It was an odd thing. I wished I didn’t feel so self-conscious about how he affected me – and the way he sat beside me at the desk, the way he said things, the way the shy smile played across his lips every time he noticed me glancing yet his face warmed with adoration over the recognition of whatever he was doing, spirits, even the way he smelled filled up my mind like a daybreak deep in the woods. And yet I was distracted. Couldn’t tear my mind away from what he’d said. And it wasn’t like our latest transmutation task took the remotest bit of interest.

  “Just do it. So it’s done,” he said, low.

  Shoreshell had floated down this end of the room a couple of times already, flotsam on an unseen tide. “I don’t wanna. Feels like the whole world is staring at me,” I said from under my cowl.

  “So fuck them. They’re below you.”

  “What if I fucked you instead…?

  “Whatever gets it done.” His eyes shifted, and I could sense Shoreshell’s presence. He’d already figured out how to make his block of wood turn a slightly different shade. All the way from almond to beige. Truly this class was invaluable. “Disregard the others. Do it for me.”

  At least after the night with him, I felt much fresher again and I rolled my own block in my hand, thumbing the corners. Sharp on my finger pads, almost sore. Felt good. “For you,” I conceded. I shut my eyes and tried to recall Grove’s words about mistrained guard dogs barking mindlessly, the faces of Stack and his pals protruding from the chained collars. I was better than this. Their jibes, if they came, meant nothing to me. Buzz warmed my legs and I channeled it through me, fizzing up to my fingertips. Something new: pinpricks, bubbling pinpricks rippling across my skin like a tidal wave of nettle rash, over my chest and my arm and my hand and I –

  Opened my eyes and knocked the block off the desk in shock. It wasn’t a block anymore. “What the fuck,” I said softly, and I didn’t just feel like the whole world was staring – I knew they all were. Kaspar rounded the desk to fetch the wooden abomination I’d made. “What the fuck…” He turned it in his hands, perplexed, silent. Passed it to me. In my palm sat a perfect, life-accurate carving of a dog. A guard dog.

  Of course it didn’t escape the professor’s attention. They whisked over like a feather on the winds and I handed it over to their waiting hand so they could squint into it, barely a hand’s width from their face. “Remarkable,” they said, gave it back to me, and left.

  “Was that… a good ‘remarkable’?” I asked aside to Kaspar. He rotated his beige block roughly, quietly, pressing it down with so much pressure I thought either it or the desk would crack. “Kaspar?”

  “What does it matter?”

  “...Did I say something wrong?”

  He pressed the block again and this time it did crack. A crooked slice snapped across the surface. It matched the small smile that grew on his face.

  “Kaspar?”

  *

  He didn’t talk to me all through history, because we had so much textbook to catch up on and we really had to maximise the time spent on timelining events and contributory factors after Professor Fletcher’s thirty minute monologue on the intricacies of the Virrenback Accords, which really could have been a ten minute runthrough if he hadn’t tried to name every single signatory on the accord papers off by heart. So it was understandable why we didn’t have chance to talk, me and Kaspar. Or that’s what I told myself anyway.

  I never saw him in the food hall even on our good days. And I didn’t see him in the afternoon either.

  He wasn’t there in conjury the following morning either. I sat alone, repeatedly wrenching my gaze from the space where he should have been. Had I said something wrong? Had I upset him somehow? I urged myself to believe that if I had, surely he would come to me and talk it over. If he cared. And he did care, he did care. He must care. He’d bought me all the fancy stuff – I was wearing half of it. He must care, right?

  Field’s reminder we only had five weeks left before our exam was almost rote by now, and it left my guard down to the slap of, “And Oakley, I’m aspiring on acquiring a few minutes of your time afterward.” I flinched, expecting some remark from Stack and without Kaspar by my side or a rock on my desk, I’d have to think of something new, but nothing came. The absence, in itself, was disturbing. Stools scraped floorboards and chatter fluttered around the room but over in his corner, Stack said nothing. He had his head down. Favouring the massive, ugly bruise on it.

  I hated how I felt sorry to him.

  Too soon it was just me and Field, and she patrolled down the aisle like a Forester commander. Stopped right over me. I drew my shoulders in. “Oakley. I take it you understand the reasoning behind the masked nature of all chancellors but the High Chancellor, correct?”

  “Yes, professor,” I said dutifully.

  “Explain to me why.”

  My heart dropped through my guts. “Well, uh, I think it might be something to do with the, uh –”

  “A tertiary note while it’s salient: present a better version of yourself to your professors and they’ll present better of themself back to you.” She turned sharply to me. “Be honest and be decent. Is that so pernicious a prerequisite?”

  I chewed the inside of my cheek. “Where I come from, you have to agree with whoever’s in charge or you get in trouble.”

