Chapter 20. Report

“Soooo… this is it, huh?”

Rael was leaning against the side of my carriage with his arms folded, grinning while the driver was checking the Greymanes’ tack a few paces off. Gowyn stood at a polite distance behind my shoulder, and Sera as well as Rael’s shadow were beside him, and beyond them the other carriage lanterns were moving across the staging yard as the rest of the cohort found their rides home.

“It seems to be, yes.”

“So what path are you going to take when we start?”

“I haven’t thought about it much. I’ll use the week to figure it out.”

“Shield, probably. You look like the Shield type. Just like Eydric over here.”

I was about to answer when Eydric slammed an elbow into Rael’s side.

“Ouch. Okay. Okay, let me just—okay.“

I looked at the two of them. Rael was rubbing his ribs while Eydric had gone back to standing at exactly the same angle as before, as if nothing had happened.

“…Is everything alright?”

Rael took a breath and straightened.

“Howl. About the thing. In the forest. The honour thing.”

“Oh.”

“…I was wrong about it. Not about all of it, I want to be clear, I’m not apologising for all of it, but the part where I told you your honour was a costume you were wearing because people from houses like yours put costumes like that on. That was a call I made too fast, on too little time with you, and it was cheap. Your honour isn’t fragile and it isn’t a costume. I know that now. I should have waited a day before deciding I had you read. So… aah, I guess what I mean to say is that I’m sorry.”

Wow. I did not know what to do with my face. The truth was that I had spent most of the walk back from Morren turning Rael’s words over in my head and discovering, slowly, that he had been closer to right than I had wanted him to be.

I had been ready for a conversation where I apologised to him, not the other way around, and now he had gotten out in front of it, and I was the one standing in a staging yard in front of a carriage feeling like the worse person.

“Well, I… I’m the one who should be apologising.”

“Huh?”

“Yes. I walked out on both of you. I left you in the middle of an exam with one less team member and a plan we hadn’t finished arguing about. That was worse than anything you said on that bench.”

Eydric shrugged. “You came back.”

I smiled slightly at that, took a breath and made myself say the rest.

“And for what it’s worth. I… did enjoy the thrill of it.”

Rael’s eyebrows went up.

“Not to the point of wanting to mug anyone at an extraction arch if it came down to it, mind you. I want to be clear about that. But the fighting, and the running through the trees, and the pack in the clearing, and the part where there were eleven of them in the bowl and I was mostly sure I wasn’t going to make it out. That part. I liked that part more than I knew I was allowed to.”

Rael spun on his heel and pointed at Eydric with both hands.

“AHA! SEE? SEE, Vael? I TOLD you! I said to you, I said—”

Gowyn, Sera, Rael’s shadow, the driver, and three candidates climbing into a nearby carriage all turned their heads to look at the Solenne at the same time.

Rael stopped, cleared his throat, and lowered his hands, putting them very deliberately behind his back.

“I meant, of course, that there is nothing wrong with enjoying the thrill of honest combat, which is a perfectly noble and healthy instinct in a young mage, and that honour and enjoyment are not, in fact, opposing forces, and can coexist quite beautifully in a well-formed character, as I have always maintained.”

Eydric was looking at the stars now and I was laughing before I had decided to laugh, and for once I did not stop myself from letting it out. That is, until I noticed that several candidates near the next carriage had turned to look at me, and that more than one of them seemed faintly startled by the sound.

The laugh died in my throat. I straightened without meaning to, and I felt my face slide back into the composed Aridis neutrality. I cleared my throat and offered my hand to Rael.

“It was good to meet you. Both of you. I learned a lot today and I enjoyed your company.”

Rael looked at my hand, frowned, then looked at me.

“Aaaah, come on. Stop that.”

He took the hand, but instead of shaking it he pulled, and I stumbled forward half a step into him before I understood what was happening, and his other arm was around my shoulders and my face was briefly pressed against the side of his collar.

“This is how friends do it.”

“…Oh.”

He let go and held me at arm’s length with both hands on my shoulders, still grinning.

“Me and Eydric have a handshake, too. It’s got about four moves in it. We’ll teach you if you want. It’s very stupid. You’ll love it.”

Friends… I have made… friends.

“Howl? Hello? Howl?”

Rael snapped his fingers in front of my face.

“Oh. Oh, uh, yes. I… I would like that very much. Yes.”

I turned to Eydric and offered my hand again, less certainly this time. He took it, and to my quiet relief, did not yank me forward. He gave it one firm shake.

“See you in a bit.”

“Yes.”

I turned to Sera next, because she was closest. I did not know the protocol for saying goodbye to somebody else’s Shadow, so I just gave her a small nod, and she smiled and lifted her hand in a warm small wave.

“Safe travels, Young Lord.”

I nodded to Rael’s Shadow next, the young man in the long coat whose name I still did not know. He inclined his head a fraction without speaking, which I took for the goodbye it probably was.

Then I climbed into the carriage and settled into the seat I had ridden in on the way here, and Gowyn followed a beat later and took the seat across from me, same as before. The door shut. The driver clicked his tongue somewhere up front, and the Greymanes pulled.

The silence came in fast. It was not a comfortable one. Gowyn had his hands folded on his knees, and I had three conversations lined up in my head that I wanted to start with him but no idea which one came first, and the idea of starting any of them right now, with today’s events still humming in my bones, was more than I could manage. I let the silence stretch and told myself I would handle it in a minute.

My eyes closed somewhere between one crunch of the wheels and the next, and I did not notice they had closed until they were already closed, and by then it was too late to do anything about it.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

***

“Young Lord. Young Lord.”

I came up out of something warm and slow with a start. The voice was close. I blinked, and the inside of the carriage resolved itself around me, and there was Gowyn across from me, leaning forward slightly with one hand half-raised toward my shoulder, waiting for me to surface the rest of the way.

I sat up and felt the wet patch at the corner of my mouth and the slightly damp line down the side of my jaw, and I wiped it on the back of my sleeve before he could pretend not to have noticed.

The air inside the carriage smelled sweet. Not perfume sweet, but something closer to warmed honey and a flower I could not name, faint enough now that I suspected it had been much stronger while I was out.

“We have arrived at the estate, Young Lord.”

“What?”

I twisted in my seat and pulled the carriage curtain aside.

The gates of House Aridis were sitting directly in front of us, thirty feet of black iron and granite rising out of the ground with the gryphon carved above them, the watchtowers on either side lit against a sky that was already the pale grey of early morning. The Greymanes had stopped. The driver was speaking to somebody on the wall.

“…I slept through the whole journey?”

“Yes, Young Lord.”

“All of it?”

“The carriage was released with a measure of hollowreath burned into the compartment. It is a recovery smoke. Long enough for the distance, weak enough that you would wake when the driver signalled.”