That night, Dalliance had nightmares.

  In the morning, the habitat’s spell began to wear off. He was told later he’d had five minutes of warning, but he’d been sleeping in fits of twenty or thirty minutes on, twenty or thirty minutes off all night, and he was tired. Which is the only way he was able to avoid the obnoxious screaming sound of the alarm waking him up.

  Which meant that the first thing Dalliance knew that morning was that he was falling.

  Not very far, on the other hand. He landed on the fallen bits of the portcullis—strange metal bars—and beneath them, the hard-packed dirt and cobblestones of an old and unmaintained roadway. He was very fortunate not to break any bones or die, some of which could be ascribed to the magic of the habitat, which, as he would find out later, advertised a ‘feather fall’ charm.

  But in fact, on this occasion, he didn’t feel any particular sort of forgiveness or wonder. Mostly on account of having been stabbed.

  The piece of metal was about two inches long, beveled on one side, and sharp as a blade on the other two, forming a triangle. It had been the very corner part of one of the bars which had broken.

  Dalliance pulled it warily from his arm but found the wound, having been created by a very sharp implement, did not bleed terribly. After staggering toward the magazine while holding one hand clapped to his forearm for a while, he observed that the bleeding was slowing, although from the feel of it, his bruises were only just developing.

  The piece of metal was interesting, though. The one side was black, but the cross-section was only black paper-thin deep, whereupon it gleamed like brass or bronze and had a strangely regular, speckled pattern, like a checkerboard. Dalliance did not know very much about metallurgy, but this seemed special.

  It wouldn’t occur to him until later that it was the exact shape of a spearhead.

  Sliding the two-toned bit of metal into his pocket proved to be a mistake. It cut right through. In the end, Dalliance managed to wrap it in a bit of bandage from his hand, which, he had to admit, had been hurting him less of late and probably didn't need it anymore, not with the bleeding stopped.

  Thus wrapped, he was able to stick it in his pocket. A bit of a souvenir.

  It wouldn’t occur to him to think about what that looked like, either, until much later.

  The magazine was quiet.

  He approached it cautiously, but even approaching it cautiously h felt like an awfully large amount of work. It had him aback, the day before, to realize that Lackey was doing fine but was liable to attack him the instant he unlocked the door.

  “I am going to unlock this now,” Dalliance said loudly, and suited action to word.

  The spear came into view, as did the fact that the magazine floor contained a veritable lake of blood. On the opposite side of the room stood a weary but furious-looking Woebegone Lackey.

  “You tried to kill me,” he said flatly.

  “If I’d tried,” Dalliance said, “you’d be dead.” He replayed the words that had come out of his mouth to himself and compared them to the ones he had rehearsed walking up, which were more like apology and monstrous thing to do.

  “You blamed me,” Woebegone said. “You truly blamed me for what happened to Sterling.”

  Dalliance tried to remind himself that, locked in as he had been, there was no way for Woebegone to know any differently. But the angry part of his brain didn’t share his desire that he not be angry, or that he be reasonable.

  “I’ll tell him what you did,” Dalliance said. “I’ll tell Sterling. He’ll tell his father. You’ll never get an apprenticeship. Oh, wait. You’ll be joining the army, or is there some other path for a failed student I am unaware of? You can’t be a [Scribe]. Your parents haven’t any money.”

  Horrible thing to say. Terrible. He felt terrible. He was also racking his brain to see if there was anything else terrible he could say.

  “And it wasn’t just Sterling. It was Zenith. And Circe. Circe was very badly hurt.”

  It was an odd feeling, that of being so angry that you went through, quite to the other side, back to being quiet and civil. A thought occurred to him that possibly, this was a trait of his father's—his biological father, his birth father—because it certainly hadn’t been something with which he had been raised.

  “Whatever you’re trying, it won’t work,” said Woebegone.

  Dalliance stared at the boy, incredulity masking his real feeling of what am I doing?

  “Were you sweet on her, will you be honest?” Woebegone asked suddenly.

  Dalliance felt his face freeze, the reflexive "no" frozen with it.

  “I didn’t know,” Woebegone said after a pause. “I didn’t know she got hurt. But then, it’s not my job to stop her from getting hurt, is it?”

  Dalliance felt his fists clench into balls.

  “Oh, and what you did,” Woebegone said, “that’s murder. Who do you think you are to judge me? You are a murderer.”

  “It doesn’t work that way, you’re fine. Besides, it was the only way,” Dalliance tried.

  “No. I saw your face,” Woebegone replied. “Right before you shut the door. You didn’t think no such thing. You was doing a murder, and we both know it.”

  Dalliance flinched at the hate in the hard voice.

  “You left me in there all night,” Lackey said angrily. “You tried to kill me and left me for dead all night. And I’ve had all night to think about why. And I understand.

