Chapter 1240: Front-loaded

"Give them the mouth, and you give them room to build pressure."

Lucavion knew the voice before he turned. Kaireth Vaulden stood on the far side of the room with one hand wrapped around the spear propped against his bench, his pale blond hair catching the light from the upper windows, his shoulders as straight as they had been in the examination hall.

During the Combat Awareness trial, Kaireth had let his teammates’ convenient mistakes find Lucavion again and again, though Kaireth himself had never once struck him. Afterward, across the safer distance of several blackstone desks, Lucavion had pointed out how well that arrangement suited them both. Kaireth had told him to take the exam.

Since then Kaireth had stopped answering his greetings, and he no longer looked long enough for a smile to turn into a challenge, which, Lucavion suspected, took more discipline than the old insults ever had.

House Vaulden held the frozen passes of Darsenhold, its sentinels keeping the road open while others crossed behind them, and Kaireth had walked away from that duty to come here. What he made of the choice, Lucavion could only guess, so he looked at the map instead. Cedric had put his first rank beyond the bend, with room to rotate and ground to give up; Kaireth, on the other hand, was pointing at the open approach.

"Go on, Student Vaulden," Arcten said.

Kaireth left his spear against the bench and stepped into the aisle. "You’ve handed them the approach. They bring their fighters forward, see where you’re standing, and choose how to take the bend." He pointed to the wide ground before the pass. "Put the obstacles here. When their first rank breaks formation to get through, hit it. Make the rest come around their own men."

"You would fight outside the narrowest point?"

"I’d fight there first. If they bring enough to force us back, the bend is still behind us."

A student near the front leaned over his map. "You’ll have farther to retreat."

"Yes." Kaireth’s finger slid to the turn. "So the fighters at the mouth get an order they can follow before they’re pressed together. They hit the first rank, then withdraw while they still have room."

Lucavion measured the stretch between Kaireth’s finger and Cedric’s block. A withdrawal across it would be ugly if the enemy stayed close, and Kaireth, who had evidently made his peace with ugly, was choosing the moment his line moved, while it could still move as a line.

Jesse was looking at the same stretch. Beside her, Valeria’s pen hovered over her notebook.

"What does the first attack buy you?" Arcten asked.

"Time. They have to clear the obstacles under pressure." Kaireth looked up. "If they hurry, their first rank reaches us without support. If they slow down, the people on the road get farther away."

Arcten lifted Cedric’s block and held it over the place Kaireth had marked. Several students leaned in.

Cedric came forward before anyone called him. Once Arcten had set the block at the mouth, he traced the road behind the ridge. "How many are with the withdrawing group?"

"Enough to protect them."

"And at the bend, to receive your first rank when it falls back? We were given no numbers. Take your best guess."

Kaireth put a small escort on the road and kept enough fighters at the mouth for a credible attack. Lucavion had expected a workable split, and got one.

"Your first rank fights at the mouth, then withdraws under pursuit," Cedric said. "How soon can you use it again?"

"I’d have them ready."

"Jesse told us what a line looks like by then."

Jesse’s hand went still beside Lucavion’s notebook. Kaireth nodded, conceding the point.

Cedric moved two of Kaireth’s imagined fighters from the mouth to the road, then one more from the bend, and Kaireth’s knuckles whitened against the wood. His attack still had a purpose; every answer, though, had cost him someone he had placed forward.

"Then the reserve stays at the bend until we know whether the first line broke," Kaireth said.

Lucavion had been following the road with his eyes. The withdrawing group had started there when the exercise began and would be somewhere farther along by the time Kaireth’s fighters struck, but the map gave no distance and Arcten had refused to give a time. Somebody would have to tell the fighters at the turn when the group was clear.

"How do you know when they’re clear?" he asked.

Kaireth turned toward him. So did Cedric.

Lucavion touched the road on his copy. "You can see the enemy from the mouth. Can you still see the people you’re buying time for?"

Kaireth looked at Arcten rather than at him. "We’d send a runner."

"From where?" Cedric asked.

