadet was him!” Dominicus cried. “Could be him,” he amended, to be fair to the roundabout way Eire had suggested it, but returned to his old pitch to add, “What is so special about him!”
“Is he not attractive?” Ghent asked.
“What is attractive?” Dominicus turned on him, having perhaps forgotten he was addressing one of the most senior officers he could possibly see on the Academy campus.
Ghent’s “Did he want to fuck you?” didn’t help re-establish the sanctity of rank, except that hearing such a vulgar construction reminded Dominicus it shouldn’t come out of the Academy Quartermaster’s mouth (he was pretty sure).
“Don’t be ridiculous!” Dominicus said, narrowly avoiding a sputter. “To even think!”
“Did you not want to fuck him?” Ghent asked, stone-faced.
“How dare you suggest something so degrading!”
“How dare you scold your elders like a innkeep her daughter,” Ghent shot back. “Anyway, you’re not among Midraeics anymore – language like that won’t suit, and anyway, a good fuck can clear the mind. If you’re amenable, you should take him up on it.”
Ghent suspected the Midraeic cadet was amenable, but Dominicus collapsed – forgetting his own dignity – into a seat on the ground, barely resisting the urge to press his face into the grass to cool it.
“What is wrong with you, old man?”
“Old man,” Ghent grunted. “Young upstart.”
Dominicus – his back groaning at him – lifted himself to sit upright again. It wasn’t any of Ghent’s business – and he supremely desired avoiding any kind of entanglement in Academy Romances, especially but not limited to those between cadets, who were, even when operating without half their blood diverted away from the brain, a blight on the peace and well-ordered workings of the world. But he also knew, because the young Midraeic had intimated as much, that such entanglements were in the cards, so to speak. And like his refusal to fully invest in his talents, Galen’s refusal to acknowledge as much was going to lead to trouble, if only because others far more comfortable and well-versed could easily use it against him.
More trouble or less trouble than actually getting good and entangled? That was also not Ghent’s business, nor did he want to guess, nor, he hoped, would he ever have to hear about it. His job, as far as he was concerned, was to point out there were hurdles, not to fiddle about with them.
“Not young enough to be preoccupied about who’s fucking who, though.”
“Eha! Matri’ futotor! Sancti Mater, salve fili...” but the rest of what he said he said to the ground again.
“I don’t think he wanted to fuck you,” Ghent said, eliciting another cry of dismay he ignored, “though you should consider it. Anybody willing to give you that advice could be a good ally.”
“One does not fuck allies!” Dominicus called to the heavens. “There is no relationship between fucking and allies!”
“Not necessarily,” Ghent conceded. “Could be fun, though.”
“Eha, old man, I am asking you to focus,” Dominicus said, again, with the cake gesture, as if this explained things.
“No, you’re not,” Ghent rumbled. “You’re asking me to indulge your urge to delay accepting the inevitable.”
Miserably, Dominicus looked at Ghent exactly as Ghent expected him to – as if he didn’t want to hear it said.
“You could do well here,” Ghent said. “You should do well here. Your father asked you to do well here, because he knew that you doing well here would mean something for your people, and he believed you could do it.”
Dominicus looked crushed. So Ghent crushed him further.
“And you’re fucking up because you don’t want to.”
The Quartermaster sat on his stump, and Dominicus sat on the ground, looking up at him. The fight was a brutal one, internally; Ghent could see it, had seen it, going on for far too long over the last weeks. This was just that same fight held in a bottle. He had a decent respect for what was at stake, however – it was not a small thing, to change utterly one’s self-image, to give up on the picture of one’s self and one’s future developed over such trying years. It was probably the least of the problems he saw facing Dominicus Galen, but it was at least the most important. And he didn’t have time to go about leisurely rebuilding his understanding of himself.
Then again, Ghent didn’t think he would need time, once he had faced it. He was just stuck in an unusual situation for a Midraeic, in that it was their way to talk it out. He did not mind being challenged, but he had not yet realized that it was going to be his business to challenge himself now – there would be fewer and fewer teachers, and fewer and fewer who could teach him more than himself. Or, at least, could teach him without him having to meet them at it. That was growing up.
Fuck this, though, Ghent thought. At least he was doing it at sixteen or so, and not as a more-than-twenty-year-old soldier, leaving Ass-Backward Village up Buttcrack Creek from the utter Taint of Nowhere. Ghent had had enough of those.
“Boy,” he said, “what is it that you don’t want to give up?”
“My faith,” Dominicus answered, uncharacteristically weakly. “How can I be Midraeic and also follow this path?”
“Who said they are opposed?”
This prompted an unhappy little turn of the mouth, forcing his glance to the ground. If his father wasn’t an idiot – and Ghent was pretty sure father was at least as sharp as son, if not just more socially gifted – then his father had also pointed out that they weren’t opposed.
“Do you just not want to get wrapped up in how we live?”
Now Galen looked embarrassed. Which at least demonstrated that, when given time to think, he wasn’t stupid enough to insult his superiors to their face. Ghent had reason to doubt, sometimes. But also, he wasn’t a fan of such over-formal protection of pride, and the minute this dutiful little Midraeic son got wrapped up in ‘shoulds’ and ‘ought-tos’ he would be too stiff to learn anything at all.
“What, boy – afraid you’ll enjoy it too much?”
Now Galen glared, narrow-eyed.
Ghent laughed – he didn’t know it yet, but he certainly was.
“I do not think the plans I have come up with so far have been bad,” Dominicus said, moodily.
“They’re only bad because they demand you be less than you are,” Ghent scolded. “If you are able to be First, why shouldn’t you be First? Are you worth any less? Does being Midraeic mean you must be less? Does it mean you are less than the Ainjir? That you are less Ainjir? That the things that belong to this nation belong less to you? Is that not what these assholes are trying to assert by being so insistent you ought not beat them? Why are you trying so hard to prove them right?”
That did it. He knew that did it, even though he suspected Dominicus Galen would get little sleep tonight, mulling it over. The decision had finally been made, somewhere deep down, and it would be as hard to shake as this hesitation had been. He just needed to say it, or to hear it said – by someone other than his dad, Ghent figured, who he could not conceive of challenging or disappointing.
Well, he could challenge Ghent, but Ghent knew he wasn’t going to be disappointed.
Dominicus Galen was about to fuck up this whole place.
Ghent started laughing. Galen scowled at him, perhaps thinking he was laughing at him, instead of at the havoc he was about to unleash.
“You should still consider plugging that cadet if he’s soft on you.”
This time, Dominicus bothered to translate himself.
“Fuck you, old man!”