21. Chapter 21 The Training Yard
Rask pointed at the field before the class and clapped his hands then raised his voice.
"Speed-tag," he said. "One runs. One chases. Mana-augmented movement is permitted. You switch after each round." He looked at the class. "Pick a partner."
The class shifted. Thirty students in training gear looked sideways at each other, the quick social calculus of who to pick and who to avoid. The training yard was already hot, the packed dirt dry, the morning shadows barely reaching the center of the field.
Jossi Ashwick was already moving.
She crossed twenty feet of open ground before Rask finished the sentence and stopped at Lucien's side with the unhurried confidence of someone who'd decided three minutes ago and was waiting for the formality to catch up.
"You're with me, Lucien," she said.
She planted her feet and looked at him with gold-green eyes, the vertical pupils narrow in the morning light. Her leopard ears, the rounded pair that sat higher on her head, tufted with dark fur, had rotated toward him before the rest of her had turned.
"Sounds good, I guess," Lucien said as he took a quick peek back at Liora.
Behind him, Liora stopped mid-step.
She'd been moving toward Lucien at a walk that assumed the outcome, and the assumption had expired two seconds ago. Her gold eyes found Jossi, held for a moment, and amusement settled across her expression.
"Wulden," Liora said. She pivoted without breaking stride and pointed at the dwarf, who was standing eight feet away with the posture of someone considering whether the wall might accept a partnership. "You and me."
Wulden's face cycled through three expressions in half a second and settled on quiet terror.
"Oh," he said. "Sure. Great. Yes."
Liora's tail tapped his shoulder once and she walked toward an open square. Wulden followed, glancing back at Lucien once with wide eyes, and then he was gone.
Jossi let this play out, a faint grin on her face.
"Was she coming over here?" she asked.
"Probably."
"Hm, that's too funny. I hope she’s not too mad that I swiped her boyfriend." She shrugged one shoulder and turned to face him. "She'll live."
Jossi’s fitted athletic shirt left her arms bare from mid-bicep down, lean brown arms built by nineteen years of active use.
Her skin was light brown and it caught the sun and held it.
The faint spots that scattered along her jawline were darker than they'd been at the start of term.
Generous weeks of campus sun had brought them up, the marks more defined now, the scattering tighter along the line of her jaw and continuing across the backs of her hands where they faded into her skin at the wrists.
Her hair was shoulder length but pulled back into a ponytail. The leopard ears sat higher, rounded, tufted with dark fur that was a shade deeper than her hair. They moved on their own schedule, tracking sounds she probably wasn't conscious of hearing.
She was average height. Everything below the shoulders was built for running: legs that were lean and defined through the standard-issue training shorts that were too small for her butt.
The bottom ten percent of each cheek dangled out of the shorts for the world to see.
Her spotted tail hung behind her, long and relaxed, and swaying at the base.
She wasn't Liora. Liora drew attention by existing, with curves and confidence and a body she'd been weaponizing since she was old enough to notice the effect.
Jossi drew attention differently. Standing still, she was pretty.
Moving, she was something harder to look away from.
"Are you going to stare all morning, or are we running or playing tag or whatever? You like these shorts, don’t you? I picked out some that were too small," Jossi said, pointing her ass up at Lucien. “See, I like the way my cheeks pop out. I think you do, too. Mission accomplished.”
"If you want your ass looked at, your strategy is sound."
She grinned, crooked and quick, and took off.
The speed was the first thing. Jossi's augmentation magic lived in the transitions, and even without channeling mana, she was faster off the mark than anyone else in the class.
She hit full stride in three steps and cut right at the edge of their square, a sharp pivot that left her hips ahead of her shoulders for a fraction before the rest of her caught up.
Lucien chased. He calibrated on the first change, reading her acceleration against the gap he needed to maintain: close enough to look competitive, wide enough that the distance looked earned.
