Traitor Savant (Second Seal of the Duelists) (16 page)

The boy’s mouth opened and shut a few times before he managed to speak.
“Bayan, do you see this? Tell me I’m not mad, aye?”

A curious Balang
anese face leaned into view from the lower bunk. “I see her.” Bayan seemed to recognize Tala as a fellow Balang, and he eased warily into a standing position.

“Bayan, you do know you’re in your
smallclothes in front of a girl.” The pale boy edged around the side of the portal’s view and dragged his night shirt off his bed with the hand that wasn’t clasping the pillow to his person.

“So are you, Calder. But she came into our room without knocking, so I’m not going to dress up for her.
Besides, I come from a warm country. Clothes are far more optional there than where you’re from.”

Tala flushed. “
Ay, Bhattara! I’m so sorry. Doc Theo told me I could look for you to say hello. I didn’t mean to interrupt your… whatever you’re doing.”

“
Doc Theo? Is he with you?” Bayan leaned forward. “This is singer magic?”

Doc Theo
bent around behind Tala and waved. “Good to see you-all again, boys.”

Bayan grinned, and Calder edged back into view, now wearing
a knee-length tartan night shirt. “Eward is never going to believe this happened when he gets back from the cold house.”

Bayan’s eyes locked onto
Doc Theo. “Are you feeling better? We’ve been worried. Gerrolt’s been taking your absence badly.”

“I’m much improved, thanks. I’ve been helping Tala get over some nervousness with her singing, in between working shifts at the
Temple Chantery. She’s done so well, I’m letting her try an advanced spell to meet you.”

Bayan gave Tala a courteous nod.
“Congratulations, Tala. When I first got here, I couldn’t do any magic at all. But I found some help, like you did. I hope your training is as exciting as mine.”

“Don’t wish that on her, you great stupid
loon.” Turning to Tala, Calder added, “Don’t listen to him at all. He’s the sort to run mad along the edge of a cliff because he likes to feel the wind in his hairy feet—”

“I do not have hairy feet!” Bayan protested, shoving
Calder’s shoulder. “I don’t,” he insisted to Tala, who watched their boyish exchange in speechless amusement.

“
Don’t let him take you on any dates here on campus,” Calder continued from beneath a hail of pillow strikes that toppled him onto his own bed. “It’ll only end in tragedy!” he cried in mock horror.

Bayan attempted to smother Calder’s words with his pillow.
“You’re no safer. You’d trade my finished homework to Taban for a single waskukone’yen flower, just to impress her.”

Calder shoved B
ayan off and thwacked him with another pillow. Bayan ducked onto his own bed beneath the upper bunk, and Calder leaped close to the portal, wearing a cheeky grin. He was so close, Tala could smell spiced yams on his breath. “I would, you know. Bayan’s homework is worth plenty a ducat on the black market. And you’re a very pretty lass.”

Tala felt her cheeks warm under Calder’s frank regard.

“That’s enough, you-all.” Doc Theo’s voice carried a strong hint of disapproval. He diverted the boys’ attention by asking after Gerrolt and the state of affairs on the Academy campus, but the answers Bayan and Calder gave him seemed conflicting and didn’t mean anything to Tala. She refreshed the portal notes in her crystals three more times before their conversation wound down.

Finally,
they bade the boys a good evening. Calder lurched in once more and added, “Next I see you again, I’ll get you one of those what’s-yer-cinnamon flowers. Count on it.”

Bayan moved to tackle Calder again.
“Waskukone’yen, you horsekiller.”

Tala raised her eyebrows in surprise at Bayan’s insult
. A moment later, her crystal resonances depleted, the portal winked out. She and Doc Theo were alone in the cellar again, their faces lit by the flame of a single candle.

“Are they always like that?” Tala asked.

She could hear the smile in Doc Theo’s reply. “They haven’t seen a girl who isn’t a duelist in almost two years. You’ll have to forgive their exuberance.”

