Chapter 75: The Girl Who Took His Side

Dante nearly lost a mark because he had described the release as a final surrender instead of labeling the line where the spell ended. Professor Vale returned the paper with the correct point circled. The score was good enough to keep, which made the comment beneath it especially irritating. A clear answer had been requested. A declaration had been supplied.

He looked up from the desk. “The declaration contained the answer.”

“Eventually,” Professor Vale said. “Your examiner shouldn’t need to negotiate for it.”

She moved to the next student before he could offer terms. Dante added the missing label in his notes, then studied the questions he had answered correctly. The patterns made more sense now than they had during his scholarship interview. He could follow a path, find the place it met an object, and explain what happened when that meeting point moved. That was real progress, even if nobody had provided a suitably large certificate.

Outside, Jett read his own result twice and announced that food was required. Their final short assessment remained later in the week, but this one was finished. Dante followed him to the dining hall with the pleasant feeling that he had earned an hour in which nobody could demand more work. A serving golem disagreed when Jett covered a borrowed plate with his notes. It waited until he looked away, drew the plate out, and carried half his breakfast toward the collection counter.

Jett caught up with it at the door. “I was still using that.”

The golem pointed at the sign asking students to return empty plates promptly, then inspected the food as though considering an appeal. Dante rescued the notes from a spreading patch of sauce. “Your first mistake was letting it see weakness.”

“My first mistake was sitting beside you instead of the tray return.”

They recovered the food, ate, and spent the walk back discussing the screen. Lucan’s rope hinge could let it fold flat beneath a gate, but neither of them yet knew how to move it quickly enough against an unexpected shot. Jett promised to bring the problem to practice after the game. Dante resisted asking whether football could be made more useful by happening sooner.

The common room was already busy when they arrived. Honey worked near the window with a plant tray, and Posey had left a message on the little session board saying that she would join them after class. The notebook student stood beside the table, holding the old practice sheets and a pencil sharpened almost to a weapon.

“Honey said I could speak to you about keeping the ordinary session records,” she told Dante. “If everyone still wanted help.”

Honey looked up. “We agreed on times, exercises, and accurate notes. That’s the job.”

Dante remembered her catching a badly placed pad before their earlier session. That seemed a more useful qualification than willingness to look impressed, although he saw no reason a person could not manage both.

“We should probably put names on the roster before I start assigning titles,” he said.

“Nell,” she answered. “And I would rather have the names right than the titles.”

Jett laughed into his drink. Dante decided this was evidence that he attracted strong minds. The skeptical student arrived carrying a repaired folder. When Nell asked his name for the sheet, he introduced himself as Evan and requested the late practice slot. He had entered the relay with two classmates. They needed space to test their carrier before the court became crowded, and the common room’s ordinary target practice would help with their timing. Dante felt a brief, unreasonable offense at discovering somebody had entered his competition before he did. He dismissed it as poor notice from the event office.

“We’ll keep an open period,” he said. “My team won’t need the whole afternoon.”

He asked her how she wanted the notes arranged before handing over the pile. Nell suggested separating the instructions from the results, so a bad attempt could be recorded without changing what the student had been asked to do. Dante accepted it, surprised by how much time that would save them later.

Evan offered a spare folder for the finished sheets. Nell thanked him, and for a few minutes the table worked without anyone deciding who deserved to belong at it. Dante liked the easy exchange enough to imagine the same thing in a room they could keep. The desire had started well before he began thinking about who would have the best chair. Nell wrote that down, then compared the printed exercise with Dante’s diagram. Her pencil stopped above the third step.

“Should this show the release after the frame touches down?” she asked. “The sheet puts it before.”

Dante looked. It did, and it was his handwriting. Several people waited while he considered the options available to a respected teacher caught making a stupid mistake.

“Correct it,” he said. “The frame should survive the lesson, despite my ambitious editing.”

Nell smiled uncertainly. He took the sheet, changed the order, and told the others what she had found. Her shoulders settled when nobody treated the correction as an attack. He liked that more than he expected. People could improve around him without every improvement needing to begin inside his own head. The session went well. Evan moved the drink cups away from the practice space before anyone asked. Nell kept the turns even, and a student who had struggled with the landing finally set the target inside the circle.

Dante nearly announced that success as proof of his leadership, then saw the student’s face and asked him to repeat the movement while it was still fresh. The second landing was better. Honey watched from her plant tray, then returned to measuring a stubborn bud. She had work that refused to care how popular Dante became, and he found that both unreasonable and strangely comforting. When the open session ended, he checked the relay drawing with Jett. There were gaps between their rehearsal times, football, and the last assessment. None was large enough to invite wasting it.

Nell brought the roster while he was comparing two sketches. “Would protecting your preparation count as helping?”

“Absolutely. I have allies who insist on sleeping and a rival who enjoys measuring things.”

She smiled at the answer. Dante signed the entry form without looking closely at the practice sheet beneath it. Nell turned the roster toward herself. Evan’s requested period sat beside the time Jett had marked as useful for their own rehearsal. She drew a careful line beneath Dante’s name, not yet crossing out the other request. He had told her to keep accurate notes. He had also looked considerably happier when she offered to protect his time. By the time he glanced back, she had covered the roster with a clean page and asked whether he would need anything else.