CHAPTER 203: 203: THE FIRST SEMESTER XXVI

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He glanced at her ribbon, at the stance that says I slept with my knife in my hand and dared sleep to argue. He nodded once. Respect, issued without needing to know a last name.

The woman in gray lifted her chin at John. "Who is the leader?"

Before Ray could invent a terrible answer, Fizz floated forward, drawing himself up to his absolute most official height. "Team Lord Fizz, reporting," he said. "Acting commander, strategic genius, snack quartermaster. This is my human, John. These are my flames, first-class and second-class respectively."

Rhea coughed into her knuckles. Ray stared at a fern to keep his face from telling a joke it would regret.

The woman’s mouth almost smiled. Almost. "Proctor Yarrow," she said. "Field supervision. Who started the fire line."

"I did," Rhea said.

"Who placed the lamps and guard stones?"

"I did," Ray admitted, because lying to competence is a disease and he was trying to stay healthy.

Proctor Yarrow’s eyes landed on John’s palm and then on the ground where a hundred trampling hooves had stopped being futures. "And who did the... quiet work."

John held his gaze. "I did," he said. He did not offer vocabulary. He did not deny it, either.

Green-leather circled back, crouched, and sniffed a dark smear the dew hadn’t convinced to dissolve. He unstoppered a tiny bottle, touched the rim to the smear, watched the glass halo, nodded to himself. "Drugged blood," he said. "Spiked. Citron-alkaloid, ground rattle root — cheap, cruel, and illegal to carry within three miles of Academy lines."

Fizz’s whiskers prickled. "Soup of bad decisions," he said.

"Someone seeded the perimeter," Yarrow said. She looked up, the way hawks look up — to roofs, to branches, to the idea of a watcher. "You saw no one."

"We smelled the truth after it had already lied," Rhea said. "It was set and gone before we woke up to its noise."

The healer had already started her quiet triage. "Superficial," she murmured at Rhea’s knuckles. "Singed," at Ray’s hairline. She hovered a hand near John’s ribs, hesitated like someone listening for a song under floorboards, then moved on. She did not ask why the air felt different around his right wrist. Good healers save their questions for after water.

Other gliders whispered down through the canopy. Students on borrowed frames, seniors acting like juniors, juniors pretending to be seniors, and two first-year squads with faces still blue-white from sleep. They piled in with too-wide eyes and questions kept behind their teeth until the teachers let them out.

"Are we late," a boy blurted, and then reddened at his own voice.

"You are safely late," Yarrow said dryly. "Which is the correct kind?"

The beastkeeper —square shoulders, kind hands with scars in them— had his caps out, netting the last of the frenzy scent into little domes that would keep it from confusing anything that survived the night into more stupidity. He paused by the edge of the ring, knelt, set a cap gently over a zig of blood as if he were tucking in a child that had lied and learned from it. "We’ll burn these in the pit," he told Yarrow. "Before the light climbs."

Yarrow nodded once. Then to John again: "You held this ground."

"We held it," John said. "All four of us together."

Ray’s eyebrow ticked up, surprised at being included before he could ask to be.

Yarrow wrote three words on the slate that lived in her head and a different three on the one at her belt. She pointed with her chin at the heap of netted cores by John’s pack. "Count," she said to the junior who had arrived with the wrong kind of excitement. "One by one. Don’t drop anything. Your hands are not interesting enough to replace these."

"Yes, Proctor," the junior squeaked, chastened into competence.

Fizz hovered higher, then lower, then gave up on a height and picked voice instead. "We request a small ceremony," he announced. "Something tasteful. A laurel composed entirely of pancakes. A ballad in which I am described reasonably as luminous."

"Lord Fizz," Yarrow said without looking at him. "If I give you three biscuits and a ribbon, will you be quiet while I take statements?"

Fizz considered, steepling his paws. "Two biscuits and a ribbon," he bargained. "I like to feel the moral high ground."

"Done," Yarrow said, and the healer, without breaking her flow, handed Fizz two hard, sweet biscuits from the universal province of healers and tied a spare white strip around one of his ears. Fizz floated backward, solemn as a small saint with snacks.

Green-leather —Ranger Dorn, by the name stitched to his strap— finished his circle and came to stand at Yarrow’s shoulder. "Trail in," he said. "Downwind. Soft-soled. Shadowed. Whoever laid the bait is a student or wants to look like one. The knot on the vial was academy work, not city. And the blood... the blood came from a penned beast, not a field kill."

"Internal," Yarrow said, and that one word took on a weight the gliders bent under.

Ray’s hands clenched. Rhea’s mouth went very flat. Fizz’s biscuit paused halfway to his teeth like it had suddenly remembered a diet.

John looked down at the spot where the Bramblehorn had ended and tried not to trace a line from there to a boy with a neat coat and a worse smile. He failed, privately.

Other students drifted to the edge of the cleared arc as if curiosity had been spelled onto their boots. They made a white-noise hum of admiration and envy that people learn to produce in schools. Words like stampede and freak luck and crazy mages passed lip to lip. The word void did not. John had kept it a quiet tool. The night had helped.

Yarrow raised a hand and the buzz cut itself in half. "Listen," she said, and the tone pulled eyes. "If we arrive late again, I want it to be because you were competent, not because you were lucky. Tonight was planned against you. The line held. Good. That is the minimum. Tomorrow will test you and not tell you first. Be less interesting to your enemies by being more boringly correct with your procedures."

Fizz clapped. No one else dared. Yarrow did not mind. She turned back to John. "Walk it for me," she said. "Short, clean."

John did. He told the shape of the night the way stone masons tell the walls — courses, edges, pressure points. He said where Ray had placed the lamps and when Rhea had set the heat. He drew the arc of the first charge and the place where the tide broke because someone had been insulted by a bright small thing at exactly the right pitch. He did not perform. He did not underplay. He made the night a diagram with grace in it.

Yarrow did not interrupt. When he finished, she nodded once. "You will write that down," she said to Ray. "Your hand. Your words. Your mistakes. Your corrections. Bring me the page at dusk."

Ray blinked. "Yes," he said, reflex running ahead of humility and getting there first for once.

Ranger Dorn held up the little bottle he’d capped. "We’ll run the mix," he said. "I’ll know whose kitchen it came from by evening. Every blender has a signature, and the city’s apothecaries sign their work with habits they think no one sees."

Rhea’s eyes flared with a quiet, contained heat. "If it is a student," she said, "what then."

"If it is a student," Yarrow said, and her voice went like iron pulled from water, "then they will learn how many consequences fit into a week."

The healer finished with an older boy who had mostly scraped his dignity and not much else. She wiped her hands, came to John finally, and tilted her head. "Hand," she said. "Right."

He offered it. She didn’t touch the skin. She held her palm a finger over his and waited. The air between their hands went cooler by a degree, like a library remembering itself. She nodded, satisfied in a way that said Not my field and also Not my problem. "Sleep on it," she advised mildly. "Eat after. If you insist on playing with ideas that make the air misbehave, do not forget to drink soup."

"Soup is a gossip," Fizz informed her.

"Soup is a cure," the healer said, and pressed a wrapped sugar into his paw as if she had known him all her life.

One of the late first-year squads edged closer, all elbows and breath. A girl with a braid too tight for her skull stared at Rhea’s ribbon like it might be a talisman she could borrow by sight. A boy with rich shoes and poor posture looked at John and tried not to look like he was looking.

"Say it," Yarrow told them, not unkindly. "Then go do work."

"How many," the tight-braid girl asked, words tumbling in a rush. "How many did you... how many cores did you get."