  “So you’ll lie to keep out of it?” I shrugged. “Sounds rather… virulent. From now on, while you’re talking to me I want you to be truthful, no matter what the truth is. You don’t believe I’m on your side, do you?”

  Shrugged again. “You don’t act like it.”

  “How do I act?”

  “Like most everyone else here. Like you tolerate me for the sake of politeness but if I wasn’t here, all of you could finally be at ease again. I leave rooms to the sound of shoulders untensing.”

  “Well, I think that’s very unfair of you,” she said.

  “I think it’s fair considering how you’ve treated me.”

  “Oakley…” She turned her face away and scratched at her ear. “Respectfully, there’s a non-zero number of things in this world that aren’t directly about you. Perhaps more than ten of them. Why do you think I invested the hardest years of my life into becoming a professor?” Her pale eyes sought me, scoured me, and I whispered silently to the spirits it was a rhetorical question. “The world is a vibrantly complex place,” she continued, praise to the spirits, “and in my experience – a thing which counts for most everything in this life – almost all conflicts have more than two sides. And it’s for the convenience of the many sides which keep themselves hidden, that we continue pretending there are only two.”

  Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

  “So what other sides are there? All I see is them and me. And you’re sure not with me.”

  She strode off a few paces and I wasn’t convinced she’d come back. But she did. And when she did, she walked like she was approaching an ailing old pet. “I was in two minds over this. Alas. To return to topic, the chancellors stay masked to enforce impartiality as far as possible. The world of the arcane is a living, twisting spiderweb of connections, and your success and failure after graduation can largely be determined by who you know and what they think about you. Understand so far?” I nodded. “So when I met with them to discuss your petrological proclivities, I put forward your case best I could in their gathering chamber, and they left to deliberate. As I’m sure you’ve garnered, I have a naturally restless and insatiably inquisitive mind and during the quarterhundred I was left idle in the chamber, I may have cast an eye across their high table seeking to alleviate my boredom in this windowless chamber deep in the undercroft of this place. Files and folders, packs and papers. Esoteric but highly important, doubtlessly, doubtlessly. A card caught my attention, one I supposed amounted to correspondence. An errant gust of wind caught it and as I replaced it on the table, my sight caught a name on the obverse.” She leaned on the desk, right by where Kaspar should have been today. “The target of your projectile has a popular surname.”

  “Stack has family in the chancellors? –”

  “I’d never suggest such a thing,” was what she declared, head turned, but the slightest hint in her assured tone said something else. “To quote the code of conduct, speculation over the identity of the chancellors is strictly forbidden, so I think we’ll both agree I didn’t hear anything just now. …You did read the code before you enrolled, correct?” I was about to reply when she gave me a look. “Honesty, please. There are former students who consider my classroom to be sanctified ground.”

  “...I find we, as people, learn best from experience,” I said very innocently.

  Her look lingered. “Shame they don’t run courses in equivocation here. I often find it a more useful magic than any you’ll find in the old textbooks.” She tapped the desk heavily and stood up. “Word to the wise – per the code, sharing information on the identity of a chancellor is direct standing for disbarment. Even the greatest extent of my interfaculty diplomacy can’t get you out of that.”

  “But it’s not fair. If he’s related to – or if, y’know, what you didn’t tell me just now, is true, then that’s… That’s why he is like he is.”

  “Perhaps. As stated, I couldn’t possibly speculate.”

  “But you let me… Why? And why trust me with it?”

  “I have respect for you,” she said. “And if you return that, and give me some trust, I think we could get along far better. I see the potential for triumphs in your future, if you stop squabbling with the inconveniences along the way. I won’t pretend it’s easy to pick your battles. But I can promise you this: you can’t fight them all.”

  I ran a hand over my chin. I’d shaved this morning but I’d have to do it again soon or my claws would take matters into their own… hands. “If I tell people you said this stuff about the chancellor to me, what would they do to you?”

  “Dismissal, most likely. The skies know they’ve been manoeuvring for reasons for long enough.”

  “And is any of it true?”

  Professor Field smiled in a way I couldn’t read. “The truth is a fickle bird and rarely holds sway before a person in a big chair who can shout loudly. I’ve tied my own noose merely by telling you, but would we ever rather someone else tie it for us? You’ll have to trust me.” I rolled her words around my head amongst the revelation – that is, if I even believed what she’d said. Then again, why would she lie here? What did she have to gain from me? Was everyone always trying to gain from me?

  “Do you?” she asked.

  My stool scraped back and I headed from the room. She didn’t try to stop me.

  *

  It stewed in my head like the slop in a Dreadfall tavern cauldron. And much like the tavern slop, I picked over it and tried to make it prettier, but it remained sourly unpalatable.

