Chapter 1239: The Question

Morning light slanted across the upper benches of Arcten’s lecture room and caught on the buckles of half a dozen sword belts. The students filed in by twos and threes, still litigating Clubs Day, and Lucavion, having weighed the front row against the back, took a seat near the middle, the one place in any lecture hall that an instructor’s eye reliably slid past.

Two students settled in the row ahead. One carried an application sheet folded down until only Alchemy Society showed above his thumb.

"I might put my name down," he said. "Learning how potions work sounds interesting."

"You said that about formations."

"Formations are interesting. The coursework isn’t."

"I heard alchemists spend weeks reading before they touch a pot."

"That sounds miserable."

"That sounds like what they tell you so you don’t blow up a table."

’Heh... Do they know?’

The boy kept smoothing the fold in his sheet, plainly wanting someone to promise that the work would reach the part he had signed up for. Lucavion sympathized; ingredient lists would never have hooked him either, though watching one substance change what another could do was another matter entirely.

"Ask what they let first-years make," he said.

Both heads turned.

"The society. If they put a pot in front of you, you’ll find out whether you like it."

Both boys looked at him the way people look at a bench that has just offered an opinion, and the one with the sheet kept the face of a man waiting to learn why Lucavion had spoken at all.

Looking down at the sheet, the boy seemed to concede that Lucavion had a point. "That was more helpful than I expected."

"Raise your expectations." Lucavion laughed.

His friend also laughed, and they went back to arguing in lower voices.

Just then, someone stopped at the end of his bench.

A plain sword hung at her side, its grip worn pale where a hand had found it often, and Jesse’s brown hair, tied back simply, had lost a few strands to the walk over. She measured the gap between bench and desk, then set her things down beside him.

"Morning."

Lucavion looked up. For one stupid second he had no idea what to do with a greeting.

"Morning," he said, shifting his arm to give her room.

Easing her sword out from under the bench and propping it against her leg, Jesse sat and faced the front, nothing in her manner asking him to explain himself.

In any sane world, that would have made sitting with her easy.

Since the Western Terrace, every ordinary line he owned came with a second reading. Teasing her about being late might sound like a bid to skip ahead to the old routine, asking whether she had slept might sound like a report card, and silence had problems of its own. Every option had a trapdoor; he simply could not tell which one she would mind least.

’Yet...’

Jesse had asked him to stop deciding things for her. He had agreed, which had been much easier with her standing at arm’s length demanding an answer.

’I said I’d try. So. Trying.’

He let out a quiet breath. Jesse glanced over, her fire-touched eyes resting on his face a moment before they returned to the front, and left him in sole possession of all the awkwardness he had brought to the bench. He found, to his mild surprise, that he could bear it.

Across the aisle, Valeria stopped with her notebook in hand. She saw Jesse first, then met Lucavion’s eyes, then looked at the open place on Jesse’s other side.

Jesse drew her things closer without looking over. Valeria came around the end of the bench and sat anyway.

"Morning," Valeria said.

"Morning."

It was the same word Jesse had given him, a shade flatter. Valeria’s hand paused on her notebook cover.

"You could have sat anywhere," Jesse said.

"I wanted to sit here."

"That so?"

"Yes."

Jesse faced front again and left the answer hanging. Lucavion could have asked whether the benches came with assigned territories. He was still deciding whether either of them would enjoy it when the door opened.

Arcten came in with a rolled map under one arm. Valeria opened her notebook, the last conversations died, and he set the map on the desk without unrolling it.

"Where did we leave off last time?"

Someone near the back ventured defensive positions. Another said terrain. Clearly those were the ones who dozed off in the middle of the lecture.

"Close enough." Arcten did not seem to mind. "A smaller force can delay a larger one by choosing where to stand. What were you meant to do with that?"

Lucavion looked at the empty page in his notebook while Arcten’s gaze moved over the room.

"Think like the person responsible for keeping everyone else alive. What must be protected, what can be surrendered, and how much time each choice buys."

Only then did he unroll the map and pin its corners with two wooden blocks, revealing a narrow pass through a ridge, the approach widening on one side and falling into rough ground on the other, with a road behind it that ran toward a small settlement.