She cut left and he followed, trailing by two steps on the turn where a student his level would lose ground.
She was faster than she'd been at the start of term.
The conditioning had caught up to the talent, and her direction changes came with a precision that said she'd been drilling outside of class.
Her tail went rigid on the hard pivots, the musculature locking to counterbalance, and she reversed with a snap that carried no wasted motion.
"Switch," Rask called.
Lucien took the lead. He ran with the manufactured inefficiency he'd built over weeks of calibration: wider turns, a hitch in the direction changes, the looseness of a body still figuring out its edges.
Jossi stayed on him. She read his movement with a speed specialist's eye, anticipating the changes before his feet committed, closing the gap on the straightaways.
She tagged his shoulder on the third change, her fingers light and fast.
"Too easy, Lucien." She wasn't breathing hard.
"I'll try harder, just for you."
"Let’s see what you got!"
They ran two more rounds. Between the second and third, Jossi grabbed her water bottle from beside the wall and took a drink. Sweat had darkened the collar of her training shirt and the spots along her jaw were flushed underneath, the color deeper beneath the marks.
"So." She didn't ease into it. "The dining hall thing with Krenning."
He looked at her. “What about it?”
"Everyone heard," she said. "The version I got had you levitating Krenning six feet off the ground for a full minute. Which I doubt, but the part about choking him with invisible force seems like it might be bullshit too."
"It was telekinesis," Lucien said. "It lasted just a few seconds."
"What did he do?"
"He existed. However, to be more specific, he called Liora my ‘demon whore girlfriend.’"
Jossi nodded once, a quick bob, and she was done with it. She capped her water bottle.
"Yikes. I’d be pissed, too. Valt is such a douche. When I first started school here, I thought he was cute, but that was before I got to know him at all. I’m so embarrassed that I thought that about him," she said, blushing lightly.
“Douche is a correct assessment,” Lucien said, chuckling.
"Another round," she said. "I'll run. Try to keep up this time."
They ran the fourth round. Between water breaks, Jossi stopped pretending she wasn't doing what she was doing.
"You've filled out since the start of term," she said, looking at him without apology. "Your shoulders are wider. Whatever you've been doing, it's working. You were kind of sickly looking during the first class. Now…you’re athletic and kinda handsome."
"Thanks, I think."
"Running doesn't do that to your shoulders." She tapped his upper arm with the back of her hand, a touch that stayed half a second longer than it needed to. "You're training on the side."
"Maybe."
"Not maybe." She took a drink. "You move better, you hit the changes cleaner, and your recovery time is half what it was at the beginning. I run next to thirty people twice a week. I pay attention."
"I can tell."
"Good." Her grin was crooked and warm and carried no ambiguity at all. "Ready?"
The next round started. Jossi led, and she pushed the pace harder than she had all morning.
She ran a series of mana-fueled direction changes, the augmentation field flickering at the edges of her movement as she channeled speed into the pivots.
The changes came tighter and faster, testing the gap between them.
Her tail locked rigid on the hardest cut and she reversed direction with a snap that should have left a first-year chaser behind by three full steps.
Lucien reacted before he thought about it.
His change of direction was instantaneous, no lag, no search for balance, no manufactured hitch.
He closed the distance in the same fraction of a second that she'd created it, his feet finding the angle with the reflexive precision of someone who'd been reading competitors for centuries and whose instincts didn't wait for permission.
He caught himself. He widened the gap, added the hitch back, slowed into the student's rhythm.
Jossi finished the round at the same pace and came to a halt at the edge of their square. She reached for her water bottle, took a drink, and wiped her mouth with her wrist.
Then she looked at him with one brow elevated. “You were extremely fast then you just slowed down out of the blue. What gives?”
“I’m just winded.”
“Yeah, right, if you were winded, you’d be breathing much faster and heavier.”
On the far side of the yard, Liora and Wulden were running their round.
The mismatch was visible from all that distance away.
