The frogs chirruped, a piercing little modulation, reedy and cheerful. Dalliance could see the trajectory of his friend's next leap just as the frogs were fleeing in every direction.
"Left!" Dalliance strode forward.
Earnest jumped left, but with too great a delay, and missed the frog. Trying to push past the doubt.
"That really sucks," Earnest growled, climbing up the bank and sitting with his legs dangling in the cool water. He splashed a foot idly. "Why does the System even do that?"
Dalliance had asked Charity that same question. "No one apparently knows. At least the gods' names are on some of the system traits it gives out, but the logic for granting them—and whether they’re good or bad—doesn’t seem to be consistent."
"So you got a bespoke curse?" Earnest asked.
Dalliance hemmed before answering. "More or less."
He probably couldn’t have beaten the bear without it, he knew. He wondered if that made it a curse, as such.
Earnest attempted to skip a pebble, which plopped into the water instead, vanishing into the depths.
"Seen that coming," Dalliance said. He’d been working on flipping through the different threads he could see instead of getting stuck watching just one. He could still go forward a few minutes before dropping a thread and picking up a new one. It just took practice.
"Uh-huh," Earnest said, changing the subject. "SO: Lackey looked like he'd lost a fight."
Dalliance grinned openly, able to be completely transparent with his friend. "I left him in a tree," he admitted. "Think he fell out of it."
"I saw you move Circe. Put her down on the wall. Do you have to put someone down?"
Dalliance shook his head. "I don’t think so."
Earnest scowled. "For all that I would never give up my faculty with the cards willingly, sometimes I do wish I could just do some hocus-pocus."
"Well," Dalliance offered, "there’s probably a prestige on Tier-Up. Seer sounds magical to me."
Earnest rolled his eyes. "I guess I’ll find out soon. Next week, I'll start as an acolyte."
He looked dour as a mourner, "I've got my robes from my patron's brother, and I guess while you’re learning the fundamental forces of the universe," he said, quoting Mister Best's verbiage, "I will be going door-to-door, checking on widows and orphans, listening to last bequests, bringing tinctures to the sick, collecting alms for the poor . . . and listening to the clergy give judgments."
That last one sounded almost like a question.
"You're not sure?" Dalliance asked.
"Well," he admitted, "I don’t understand why it’s useful for me to sit there listening to seniors say whether arguing's valid or not."
"You could be a senior one day," Dalliance suggested.
"I will be a [Seer]," Earnest corrected him. "That means Dowser. I’m not going to be one of the Gremantle clergy, so what’s the point?"
Dalliance shrugged. The wind whistled in a friendly fashion as it slipped past his ears.
"No," Mister Best said harshly. "Absolutely not.”
“You cannot demand a reversal of my decision," Parsimony Pleasant said in quick, emotionless tones, the words pattering one close upon another's heels. "It’s not for you to decide. As auditor, it is my duty to find appropriate stakes to be levied at our contestants."
"They are children, no matter their track record thus far," Mister Best countered.
"It is a lone ghoul.There is only so much harm something so slow and torpid will be able to inflict upon such a very capable group as this. They are in peril, I agree. But life is perilous—surely we must give them every chance to reach their best level of capacity prior to entering upon the Wall?"
Dalliance was listening in, and he knew he wasn’t supposed to. But, with his back against the back of the closet in the one-room schoolhouse, the voice of the wizard-and-auditor visiting Mister Best was perfectly clear.
A ghoul.
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"I won’t stand idly by and watch you murder an entire class." Mister Best's words were soft with disgust.
Parsimony nearly laughed. "Murder? I hear that word has been tossed around a lot of late." He tilted his head, a thin, humourless smile playing on his lips. "Do you know, in my own class, I led my ragtag band to victory over a hydra."
"I'm sure you did," Mister Best said noncommittally.
"It is the nature of the exceptional to elevate their peers," Parsimony continued, his tone lecturing. "And it is the nature of the commons, in such rarefied air, to struggle. But that is the purpose," he said, emphasizing the word.
"So that the Empire may have more fat cats like yourself?" Mister Best countered.
Parsimony's chuckle was an unpleasant thing. "As if you’re any better? One does not rise to privilege without risking a certain amount of collateral damage."
