Chapter 887 - 886- Classes are too much for Few Students

Chapter 887: Chapter 886- Classes are too much for Few Students

The morning classroom smelled of chalk dust and old wood polish, and Lyssa entered it with Elara at her side like a matched pair of knives in different sheaths.

Students dotted the benches in loose clusters. Sophia sat near the front, horned head bent over a notebook.

Yuki occupied a middle row with her back very straight, the posture of a girl pretending her hips did not ache.

Aldric slumped beside a window, grey-faced and hollow under the eyes, the look of a boy who had volunteered his own body to an apothecary’s table and was paying the installment plan. And near the far wall, Prince Leo sat with his chin propped on one hand, wearing boredom like a crown he was too proud to remove.

Lyssa took her usual seat.

Beside her, as always, sat the dwarven prince. Short, broad, beard braided with copper rings, a foreign delegate’s son attending the academy as a diplomatic courtesy. He was the only representative of his race in the room, and he made certain everyone knew what a waste of his time it all was.

"Inferior teachings," he muttered, loud enough for three rows.

Lyssa sighed through her nose and ignored him.

She had ignored him every day since the term began. The dwarf attended under protest, looked at the professors like a blacksmith inspecting counterfeit steel, and never once answered a question, because answering would imply the question had value. It was a daily performance. It had become as constant and as ignorable as the weather.

Then the door opened, and Viktor Ktorian walked in, and Lyssa’s whole body flinched before her mind had registered anything at all.

She steadied herself with a slow breath and glanced sideways.

The dwarven prince had gone rigid. His thick fingers clenched once around the edge of his desk. Then, in complete silence, the dwarf drew out a notebook, uncapped a pen, and began to write.

Lyssa stared.

Six weeks of inferior teachings. Six weeks of scorn. And now the little mountain royal was hunched over his paper like a first-year facing final examinations, his beard nearly brushing the ink.

’What in the world.’

Viktor set his books down and began the lesson.

He taught the way a flood crosses a plain, without hurry and without mercy. He asked questions that no human student in the room could have answered, layered them one atop another, and threaded them through history that appeared in no textbook on the continent. The divide of the nations. The old compacts. The wars the records had quietly misplaced.

Only four students in the entire room kept pace with pen and paper. The rest sat like decorations. Lyssa caught Elara, two rows ahead, exhaling through her teeth at the ceiling in frustration, and understood the feeling perfectly.

Because Lyssa wanted to meet this man. She had decided that days ago. But wanting to meet someone and knowing how were different animals entirely. What would she even say to him? What did one ask a person who seemed to know everything and fear nothing?

Her eyes drifted to Yuki instead.

’Is she really.’ The question Elena had planted sat in her chest like a swallowed coal. ’Is she really letting him do all of that. The marks on her neck said enough. The way she sits says the rest.’

Then her gaze slid to Aldric by the window, her own stupid brother, grey and drained and hunting potency in medicine bottles like a dog digging for a bone that was never buried. Nothing to be done there. He had chosen his hole and would lie in it.

And then there was Leo, glaring faintly across the room at the professor with the expression of a prince discovering that the sun does not orbit the throne. While Viktor simply was. Bright, effortless, complete. Smart, strong, powerful, and young enough to sit in this classroom as a peer rather than a relic.

Lyssa bit her lip.

’Only if I had known this early. I would have spread my legs for someone else, I suppose.’

The smirk arrived on its own, small and crooked and private.

"Professor is not like other humans." The voice came from beside her, low and gravel-deep. The dwarven prince had not lifted his eyes from his notebook. "So you better keep that lustful gaze away from him."

Lyssa’s spine went straight as a fence post. In six weeks, the dwarf had never once addressed her directly.

"You little filthy punk," she hissed, mouth twisting. "How dare you. Mind your paper, you bearded boulder, before I..."

The chalk hit her square in the temple.

It bounced off her head and rolled under the desk. The entire room turned. Lyssa rubbed the stinging spot and looked up into Viktor’s eyes across the rows, and found them cold and level and entirely without humor.

"Miss Lyssa." He said her name the way a man reads an item off an invoice. "It does not seem like this academy belongs to your father, does it?"

She jumped in her seat. "S... sorry."

"No. Not yet." He turned to the board and began writing. "Perhaps you will learn whose it does belong to before the year is out. Now. Since you have such energy for conversation, let us speak of your family."

The chalk tapped twice against the board.

"House Vaerin. A great grandfather, and a sister to him, who stood among the very few Paleogene majors of the founding age. Names carved into the formation accords of this continent. Dwarven steel in their hands, elven bows at their flanks, and dragonfire overhead, when the races still shared a battlefield instead of a border."

Lyssa’s mouth opened. Nothing came out.

He continued, calm as a man reading a shopping list. He traced the lineage forward. The first generation that squandered the armories. The second that sold the archives.

The third that married into comfort and mistook it for greatness.

A slow parade of degradation, laid out in names and dates that existed in no textbook the academy owned, and could not have, because half of them had been quietly buried by the houses involved.

"And here," Viktor said, turning from the board at last, "is the most recent bloom of that great lineage. An heir who looks down on the very dwarfs whose weapons her ancestor carried into the formation wars. Who sits beside a prince of the mountains every single morning and calls his very presence inferior."

The silence that fell was total.

Row by row, students looked at each other. Nobody had ever heard any of this. The compacts, the shared wars, the cross-race alliance, it went over their heads like a cathedral ceiling. The history was lost, and here it was, being rebuilt in front of them by a man who spoke of it the way one speaks of last week’s weather. Leo blinked slowly, his hand sliding off his chin. Sophia’s pen had stopped moving. Yuki’s ears had gone red.

The dwarven prince stared at the front of the room, copper rings glinting, and for the first time in six weeks his expression held something other than contempt.

Viktor kept talking.

He filled the hour to the last minute, and when the bell tolled he gathered his books under one arm.