  “You’ve got a sister. I heard you talking, said you had to go to the capital to invite her to your little club when the Sisters gave her leave, on account of she is a novice now. Why is she a novice? A farm girl like her should be at home with her mom and pop. Except home ain’t real homey right now, I’m thinking. So you got a sister. Might as well be an orphan. And you want to protect her. You want a nice city job, and the salary and lifestyle that comes with it, to provide for her.

  “Now, I understand that. I have a Mam and my Grammy, and I’m the only person in the whole world that they have who will be providing for them. And I would watch your sister starve before I’d watch them starve. And you could say the same, the other way around. Because that’s what blood do for one another. Isn’t that right?”

  “And so now we stand here.” He reached out and tore the bloody spear from the bear. “You’ve tried to murder me. And I believe you were thinning the ranks. Sterling’s out of the picture, unless I am much mistaken. Circe is out of the picture. Knot was never really competition, I guess, but he removed himself from the equation as well. Three spots, now, after you pay for what you did. Charity, Effluvia, and myself.”

  “You hid like a coward,” Dalliance said. “You’re not getting any points for this hunt. I killed it.”

  “All of us just doing what we have to,” he reflected. “Sterling with your books—yeah, we knew. Saw them float past the cart on the way up. He’s not a [Pupil] anymore, obviously. Needs the edge over the competition, same as us. Same reason nobody waded in and got them for you.”

  That put Charity’s willingness to study with him in a bit of a different light.

  “All just doing what we have to,” Woebegone repeated. “Me, I couldn't afford to die here. Failure’s better than that.”

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Dalliance said nothing.

  “If you think about it,” he continued, “with Knot, Circe, Sterling, and you off the board, I’m in a pretty good place.”

  He hefted the bloody spear, looking at the light playing off the red and gray smears.

  “If that’s the options, then I guess I’ll get the third spot,” Lackey said softly.

  “You keep saying that!” Dalliance snapped, engaging his [Prediction], “But what makes….”

  He trailed off as he saw.

  Lackey hefted the spear. “On account of this is self-defense, at this point. It’s nothing personal.”

  Dalliance saw the future jolting and overlapping, one prediction atop another, too many to parse. In several of them, Woebegone rushed him, stabbing with the spear. In several, the point struck home.

  “I suppose I deserve that,” Dalliance murmured, stepping back out of easy reach.

  Concentrating proved difficult: harder than the night before, when he had first touched the winds. Zephyrus…Eurus…Boreas…Notus—he reached for the thing he had done before, invoked the names. He cast, and the world blasted outward.

  His body vanished. Or rather, it erupted into motion.

  He was where he had been standing, and a hundred feet above, and a hundred feet to either side. It was not sight, precisely, but a sheaf of perceptions: awareness might be the better word. He knew what was here, and what was slightly elsewhere, all layered upon one another. He felt leaves and grit lifted by the currents, spinning with him.

  His expansion tore Woebegone’s hair straight back and snapped his clothes against his frame, as though caught in the wake of some vast gust: because eighty pounds of Dalliance-as-wind was a vast gust. The boy did not stagger.

  Dalliance rose. Faster and faster, until the Hill fort dwindled to a little dark triangle atop a toy hill. Woebegone vanished from his awareness entirely. Dalliance wheeled once, gathering his scattered perceptions, then streamed away toward home.

  When he reached the Best homestead, he did not resume his body at once. Instead, he drifted through the windows, rustling textbook pages, sending chalk-sticks rolling from shelves, stirring the lamplight like a restless curtain.

  Mister Best looked up sharply from his accustomed seat, still surrounded by paperwork, even now.

  “Is someone here?” he asked.

  The skill began to fail: a sensation like warmth draining from the fingers. Dalliance condensed in an instant, coalescing on the very edge of the man’s desk, directly beneath his teacher’s now-broad grin. Papers from the precise stacks on the desk's edge fell like fallen leaves in the inward-collapsing gust, but his teacher didn't look upset. Far from it.

  “You made it back,” Mister Best said, voice relieved. “Very well done indeed.”

  “The others?”

  “The Temple’s house of healing, that you so recently vacated. The Mallows send their regards.”

  Dalliance fidgeted.

  "Do sit down," said Mister Best presently. "We should have a chat."

  Dalliance claimed his accustomed seat, moving with reluctance. The muscles he hadn't realized were bruised twinged, complaining as he settled himself into place.

  His teacher set his papers aside and fixed Dalliance with a steady, almost sorrowful look.

  “Dalliance,” he began, “Charity has told me—reluctantly, and with considerable distress—that you drove a bear into a small room and locked the door behind it, leaving your fellow student trapped inside.”

  “I did,” Dalliance said. "But with a place to hide, and I warned him."