"You’re using terms to dehumanize them," Mister Best said. "Say what you mean, plainly. The less talented are disposable."
"The less talented are incentivization to excel," Parsimony corrected, his tone cool and precise. "The young heroes of the Empire will surely do their best to preserve the lives of all of their classmates. Will they not?"
Mister Best did not reply.
Parsimony laughed again, a sound devoid of warmth. "Oh ho! Too close to home, that one?" he said jovially. "Whetted your own daggers, did you not? It seems to me enough prevaricating about the bush. One ghoul. If the Rather boy is as exceptional as you claim, it may well be they all come out alive."
He didn’t even sound sinister. Just . . . businesslike. It was somehow worse.
"What is your stake in all of this?" Mister Best asked, his voice different now, contemplative. "Why do you care if someone gets an easy ride to King's College?”
“Aside from my mandate," Pleasant said casually, "which would have sufficed by itself?”
Mister Best made an affirmative noise. “The cohort must tier up, or you face censure. But this much is true every year. What’s changed?”
I’m his son, Dalliance thought, numbly.
"I can’t think of anything personally," Pleasant said after a moment.
Dalliance's thoughts were in a whirl. He knew the wizard knew about him, and Whimsy. He knew he was pushing them harder.
By the time the wizard finally left, with a "Good day, schoolmaster", Dalliance was bursting with questions.
Parsimony closed the door gently behind him, his light footfalls trailing off the porch and down the steps with a jaunty staccato. Dalliance counted to sixty before emerging.
"What’s so bad about a ghoul?" Dalliance asked.
Mister Best put his face in his hands. "Dalliance . . ." He didn’t look angry now, just weary. "There’s such a thing as privacy.
“It concerns me, doesn't it?"
"What?"
“This. It’s about me. So it shouldn’t be private.”
"And you predicted it would be about you, did you?" asked Mister Best snappishly, before mastering himself. “I doubt that very much.”
He had not, no. Not enough lead time to get to the closet . . . he’d just happened to be sleeping off Missus Best’s generous dinner serving.
"Dalliance," Mister Best said, his voice heavy. "It is the nature of children to indulge their curiosity, and on the whole, a good thing. But against people of power, it is a foolish risk."
He paused, letting the weight of his words sink in. "Here in the schoolroom, perhaps Parsimony did not feel the need to test for life-signs, but such is within his ability. And the conversation touched directly upon you, whom he knows to live here. Looking around would have been plausible. You took a grave risk, Dalliance."
Dalliance swallowed, the implications of what his teacher was saying chilling him. He pushed the thought aside, focusing on the more immediate question he’d been worrying about all evening.
“Do you hate me now?”
"Hmm?" Mister Best looked up, clearly surprised. "Hate you? No. I am merely disappointed in the outcome. The result was, in the end, not even of your doing." He let out a long, weary sigh. "The Lackey women . . . they have it hard. I've often told my own family that if something were to happen to me, they could be in those shoes."
He paused, stacking a few pamphlets neatly. "Woebegone was on a path to earn a real income. He could have changed their lives. His mother has to watch the old woman constantly, or she'll wander off and get into an accident, or simply get lost. It is a difficult life."
“I supposed you already guessed what he was going to do?”
“Dalliance. I had already spoken to Sir Worth about the topic. No amount of shit-stirring by Sterling Worth would have accomplished anything. But it was within my power to be merciful to his family, to keep their son at least on track to receive a certificate of letters, so he could . . . be a clerk or something. For a time, it was within my power."
“He did it himself,” Dalliance said mulishly.
“I am not blaming you. However, children weigh short-term hurts on the same scale as life tragedies, and this is a folly of youth,” said Mister Best, looking at Dalliance directly. “One which you are embodying. Suffice it to say you will understand when you are older.”
Silence fell. Dalliance wasn’t sure when or if he’d become the bad guy. But the hot flare of anger had faded to numbness, and a hollow in his stomach.
"Ghouls, then. Why are they so scary?" Dalliance asked. He wasn't meaning to be tetchy; he just wanted to know. If it came out waspishly, it wasn’t intentional.
Mister Best simply shook his head, a look of profound weariness on his face. "I shall tell the whole class tomorrow," he said. "It is the least I can do."
Cozydark / Grimcozy / Cozygrim / Darkcozy (See comment thread from last chapter)