6. Chapter 6
Chapter six
Jessica
The first thing I hear is Torres losing an argument in his sleep.
"—not the point," he tells the ceiling, quite clearly, and then goes quiet again, and I lie there in the gray light of my own room and grin until my face hurts.
He's on his back with one arm over his eyes and his feet off the end of my bed. Soren's chair is empty but his coat is still over the back of it. Luke is somewhere else, judging by the smell coming in from the kitchen, which is coffee and something with butter in it.
Then my shoulder remembers it was shot.
"You're awake," Torres says, without moving his arm.
"How do you know?"
"You went from asleep-breathing to swearing-breathing." He rolls onto his side and props his head on his hand, hair completely destroyed, voice sleep-rough. "Morning."
"Morning."
"You want the thing guaranteed to take away the pain or the experimental version."
"Hmmm, I have more questions about my options."
"The pills, or me kissing you until you stop noticing your shoulder." He considers. "Full disclosure, the second one's got no research to back it up, but I’m game if you are."
"Pills. Then the other thing."
"Efficient," he says, and goes to get them.
Luke brings breakfast in on a tray with his sleeves rolled and his hair still wet. He sets it across my knees, moves the coffee to my right side without being asked, and then sits on the end of the bed and eats half my toast.
“You’ve been awake for a while. What happened?"
"My father's office." He breaks off another corner of toast. "Nothing that can't wait until you've had a meal."
Soren comes back from the gym looking like he wants to ask me something.
"Go for it," I tell him.
"Do you want help with the sling, or would you rather fight it for ten minutes and then be furious?"
"Help."
He supports my arm at the angle Bergstrom showed us and fastens the sling without jarring my shoulder.
Sophia appears in the doorway with a mug in each hand and gets straight to business. "Right. What's the plan, because Declan has a spreadsheet."
"He doesn't."
"He has a list, and he wrote it on the back of an envelope, and that's basically a spreadsheet."
The list is annoyingly reasonable: somebody carries my bag, somebody gets my notes, I sit where there's space on my left, and if I'm still upright by three o'clock, I've exceeded expectations.
"I can carry a bag."
"You can carry a bag," Declan agrees from the corridor. "Then your shoulder goes and you're in the infirmary again and Bergstrom tells all of us off, and I'd rather be told off for something I enjoyed."
At eleven, Bergstrom removes the dressing, checks the open wound, and cleans it again. She says satisfactory, then signs a note saying I may attend classes as tolerated. No physical training. No shifting. Bergstrom decides when I'm cleared, not me.
"And the meeting with the Chancellor," she says, handing me the note. "Are you well enough for that this morning, or would you like me to say you aren't?"
"You'd do that?"
"I'd enjoy it," Bergstrom says.
Falken’s office has three chairs in front of the desk. Freya drags another one over by the door and opens her notebook, because I asked for a witness and she was standing in the corridor before I’d finished the sentence.
Jon is already there. He looks like he’s slept about as much as I have.
“I’ll keep this brief,” Falken says. “Professor Matthias came to me early this morning and formally disclosed that he believes you are his mate, although the bond between you remains unsealed.”
I look at Jon.
He meets my eyes.
“He also asked to be removed from every decision that could affect your standing here,” Falken continues. “I agreed.”
“You asked for this?”
“Yes,” Jon says.
No hesitation.
Falken slides a document across the desk. “As of this morning, Professor Matthias has no authority over your grades, evaluations, training, placement, housing, discipline, scholarship status, or continued enrollment.”
I pick up the document. Jon’s signature is already at the bottom.
“Those decisions pass to a rotating panel of three faculty members who don’t currently teach, supervise, house, or assess you,” Falken says.
“Professor Matthias will not advise the panel, recommend an outcome, or have a quiet word with a colleague. If someone asks for his opinion, he will decline to give one.”
“Understood,” Jon says.
“Your next practical assessment will be set and marked by another instructor once the infirmary clears you,” Falken tells me. “The result goes directly to the panel. Professor Matthias will learn your score when the rest of the faculty does.”
“He’s still allowed to think I’m good at it.”
