Chapter 79

Chapter 79: Chapter 79

Madam Sorrel put five stitches in the back of Nia’s right shoulder, using a curved bone needle that made a dry pop every time it went through the tough skin near her shoulder blade.

Nia didn’t make a sound the whole time. She just sat backward on the wooden examining stool with her chin resting on her folded left arm and her teeth clamped hard on a folded strip of belt leather until Madam Sorrel snipped the last black catgut knot and dabbed the seam with pine resin.

"Keep it dry until Wednesday," Madam Sorrel said, dropping the bloody needle into a dish of vinegar and pinning a clean square of linen over the cut. "No swimming in the bathhouse plunge pool, and no lifting a spear above your waist for five days. If you tear my stitches reaching for a teacup, Cadet Valerius, I’ll stitch them back up without the numbing salve."

"Yes, ma’am," Nia mumbled around the leather strap, spitting it into her good hand and letting out a long, shaky breath as she slid her right arm carefully into a black linen sling. "Five days off spear drills. Did you hear that, Elvit? Doctor’s orders."

"Your left arm isn’t stitched," I said from the next stool over, where one of the third-year infirmary apprentices was scraping the burned leather of my left glove off my forearm with a pair of blunt tweezers. "You can still practice buckler punches against the wall post."

Nia groaned, leaning her forehead back down against the stool rail. "You have no soul, Lieutenant. None at all."

Across the aisle, Luckas was sitting on the edge of a cot with an ice bag held against his right cheek—where Valen Dross’s shield rim had clipped him during the final scramble—and a wooden box the size of a boot-chest resting across his knees.

The box was made of polished red mahogany, bound at the corners with heavy brass straps and stamped across the lid with the crossed cannons and eagle of the Imperial War Ministry.

A senior colonel from the Ministry’s western desk had come down to the tunnel ten minutes after the gong rang to hand it over in person, shaking my good hand while Captain Varga stood twenty feet away looking like he had swallowed a lemon whole.

"Open it up, Vance," Kaelen said from the window ledge, where he was re-spooling his six feet of braided steel wire onto a wooden bobbin and checking it for kinks. "Let’s see if the Ministry is cheap."

Luckas popped the two brass catches on the front of the chest and lifted the heavy lid.

On top, resting on a sheet of oiled parchment, was a heavy brass cylinder four inches thick, sealed at both ends with red imperial wax and stamped with Headmaster Corvus’s personal signet alongside the War Minister’s seal. Tied to the brass tube with gold cord was a folded sheet of thick sheepskin vellum:

BY ORDER OF THE WESTERN MARCH COMMAND & THE IMPERIAL ACADEMYIndependent Reconnaissance Warrant — First ClassIssued to First-Year Squad Seven (Capt. Elvit; Lt. L. Vance; Scout Kaelen; Support N. Valerius).The above-named unit is hereby detached from foreign garrison authority for the Spring Campaign and assigned directly to the 7th Vanguard Legion, Special Scouting Directorate, effective upon the March thaw.

Luckas lifted the tray of parchment out of the box and whistled softly under his breath.

Underneath the tray, set into deep velvet holes, were eight full vials of refined red ember-quartz—two apiece for the whole squad—plus four smaller lead-glass bottles filled with thick, silvery liquid that shifted like mercury when Luckas tilted the box toward the window light.

"Deep-mine marrow oil," Luckas said, picking up one of the heavy lead-glass bottles between two fingers. "My brother got a single bottle of this when he made captain in the 2nd Heavy. You rub it over your sternum before you meditate on the quartz; keeps your ribs from cramping when the core expands."

"Two vials of red quartz and a bottle of marrow oil each," Nia said, sitting up straight on her stool despite her stitched shoulder and peering into the chest. "If I take both of those before January, I might actually catch up to the middle of the first-year pack before spring."

"Take one tomorrow night, and wait until New Year’s Day for the second," I told her, wincing slightly as the apprentice finished wrapping my blistered left forearm in greased linen and tied the string behind my elbow. "And don’t leave yours in your unlocked desk drawer. Half the fourth-years who lost out on the top four brackets today are going to be desperate for extra minerals before the February exams."

"Speaking of the fourth-years," Luckas said, closing the mahogany lid and locking the brass latch with the small iron key tied to the handle. "The Solstice Hall dinner starts at six. Since we won the first-place warrant, Corvus says all four of us have to sit at the front tables below the dais so the War Ministry clerks can read our names off the scroll."

I looked down at my uniform tunic, which was stiff with dried grey rock salt around the hem, smelled like mutton tallow and burned horsehide, and had a three-inch tear across the left shoulder from Aurio’s flat blade.

"Do we have to wear the dress collars?" I asked.

"Stiff white linen and the silver shoulder knots," Nia said cheerfully, already heading for the door with her right arm tucked in its sling. "And since my right arm is out of commission, Elvit, you have to help me braid my hair before five-thirty, or I’m telling Professor Sterling you used your dress dagger to scrape mud off your boots last Tuesday."

The Grand Pavilion looked very different when the stewards cleared out the long oak breakfast benches and set up the round banquet tables for the Solstice feast.