"The enemy comes from here." Arcten touched the wider approach. "Your people are on the road behind you and need time to withdraw. You have enough fighters to fill the pass, and fewer than the force advancing on it."

A student in the front row raised a hand. "How long until they’re clear?"

"You don’t know." He stepped back. "No reinforcements. And you can’t send the people behind you through the ridge ahead of your fighters. How do you hold the pass?"

Hands rose. Arcten looked over them to Jesse, whose hand stayed on the desk.

"Student Jesse. You’ve held a line before, if I’m informed correctly. What would you want to know?"

Jesse looked at the narrow mark on the map. "Whether the people filling it can still move."

Arcten waited, and she gave him Mornrock Vale: an Arcanis advance, shields raised, the standard visible from far back. Every place in the formation had a soldier standing in it.

A few students looked up at the name. The war was recent enough that a Lorian soldier talking about the other side could quiet a room in the Arcanis capital.

Lucavion watched her finger come to rest against the edge of the desk. He had never heard her mention Mornrock. It must have happened after he left the army.

’I never asked.’

He kept his eyes on the map.

"The man beside me couldn’t put weight on one leg," she said. "The next one had his shield on the wrong arm. When they ordered us to shift, half the line couldn’t follow."

He had seen formations look whole from a distance, then reached them and found soldiers propping each other up, and Jesse, it seemed, had stood in one of those while he was somewhere else.

"The line held its shape," she finished. "That was about all it could do."

"You would change it before then," Arcten said.

"If I could. I’d need to know who could still move before I gave an order that depended on everyone."

He nodded and returned to the map. "Something you can assess while the pass is still yours. What else?"

Suggestions piled up: blocking the mouth, loose stone, obstacles hauled down from the ridge, archers on the high ground. Arcten let them accumulate until someone pointed out that every fighter sent forward would have farther to run if the enemy broke through.

"Then don’t hold the mouth," Cedric said.

He sat a few rows below Lucavion. Heads turned as he rose, though his attention stayed on the map. "Let them in. The pass narrows farther along, where the ground gives them less room to spread."

Arcten set a block over the point Cedric indicated. "Here?"

"With obstacles ahead of it, but yes. The first rank stands beyond this bend. Anyone coming through has to clear it before he sees the full line, and they can’t bring many against us at once."

"Archers above them?" someone asked.

"If the shape of ridge gives them a place to stand. I wouldn’t count on it until I’d seen the ground."

Lucavion glanced at him. Cedric had answered from the map and then stopped right where the map stopped telling him anything. Several earlier suggestions had perched archers on ledges that existed only because the cartographer had left blank paper around the ink.

"Jesse’s front rank tires," Arcten said. "What do you do?"

"Replace them before they ask."

Someone laughed quietly, as though Cedric had underrated how long a fighter could last. He waited for it to pass. "The rear rank needs room to step forward. If the front has to be dragged out, that room is gone. Keep the replacements close enough to move when called, and far enough back that a break at the bend can’t catch them all."

Jesse looked toward the bend, her thumb going still against the callus on her hand.

Valeria lifted her pen. "What happens to the road if they get past both?"

Cedric followed the pass with one finger to the stretch between its inner end and the settlement. "A final group holds here, small enough to move with the people withdrawing. If we lose the bend, the fighters falling back give them warning."

"That leaves fewer at the bend."

"Yes."

He offered no adjustment to hide the cost. The block stayed where it was, thinner line and all.

"Suppose the first line holds and the enemy takes the ground in front of it," Arcten said. "Do you send men to recover it?"

"Only if losing it exposes the pass."

"So they can have the approach."

"I can afford to lose the approach." Cedric’s finger returned to the road behind the bend. "I can’t afford to lose the way out for the charge."

The charge.

Lucavion kept his eyes on the map. Arcten had not given them a commander, a count of wounded, or anyone worth singling out, and Cedric had already put someone on that road. Even his reserves had been placed with a retreat in mind.

A baron’s retainer might have learned the same tactics, but Cedric, supposedly knight to Elowyn Caerlin, spoke of the people behind the pass as though he had already decided to stand in front of them.

Lucavion wondered whether he would hold the same ground if the charge could get away faster without him.

No one else seemed to have noticed the word. Arcten bent over the map, and Valeria went back to her notes. Lucavion lowered his eyes to his empty page and left it where it was.