14. Chapter 14 The Dining Hall
The eggs were better on Mondays.
The dining hall was a quarter full. Students sat in clusters at the far tables, voices low, carrying the collective energy of people who hadn't committed to being awake yet.
Morning light came through the tall windows on the east wall and put long rectangles of gold across the wooden tables.
The smell was bread and butter, and the coffee tasted like it had been brewed by someone who held a grudge against coffee.
He ate without hurry. The weekend sat behind him like a warm room he'd stepped out of, and it had left good pictures: the waterfall, the bikini, the mark uncovered in the sun, the walk back through the trees with Liora's shoulder bumping his arm on the trail.
Sunday had passed without an event. He'd read, slept, read again.
Corvath had spent the afternoon mapping a ventilation shaft above the second-floor archive and returned with dust in his fur and twelve new linear feet of claimed territory.
Now, it was Monday. Practical Applications came after breakfast, then the rest of the day opened up. He cut an egg in half and ate it.
Valt Krenning sat down across from him.
He didn't greet Lucien or ask permission. He pulled the chair out, set his tray down, and sat with the posture of someone who'd been thinking about this moment for the entire weekend and had decided it was going to happen now.
He was alone. He'd left Ashavir behind and come without his usual orbit of crested friends.
It was just Valt. Sandy blonde hair, pale blue eyes, the elven bone structure that ran to sharp angles without warmth.
His uniform was pressed and the Krenning crest sat on his collar in silver thread, catching the early light.
He looked like he'd slept badly and dressed well to compensate.
Lucien looked at him. He set his fork down.
"Krenning."
"Margrave." Valt's voice was steady, carrying the practiced control his family had spent nineteen years teaching. "We need to talk about what you did to Ashavir."
"No, we don't."
"You burned a permanent mark into my familiar's body.
Five fingers. Scarred into the scales. The iridescence is gone where your hand was.
It won't come back." His jaw was set but the words came clean and measured, rehearsed in front of a mirror or a closed door.
"That's a bonded familiar. Not a stray animal.
A bonded familiar with a direct link to my nervous system.
I felt what you did to him. Every second of it. "
"Good. Maybe you will learn."
Valt’s fingers tightened on the edge of the table.
"My family spent three years finding the right breeder.
Ashavir was selected from a batch of eleven.
He was bonded to me last summer at Krenning Hall by a specialist my father hired from the eastern coast." He said it like the details should carry weight, like the pedigree of the animal made the damage worse.
"You scarred him permanently. With your bare hand. In front of other students."
"Your snake wrapped itself around my familiar and tried to crush him in a corridor where there was nowhere to run. The little cunt of a serpent was going to strike my cat. I’m glad I intervened when I did.
Your familiar was going to kill him." Lucien picked up his fork and cut into the remaining egg.
"Your snake has a scar. My familiar has nightmares. Your snake was gifted his life by me.”
"Ashavir acted on instinct. He's a predator. That's what predators do."
"Then keep your predator on a leash."
"He doesn't need a leash. He needs to not be assaulted by a first-year who can't control his temper."
Lucien ate the egg. He chewed, swallowed, and looked at Valt across the table with the flat attention he gave to things that were wasting his time.
"Is there a point coming, or did you sit down to read me Ashavir's pedigree papers?"
Color touched Valt's cheeks. It was the first real crack in his composure, small and controlled. He wasn't used to being dismissed.
"The point is that you went too far. You could have pulled the snake off and thrown it like you did the first time. You chose to brand him. You chose to burn a permanent mark into a living animal. That's not self-defense. That's cruelty."
"The first time, your snake reared at a girl who was sitting on a bench holding a quill.
Ashavir got thrown and neither Ashavir nor you learned anything.
The second time, your snake coiled around a cat in a narrow hallway and started squeezing, then prepared to bite Corvath on his fucking head.
So I made sure there wouldn't be a third time.
" He set his fork down again. "You're welcome for me choosing to continue the life of your pitiful familiar. "
"I'm not here to thank you."