“He’s allowed to think whatever he likes. He isn’t allowed to write it anywhere that counts.”
Jon’s mouth moves slightly. Falken ignores it.
“This is not a judgment on Professor Matthias’s conduct,” Falken says. “The conflict exists whether he acts on it or not. Removing his authority protects your academic standing and prevents every favorable decision from becoming evidence against both of you.”
“And what doesn’t change?”
“Nearly everything else. He remains a member of the faculty. You remain a student. You’re both on this campus, and people will talk. The Council may impose conditions I don’t control.” Falken looks from Jon to me. “I have removed his authority over you. Nobody should mistake that for permission.”
There’s the part I expected.
“Understood,” Jon says.
Falken stands and picks up the next folder on his desk. “Miss Nordlund, thank you for attending. Miss Miller, you’re twelve minutes late for History.”
Freya is through the door first, already writing something.
Jon and I end up alone in the dead space by the window where two corridors meet.
“When did you go to Falken?” I ask.
“After Bergstrom finished treating you.”
“That was the middle of the night.”
“I wasn’t sleeping.”
Neither was anyone else.
“Why now?”
Jon looks down the corridor, but there’s nobody close enough to hear us.
“Because while you were missing, I wasn’t looking for a student.” His eyes return to mine. “I was looking for you. I used every contact and every scrap of authority I had, and I would do it again. I can’t claim impartiality after that.”
I don’t know what to say. Unfortunately, Jon does.
“Are you going to be sensible about your shoulder?”
“You’re no longer allowed to have an opinion about my training.”
“I don’t. I have an opinion about whether you’ll be sensible, which is a separate subject and one I’m still permitted to discuss.”
“And?”
“You won’t be.”
I laugh, and pain catches in my shoulder. Jon takes my good elbow and holds it until the pain passes.
He’s standing closer than he used to. Close enough that I can see he missed a strip beside his jaw when he shaved and that his collar is crooked. I want to straighten it badly enough that I put my hand in my pocket.
“Go to class,” he says.
“That’s not your call anymore.”
“No,” Jon agrees. “It’s merely a suggestion.”
Conversation dies when I walk into Faris’s lecture hall. Forty people suddenly find their notes fascinating.
I have to walk the length of the room with Sophia on my right and Declan behind me carrying my bag.
Most people look at the sling. Natasha looks at my wrist.
She waits until I’m sitting. “Is that really a fourth mark?”
“Yes.”
“Please don’t tell me the new one belongs to another prince.”
I stare at her.
“I was kidnapped, shot, and dragged up a mountain, and you’re worried I’ve taken another prince off the market?”
Someone behind her laughs. Natasha’s face tightens.
“I was only asking.”
“No. You were counting.”
“Enough,” Faris says from the front of the room. “Miss Miller, page two-forty.”
We're on the years after the war — the Council's formation, the treaty structure, the settlement of who sat where. It's the least contested part of the period, but I now know the settlement rests on an account of the war that may have been altered.
Then she asks why the arrangement needed so many written safeguards between Houses that had just fought on the same side. The room goes silent. Nobody wants to answer first.
I put my right hand up.
"Because winning together isn't the same as trusting each other. They'd just watched what a coalition could do to a House. Every one of them knew it could be done again, and there were only three of them left."
Faris considers this.
"Correct. Support it," she says. "Find me two provisions in your reading that only make sense if the parties expected each other to cheat, and be ready to name them next time."
My notebook slides when I try to write.
Declan reaches over and holds the corner flat with two fingers, and goes back to his own page.
"I'll copy mine out for you after," he says, when I look at him.
"Thank you Declan."
"I’ve got the notes from yesterday too." He doesn't look up. "I didn't know if you'd want them."
At the end Faris says, "Miss Miller," and I brace for it and wait while everyone files out of class.
"Your essay was due while you were away. We'll agree on a new deadline once you've had some rest." She snaps her folder shut. "Don't tell the others. I'm not renegotiating twenty deadlines."
Sophia is waiting at the door and marches me back to the suite after class. I sleep until late afternoon.
