“Oh? Let him do his own poisoning when he gets to it.”
“I don’t see how you two can joke about such things,” Arram retorted, shaking. He thought he was going to be sick.
“That’s because we’re old enough to have developed senses of humor,” Ozorne replied. “Maybe you’ll get one for your birthday.” Gently he ruffled Arram’s hair. “In the meantime, relax. We won’t poison anyone unless you ask us to, will we, sweetheart?”
Varice sighed. “Very well, but it would have been a lovely diversion from examinations. One can only remain wound up over books for so long before one has to do something wild.”
“Ozorne!” Lindhall shouted.
“My master calls,” Ozorne complained, and ran.
Varice picked up Arram’s hand and kissed it. “Don’t be angry with me,” she said. “I was trying to take your mind off the pain.”
Whether it was her suggestion and his panic, or her lips and perfume, she had certainly done that.
Preet croaked for food. Varice laughed. “Aren’t you a jealous thing!” she chided, removing a scrap of bread from her pocket. She offered it to Preet, who gobbled it. “You’re an even more jealous mistress than Prisca!”
“Prisca isn’t my mistress,” Arram said automatically—how absurd, to be thinking of mistresses at his age. Then he added, more woefully, “And she never gets jealous.”
“Because she knows you’re too honorable to cheat on her,” Varice reassured him. “Though only because she doesn’t understand you’re devoted to a scrawny little tree mite.” She walked down the hall as Preet screeched at her. “I said ‘tree mite’ and I meant it!” she called back over her shoulder.
“She’s the most amazing girl,” Arram murmured, picking Preet up on a finger so he could stroke her. The little bird preened.
Lindhall returned from his office. “I’ve sent a runner for a healing mage,” he told Arram. “I take it you don’t want to rouse questions from your teachers with that eye.”
Nausea welled up from Arram’s belly. He had to wait to swallow, and wait again, as Lindhall watched with concern. When he tried to speak, the master held up a hand and disappeared into the small kitchen down the hall.
When he returned, he bore a cup of tea. “Ginger, cinnamon, lemon, spearmint,” he told Arram, handing the cup to him. “It will soothe both your nausea and the aches from your eye and belly.”
Arram drank in tiny sips until the liquid was cooler, then in gulps. “It’s very good,” he said when he finished it.
Lindhall nodded. “I think you’ll find your head and belly to be far better in the morning. In the meantime, you may undertake the studies you can manage out here—with your friends, if they are willing. When you are ready to sleep, I’ll have one of the students manage Preet.”
Arram felt he should protest all this trouble being taken on his behalf, but he was rather sleepy—too much so to protest. He nodded off in the chair, waking only briefly when Ozorne returned to gather Preet. A blanket was placed over him at some point. He remembered nothing until the musical sound told him that it was an hour before dawn.
All the next day, in the classes they shared and when they met between classes, Ozorne complained. It was always the same thing: he didn’t understand how Arram survived each day without collapse if he woke frequently in the night to feed a tiny feathered tyrant. Ozorne informed them he could hardly stay awake. By the time they sat down for supper, his sorrow made Arram laugh so hard that tears came to his eyes.
It was there that Diop found them. Laman was nowhere in sight.
“What did you do, bribe someone?” he demanded hotly.
Varice looked up at him and frowned. “Goddess bless me, who bit you today?”
“Never you mind,” he snapped at her.
That brought both Arram and Ozorne to their feet. Varice exhaled. “Boys, I am perfectly capable of taking care of myself. Diop, for all your bragging about your splendid family, you are a guttersnipe,” Varice said. “My apologies to guttersnipes.”
Diop glared at her, then demanded of Ozorne, “Well? How did you do it? Who did you bribe?”
Ozorne gently brushed off the front of Diop’s robe until the older youth knocked his hand away. “I have no idea what you’re ranting about,” Ozorne murmured.
“No idea, he says,” Diop told everyone at the tables around them. The other students were doing a bad job of pretending not to eavesdrop. “No idea of a clutch of oafs coming into our quarters without permission, packing up the leftover prince and his bum boy here, leaving things all over the floor—no idea! You’re to be lodged with the masters, they said. You, no more than first-years in the Upper Academy, and not even legitimate first-years at that! Who did your sainted mother bribe, Prince Ozorne? Or did—”
Using a move Varice had taught him, Arram got Diop’s hand in his and shoved it up against the older boy’s wrist. Diop gasped: he seemed not to have known how painful a wrist could be when bent into a U.
“Walk,” Arram whispered to Diop. “Let’s walk to the door before the proctors get here.” Out of the corner of his eye he saw Varice and Ozorne rise to intercept the proctors. “Don’t call out,” Arram cautioned, “or I might get excited and break something.”
With all of his digging and juggling, his hands had gotten broad and strong. He might not have been able to trade punches with Diop, but his grip kept the older youth’s attention. Holding Diop’s hand in both of his, he steered his former roommate toward the nearest exit from the dining hall. When Diop opened his mouth to speak or shout, Arram pried the captive little finger away from the others, bending it backward. Diop gasped.
“You can choose which you’ll have broken,” Arram suggested. “Your wrist or your little finger. Right before examinations, too! The little finger would heal faster, of course, but all broken bones hurt for a time after they’re healed, did you know that?”
He deposited Diop outside the hall and waited to see what would happen next.
The older boy rubbed his freed hand, his mouth quivering. “This isn’t over!” he threatened like a villain in one of the old stories Arram loved to read.
Perhaps it was the knowledge that a god owed him a favor. Perhaps it was simply that he’d had enough. Arram didn’t know what caused him to shrug and say, “Do your best—if you think it’s useful. If I were you, though, I’d concentrate on my marks. From what I’ve been hearing, you’ll be lucky if you don’t have to retake half of your courses.”
He turned and walked back into the dining hall.