"I know why you're here. You spent the weekend working up the nerve. I will give you some credit for actually growing a pair of balls and facing me man-to-man."
Valt's jaw tightened. "I didn't need to work up to anything."
"Your father was here on Friday. Commissioner Krenning came from wherever commissioners come from to sit in the headmistress's office and file a complaint on your behalf.
" Lucien's voice stayed level, conversational, the register of a man discussing a simple topic over breakfast. "A trade commissioner, a man who negotiates with governments, came to a school to argue about his youngest son's pet snake. Don’t you feel like a giant toddler for needing your father to fight your battles? "
The hit landed. It arrived in the shift of Valt's posture, the slight backward lean, the pale eyes going harder. He was the youngest son, the one nobody in the family cared whether he proved himself or not.
"My father came because what you did was worth coming for."
"Your father came because you couldn't handle it yourself.
You filed a complaint. You called home. You waited for daddy to show up and fix it.
" He leaned forward, not much, six inches of distance erased across the table.
"And he lost. The headmistress sent him home with nothing.
No formal action. No consequences. No discipline.
Your father journeyed here, sat in that chair, played the money card, and lost to a woman who offered to give him his money back and take his name off the library.
Daddy went home with his tail between his legs. "
Valt's hands were flat on the wood now, pressing down. The veneer he'd walked in with was thinning at the edges. His words came faster, clipped shorter.
"You don't know what happened in that room."
"I was in the room."
"My father is not done with this. You’ll see. He is a powerful man."
"Your father walked out of that office and left you here. Alone. Without resolution. Your father doesn’t make me the least bit apprehensive. He is a fool."
The noise around them had dropped. Students at nearby tables had stopped eating. Two girls from three seats down were watching with forks suspended, and a boy at the next table had turned in his chair. The confrontation hadn't reached a shout, but the tone carried.
"You think you can do whatever you want," Valt said.
His voice had risen half a register. The Krenning control was fraying into open anger, the rehearsed arguments giving way to the ones he hadn't planned to make.
"You walk around this academy like none of us matter.
You burned my familiar's scales off with your bare hand and nobody does anything.
Nobody. The headmistress lets it go. The professor defends you.
You get to sit here eating your breakfast like nothing happened. "
"Something happened. Your snake learned to stop attacking cats. You will look at that snake and see my mark and remember me until you or that serpent dies."
"You think this is funny?"
"I think your snake attacked my familiar twice and I solved the problem permanently. If you don't like the solution, get a better snake."
Valt shoved back from the table. His chair scraped the stone floor, and the sound cut through the morning noise. He was standing now, leaning forward with both hands on the table, his pale eyes bright with fury he'd stopped trying to hide.
"You know what your problem is, Margrave?
You hide behind that dead expression and your shit-tier noble house and a cat that runs from everything, and you think that makes you above everyone.
You're nothing. You're affinity-null. You're from a family that's a punchline.
The only reason anyone knows your name is because you keep picking fights you shouldn't. "
Lucien looked up at him. The fork was still in his hand.
"Stand down, Valt."
"No." He was louder now. Students at the far tables were looking. "You scarred my familiar. You humiliated my family. My father came here and the headmistress laughed him out of the room, and you sit there eating eggs like that's acceptable. Like any of that is acceptable."
"It was acceptable to the headmistress. It was acceptable to the professor who told the headmistress exactly what she saw. The only person in the building who finds it unacceptable is you, and that's because you're the one who let it happen."
Valt's mouth opened and he finally unleashed what he really wanted to say. "You attend school here with your pet cat and your demon whore girlfriend and you think you're untouchable."
The room went quiet.
Lucien stopped. The fork was in his hand and his eyes were on Valt and his expression hadn't changed. The air at the table went cold, and the students close enough to see his face understood before Valt did that the argument was over.
Valt's throat began to slowly close.
Lucien didn't raise a hand. He didn't gesture, didn't incant, didn't produce a visible channeling or a mana signature that a first-year should have been capable of generating without a formed construct. Valt's airway shut.