Blood and Mud

Chapter 64: Chapter 64

Professor Orlov’s classroom was at the very top of the Old Observatory, up four flights of narrow, creaking wooden stairs that smelled of pigeon droppings and dry cedar.

Unlike the grand marble amphitheaters where hundreds of cadets fought for the front rows, Imperial Geography only had eleven students enrolled. Most of them were third-sons of merchant houses who needed a passing grade in cartography to manage family shipping lanes, plus two fourth-years who were already asleep with their boots propped up on their desks.

Nia and I took a long table near the arched windows. Outside, the afternoon wind pushed whitecaps across the surface of the lake.

”I take back what I said earlier,” Nia whispered, leaning back in her chair and letting out a contented sigh. ”This is the best room in the citadel. Nobody is trying to set anyone on fire.”

”Wait until he hands out the blank maps,” I said, opening my leather notebook and laying out three charcoal pencils and a brass ruler I had bought from the campus stationer.

Professor Orlov walked in two minutes after the bell, carrying a Tin mug of steaming chicory coffee and a rolled-up canvas map tucked under his elbow. He was a wiry man in his sixties with a crooked nose and three fingers missing on his left hand—lost to frostbite during the third northern survey expedition thirty years ago.

He didn’t bother with a greeting. He hooked the canvas loop over a nail on the blackboard, let the map unroll with a loud clack, and took a slow sip from his mug.

”The Western Marches,” Orlov said, his voice gravelly and conversational. ”Specifically, the limestone shelf between the Red River and the Republic border towns. Look at the contour lines around the pass at Oakhaven. If you are commanding a supply train of forty wagons in late October, which road do you take? The valley highway, or the ridge trail?”

A pudgy boy in the front row raised his hand. ”The valley highway, sir. It’s paved, and the grade is flat for the oxen.”

Orlov stared at him over the rim of his tin mug. ”Congratulations, Cadet Harlan. Your oxen are comfortable for three days, and on the fourth day, the autumn rains hit the limestone shelf above you. Because limestone doesn’t absorb runoff like topsoil, the entire valley turns into four feet of liquid mud in six hours. Your wagons sink to their hubs, Republic light cavalry rides along the dry ridge above your head, and they shoot your horses for winter meat. You’re dead.”

Harlan sank an inch lower in his seat.

Orlov tapped the wooden pointer against the upper contour lines on the canvas. ”Generals love paved roads because generals ride in carriages. Soldiers look at the drainage basins. Who can tell me where the water goes when the snow melts on the eastern face of the Grey Peaks?”

I didn’t raise my hand, mostly because I wasn’t used to classroom habits, so I just spoke up from the back row. ”It runs south into the sinkholes above the marshland. That’s why the caves three miles north of Shepfold flood every spring even when it doesn’t rain locally.”

Orlov paused, turning his head to squint at me in the back row. ”You’ve been down in the sinkholes, Cadet?”

”Yes, sir. For about two weeks.”

”Miserable place, isn’t it?”

”Smells like wet rot,” I agreed. ”And the stone sweats too much to light a fire.”

”Because of the shale layers trapping the groundwater,” Orlov said, nodding in satisfaction. ”Write that down, the rest of you. What the Lieutenant just told you isn’t in your first-year primer, and it’ll save your boots from rotting off your feet if the High Command ever ships you south.”

For the next hour, Orlov walked us through the river systems of the southern coast and how to calculate elevation using a plumb line and a pocket mirror.

I didn’t have to force myself to focus the way I did in Etiquette. For the first time in my life, the places I had marched through weren’t just dark, nameless stretches of dirt where people died. On Orlov’s canvas, they had borders, names, and reasons for being the way they were. As I copied the mountain passes into my notebook with careful, neat strokes of charcoal, I traced the blank ink beyond the Imperial border—the vast, unmapped white spaces to the east labeled The Salt Wastes, and the jagged coastline of the Free Isles to the south.

Nia leaned over my shoulder, watching me shade in a mountain range. ”You’re actually smiling,” she murmured under her breath so only I could hear. ”It’s tiny, and a little frightening, but that’s definitely a smile.”

”I’m drawing a ridge,” I muttered, immediately schooling my face back into a flat line, though my chest felt strangely light. ”Pay attention to your own paper. Your coastline looks like a potato.”

”It’s an artistic interpretation of the peninsula,” Nia whispered back, grinning as she smudged her charcoal with her thumb.

That evening after dinner, I met Luckas in one of the small stone courtyards behind the first-year practice halls.