When I wake, my shoulder is throbbing. I lie there for a while, remembering the net dropping over me and how slowly my body responded in the van. Four darts took me down. A zip tie nearly kept me there.
I want to know how to make myself harder to take next time.
Bergstrom said no training and no shifting. She didn’t say I couldn’t watch.
I hear the arena before I reach the double doors—shoes striking the mats, Voss calling corrections, and someone hitting the floor hard enough to make the others laugh.
Torres is sparring with Declan near the center. Most of our class waits along the edge of the floor for their turn.
For the first time since I woke up, I’m thinking about footwork and not darts and a net.
"You can watch from the gallery," Voss says, arriving beside me. "You may not go on the floor, you may not demonstrate anything."
"Can I take notes?"
"You can take notes."
I take a seat in the gallery, borrow a pen, and start making notes.
Torres is faster than anybody on that floor and sometimes gets careless once he's ahead.
Voss comes up the stairs and reads over my shoulder without asking.
"Torres coasting," he says. "What made you think that?"
"Third exchange with Declan. He's ahead, and then he stopped moving his feet."
"He stops moving his feet because Declan stopped coming forward," Voss says. "Watch him again. Torres isn't coasting, he's waiting, and he's right to. I think your instinct is correct, but I did not see that in the Declan match."
"Then where?"
"You tell me. That's the exercise." He hands the notebook back. "Write me the paired-drill brief — every pairing on that floor, what each of them does under pressure, what you'd do about it. Hand it in before you're cleared."
"Is that a punishment?"
"It's the half of fighting most of you never learn, because you're all too busy enjoying the other half. And frankly it'll keep you off my floor."
Torres comes off the mats while I'm still writing, jogs up the gallery steps two at a time, and arrives in front of me sweating through his shirt with his sleeves shoved past the elbow.
"Verdict."
"Your guard drops when you're ahead."
"It does not."
"You think Declan's slow. Declan's patient. There's a difference and it's going to cost you."
Torres plants his hands on his hips and looks at me like the criticism turned him on.
"God, I missed you," he says.
"It was only one day!"
"Yeah." He leans down and kisses me, quick and when he straightens, his hand trails across my waist. "Eat something. I'll be there in twenty."
Renzo sees the roast potatoes and grabs my arm.
“The universe loves me. It’s giving me potatoes.”
“It’s giving everyone potatoes.”
“Don’t ruin this.”
He takes four, then puts two on my plate.
I look at him.
“What?”
“You gave me potatoes. Are you feeling okay?”
“You were kidnapped. I can be generous for one meal.”
“Should we write down the date?” Declan asks.
“Absolutely not. This never happened.”
Sophia is in the middle of telling Freya about an argument with her tutor that apparently lasted forty minutes and wandered through several unrelated subjects. Freya listens with a book propped against the water jug. Declan keeps passing food whenever somebody’s plate gets low.
A student two tables over is still staring at me. I eat one of Renzo’s potatoes and let them stare.
Ander comes in with his coat over his arm. He finds our table and walks straight toward us.
“Is this seat free?” It's the one on my right, because Declan has been keeping my left side clear all day. "It's yours," Declan says, and moves his bag. Ander sits beside me.
His knee rests against mine under the table. Neither of us moves away.
“Natasha asked about the fourth mark today,” I say.
“I heard.”
“That was fast.”
“Luftis is remarkably efficient when the information is none of anyone’s business.”
“She wanted to know if it belonged to another prince.”
“It does.”
I glance around the table. Everyone appears deeply invested in the argument over whether the fish is worse than the pie. Renzo is trying so hard not to look at us that he’s staring at the ceiling.
“Are you ready for everyone to know?” I ask.
Ander looks at my mouth and doesn’t hide that either.
“I came over here to sit beside you.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Yes,” he says. “I’m ready.”
I put my good hand on the table, palm up.
Ander looks at it, then places his hand in mine and closes his fingers around it.
Nobody at the table says anything. Sophia smiles into her cup. Renzo continues studying the ceiling with the concentration of a man expecting answers to appear there.
“Pass the water,” Ander says.
Declan passes it. Ander takes the glass with his free hand and leaves our joined hands on the table where everyone can see them.