They had hung the high stone walls with thirty-foot banners showing the crests of the nine Imperial Legions, and instead of the usual floating light spheres, four massive wrought-iron chandeliers holding hundreds of beeswax candles hung from the vaulted ceiling, dripping warm yellow light down onto white linen tablecloths and polished silver plates.

My collar felt like an iron dog-collar.

It was two inches high, stiffened with boiled whalebone inside the wool, and hooked under my chin with two tiny brass eyes that pinched my skin every time I turned my head more than twenty degrees. Between the stiff linen wrap on my right wrist and the fresh burn bandages under my left sleeve, I could barely bend my elbows enough to pick up a soup spoon.

"Stop pulling at your neck," Nia whispered out of the corner of her mouth as the four of us walked down the center aisle toward the front tables. She looked completely at home in her pressed charcoal dress coat, with her black linen sling pinned neatly to her lapel with her family’s small silver crest so it looked almost like part of the uniform. "If you pop the brass hook off before the roast beef comes out, the proctors will make you go back to the dorms to sew it."

"Whoever designed a soldier’s coat that keeps you from looking left deserves to get stabbed from the left," I muttered.

As we passed the middle tables where the third- and fourth-year squads were sitting, the low rumble of dinner conversation quieted down along our side of the hall.

Nobody booed, and nobody threw bread crusts the way the upperclassmen usually did when first-years had to walk up to the front for an academic prize.

At Table Four, Titus Mercer was sitting with his big legs stretched out into the aisle, a mug of dark winter ale in his left hand and his right wrist still wrapped in a leather support strap. When he saw Nia’s sling coming down the narrow gap between the chairs, he didn’t make us squeeze past his back; he pulled his heavy boots in under his chair, hooked a thumb to his forehead in a short salute, and kicked out an empty chair at the corner of the front table for us.

"Save you the walk around the pillar, Squad Seven," Mercer rumbled. "And stay away from the pickled eels on the side dish—they taste like ditch water."

"Thanks, Mercer," Luckas said, pulling out the chair for Nia before dropping into the seat beside her.

Our table sat ten feet below the raised marble dais where Headmaster Corvus, the War Ministry generals, and the Sospurro lords were dining on roast pheasant off gold-rimmed porcelain.

Sharing the other half of our round ten-seat table was Squad One.

Aurio Gentrimio sat across from me in his pristine crimson representative coat, though if you looked closely at his hands when he reached for the water carafe, both of his wrists were wrapped in thin strips of white silk under his lace cuffs where my leather gauntlet had crushed his skin against his own hot crossguard that morning. To his left, Cassia Thorne had a purple bruise the size of a plum under her chin where my dwarven dagger had bumped her throat, and Corbin Vane was eating his soup left-handed while resting his bruised right fingers on his napkin.

"I see Madam Sorrel got to all of us today," Aurio said pleasantly, pouring a glass of spiced red wine from the table decanter and sliding it across the white tablecloth toward me. "No permanent damage to the forearm, I hope, Elvit?"

"Just the glove," I said, picking up my soup spoon awkwardly with my stiff right fingers. "Master Bram made me pay two silver marks out of my tournament purse to replace it."

"Bram would charge the Emperor himself for a bent horseshoe nail," Valen Dross grunted from beside Aurio, sawing into a thick slice of rare roast beef that the stewards had just set down in the middle of the table. "Here, Vance—pass your plate over before Thorne eats all the Yorkshire pudding. A man who burns through that much heat in ten minutes needs red meat."

For the next forty minutes, nobody at our table talked about rankings or borders. We were all too hungry and too sore to care about politics. I ate three thick slabs of roast beef, four roasted potatoes swimming in brown gravy, and half a loaf of buttered white bread, washing it down with the spiced wine until the dull ache in my wrists and ribs settled into a warm, heavy buzz behind my ears.

Up at the high table on the dais, however, the mood was considerably less friendly.

Duke Ramiro of Sospurro had already gone through two carafes of burgundy, his round face glistening with sweat under the chandelier light while he laughed loudly at something an elderly Imperial logistics general was telling him.

Down at the far right end of the dais, though, Captain Varga and Lord Lorenzo had been seated only three chairs apart by some junior protocol clerk who didn’t know any better—or by Headmaster Corvus, who probably did it on purpose to watch them squirm.

Neither of them was eating their pheasant.

Varga was leaning over the back of his chair, speaking in a fast, angry hiss to one of his green-sashed Sospurro lieutenants, pointing down at the mahogany warrant box sitting under Luckas’s chair, while Lord Lorenzo sat stiffly with his wineglass in his hand, watching a thin, stooped Sospurro quartermaster clerk in a plain brown wool coat who had just hurried in through the side service door with a leather dispatch pouch under his arm.

The brown-coated clerk didn’t go to Duke Ramiro, and he didn’t go to Varga. He walked straight behind the curtain at the back of the dais, handed a folded slip of paper to Lord Lorenzo’s personal valet, and slipped right back out through the servants’ door toward the kitchens.

Beside me, Kaelen set his fork down noiselessly on the rim of his plate.