The sun had already gone down, leaving the sky a deep bruised purple above the towers, and the air was cold enough to turn our breath into faint puffs of white mist. Luckas was sitting cross-legged on a flat stone bench with two unlit tallow candles between his knees, wearing a simple wool sweater over his uniform trousers instead of his usual tailored coat.

”You’re two minutes early,” he said, looking up as my boots crunched on the gravel. ”I thought vanguard officers only showed up at the exact second an order was given.”

”If you show up on time in the 7th, the sergeant makes you dig the latrine trench,” I said, sitting down on the cold stone opposite him. ”What are the candles for?”

”Wax is cheaper than Professor Maren’s glass leaves,” Luckas said, picking up one of the candles and setting it between us. ”Hold out your left hand. Palm up.”

I pulled off my leather glove, tucked it under my knee, and held my bare hand out between us.

Luckas reached out and tapped two fingers lightly against the center of my collarbone, then traced a line down to the inside of my left elbow, and finally to my wrist. His hands were warm, calloused along the base of the fingers from years of longsword drills, though his nails were clean and neatly trimmed.

”When you pull your Ember in a fight, you go straight from your chest to your hand,” he explained, his voice dropping its usual playful drawl and settling into the focused tone of a student who actually knew his craft. ”It’s fast, and it hits hard, like opening a floodgate. That’s fine when you’re swinging four pounds of runic steel. It’s terrible when you’re trying to do precision work.”

”So how do I slow it down?”

”Valves,” he said simply. ”My old tutor used to make me sit in a cold bath for an hour and imagine three locked doors between my lungs and my fingers. One at the shoulder, one at the elbow, one at the wrist. Don’t push the heat all the way to your palm. Pull a small breath of it up to your shoulder, stop, and wait until you count three heartbeats. Only let a fraction through to your elbow. Wait three more beats. Then let what’s left trickle into your fingertips.”

I looked down at my open palm. ”That sounds slow. If someone is trying to kill me—”

”Nobody is trying to kill this candle, Elvit,” Luckas said, tapping the wax cylinder with his knuckle. ”Try it. Count your heartbeats.”

I closed my eyes and drew in a slow breath of the crisp night air.

I reached down into the heavy, constant warmth sitting behind my ribs. Usually, touching it felt like kicking open a furnace door; my muscles would automatically tense, ready to jump or swing. This time, as the heat surged up toward my left arm, I clamped down on it right at my shoulder joint.

It felt unnatural, like holding back a sneeze. My shoulder muscles twitched.

One. Two. Three.

I let a thin thread of warmth slip past my shoulder, down to the crook of my elbow, and stopped it again. The excess heat bled harmlessly out through the wool sleeve of my tunic.

One. Two. Three.

I opened the last mental gate at my wrist and opened my eyes.

Sitting right in the center of my scarred palm was a tiny, stable bead of orange light, no larger than a dried pea. It didn’t hiss, it didn’t flare, and it didn’t trigger the cold defensive hum of the rune on my right arm.

”Now touch the wick,” Luckas said quietly. ”Don’t push. Just let the heat sit against the string.”

I leaned forward and touched my index finger to the tallow candle. For a second nothing happened; then a thin curl of white smoke rose from the cotton wick, and a small, steady yellow flame flickered to life.

The candle didn’t melt in half. The wax didn’t explode. It just burned quietly between us, lighting up the warm gold flecks in Luckas’s eyes.

I let the remaining heat fade from my hand and stared at the tiny flame. ”That’s it?”

”That’s it,” Luckas smiled—not his broad, showy grin for the courtyard crowds, just a genuine, pleased look. ”Do that fifty times before Friday, and Maren won’t have a single excuse to dock your rank points.”

”Thanks, Luckas,” I said, picking up my glove. ”Seriously. That helped.”

”Anytime, Lieutenant,” he said, leaning back on his hands and looking up at the dark outline of the spires. ”You taught me not to get my wrist broken by a tree branch. Call us even.”

The goodwill of the quiet evening didn’t survive past nine o’clock the next morning.

On Wednesdays, all four sections of the first-year class—along with half the second-years—reported to the Bramble for Practical Squad Tactics.

The Bramble wasn’t an arena; it was a square mile of rough, walled-off wilderness on the northern edge of the Academy island, filled with steep granite gullies, thickets of thorny scrub oak, and mud streams fed by the lake.

Master Toris stood on a wooden watchtower overlooking the staging yard, a brass speaking trumpet in one hand and a clipboard in the other. Below him, fifty four-person squads stood in the damp grass, wearing padded leather training vests over their grey uniforms and carrying blunted ash-wood weapons smeared with red marking chalk along the edges.

