Chapter 1254: Reilan’s Version

Asking him was easy to say in a lecture room. Finding him took the rest of the midday break.

At the corridor fork she took the Martial branch, which she had not done all week, and found him where the sector’s practice yard began, sitting on a low wall with his blunted longsword across his knees. Rolling his wrist once, he looked up and saw her coming. He did not look surprised.

"Elowyn." He said it the public way, but he had already shifted along the wall. "You’ve heard."

"Three times. Each one different." She took the space he’d made, with a hand’s width between them. "So I came for the fourth."

"Which one did you like best?"

"The one where you pinned him to a wall."

"I didn’t pin-"

"I know you didn’t. Selphine says he wouldn’t stay pinned."

That earned her half a smile, gone quickly. "It was Instructor Arcten’s drill. A lane, a group on a road, and that insolent guy leading the attack."

"Which one? Selphine had three names for him."

"I’m sure she did." He turned the sword’s flat against his knee. "Vaulden. His name was Vaulden. He kept pressing, and then he stopped pressing and started talking. About-" He stopped. "About you."

"What did he say?"

"That you collect men." He was looking at the yard, not at her. "That you need someone to entertain you, and I follow you everywhere and it still-" His jaw moved. "Still isn’t enough. Then something about a name, in their houses, for a lady who goes from one man to the next-"

"Salon beggar. Aurelian said it for you, no need to worry."

"Then I won’t say it twice."

She nodded. She waited, and he took the pause as an opening to go on.

"I told him to take it back. He asked which-" He stopped again, a half breath, and his thumb found the edge of the blade.

Elara knew that stop. He had done it since Loria whenever a subject came close to something he did not want to talk about: the sentence cut short, the thumb on steel, then a new sentence started somewhere else. She had learned to recognize it before she had learned to be annoyed by it, and she was a little of both now.

"You crossed the line," she said, before he could start somewhere else.

"The chalk. The edge of where I was meant to stay." He let out a breath. "Yes. And I meant it. I’d have put it through his arm."

He said it flatly, the way he reported a drill. It was somehow easier to hear from him than it had been from Selphine.

"Instructor Arcten asked me if I’d seen the boundary. I said yes. Then he asked whether I’d crossed it-"

"Deliberately."

"Yes."

"And you said yes to that too."

"It was true, and half the yard was watching. I’d have had to lie to all of them." One shoulder lifted. "Valeria Olarion took the assessment, and Instructor Arcten wrote it into my result himself. It’s on the slate. I’d rather you hear it from me than find it in a margin."

"Selphine says you stopped," Elara said. "And that nobody can tell her why."

"I pulled it." He said it to the yard. "The swing was going wide, so I pulled it, and it went into the barrier."

It was the one answer she had not tried. All through the lecture room she had been looking for whoever had held him, and it had not occurred to her that he might simply have held himself. She turned it over. It sounded like him, more than the pinned-to-a-wall version had, and it came out of him whole, without a stop in it.

She had meant to ask the next thing lightly. On the walk over she had decided to ask it last, and quietly, in case the answer wanted room. Her voice came out more level than she’d planned.

"Was Lucavion part of-"

"He was in the reserve."

Cedric said it over her, but not roughly. It was the first sentence he had finished without a catch since she sat down, and Elara noticed that more than the words.

"In the reserve," she said. The word gave her nothing to picture. In her head, a drill was only a lot of people hitting each other in a yard. "Meaning what?"

"The ones held back." He lifted one hand flat and set the other behind it. "The front goes in first. A few stay behind them, out of the fight, until someone sends them in or the line thins out. They stand there until they’re called. Vaulden decides who gets called, and he put him back there, behind the ones who were going to-"

"Behind the front, waiting for a signal." She had it now: a row of spears at the rear of the attack, with nothing to do until their turn came. "All right. I see it."

"Yes."

"He wasn’t in it, then."

He did not answer that. She waited for the rest of it. There was always a rest of it, where Lucavion was concerned: a dry remark, or a look at the sky, or the name said as if it hurt his teeth. Today there was nothing. He sat with the blade across his knees and let the sentence lie there.

’He’s tired.’

It was a reasonable guess. He had been up before the drill and had spent the hours since being measured by a yard. She let the guess stand, and she let the answer stand too. The rumor had put Lucavion right at the center of it in one telling and nowhere near it in another, and a fact that fit all three was worth more than a fourth opinion. A man at the back of a drill could be right there in one account and nowhere near the fight in the next.