  I couldn’t tell Holly. Wanted to. Couldn’t. Whatever came of this, I couldn’t risk Professor Field’s place here. My heart held Holly warmly, but she wasn’t one for keeping secrets. Even if I could find Kaspar, I wouldn’t trust him with it. The instant something rubbed him the wrong way, he took off brooding or moping somewhere like one of those tortured wandering poets. I imagined him in the dark recesses of the castle, wailing a lament high up in a lonely turret, echoing in the rafters. And I couldn’t burden Robin with any more – spirits beyond, he took on more than his fair share as it was. The guy needed a rest. He needed care.

  So it was all set up to keep those in, in, and those out, out, but what wasn’t nowadays? The industries in the Wrevon Valley, the councils and the barons of the seven cities – why would this Institute be any different? Even the warfare was a game of hierarchies and power plays, all the ranks and files and honours I didn’t care to name, and a fighter would do anything for a shiny badge of promotion, some recognition they were doing it right.

  That was exactly it. That was what Stack would never understand. In my life I’d been called plenty worse things by plenty more respectable people than him and by the spirits I’d hoped to have left that behind when I came here. If I hadn’t, well, I hadn’t. I hadn’t had the smooth-skinned life he’d had, the connections and the benefits that raised him into that tight-mouthed, scarless young man poised in the other corner of the class like he considered himself a work of art, temporarily blemished though he was. But I was built tough. I’d been through worse than him. And I was tired, so tired of running away, and every time I did it led me to worse and lesser places. Whether Field’s words were true or not, I still trusted Kaspar’s, not that he was here much to offer them lately. And it all pointed to the same end. So Stack could do and say what he liked. I wasn’t gonna quit and I wasn’t gonna get myself kicked out. I wouldn’t rise to the barking. I’d been through plenty worse than him and always dragged myself out the other side.

  *

  It was Afday when Grove came back earlier. I tossed aside a riveting case study book on the academically recognised dullest arcanist who ever lived, and double-checked the door was closed. Leaned against it, just in case. I told them about the week, what I’d learned, what I’d decided, and they swore on the Ooh to absolute secrecy even from Holly, for the safety of everyone involved. My chest felt a little lighter and they acknowledged the difficulty of it all. “Which is why I’m not fighting it,” I said. “All my life it’s been fight, fight, fight. To fight me, he’s gotta drag me down to his level, and I’m not doing it anymore. I’m better than that, and other people get hurt in the melee. They always do. I’m not picking this battle again.”

  I sighed deeply and crossed the room. More snow had fallen, proper snow this time, and the grounds of the castle looked serene. Undisturbed. “And I should apologise to my professor. She got hurt. I think she was right, and I think I didn’t want to see it. Not till she put so much of her life on the high wire for me. She deserved better than how I acted.”

  “That’s very mature of you,” said Grove, and I turned.

  “You think I’m not mature?” They didn’t answer. From the way they looked at me, they didn’t have to. “Fine, maybe I’m not, but it’s not like they teach tact and deference in the Sunken Woods. Fight, fight, fight – like I said. You only win when the other guy stops punching back. And I’m not getting trapped in that anymore.”

  I heaved another sigh and settled heavily onto my bed again. Picked up the study book. Glared at it. Tossed it back onto my pillow. “I know you’re still watching me,” I said.

  “Do you want me to stop?” they asked amicably. “It felt like you weren’t done yet. Normally people aren’t so melodramatic if they’ve resolved their issue.”

  “So how do I resolve it? I go to her, I say some apology, but it doesn’t feel like it’s gonna fix what I did. A few words won’t undo two months of mistrust.”

  “So how do you usually apologise?”

  “As a Forester? You don’t. You keep a grudge till the day one of you dies.”

  “...Which then resolves the issue?”

  “Think again, Clearie: blood feuds.”

  “Have you tried a cactus?”

  I leaned up. “A what now?”

  “Or some other succulent. Typically small plants which grow in the continents to the north, botanically known for their sturdiness and compact bodies and which require infrequent watering. My grandparents were bought several over the last few years as gifts for their bespoke work for some of our business’s long-time customers. They’re very easy to maintain and I suspect now they’re becoming more popular, some florists down in the city may stock them.” Grove smiled contentedly. “A cactus might make things better.”

  “Make what things better?” asked Holly as the door swung open, and whatever relief I’d made in my chest instantly seized up again.

  I looked at Grove in concealed panic and they replied without a blink: “The room. I was thinking we could get a plant for the desk, right where there’s sunlight.”

  “That’s a cool idea!” Holly chirped. She was already finding a spot, making space between the stationery for where it would go. “Do we need to get plant food for it too? What are we gonna call it?” Behind her back, Grove gave me the world’s quickest side glance and I whispered a silent thank you as I let myself breathe again.