”The rules are the same as last week!” Toris shouted through the brass horn. ”Two squads per sector! Each squad starts at opposite ends of the ravine with an iron pennant planted at their base camp. You take the enemy’s pennant, or you chalk-mark all four of their cadets across the torso or neck! A red chalk stripe across the chest means you are dead! Dead cadets sit down on the dirt and keep their mouths shut until the whistle blows! Uncontrolled Ember bursts that cause second-degree burns will result in a week of latrine duty!”

He lowered the horn and flipped a page on his clipboard.

”Sector Four: First-Year Squad Seven—Elvit, Vance, Kaelen, Valerius!” Toris barked. A murmur went through the assembled students around us. ”You are matched against Second-Year Squad Two—Hollis, Vane-Croft, Miller, and Drev!”

Beside me, Nia winced, tightening the straps of her padded vest. ”Darian Hollis,” she muttered, tightening her grip on her wooden short-spear. ”He’s Rank Eighteen overall. His whole squad has been fighting together since last autumn.”

Across the staging yard, four second-year cadets stepped toward the Sector Four gate.

Their leader, Darian Hollis, was a tall, squarely built nineteen-year-old with cropped brown hair and a heavy two-handed wooden greatsword resting on his shoulder. He didn’t sneer at us or make any stupid remarks about border mud. Instead, he looked at the four of us with the calm, measuring gaze of a veteran upperclassman, his eyes lingering briefly on Nia’s light spear and my wooden bastard sword before he turned and spoke quietly to his three teammates.

”He’s smart,” Kaelen observed quietly, testing the weight of four blunt leather-wrapped throwing weights in his palm. ”That’s much worse than the angry ones.”

Ten minutes later, we stood at the northern mouth of Sector Four, beside a three-foot iron pole stuck into a mossy dirt bank. A sharp blast from Toris’s silver whistle echoed across the trees, signaling the start of the twenty-minute match.

Nobody moved immediately.

I crouched down on one knee and looked at the terrain ahead of us. The ravine was about four hundred yards long, split down the middle by a knee-deep creek choked with waist-high ferns and grey boulders. To the left, the ground rose into a steep, rocky ridge covered in dry pine needles; to the right, a dense thicket of thorn bushes made moving in formation nearly impossible.

”How do we play it?” Luckas asked, resting his wooden longsword against his shoulder. ”If you and I push straight up the creek bed together, they don’t have the physical power to stop us head-on.”

”Hollis knows that,” I said, looking up at the ridge on our left. ”Everyone in this school watched me break Gael’s sword last month, and they know you’re Rank Four. Darian isn’t going to fight us in the creek bed. How would you beat us if you were him?”

Nia spoke up immediately, pointing toward the rocky ridge. ”Points. You don’t have to beat Rank Three and Rank Four to win the exercise—you just have to grab our iron flag while we’re busy, or take out the weakest member of our squad to force a four-on-three surround.” She tapped her own padded chest. ”That’s me. If I were Hollis, I’d put two heavy blockers in the creek to stall you and Luckas with ranged Ember, and send my two fastest runners along the ridge to take our flag and chalk me out.”

I looked at Nia and nodded. ”Good. So we let him think that’s working.”

I pulled off my dark grey Academy cloak with the silver Rank Three clasp on the collar and tossed it to Nia.

”Put that on and pull the hood up,” I told her. ”You’re roughly my height from two hundred yards away if you keep your shoulders wide. Luckas, you and Nia walk right down the center of the creek bed. Make noise. Let your sword smoke a little so they can track you through the trees. When their blockers engage you from range, drop behind the boulders and stall.”

”Wait,” Luckas frowned. ”If Nia is pretending to be you down in the creek, where are you?”

”Up on the ridge with Kaelen,” I said, picking up my heavy wooden bastard sword. ”Waiting for Darian.”

We split up immediately.

Kaelen and I didn’t use the main trail up the ridge; we climbed a steep rainwater gully choked with tangled tree roots, keeping our heads below the skyline. Because I wasn’t wearing my flapping cloak, the grey wool of my tunic blended cleanly against the granite rocks.

We reached the spine of the ridge in four minutes and crouched behind a fallen pine trunk smeared with green lichen.

Down below in the ravine, right on cue, a bright orange flare of heat rose from the creek bed as Luckas deliberately set a patch of wet ferns smoking, shouting something loud and obnoxious to Nia about watching the left bank.

Fifty yards ahead of us on the ridge trail, bushes rustled.