Tala nodded. As they sneaked back out of the cellar, she found her thoughts returning to the handsome duelist sh
e’d just met. She’d remember the evening for a very long time.

Kiwani kicked at a stone
on the gravelly trail, enjoying the feel of its submission to the sole of her shoe. Campus had become noticeably crowded in the two days since the second wave of the emperor’s newniks had arrived. The racket in the common room of the barracks was incessant. Who knew girls could be so rambunctious? She’d blame the Raqtaaq if she hadn’t seen, just that morning, three Akrestoi girls and a couple of Waardens engaging in a full-volume pillow fight.

She had left Master witten Oost’s class, but h
er hexmates remained enrolled, as if they didn’t agree with her or support her decision. She doubted they could even see what she had seen in witten Oost’s actions. In addition, Calder seemed to be getting special treatment. If she didn’t know better—and she wasn’t sure that she did—she’d assume that Calder’s new status was in direct retaliation to her leaving, as if the master were spiteful enough to rub her rejection of him in her face.

Some days, she really hated her
ingrained ability to read politics like a book. Not even Odjin followed the rants she’d included in her recent letters. She blew out a frosty breath and stared at the trail’s pebbles as they passed underfoot. Maybe it was time to admit she’d made a miscalculation and return to class. It had been a hasty decision, after all. Maybe if she talked it over with Bayan—

“Kiwani!” Taban’s
breathless voice wheezed her name from a distance.

She looked
around and saw Sem, Taban’s tall, creaky Wood avatar, running at full speed toward her, a limp figure in its arms. Taban himself lagged further and further behind his long-legged avatar. His arms formed the arc that held his avatar in Idle. She couldn’t recognize the person Sem carried.

“T
aban, what’s—”

Taban
angled toward her as his avatar leaped over her head and kept running. His breath came in ragged gasps. He staggered to a stop before her, and she steadied his arms so they wouldn’t lose the arc that sustained Sem and his unconscious passenger. “Who’s hurt?”

“Cormaac. Attacked.
Bear, I think.”

Alarm shot through her veins.
Kiwani glanced around and spotted a pair of newniks on the roof of a nearby classroom building, replacing worn cedar shingles. Invoking her Wind avatar, Stratus, she cast a quick voice-carrying spell and demanded that one trainee should fetch the members of Taban’s hex from the girls’ barracks and direct them to the Chantery, and the other should report to her for further instructions.

“I’ll have him tell Master witten Oost that a student is injured. You hurry
to the Chantery.”

“Thank you.” His
stressed tone evinced surprise and gratitude.

It had been Taban and Sem who had escorted Odjin to the edge of campus after Taban’s hexmate, Braam, had blown his leg off last year. Sints only knew how bad Cormaac’s injuries were.
“You were there for Odjin. I’ll be here for Cormaac.”

Without another word, Taban sprinted after his avatar. Kiwani turned her attention to the
plump newnik running up to her. She vaguely recalled that his name was Tammo. She told him what little information Taban had given her, then ordered him to inform the headmaster. He hesitated for a split-second, pouting, then did as he was told. Kiwani squinted after him, marking him in her mind as an insubordinate little newnik. She let out the tension that had filled her over the last few seconds all in one breath. She had far more important things to focus on.

Attacked by a bear. Kiwani
searched her thoughts as she jogged after Taban. Something Bayan had said about Treinfhir tugged at her memory. The outlander had told Bayan that he felt safe even up in the isolated cold house, because he knew that there weren’t any large predators on the mountain. She couldn’t trust him completely because of his previous association with rebels, but on the other hand, who would know more about nearby creatures than an anima caster?

In
the Chantery’s clearing, she saw other students gathering around Taban, who had let Sem vanish. The black-haired duelist sat on the Chantery steps, head in his hands, not answering anyone’s worried questions. From the other students’ conversations, she picked up that Cormaac had already been whisked inside, and that Diantha and two other healers were doing their best to save all of him.

