The One Who Goes First
They lost the road on the way to the village, and the detour ate the hours. They lingered once they arrived, too, so it was evening before they made it back.
Chris looked into the dining room and found Juan laying out supper. The man was sullen on an ordinary day, but today anyone could see he had gone well past sullen. A vicious air clung about his shoulders, the look of someone who would bite if you so much as touched him.
Hungry as he was, Chris did not sit. He withdrew to the lounge, and a little later Juan came out of the dining room with tears cutting across his cheeks.
Crying. Why? What for?
Juan swept straight through the lounge and went outside.
What is wrong with him?
Chris was still tilting his head when Smith came in, looking oddly downcast.
"And what's got you so low?"
Smith puffed his cheeks full, then let the breath out in a sigh.
"This is shit."
Even his voice had gone flat.
"Did something happen at the dormitory?"
"Something happened, all right."
Chris went tense, certain some disaster had struck.
"What?"
"Alex... Alex... Alex..."
"Ah, that bastard caused trouble. I knew it. Did he grope Catherine?"
Alice said it as she came into the lounge.
"Chris, you really hate Alex. He isn't that rotten."
"No, that isn't what I—"
He was still scrambling for an excuse when Smith tossed the words out like a stone.
"Alex sensed mana."
At first it didn't register.
"Oh. Right. Alex sensed—"
Halfway through the sentence the meaning landed whole.
"He sensed mana? Alex did?"
Chris was genuinely stunned. Of everyone training in Lion Pavilion, he had been sure Prince Mark would be the first to feel mana.
He had no idea whether Mark was clever or stupid, talented or not, diligent or lazy, lucky or unlucky. He had only thought it in a vague way. A prince ought to be different. A prince ought to be special. That was what he had expected, and he was privately startled by his own prejudice. He had barely spared a thought for kings while he was a slave in Javier Barony, and he had barely spared one now, living under the same roof as a prince—yet somewhere along the way he had come to treat royalty as something set apart.
"Why did it have to be Alex."
He groaned it.
"The king of bad manners, sensing mana."
Alex was the person he disliked most in Lion Pavilion. He chose his words to wound, then went stiff with rage the moment anyone said something he didn't care to hear. A wreck of a character with two sets of scales.
"If a colleague in Lion Pavilion does well, that's a good thing. Congratulate him."
"You've got a generous heart," Smith said. "He doesn't think of us as colleagues."
"Jealousy only hurts us."
Alice turned the talk aside.
"Did you drop off the laundry?"
Chris still hadn't climbed out of the shock.
"Huh? What?"
"I asked if you dropped off the laundry."
"I did."
"Catherine's been fretting like mad. If those clothes shrink even a little, she's going to eat you alive."
Hearing that left him strangely uneasy.
Can I trust old man Stan? Ah, he'll manage. He will.
The arrow was already loosed, the water already spilled. There was no calling it back.
"Let's just eat."
The three of them, all born slaves, sat down together. Shocking news or not, they were hungry enough that the food tasted good, and they were eating their fill when the rest of their cohort came in.
Alex swaggered to his place, chin cocked, lip thrust out, a sight offensive to the eye.
"Slaves huddled up and eating first. Figures. Slaves move fast."
Chris let the nasty remark pass behind a smile.
"We starved from the time we were small, so we're touchy about mealtimes. Miss the hour and you go hungry all day."
He dipped his head a little and turned the subject.
"Sir Alex, I heard you sensed mana. Congratulations."
Alex shrugged.
"I knew I'd sense it. I thought it would take a day. It just came later than I expected."
Listen to him preen.
Chris sneered inwardly and pressed on.
"How did you sense it?"
"I just did it, and it worked."
On an ordinary day Alex only answered when he wanted something. He was in a good mood now, though, and he replied readily enough. Chris did not waste the opening. He poured the questions out.
"There must have been some trigger."
"It's hard to put into words. I was reciting the incantation, and at some point I could feel the mana drifting around me."
"What did it feel like?"
"I just thought, ah, so this is mana."
He waved an arm.
"The feeling isn't much different from air."
"Surely you can tell it from air."
"Well, yes. In winter, step out of a warm room and you feel the cold. The other way around, come in out of a cold wind and you feel the warmth. It's like that. There's air in the air that feels different."
I have no idea what he's saying.
"If you boil a lot of water, steam fills the room. Is it like that?"
"No."
"Like being underwater?"
"There isn't that much mana."
"This is difficult."
"If it were easy, every dog and cow would be a mage."
Catherine cut into the talk. She seemed far more concerned about the laundry she had entrusted to Chris than about Alex sensing mana.
"Did you drop off the laundry?"