Two figures in second-year uniforms came trotting down the narrow deer path at a fast, disciplined clip. Leading was Darian Hollis himself, his wooden greatsword held low, followed closely by a wiry girl carrying a pair of chalked hunting daggers—Tessa Miller, one of the fastest sprinters in the second-year class.

Darian stopped briefly on a rock outcropping, peering down through the pines into the ravine. He saw Luckas’s bright midnight-blue hair and the hooded figure wearing the Rank Three cloak crouched behind a boulder beside him, pinned down by streams of compressed wind and fire balls thrown by Darian’s other two teammates in the brush below.

”She’s staying back with Vance to guard their flank,” Darian said quietly to Tessa. ”Their scout is probably hiding near their flag with the Valerius girl. We hit the camp hard, knock out Valerius, and pull the pin before the Lieutenant can climb this hill.”

”Got it,” Tessa whispered.

They started running again, heading straight along the narrow path by our fallen pine log.

I didn’t use the Rune of Antiquity. I didn’t need to waste the headache on wooden swords. I just waited until Darian’s heavy boot hit the patch of loose pine needles three feet from my shoulder, and stood up.

Tessa gasped, her eyes going wide as I rose out of the brush like a wall of grey wool.

Darian’s instincts were genuinely good. Even caught completely by surprise, he didn’t freeze; he pivoted on his back foot and swung his two-handed ash sword in a hard, whistling arc aimed at my ribs, pushing a burst of kinetic Ember into his arms to speed up the blow.

If I had tried to trade blows with a heavy greatsword using a one-handed grip, the chalk edge would have clipped my forearm. Instead, I remembered the terrain. The ridge path sloped sharply downward to Darian’s left, covered in slick, dry pine needles.

I stepped inside the arc of his swing, catching the thick wooden flat of his blade near the hilt with my left gauntlet before it could build momentum, and drove my right boot squarely into the side of his knee—not hard enough to tear the joint, just enough to shove his foot off the narrow dirt lip onto the pine needles.

His heel slipped immediately on the steep slope.

As his balance broke and his torso pitched forward, I swept the chalked edge of my wooden sword tightly across the back of his padded vest, leaving a thick, unmistakable smear of bright red dust from shoulder to shoulder.

Darian hit the dirt on his hands and knees, sliding four feet down the embankment before catching himself on a sapling.

Behind me, there was a brief scuffle of boots, a dull thwack of leather, and a muffled curse. I glanced back to see Tessa Miller standing frozen on the path with a thick red chalk circle stamped dead center over her collarbone, while Kaelen tucked his leather throwing weight back into his belt and stepped out from behind a pine tree with a second chalked wooden dagger held an inch from her ribs.

Darian looked down at the red chalk dust on his shoulder, then up at me standing on the ridge above him. He let out a long, disgusted sigh and leaned his forehead against the sapling.

”You swapped cloaks with Valerius,” he muttered.

”You didn’t check the gully on your way up,” I replied, resting my wooden sword on my shoulder. ”If you had looked at the mud at the bottom of the hill, you would’ve seen four sets of boot prints leaving the base camp, and only two going into the creek.”

”I’m a combat major, not a tracker,” Darian grumbled, though there wasn’t any real malice in it. He sat down properly on the pine needles, obeying the rules for ’dead’ cadets. ”Go on, then. Go finish off Milo and Drev before they realize we aren’t coming.”

It took us less than three minutes to wrap up the ravine.

With Darian and Tessa out of the match, Kaelen and I simply walked down the rear slope behind the remaining two second-years while they were busy throwing small fire bolts at Luckas’s boulder. Kaelen tagged the archer in the back with a throwing weight from twenty yards out, and when the last boy spun around to face us, Luckas vaulted over his boulder and tapped him across the chestplate with his wooden longsword.

Above the trees, Master Toris blew two long blasts on his silver whistle.

”Sector Four concluded!” the brass horn echoed across the woods. ”Time: eight minutes, forty seconds! Winner: First-Year Squad Seven!”

Down in the creek bed, Nia pushed the heavy grey hood back off her curls and grinned up at us, completely dry and unharmed. ”I make a terrible decoy, by the way. I didn’t even get to poke anyone with my spear.”

”You looked very menacing crouching behind that rock,” Luckas assured her, tossing his wooden sword from hand to hand as we walked back up the trail toward the staging gates, passing Darian Hollis on the way.

Darian stood up, brushing pine needles off his trousers. He caught my eye as we passed the gate. ”Next time we draw Sector Four, Lieutenant, I’m burning the whole ridge down before I walk up it.”

”Bring a map next time, Hollis,” I told him. ”It’s less work.”