All of him. As if some parts were in more danger than others.
Oh, sints, not again. Please.

Kiwani looked around, but she didn’t see either Kendesi or Breckan yet. S
he slipped through the crowd and sat by Taban’s side. Seeing his pinched face, his empty stare, she slid her hand into his. He squeezed hers hard and said nothing. Kiwani felt a fountain of guilt rise in her chest as she remembered the last time she’d been at the Chantery for a serious injury. That time, she’d been coarse, rude, superior, and Odjin had left the Academy hating her. This time, she knew that all that mattered were the connections between people. Magic could kill, magic could heal, but only trust and friendship could make living with magic worthwhile.

~~~

Bayan couldn’t make sense of the garbled facts the newniks at Kipri’s classroom door were gabbling at him. All he could make out was that Kiwani was involved in something at the Chantery. Fearing the worst, he apologized to Kipri, pushed through the younger students, and ran across campus, abandoning the talk he was about to give to the second wave of fresh new faces on campus.

His relief was complete when he arrived at the Chantery steps and found Kiwani whole and unharmed.
Still, he found himself stuttering the first parts of several questions at once, even as he reached for her shoulders to assure himself she was unhurt. She drew him aside from the other gathered students, explained the little she knew about a supposed bear attack, and told him Taban and his hexmates were inside. She murmured a detail Bayan himself had forgotten until then: that there were no bears on the mountain, according to Treinfhir.

“Do you think Treinfhir was telling the truth?” Kiwani asked.

Before Bayan could answer, Calder, Eward, and Tarin jogged up. “We heard.” Calder’s face was a thundercloud. “It was him, wasn’t it? Treinfhir.”

“What?” Bayan
asked. “What in Bhattara’s name makes you think that?”

“Don’t play
the fool, Bayan. The man is dangerous!”

“Calder, you couldn’t be
more wrong. I was just with him before Kipri’s class began. I took him supper. He was in the cold house, as always. Nothing was out of the ordinary.”

Calder crossed his arms and raised his chin. “And you’d know anima magic invocations if you saw them, aye? How do you know he wasn’t doing magic right in front of you?”

Bayan paused, stymied. He briefly racked his brain for some applicable detail from one of Instructor de Rood’s anima lectures last year, but could recall no mention of whether a cold house would block anima magic the way it did elemental magic. Bayan had just assumed that it would. Calder was right. None of them had any idea what anima magic invocations and spells looked like. Bayan didn’t even know whether anima magic used invocations.

“See? You
have no idea. Bayan, we canna keep protecting this man. He’s an enemy of the empire. We were
there,
for sints’ sake!”

Bayan fully recalled the terror and chaos of the Battle for the Kheerzaal
. It rankled to have Calder try to prove his point using Bayan’s own famous success. “It doesn’t make any sense for someone to drag him away from his death sentence, though. Something more is going on, and it involves Kiwani.”

Calder took an aggressive step forward. “You’re not the only hero in the hex, Bayan. I’m looking out for Kiwani, same as you. I’m looking out for all of us. Especially you, who’ve gotten so blinded by some
fun little puzzle in this outlander’s life that you canna see the threat he poses. Canna you see, Bayan, how he’s drawing you in? Getting you on his side? He’s turning you against us, for whatever his dark reasons are.”

“That’s not true, and you’d know that if you only—”

“Stop!” Eward’s voice was ragged. “Stop, please. I can’t—”

Bayan felt a sharp stab of guilt and worry. Eward’s sensitivity to the hex’s well-being directly impacted his magic ability, and here
Bayan and Calder were fighting in public in front of the Chantery, where Cormaac lay gravely injured from a mysterious attack, no less. Ashamed, Bayan said, “You’re right, Calder. I have no proof of Treinfhir’s innocence. But I’ll get it. And if I can’t, I’ll admit I was wrong, and we’ll all deal with him together. But give me time. We still don’t know who took Kiwani. We can’t let them know we suspect anything.”

Calder’s lip curled. “Aye, fine. But don’t go alone. Take someone with you to watch.”

Bayan nodded assent, and the hex split up, going their separate ways. Bayan gave the Chantery one last glance as he entered the tunnel to the barracks. It disturbed him how such a pleasant-looking building could, on occasion, loom larger and more evilly in the mind than even a dozen screaming Aklaa suicide rebels.