"I left it with the finest specialist in Stratton."
"Stratton?"
"That's the name of the village."
Chris handed the bag back.
"Thanks for the use of it. Lend it to me again when I go to pick the laundry up."
"I'd rather not keep lending it out."
"Why?"
"It might get ruined."
"There was too much this time to shift it into another bag. Just this once."
"I suppose I haven't a choice."
"Thank you."
He settled the laundry as quickly as he could and turned his attention back to Alex.
"Before you sensed mana, did you do anything different from usual?"
The kindness Alex could spare for someone born a slave was smaller than a sauce dish. Once it had been no more than a mosquito's tear; his excellent mood had swollen it to that, and Chris's questions kept coming until the dish ran over.
"Sharing a table with slaves is deeply unpleasant. A once-in-a-lifetime honor for the likes of you, I'll grant. Shut your mouths and eat."
Chris did as he was told. He ate with conspicuous vigor, and Alex clicked his tongue. Mark seemed to have no appetite at all; he only stabbed at the roast lamb with his fork.
Five days later Chris paid two silver coins and collected the laundry from Stan General Store. He submitted it to Catherine's inspection wound tight with nerves, and she breathed out in relief and nodded. Two hours after that, Catherine succeeded in sensing mana.
When Alice asked how, and whether there had been any special cause, Catherine was said to have answered like this.
"I'd worried myself sick over the laundry. I'd braced for half my clothes to be ruined, and they came back beautifully done. The moment that worry lifted all at once, my heart felt light. Perhaps that had something to do with it."
Chris didn't believe it. Two hours earlier, when Catherine had passed the laundry, he had clenched a fist where she couldn't see and rejoiced. He had worried over those clothes far more than she had. If lightness of heart were the measure, his would have been ten times hers—and he had not sensed mana. Relief had done nothing.
That evening Alex sat across the table and glared at Catherine with a sour face. A commoner being second to sense mana seemed to sit badly with him. Mark and Tony never came down to eat at all. They said they had no appetite. Chris, as ever, ate with pleasure.
A month had passed since they learned the incantation from the Earth Mage William. At ten in the morning every apprentice was gathered in the lecture room. The mage had not yet appeared.
They had split back into their original six groups and were talking at a clamor. The subject was simple: who had sensed mana. Every other topic was sucked in that direction. A few students tried to start something else, but those threads withered at once, and the talk swung back to the problem of sensing mana.
In a month, the only ones in Lion Pavilion who had managed it were Alex and Catherine. The other squads were much the same—one, or two at most. Chris took comfort in that.
There's still plenty of time.
Soothing himself with the thought, he drifted among the other groups, hoping to overhear some omen or some knack. That was how he came to witness the clash between the nobles and the commoners. The two sides were quarreling over who had sensed it first.
The nobles insisted it was Alex. The commoners insisted it was Andrew. The argument heated by degrees until the lecture room was in an uproar, loud enough that Chris began to fear it might turn into a brawl. In the noise, no one noticed the mage come in.
"Quiet."
William's voice spread through the whole room. Only then did people begin, one by one, to mark his arrival, and the din ebbed a little. Taken altogether, it was still loud.
"Quiet."
He said it again, and this time anger edged the word. Chris, tense, kept his mouth shut tight. Others still had theirs open.
"Quiet!"
The shout burst from William, and at last the lecture room went silent. The air had sunk cold, and still one person, caught in the heat of the argument, could not close his mouth.
Henry Jefferson, second son of Count Jefferson, spoke.
"Welcome, Mage. Those lowborn wretches are lying."
"What lie?"
Henry had no sense for the room. He failed to read the warning laid under William's voice.
"Alex was plainly the first to sense mana, and they keep insisting Andrew was first."
"And why does that matter?"
"Those base creatures told a lie..."
William cut him off clean.
"The lies you tell among yourselves are of no importance."
Only then did Henry falter, catching the smell of something wrong.
"Then what is important?"
"My words. It is my words that matter. And you ignored them."
Henry swallowed.
"I did?"
"How many times did I tell you to be quiet?"
Sweat beaded on Henry's brow.
"Twice...?"
"Wrong. Three."
William swung his staff. At the back of the lecture room a plant was ripped whole from its pot, and the soil came flying and struck Henry in the face.
"Agh!"
He screamed in shock, but the scream could not last. Soil wrapped his face without a gap to breathe and cut the voice off as it tried to escape. Choking, he clawed at the dirt. He tried to tear it away, but it clung like glue and would not come off.
Henry thrashed and rolled on the floor. The struggling weakened by degrees, then stopped all at once. Strength left the limbs that fear and pain had bent. Henry suffocated, just like that.