Kaireth pointed to a place behind the bend and stopped. A runner there could watch the withdrawal, but reaching the fighters at the mouth would take longer.

Lucavion sat back. He had only been curious, which was how most of his problems started. Cedric was already measuring the gap Kaireth had left between his forward line and the road.

Arcten left Kaireth’s block where it was and faced the class. "Three ways to place a line. Student Jesse asked whether the people in it could move. Student Vaulden gave them a way to make the enemy pay for the approach. Student Reilan kept fighters near the road in case the bend fell."

His eyes found Lucavion. There was no smile in them. "How would any of you know when you had held long enough?"

Kaireth glanced at the runner he had placed behind the bend. Arcten let him look, then tapped the road beyond the edge of the map.

"That is the question Lucavion asked."

Arcten pronounced the name with the weight on the middle syllable. Most Arcanian speakers let it slide past. Lucavion had heard it said this way often enough in Loria that the difference reached him before the rest of the sentence did.

His fingers closed around his pen. Arcten had already moved on, his accent back to the one he had used all lesson; the name was not common even in Loria, but the cadence belonged there. Somewhere the man had picked it up, and the name had shaken it loose.

Beside him, Jesse turned her head. Lucavion eased his grip, but her gaze had already dropped to his hand.

"A commander holding this pass has to learn what is happening behind him," Arcten said. "Otherwise he may order men to die for time the group no longer needs, or leave while they are still on the road."

He assigned the drill. Each group would get a map, a fixed number of fighters, and reports on the withdrawing party’s progress. They would choose positions before the first report arrived and revise as the situation changed.

"You may find your first arrangement can’t do everything you ask of it," Arcten said. "I expect you to find out here."

The rest of the lesson passed among smaller maps. Lucavion’s group lost its first runner to an enemy advance and spent a full report interval arguing over whether the dead could be blamed for late delivery. Elsewhere, a group that had committed nearly everyone to the bend discovered the settlement was still occupied when its line broke. Arcten moved between the benches, asking each commander what he had known when he gave the order.

By dismissal, several students were still debating how many fighters a runner was worth. Kaireth went back for his spear. Cedric helped Arcten roll the maps, then left ahead of the others.

Jesse gathered her things beside Lucavion. She had given no sign that she meant to mention his hand.

"It’s fine," he said when she paused beside the bench.

"I didn’t say anything."

"You were thinking it very loudly."

Jesse lifted her sword clear and waited for him to stand. Valeria passed them on her way to the door, calling a question after Cedric about the reserve he had put near the road. He answered from the corridor, and their voices faded.

Two students remained at a rear bench, closing their books while the rest filed out. Lucavion recognized the softer Lorian cadence in the first boy’s voice before he caught the words.

"Did you hear how the instructor said Lucavion?"

"I heard him say it."

"That’s how they say it back home." The boy glanced toward Jesse, waiting in the aisle.

His friend followed the look. Jesse noticed them and returned a brief, level glance before turning back to Lucavion.

The first boy lowered his voice. "...Wasn’t the boy in that Valoria business also called Lucavion?"

"I think so. That was years ago, though."

"And Jesse Burns sat beside him all lecture. She’s the one who dueled him at the banquet."

"Duels happen between strangers too." His friend picked up his books. "And wasn’t Prince Adrian the one who chose Jesse to go against him, anyway?"

"...Yeah, that’s correct."

They left by the other door, still too quiet for him to hear. Neither had approached Jesse. Cedric was already far down the corridor.

’One syllable.’

Lucavion had pictured a record reaching the Academy, or someone arriving with a question already prepared. Instead Arcten had said his name the way Lorians did, and two boys had half-remembered a story they could barely agree on. The past had hitched a ride on pronunciation.

Jesse fell into step beside him. She had heard the boys; he could tell by how she kept her eyes ahead and said nothing. He had nothing useful to say yet. They did not know who he was, and a half-remembered name might go no farther than that classroom.

Then he thought of a certain someone hearing it.

’She wouldn’t need them to be certain.’

One question from her would be enough to make them repeat everything they remembered. His hand curled at his side. He opened it again, and Jesse, to her credit, did not look down.