"Right," she said. "All right."

It was enough, and she was a little surprised to find she had been braced for more.

She had been ready for a fight on the walk over, and the fight had not come. She looked at him, at the sword on his knees and the wrist he kept turning when he thought she wasn’t watching, and understood that she had come across the whole sector to hold him to an account he had just given her, plainly, before she asked.

’I came here expecting him to hide it.’

He had not hidden any of it. He had said I meant it and I’d have put it through his arm with half the yard for witnesses, and she had been going to be cross with him for it. It occurred to her that he had stood in a lane and heard that word aimed at her, with a spear in his hands and no time to think, and that she was asking him to have weighed it like a clerk.

It did not make it right.

"It was my name," she said.

"I know whose-"

"Not yours. Mine." She kept her voice low, because the wall was not as private as it looked. "He said it to you because you were the one in the lane, and you let him pick it up, and then you decided it was yours to answer. Without asking me."

"There wasn’t time to ask."

"There was a chalk line, Reilan. That’s time."

He opened his mouth, shut it, and turned the blade over on his knee. When he spoke, he went somewhere sideways. "I told you I’d tell you what I see. I’m telling you."

"After."

"It was a drill, I couldn’t- I never said I’d stand there while-"

"I’m not asking you to stand there." It came out sharper than she’d meant. She let a breath go. "I’m saying you didn’t need to hand them a name. Reilan Dorne, the coastal baron’s retainer, who crosses the line for a lady’s honor. You know what that’s worth in a place like this? Everyone who has an opinion about Elowyn Caerlin has one about you now. And you’ve only just come out of a verification."

"Which found nothing."

"Which doesn’t matter if it opens again. Now there’s a mark on your result, and a slate with Valeria Olarion’s handwriting on it." She looked at his wrist. "You made yourself a thing to look at, that’s all. For my sake, and I didn’t ask for it."

"I know."

"Then-"

"I know, Elowyn." He said it quietly, with no heat. His thumb found the blade’s edge and stayed there. "I’d still have stepped over."

It was not an apology, and she had not expected one. She sat with her hands in her lap and found that her irritation had gone somewhere without telling her. What remained was a tired sort of anger, and under it, though Elara did not notice, a small part of her that was glad to have been worth a chalk line.

"Let me see it," she said.

"It’s nothing."

"It’s the wrist you’ve been rolling since I sat down."

He held it out after a moment, the way he used to as a boy when a tutor asked for his hands. A faint swelling had come up along the bone, not much, with the edges just beginning to color. Elara turned it over once, found nothing worth a healer, and gave it back.

"From the swing?"

"From his spear." A pause. "Earlier. Before the swing."

"So you’ve been carrying it around all day and telling me it’s nothing."

"It wasn’t anything until you asked-"

"Reilan."

"It was a bruise." He pulled the wrist back and rested it on the sword. "You want me to say I won’t do it again."

"I don’t, actually." She was surprised to find it was true. "You’d say it, and then you’d mean it for about a week, and I’d be back here in the same spot hearing about a different yard."

"Then what?"

"I want to hear it before it’s a rumor. Not after Selphine, not after Aurelian. And whatever comes of it, the mark on your result or Valeria’s slate or somebody’s cousin asking questions, I want to be in that too." She watched his face. "It’s my name that’s out there. I’m not going to learn what’s being done with it from a margin."

"That isn’t- Elowyn, that’s my result. That’s my record."

"And it’s my name on your record."

He did not answer. He looked at the yard, where two first-years were dragging a barrier frame back across the chalk, and she could see him working the sentence over in his head and failing to find where it stopped being true. It was not agreement. She did not expect that; he would be sitting on that wall next week, probably, with the same view of the same chalk and the same opinion of what a lady’s name was worth. But he had heard it, and he had not said no.

A bell rang somewhere behind the practice sheds. The first-years looked up. Down the sector, people began to gather their bags.

"I’ve got a lecture," she said.

"Go on."

"And you’ve got a wrist to ice."

"Go on, Elowyn."

She stood and brushed off her skirt. She walked back toward the fork slowly, with the Martial sector at her back, and did not look round to see whether he was watching.