22 Loop 1, Part 2

Davos was halfway across the dining hall. I caught him the moment his swagger moved into his shoulders. He was heading straight for Kalin’s table, and in about twenty seconds, he was going to grab the kid by his robes and say something vile. And then things were going to get very, very complicated, and very, very loud, and my entire week was going to go wrong again.

Unless I stopped it.

I let out a long-suffering sigh.

Finn looked at me. “What?”

Can’t a guy be exasperated when he has to do something?

There were so many things that went into the entire clusterfuck of a week, but it all started right here. And who knew? Maybe I’d get lucky, and stopping Kalin from getting his stomach bruised would fix everything else. A boy could dream, right?

The problem with Davos Creed was nobody ever stopped him. Faculty looked the other way because the Prime Minister’s grandson was untouchable. And other students never had the appetite because they didn’t want to find out just what that meant.

Somewhere to my left, a Thessalonian exchange student had decided that wasn’t okay. She was getting ready to do something principled and brave and completely pointless. She wouldn’t be fast enough. Because rule number one about being lazy is being proactive when people are about to make you do way more work later.

Davos reached Kalin’s table, grabbed the smaller boy by the robes, and started in. “Maybe if your country wasn’t such a disaster, we wouldn’t have scum like you trying to steal good, old-fashioned Restral—”

I didn’t need to hear the rest. I’d heard it before. And what came after was wolves, fire, and forty-eight hours of batshit insanity. I was not doing that again. As far as I was concerned, Davos Creed was laziness’s enemy number one.

I flicked my wand under the table and cast two spells.

[Squeak] — Enchantment

Cost: 6 mana.

Raises the pitch of a target’s vocalizations by several octaves. Duration: until dispelled.

[Trip] — Enchantment

Cost: 4 mana.

Ties, tangles, or fuses nearby lacing, cordage, or binding material on a target.

Both landed at once. Davos’s voice cracked upward mid-sentence. The hard consonant of “foreigner” climbing three octaves into something that sounded like a Frollart being stepped on. At the same time, his boots fused together at the laces.

For a moment, he just stood there, squeaking. Then the panic hit. He grabbed his throat with both hands and lurched forward, and the fused laces did the rest. He pitched face-first into the stone with a sound that I was going to treasure for a very long time. The fire spell he’d been charging landed on the floor on impact. The stone blackened and smoked.

Davos pushed himself up. His face was red—partly from the stone, partly from whatever was building behind his eyes. “What the fuck?” His voice came out in a helium squeal. He grabbed his throat and tried again. “What’s going on with my voice?” It came out higher, if anything. Every word made it worse, and hundreds of students leaned in to enjoy it.

The grandson of the most powerful man in Restralia sat on the dining hall floor, squeaking like a bath toy. He couldn’t process two problems at once. His brain had chosen the wrong one. To him, the voice was the crisis, not the fall.

Kalin laughed. His hand went to his mouth a second too late, the fear of reprisal sharp in his eyes. But then the kid next to him laughed. And then the table behind them. And soon the whole hall was rolling until everybody was crying laughing. Humiliation, the great equalizer.

The fall alone, Davos could have powered through. He had the ego for it. And the voice, he would have been able to bluster past, having one of his lackeys talk for him. But together, he was a richness of embarrassment. An embarrassment of riches? I’d work on the phrasing later.

He got to his feet, mouth clamped shut. He unlaced his shoes. His spine straightened, and despite the continuing laughter, he walked out of the dining hall in a hurry. The doors closed behind him with a bang.

The laughter didn’t stop all at once. A few tables kept going. Then a few more went quiet. Someone coughed. The Thessalonian exchange student, the one who’d been halfway out of her seat, sat back down and stared at her plate.

At Kalin’s table, the kid next to him clapped him on the shoulder. Kalin flinched. Within a minute, breakfast had resumed its usual rhythm. The blackened scorch mark on the floor where the Prime Minister’s grandson had been charging a fire spell at a scholarship student would soon be just another stain on the stonework.

“Well, that was easy,” I said.

“What did you do?” Finn was watching me with a small frown. It was like he couldn’t tell whether I was being brilliant or stupid.

“Solved a problem so there’s less work for me to deal with later.” I scratched my chin. “The true secret to laziness, Finn.”

I was pretty certain that Kalin didn’t have the orb yet. But one could never be too sure about those things. I thought I knew when he got it, though. In an hour or so, when he had that weird meeting. I’d figure it out soon.

I left the hall without Finn. I wasn’t mad at him, exactly. As glad as I was to see him, I didn’t want to talk to him. Something about how Sarah and Finn cornered me at the tournament felt bad. That conversation sat wrong in my chest, and I didn’t have the energy to figure out why. Not yet.

Stolen story; please report.

I needed a bench.

Almost as if guided by rote, my feet went off in the direction of my usual spot. But I didn’t want the bench from last time. That bench was in Malus Isher’s blast radius, and as much as I liked the guy, I had no interest in taking a [Magiball] to the ribs again. Once per life was plenty.

I headed past the Therumian oaks and past the pickup game already forming on the lower Green. Eventually, I found a quieter spot near the old astronomy tower, where the foot traffic thinned out and the sun pooled warm against the stone wall. The bench was wooden, a little warped from years of sun exposure, but it sat in a patch of light so warm it practically shone gold. Better than good enough. I could have slept in my dorm, but that would have increased the likelihood of running into Finn.

I sat down, then immediately reconsidered sitting and chose lying instead. My robe went under my head. The sun found my face. The heat soaked through my makeshift pillow. The breeze had stopped. The only sound was the pickup game on the lower Green, far enough away that I couldn’t make out the words even with [Subtitle].

But I couldn’t just sleep out here all day. That was the tragedy.