"So, Morality sure has been staring at you a lot."

  Earnest, as usual, had no tact at all.

  "It’s nothing," insisted Dalliance.

  "Whatever," said Earnest. "I like her." He shrugged. "I mean, if anyone wants to know what I think: she’s smart, she’s got a good sense of humor, and she is absolutely ruthless."

  "I don’t know much about her," said Dalliance.

  "She would kill the dog," said Charity.

  Earnest looked excited. "I’m going to remember that. I’m gonna use that one."

  Charity didn’t dignify that with a response.

  "She is absolutely ruthless," said Charity, to Dalliance, who recalled with a start that she had probably been in classes with the Best girl since she was eight, or even younger. "You're not friends?" he asked.

  "Not . . . really," admitted Charity.

  "But you’ve been in classes together for a long time."

  "I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with her," Charity said. "We’re just… different."

  "Different how?"

  "There was a morality play," she explained, "a sort of test of what kind of person you were, what you would do. And she would kill the dog. If the dog got sick, it was a danger to the kids. She wouldn't try to capture it and nurse it back to health. She would kill it, because a small probability of a large danger to the kids is more important to her than the dog."

  "Would you kill the dog, Effluvia?" Earnest asked.

  "Of course," Effluvia replied instantly. "In governance, the worst thing you can do is place your little favorites—your darlings—as more important than the people you serve. There was a baron, they call him the Swan Baron now, obsessed with swans as you might expect. When he underwent a famine, he prioritized giving seeds to the swans rather than storing them up for the next harvest. His lord, the Count, challenged him to a duel for dishonorable conduct and ran him through, as was right and proper."

  "No one wants to be the next Swan Baron," she continued. "Not just because we have the honor of our superiors riding on our actions, but because you’ve been given a trust, and with that trust, power and prestige. If you fail that trust, what you’re really saying is that you’re unworthy. When I take up my family's mantle, our holders will experience a time of plenty, because if they don’t, then I will have failed to meet my own standards. I will have failed my people. And I would never let that happen."

  Earnest pulled out his deck of cards. "No," she said, pointing sternly at Earnest. "I don’t want to know my choices, or where the god-paths go." But she looked torn.

  "What if," he said. "I can help a different way? You draw, I look through them, I hide the Major Arcana, and you only see the Minor ones. No destinations, just the types of choices.”

  "The Minor ones mean nothing without context," Circe said.

  "No, that’s fine," Effluvia said. "I’d love to try that."

  Dalliance stood up and stretched. Effluvia watched him with narrowed eyes, but didn’t comment as his meanderings brought him behind Earnest.

  The someday [Seer] dealt. He riffled through the cards once and offered them to her to pick. She selected seven cards. He plucked out three of them, shuffled them back into the deck, and then laid out the other four in a pair of twos.

  "Okay," he said. "This doesn’t tell me everything, but… The first one, the One of Embers. The Spark. You came from a potential for power. And the second one, the Three of Glimmers. Your background also had false faces, or masks, or transient pleasures."

  "I am a noble," she said. "Both of those are obvious."

  "That’s fair," he agreed. "But I didn’t deal them on purpose. You drew them." She acknowledged this fact.

  "And the other two," Earnest continued, pointing to the next pair. "The Five of Quarrels, the breastplate with five holes in it, representing Harm, or Mortal Peril. And the Five of Patterns, a dress half-complete, representing a work that is nearly finished."

  “So?”

  “The way it works, is if you follow one path, you will find the future tainted by the other—”

  “—So if I risk harm, I will fail to complete whatever the fate is, but nearly get there. And if I choose to stop short of whatever it is, I’ll come to harm. That’s . . . absolutely useless.”

  Earnest shrugged. “I don’t make the rules.”

  Dalliance thought about what he’d seen: The Crossing, The Fruit, The Doorway.

  Exams came and went for the day—day one of them, anyway. Tomorrow, the rest, and then the Hunt. Dalliance wasn’t the only one visibly feeling the restless energy buzzing through the schoolhouse, either.

  “You don’t understand,” Circe said, simply. “You didn’t do anything in the last hunt, and you weren’t even there for the first one. You’ve been coasting. When it’s time, you’ll freeze, or you won’t, and then you have to live with whatever decision you make in that moment.”

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  “Yeah? What did you do?” Sensibly Knot was looking affronted, and Fallowfield didn’t look much happier.

  She got me the sword, Dalliance thought.

  “I did what I could, when I could. I think that’s all anybody did.”