Liora's coven-bond augmentation had pushed her past the drill's intended balance, and Wulden was falling behind on every change, his legs working hard and his breathing audible across the distance.
Liora waited for him at the end of each turn, three squares ahead of where she needed to be and choosing not to show it.
Her tail swayed behind her in a slow rhythm that said she was entertained.
Wulden was giving everything he had. His shirt was soaked and his face was red; yet he hadn't quit.
“Now look over there, Wulden looks…winded,” Jossi said with a snicker.
"Last round," Rask said.
They ran it. Jossi led with clean, sharp changes, her speed held to the earlier pace. Lucien trailed by the gap he'd maintained all morning. Neither of them spoke until the drill ended and Rask called the class.
Students drifted toward the water station and the benches along the south wall. The yard filled with heavy breathing and the sounds of people deciding whether to sit or collapse.
Jossi sat on the stone wall and stretched her legs out in front of her. Lucien stood beside her, hands in his pockets.
"Where are you from?" he asked.
"Veldrath. Border country." She pulled one knee up and rested her chin on it. "My family runs a courier service between border towns. We carry packages, messages, the occasional thing nobody asks questions about. It's fast work. I grew up running routes between villages before I could read."
"That explains the speed."
"The speed is magic. The endurance is in the routes." Her gold-green eyes came sideways to find him. "What about you?"
"Minor house. Western Cendara."
"How minor?"
"Minor enough that you've never heard of it and won't pretend you have."
She laughed, short and real. "I like that. Half the noble kids here treat their family name like a weapon. Like your pal, Valt. You treat yours like it came with the room."
"It kinda did."
She stretched her arms overhead and yawned. “I got in on my combat scores. The admissions board sent a letter asking if I'd listed the right school. Veldrath doesn't send many beastkin to Cendaran academies."
"They should send more. If they are anything like you."
"There’s no one like me, but yeah, they should." She dropped her arms, her chin still resting on her knee. "You're easy to talk to. Most guys who look like you aren't."
"What do guys who look like me usually do?"
"Talk about themselves. Or say nothing because they think being quiet or detached is attractive." She bumped his shoulder with hers. "You do the quiet thing, but you're actually funny under there. It works."
"Thank you, I guess."
"It's a compliment. Take it." She held his eyes for a second. Her tail swayed behind her, lazy and loose.
Rask was collecting the marker cones from the field. The class was thinning, students leaving in pairs through the south gate.
Jossi moved closer to Lucien.
"You're faster than you let on," she said.
She said it flatly, no challenge, no demand for an answer.
"Everybody's getting faster," Lucien said. "Weeks of Rask will do that."
"Sure." She said it the same way she'd said it before, the single syllable that meant she'd heard him and didn't believe him and wasn't going to argue about it today.
She walked toward the south gate. Her tail swung behind her, the spots catching the morning light. She moved with the easy stride and she didn't look back.
Liora appeared at his side. She smelled like sweat and the mineral warmth that sat beneath everything else with her. Her breathing was even, her tail keeping a lazy pace behind her.
"She's fast," Liora said.
"She is."
"And she likes you."
"She's friendly. That’s the extent of it."
"She's not friendly." Liora was still looking after Jossi.
"She's hunting. She just uses a smile instead of a bow and arrow.
" Her tail tapped his hip once. "I like her. I can’t believe she wears shorts that small, though.
I need to up my game. Do you want me to exchange my shorts for a smaller size? I will if you want me to."
“Liora, your shorts are perfectly fine. Your ass has my attention whenever you want it.”
“What about my boobs? See,” Liora said, grinning as she pushed them up, almost causing them to spill out of the top.
“Will you behave?”
Liora shook her head and kissed him softly. “Never.”
She took his arm and they walked toward the gate. The sun was higher now and the yard was emptying. Rask stood at the center of the field with his arms crossed, watching the last students leave, his expression saying nothing about his thoughts.