Chapter 70: The Pact of Enemies, Part Thirteen: One Millimeter

Nobody tells you what happens to an academy when fear moves in. I'll tell you: it becomes punctual.

Friday morning, thirty-five students were lined up in the circular arena ten minutes before the hour, in silence, uniforms impeccable. No noble arrived late. No noble complained about the cold. Nobody laughed at anybody.

And at the edge of the arena, leaning on the stone railing, eight men in white and amber capes watched us train.

Thirty-five. It's a number you notice. In a row of eighteen pairs, one is left without a partner.

It fell to a boy from House Analazze who spent the entire class staring at the empty space to his right.

Nobody said Naral Docaror's name all morning. At Mayorka those things aren't said: they're organized. By mid-afternoon they had removed his desk from three classrooms, his name from the library roster, and his creature, a reptar that had been with him for two days, had returned to the terrarium at the back of Fendrel's classroom, where it kept changing color every time someone walked past.

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Professor Duralianne Danyarta arrived at the exact hour, crossed the arena without looking at the railing once, and planted herself in front of us with her hands behind her back.

"Today we're not doing control," she said.

Her pink Empero was out. Not much. Just enough for the frost on the ground to melt in a two-meter circle around her, and for anyone with two brain cells to understand that woman was holding herself back.

"Today we're going to see what you do if someone tries to kill you."

Absolute silence.

"Raise your hand if you know how many seconds a real attack lasts."

Nobody raised their hand. Layda didn't either, which is the first time in two weeks I've seen her pass on an answer.

"Less than two." Duralianne began walking down the row. "Everything you've learned to do in this arena takes more than two seconds. Manifesting a shape takes longer. Concentrating density takes longer. Thinking, darlings, takes infinitely longer."

She stopped in front of Caspian Vereth.

"What do you do if someone comes at you from behind right now, young Vereth?"

"I... call a professor."

"Excellent answer and you're going to die just the same." She moved on. "The only thing that can come out in under two seconds is what's already out. That's why today we're not going to create anything. Today we're going to hold."

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The exercise was the same as Tuesday's and completely different.

Tuesday she had us hold a coin-sized sphere while she crossed the arena, and that was a game of skill. Friday she had us hold it while she talked to us, while she asked us questions, while she shoved our shoulders without warning, while eight armed men watched from the railing.

"Your Empero has to be out when you're not thinking about it. That's the only training that's worth anything. Everything else is circus."

Ardwyn's dissolved on the third shove and again it came out the size of a watermelon. Lianza's didn't dissolve once, because nothing of Lianza's ever dissolves. Layda's dissolved twice, and both times she put on a face of apology that not even she believed.

Mine dissolved eleven times in a row.

Eleven. I counted them, because counting is the only thing I'm good at when I'm failing.

The exercise became much harder with interruptions. But part of being a Rank S Empero Knight was being able to manifest several of those spheres in the middle of battle, so what cost me so much was merely a warm-up, one of the simplest training exercises... that I still couldn't complete.

On the twelfth I started getting angry, which in my case is a fairly reliable way of making things worse. I shouted at it internally. I told it to stay still for once, with those exact words, in the same voice a bad boss uses with someone who doesn't get paid enough.

It dissolved before I finished the sentence.

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And then I remembered an old woman who isn't really old, and a brush, and a letter that wouldn't come out.

The hand is the end. If your shoulder doesn't know what it's going to say, your wrist will lie.

I'd been understanding that with my head for two days. There, in the middle of the arena, with my shoulder aching from holding a stupid posture, it finally occurred to me what it meant in the hands.

I was holding my Empero the way you hold a bird so it doesn't escape. Squeezing. Watching. Telling it stay still every half second, which is exactly the kind of thing that would make me run if someone said it to me.

So I stopped saying it.

Didn't let go. Simply stopped giving it orders. Stood with my palm open and my mind on something else, thinking about a letter from the ancient alphabet that means attested, letting the black be wherever it wanted to be.

Duralianne passed behind me and shoved my shoulder.

It didn't dissolve.

She asked me a question about the War of the Three Seals that I couldn't answer and I answered wrong.

It didn't dissolve.

And at some point during that half minute, the sphere moved.

It moved on its own. One millimeter. Maybe less. It rolled across the palm of my left hand toward the edge, toward the thumb side, toward the right.

Toward my right hand.

The hand I write with.

My head came up without meaning to, with that idiot need you get for someone to have seen you.

Four pairs down, Lianza D'Tariel was looking at me. She had her own garnet sphere floating above her palm with zero effort and her head turned toward me.

She looked away before I did. But she was too late, and we both knew it.

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You see, I want you to understand the size of this, because when I say it out loud it sounds like nothing.

One millimeter. A coin-sized sphere of Empero that rolls one millimeter on the palm of a hand.

And yet I didn't tell it to do that.

Since the day it awakened, I've been the only one talking in this relationship. I write the word, I write the order, it executes, and if something goes wrong it's because I wrote it wrong. It never occurred to me that the salty black thing that comes out of my hands could have an opinion about anything.

That morning it had one. And its opinion, the first it's ever given me in its life, was that it wanted to be in the other hand.

The one that holds the brush.

I laughed to myself, in the middle of the arena, with eight Jahke knights watching from the railing and two classmates dead in three weeks and seventeen days to stop a wedding.

And the sphere held even while I was laughing, which was the hardest thing to believe of all.

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"Elcronne."

Duralianne had stopped in front of me. I hadn't even seen her arrive.

"Professor."

"Show me your hand."

Showed her. The black was still there, still, coin-sized, one millimeter to the right of where I'd put it.

She looked at it longer than necessary.

"How long has it been like this?"

"I don't know. A minute?"

"Four," she said. "I've been watching it for four minutes."

And then she did something I'd never seen her do with any student in that arena.

She went quiet.

She stayed there, arms crossed, looking at a black sphere the size of a coin in the hand of a boy from the lowest house in Earolden, and for the first time since I've known her she had nothing clever or cruel to say.

"Did you tell it to move?"

"No, Professor."

"Did you tell it anything?"

"I haven't said anything to it in a while. I think that's why."

Duralianne Danyarta let air out through her nose, and it wasn't entirely a snort.

"Eleven years," she said. "It took me eleven years to understand that, and I still get it wrong half the days." She uncrossed her arms. "Back to the row."

"Yes, Professor."

"Elcronne."

Turned around.

"When that happens to you again," she said, very low, so the railing wouldn't hear, "don't do it here."

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At the end of class, while we were packing up, Kaen detached from the railing and crossed the arena to Professor Duralianne.

He said something to her. She answered with three words. He laughed with perfect manners, brought two fingers to his temple, and left.

She stayed looking at the spot where he'd been for a good while, and in that two-meter circle that always surrounds her feet the frost didn't form again for the rest of the morning.

When I passed her on my way to the door, I heard her say, to no one:

"Eight. In my arena."

And then, even lower, something I haven't been able to get out of my head since:

"And none of those eight is the one who should worry us."