  “She straight up MURDERED everything she met!” bragged Earnest. “Serpent-from-hell? Snapped its spine like a twig.”

  The game was afoot.

  There was a brief silence.

  “Like a twig,” Effluvia ventured, making a snapping gesture like breaking a twig.

  Sterling covered his face with his hands.

  “Strange,” said Lackey, “How brave a girl could be, while Rotter slunk back like a dog.”

  “Okay now,” Dalliance said quickly, “He’d have done his part.”

  “Yeah, shut it Lackey,” jeered Earnest. “Nobody cares what the eunuch thinks anyway.”

  “I’m leaving.”

  They all glanced at Rotter.

  “Two points,” he said, defensively. “I’ll be a [Soldier]. And I’m gone.”

  Silence.

  Earnest shifted his weight, uneasy. “Are you sure . . . .”

  “I’m not going to die doing kids’ games. On the Wall, there are hundreds of us. Battle-mages. Here? We die trying to be something other than soldiers. I’m not an idiot!”

  “Nobody said you were,” Charity said, soothing. “It’s going to be fine.

  “Serving the empire is noble,” said Sterling, now participating again. “And . . . ” his face had a complicated expression. A little bit proud, a little sad. “If you’re truly set on this path, perhaps I could ask my father to take you into his retinue. You’re of his lands.”

  Rotter nodded. “Please.”

  And it was done.

  “He’s going to be the best man-at-arms there ever was,” Dalliance said into the silence. “Prosperity. And they’ll have to give you a new surname.”

  The boy nodded.

  “Probably kill trolls for feastdays, just to take part in the Triumphs,” Earnest said warmly.

  “I heard troll-skin helps regrow limbs?” offered Circe uncertainly.

  Missus Best rolled her eyes from the corner where she sat, darning socks out of a small basket.

  “They’re going to cut him in twain,” predicted Dalliance. “And put him back together with troll-skin, and he’ll become invincible.”

  “Immortal,” said Mister Best, “is the word you’re searching for.”

  The game was over. This was far more interesting. “Those who can revivify, and regenerate,” he said. “Via alchemy.”

  “That’s just stories,” Sterling said, but his heart wasn’t in it.

  “Tell that,” this with a crinkle of the lips that did not reach his eyes, “to the Thirteen.”

  Dalliance was mop boy again, but it didn’t really matter. Without all the mud, it was a quick whip-round the room, and the waxed floor was gleaming again, like honey in sunlight. Like gold.

  He put the mop on the rack and opened the back door.

  “ . . . ever *smack* call *smack* me *smack*—”

  Earnest was hardly recognizable. Lackey had him pinned against the side of the schoolhouse, one hand balled into a fist.

  [Deflection]

  The skill succeeded before Dalliance realized he’d made use of it, and Lackey’s crazed eyes met his own. There was no recognition there.

  What?!

  Dalliance bolted.

  The wagon was still within view, a few hundred yards away. He ran with everything in him, the rapid footfalls of Lackey behind him.

  He didn’t have the wherewithal to cast [Prediction], so he was entirely unprepared for what came next.

  Hoofbeats. He glanced back into the blinding sunlight to see a mounted figure gather the reins in one hand and flog Woebegone Lackey full in the face. He missed his next step, faceplanting, and rolled over himself before coming to a stop, the steaming nostrils of a horse feet from his supine form.

  Sterling jumped down and drew his sword. “Those of us with Might are always armed, Lackey,” he said harshly. “Pursuit of a fleeing victim while armed is a poor look. I will have to—”

  “—he didn’t mean it,” came the voice of Earnest. “Really, it’s my fault, let him—”

  “—you beat a boy with nothing but Charm into a pulp, too?”

  Lackey pulled himself to his feet. “You’re not better than me.”

  His body hit the grass beside Dalliance’s feet. Sterling examined the pommel for grime, and then sheathed his sword again. “Better get a move on, Rather,” he suggested.

  Earnest limped up beside him. “Looks worse than it is,” he said reassuringly. “Guy has no follow-through.”

  His face was already swelling and mottled with red and purple. "I'll . . . bother Circe about it."

  Dalliance watched him go, but retreated to the treeline at the edge of the school grounds instead of following, trying to slow his breathing.

  "That boy," a tiny, bell-like voice said from his shoulder, "is going to kill someone someday."

  Dalliance jumped, startled. Topaz flitted into the air in front of him, her mica-flecked wings catching the afternoon light. Her normally cheerful expression was gone, replaced by a look of profound, ancient seriousness.

  She had seen it too. That came from nowhere.