Chapter 127: A Perfectly Reasonable Time to Attack Strangers

( Daphne Spinster’s POV )

Brightvale came along the bank at a run.

Thirty-six of them.

Greywall had thirty-six.

That was the last time all day the numbers were even.

A blue Wellspring is not taken by touching it.

You put a hand on it and you hold, and the mana has to run for a count of thirty without breaking.

Thirty seconds is a long time when somebody wants to stop you.

We had two.

Locked.

Nobody can take a claimed one back.

There were three more on that bank, unclaimed, and everybody in the basin knew it.

Nadia formed the line where page two said to form it.

Barrier people forward, water people behind them, the two who exaggerate at the back where it does not matter.

It was a good line.

Marta did not hit it.

She split.

Two thirds of Brightvale came at the near Wellsprings, loud, slow, making a great deal of noise about it. The other third went wide. Downstream. Running hard along the water for the third Wellspring, four hundred paces off.

Nadia had to choose.

She stretched the line.

That was page two as well. It was the right decision and it was also the only one she had, and those are not always the same thing.

***

The left end broke first.

A Brightvale boy with Earth put a shelf of stone up under our barrier and tipped it. The girl holding it went down on one knee. The two beside her went back a step.

One step is nothing. One step is how a line ends.

Nadia saw it. She lifted her hand and turned it once, which is the signal on page one for rotate left, fall back four paces, reform.

Greywall fell back four paces.

All of them.

Except Lucan.

***

Page one, item nineteen.

What Lucan does when he is frightened.

He does not run. That is the whole problem. People think fear makes you run and for most of them it does, and we build everything around that, and then there is Lucan.

Lucan stops.

He goes quiet, and his feet stop arguing with the ground, and he stands exactly where he is and will not come back, and he does not know he is doing it. I have watched it happen four times since the term started. Once in a corridor. Once on the wall at Greywall. Twice in the illusion.

He was the only person left standing on that piece of bank.

Four paces ahead of his own line, with a Brightvale push coming, and stone going up on his left, and the river at his back.

Nadia had her own hands full on the right.

***

I picked up the pen.

I had three cards. I had not touched them before this morning. I had planned to hold them until the afternoon at the earliest, because everything worth spending them on happens after people are tired.

That plan was made by somebody who had not seen Lucan’s feet stop.

I wrote:

Lucan is planted. Go and get him. Now.

Slot.

Greywall went from twenty to minus ten.

I did not wait to watch it land. I was already writing the second one, because the left was not the only thing wrong, and I had seen the rest of it from up here about six seconds before anybody down there could.

Left is a feint. The wide group is the claim.

Slot.

Minus forty.

Marta had never wanted the near Wellsprings. The noise at the front was theatre. The third of Brightvale running downstream was the whole plan, and Greywall was so busy holding the pretty part of it that nobody had counted the runners.

The third card.

I wrote it and I did not think about writing it.

Let the two go. Hold the people. That is all.

Slot.

Minus seventy.

Twenty seconds. Ninety points. Every card I had.

Greywall went from second place to last while I stood in a glass box and watched a boy stand still.

***

Nadia read the first one, turned, and went back for him herself. She did not send anybody.

She got a hand in his collar and pulled, and for a moment he did not move at all, which is what he does, and then his feet came loose and he came with her.

The stone shelf went over the place where he had been standing about a second later.

***

( Sophie Trohan’s POV )

I have never once in my life wanted to look away from my own class.

Not once, not ever, not even when they’re being loud in the dining hall or when they voted for forty minutes about literally nothing, and I’ve been proud of them every single day since the first one.

And I stood there and watched them run at a class that hadn’t done anything to us.

That’s the bit. Greywall didn’t rob us! Concord robbed us. Concord took our Wellspring and our whole morning and everything, and Concord was three miles away on the other side of the basin being very safe and very clever, and here was Brightvale going flat out at thirty-six people who’d been standing quietly by a river minding their own business since dawn.

Because they were closer.

That’s it. That’s the entire reason. They were closer.

And oh, Marta was so good at it. That’s the horrible part, she was so, so good. She sent the loud two thirds up the front to be a nuisance and she put the quiet third on the water and had them running before anybody even knew there was a plan, and I watched thirty-six people I love do exactly what she told them without one single argument, on a Tuesday, when on Saturday they couldn’t agree on a name for a building.

I picked her for this. This is what I picked her for.

I could see Roth in the front group, shouting, having the time of his life.

I could see Wynne on the left, going wide round the stone the way she always does, on the left, always on the left.

And I could see the Greywall line going back four paces in one piece, all of them together, like something rehearsed, and then that one boy just standing there on his own in front of everybody, not moving.

Not moving at all.

And my class going at him.

I had my hand on the folded card. The one with the name on it. I hadn’t unfolded it since the square.

Then a girl in grey came haring back through the line and got him by the collar and dragged him out, and the stone came down on the empty bank, and I put my forehead against the glass and breathed.

Both classes.

That’s the thing I can’t say to anyone in here. I was frightened for both classes and only one of them is mine, and I don’t know what that makes me, and I don’t have anybody to ask.

***

( James Vellaroux’s POV )

Vanguard came over the rise above the river and stopped.

They stopped because Tristan stopped.

Good instinct. Look before you pile in. I taught him that, and then I spent six years ignoring it myself.