  “And you believe, on the strength of your skill, that he was destined to survive. Thus, in your mind, this becomes a forgivable act.”

  “I don't know. I did that, though.”

  A faint rustle of pages was the only sound in the room. “I need not tell you that he will not see it that way. Least of all because I suspect he does not know about your skill at all; you have been scrupulous about keeping it quiet.”

  “Yes, Mister Best.”

  “In any event,” his teacher continued, “I must be painfully clear. Your skill shows you the future as it would unfold if no one altered their decisions. But people do change their minds. Constantly. As you have perhaps noticed.”

  “I—” Dalliance began.

  “Do not interrupt,” Mister Best said, not harshly but with a precision that halted him at once. “You endangered his life.”

  “He endangered our lives!” Dalliance shot back. “He ran away and hid and left us to die.”

  “Cowardice is an ugly thing,” Mister Best said. “It would not have justified his death. Which, I will stress, you did avoid.”

  “He’s fine. He had somewhere to hide.”

  “And you knew that. I am aware.”

  “Then?”

  “Then all you have done,” Mister Best said quietly, “is torment your fellow student, with the fear of the moment.”

  “I told him,” Dalliance protested. “I did tell him.”

  Mister Best opened a drawer, withdrew a slip of paper with a single notation, and tapped it with a fingertip. “I have translated your trait. It took some doing. This may illuminate why telling him might not have proved effective."

  Dalliance took it in shaking hands, but didn't read it, yet.

  “In plain speech: your trait says that your skill will be greatly enhanced, and you will be allowed to follow a thread of possibility to its end; but no one will believe you about what you discover if they could not have reasoned it out for themselves.”

  Dalliance stared at him. “That sounds like a curse.”

  “Indeed.”

  “But—then he couldn’t have believed me. Not ever.”

  “Oh,” Mister Best said, leaning back a little, “when the weight of history stands behind a man’s word, he need not be believed instinctively to be heeded. Earnest manages it daily, as you may have observed.”

  Dalliance swallowed. “But he had no way to win. And I locked him in a room with a bear.”

  “Admittedly,” Mister Best said, “his cowardice was his own doing. Had he not fled, he would not have been in that room at all. Being labelled a 'coward' will be a hard penance in of itself, hereafter.”

  “He tried to stab me,” Dalliance noted.

  “I am sure,” Mister Best said, “that he believed you meant to kill him—if not by stated intent, then by that implicit in your actions.”

  A long pause. Dust motes drifted in the slanted afternoon light.

  “And that is where we must leave his attempt on your life,” Mister Best said at last. “Let it lie. You each believed one another, in the height of your passions, to be the attacked party. If he renews his attempts, you may call upon me, as I shall tell him to do. Or, at the furthest extremity, continue as you have, I suppose.”

  He allowed himself a long, weary breath. “Leaving these as mere bygones would be the best solution.”

  He stood and began to pace. “A thought,” he suggested.

  Dalliance watched him uncertainly.

  “My purpose,” Mister Best said, “is not only to set the scale of things rightly, to diminish your anger, and his, but to also put matters into perspective, and attempt to shape your future behavior. To wit: do not endanger fellow students, if you can avoid it. But you may benefit from some perspective concerning his behavior, and your own:"

  Dalliance nodded.

  “And so: when I undertook my own first Hunt, I carried a boar spear. By the end, I armed myself with daggers and a rapier.”

  “I thought those were for fighting people,” Dalliance said.

  “They are.”

  He folded his hands. “Yours is an extraordinary cohort. Even if one of you harbors murderous thoughts, you remain better than the worst. ‘Who knows what evil dwells in the hearts of men? It emerges only when given the cause’.”

  He folded his hands behind his back.

  “It is only to be expected that children, raised as you are, seeing the outcomes of Code Duello, might not understand the value of human life. Not to mention the Hunts, the Wall, etcetera. So: a disambiguation.”

  He paused, studying the boy’s face with the same careful gravity one gives a cracked vase.

  “A duel, Dalliance, is a sanctioned quarrel, bounded by rules, witnessed by officers, and concluded the moment one party yields. It is, in theory, a civilised barbarity. One may question its civilisation, but there are boundaries.”

  “I know the difference,” Dalliance said quietly. “He’d have been murdering me. And . . . if he’d died, I’d have done, but—” and here his voice sped up, words tumbling out in a rush, “He didn’t. I didn’t want to die, or anyone else to.”

  “Motives have the most effect prior to action,” Mister Best commented. “Never mind. We shall talk on this in more detail after dinner. First, I must fetch Mister Lackey and attempt to pacify his righteous anger.” A pointed look.

  “Sorry,” Dalliance said miserably.

  “One hopes. Nevertheless, I am glad to see you returned safely.”