~~~

Late that night, Bayan remained awake in bed, wondering if Treinfhir had indeed been fooling him all along. He heard a soft tread pass the door and slid from bed to peer into the hall. Taban moped along, eyes cast downward to the smooth wooden planks of the corridor, but he turned back at the sound of Bayan’s door opening.

Bayan caught a glimpse of
him in the dimness. The shadows that played across his face only emphasized his grief.

“Is Cormaac
…?”

Taban’s voice
sounded uncharacteristically small. “They took him down the mountain just now. His hand was… Diantha couldn’t save it.”

“I’m so sorry. Can I ask, did he say anything about the attack?”

“What? No. He never spoke to me. I found him lying on the trail in the middle of… of far too much blood. He only woke after the healers did all they could, and when he saw his disfigurement, he… he had nothing to say then, either. Does that satisfy your macabre curiosity?”

“No,
it’s not that at all. I’m just not sure there are any bears up here.”

“No
bears
? You’re worried about the bears, while my hexmate gets packed off to stir stinkpots for the rest of his life? The second hexmate I’ve lost, at that?” Taban advanced on Bayan with a bitter rage rising in his voice. “Aye, fine. Maybe it wasna a bear. A lion, a mountain jaguar, something else. You dinna see the way I found him, Bayan. Flaps of his skin flayed open, lying in a pool of his own blood. The marks in his flesh—only claws make that sort of damage! What does it matter, anyway, what attacked him? He’s gone. He’s gone, and he canna ever come back. Just leave it be. Leave me be, too, you nosy muckling.”

Bayan
absorbed the insult harmlessly. Taban was clearly reeling emotionally. He let the older student go back to his room. Bayan realized Taban was its only occupant, now that Cormaac had left. Bayan glanced back inside his own room, where Eward and Calder were sleepily questioning his yapping in the middle of the night, and tried to imagine what he’d feel if they were suddenly ripped from his life, never to be seen again. Just contemplating the idea hurt him deep inside. With a last glance down the hall to Taban’s door, Bayan reentered and climbed back under his blankets.

~~~

Kipri headed back to his small house in the campus village clearing, obsessing over whether or not he’d see Tarin later on. She’d been reluctant even to walk next to him around campus, and he feared that whatever sort of relationship they had built together was falling apart. To his dismay, he found that the thought shook him more deeply than he’d expected. He had no experience with love. It wasn’t something any eunuch reasonably expected to achieve in life.

Pushing the thought of Tarin away, he tried to think of other things.
He’d heard that Cormaac, one of the Avatar students, had been suddenly injured and left campus, and couldn’t help thinking of the myriad fates that awaited his young charges. He made a note to mention the tragedy to Philo in his next letter.

Philo’s last few letters
to Kipri had been longer than usual. They’d been full of fascinating details of high-level imperial politics and commerce. The emperor’s negotiations with Karkhedon for the whereabouts of its rebel son, Isos, were stalled. A merchant in Nunaa had been stripped of her family name and exiled for protecting a rebel organization with her store front. More Balanganese farms were investing in seerwine pitcher plants as the demand for the rare drink escalated among the merchant class.

Philo was certainly busy. But then, so was Kipri.
He’d partnered the first-wave newniks, who had been on campus for just over sixty days, with freshly arrived second-wave newniks in a format that he hoped would translate well when they were placed in hexes: three older students and three newer ones, forming a pseudo-hex. It seemed to be working for now. But eventually, these uncertain young teens would be slinging magic at each other, and inevitably some of them would be injured. Kipri shuddered, glad he had no magic in him.