From up here you could see the whole thing laid out like a diagram. Brightvale strung along the bank making noise. A third of them out wide going for a claim. Greywall falling back off a broken left and reforming. One boy getting hauled out of a bad spot by his collar.

And a hundred and eight people about to be in the same four hundred paces of riverbank.

Thirty-seven of mine standing on the rise with nothing on the board and minus thirty next to our name.

Easiest decision in the world.

Go in on the loose side. Brightvale’s strung out and committed and Greywall’s short a line. Two Wellsprings sitting there. Thirty seconds each.

Any sane class takes it.

Tristan had his hand up.

He kept it up.

I watched him stand there with thirty-seven people behind him and his arm in the air and I could feel exactly what he was doing, because I would have been doing the opposite and screaming about it.

He was counting the ones who were already hurt.

Two down on the Greywall left. Somebody in the water, getting pulled out by two others. A Brightvale girl sitting on the bank with her hands over her face.

He was working out who’d get hurt next if another thirty-seven went in.

I had two cards left.

I did not pick up the pen.

I’d like to say that was trust. Mostly it was that my hand was shaking too hard to write and I didn’t want to find out what four words would look like the second time.

But I watched him do it. On a rise above a river, holding thirty-seven people still with one arm while everything he wanted was lying in front of him.

Then he put his hand down and pointed.

Not at the Wellsprings.

At the island.

***

( Elizabeth Aurelius’s POV )

I had been watching the island for some time.

Concord was on the far side of the basin, taking small Wellsprings out of the wood one at a time, which is dull and effective and exactly what I would have ordered had I been permitted to order anything. Petra had not needed to be told. Our number had gone from one hundred to one hundred and thirty and would continue to climb quietly all afternoon.

So I had nothing to do but read the board, and the board is where the exam actually is.

There are five white Wellsprings. One has been taken. That leaves four, and four hundred points, and every one of them requires three classes standing in the same place at the same time.

There are three classes at that river.

The island sits perhaps sixty paces off the near bank, low and flat, with the white light standing up out of the middle of it. Any two of them could reach it and do nothing. All three of them could open it.

And after this morning, every person in that basin now understands precisely what happens when a Major Wellspring opens and four classes are standing around it.

Which is why I had assumed, until about a minute ago, that not one of those four hundred points would be collected today. That the correct move for all five of us was to take small Wellsprings quietly, avoid every Major, and let Concord win on arithmetic.

I had been rather pleased with that reasoning.

Then Rhael pointed at the island, and a class that had every reason to attack walked down a slope with its hands empty for the second time in one day, and I watched the fighting on that bank stop, not because anyone won, but because both sides became aware that somebody was walking toward them who was not attacking.

It is a remarkable thing to watch. I have read about it. I have never seen it.

Three classes. Two of them still breathing hard from hitting each other. All three of them now standing within sight of four hundred points that none of them can take alone, and all three of them knowing, with total clarity, that whoever puts a palm on it will be paid in full and the other two will be paid nothing at all.

There is no way to enforce an agreement out there. The conditions do not permit one. Whatever they say to each other on that bank is worth precisely as much as the person who says it.

Which means the entire remainder of this examination now turns on a question I have never once in my life had to consider seriously.

Who in that basin is believed?

***

( Alash Vortex’s POV )

I was watching Penelope.

Sanctuary had come down the last stretch of the southern rocks at the worst possible moment, which is to say exactly late enough to see the tail end of a fight and not enough of it to know who started what. Thirty-six people arriving into a situation.

She stopped them on the slope. Both hands out flat behind her. Nobody went past her.

Then she stood there for a while, and I watched her read it.

I know what she looks like when she’s reading something. She goes very still and her head moves in small increments and she stops blinking as much.

She looked at the Greywall line. Then the Brightvale runners. Then the two on the ground on the left. Then Vanguard up on the rise with Tristan’s arm in the air.

Then the island.

She stopped moving entirely.

’She’s seen it,’ I said.

[Yes.]

’She’s going to do something.’

[Almost certainly.]

’Tell me she isn’t going to walk out there on her own.’

The System did not answer, which is its way of being kind, and which I hate.

***

Here is what happened this morning to the last person who walked out into the open with empty hands.

He got a card from his own leader telling him not to. Then he crossed a square in front of three classes to help them. Then the whole square turned to watch him do it, and while they were watching, somebody took a hundred points off all of them.

Everybody in that basin saw it happen.

Nobody is going to be that stupid twice.

And Penelope Declair walked out from behind her own class onto an open riverbank, with a hundred and nine people on it who had been hitting each other ninety seconds earlier, and put both her hands up where everyone could see them, and kept going.

I was on my feet.

I don’t remember standing up.

She has B potential. I want to say that plainly because I have never once said it out loud and it has never once mattered to me, and it matters now, in exactly one way, which is that if anybody on that bank decides they do not like what she is about to say, she is thirty-six paces from her class with nothing in her hands.

Cards on the desk.

Two of them.

Ten words each.

And not one thing I could write that would get down there faster than she was already walking.

She reached the middle of the bank and stopped.

Then she turned her back on Brightvale and Vanguard entirely, which was either the bravest or the most insane thing I have seen anyone do in fifteen years.

And she faced Greywall.

She was not going to talk to the two classes with something to gain.

She was going to talk to the one that had just lost everything.