Earnest was outside by the grills when Dalliance emerged from his Aeromancy class, instructions fresh in his mind: to spend the next day familiarizing himself with what it felt like to be aware of the air around him. For once, it was something he felt eminently qualified for, rather than confused by, as his instructions often made him. Instead, he felt this was not only a reasonable thing to ask of an Aeromancer, but something which came naturally to him—or at least, had so far.

  Earnest, it seemed, had been able to strike up a conversation with some of Dalliance's classmates. It was something Dalliance himself had yet to attempt, other than with Flounce, who had walked alongside him in silence through the Hall of Aeromancy on their way out, two quiet voids in a clamour of unleashed humanity parting ways at the door.

  Dalliance comforted himself that he had an excellent excuse for his unfriendliness in his father's passing and all the accompanying drama.

  "Did you know," asked Earnest, breaking away from the small group of people he had been with, "that you have a proper enchanter on site? We make our own artifacts!"

  "I did not," admitted Dalliance, brain shifting gears with some effort.

  "If we'd ever gotten anything but experience from the hunts," said Earnest, "we could've started out really strong here. Put that bird's eye socket on a ring, steal people's spells."

  Equipment. Foci. Two classes in a row telling him to equip himself with more than what the System gave him by default.

  It was hard to be optimistic about it while going to the conversation he was about to have--but a welcome distraction.

  Dalliance found himself wondering who had gotten to keep all the parts of the things they'd killed.

  "Something to keep in mind," he said neutrally, as they shouldered their way through the front gates of the King's College, taking a left along Lakeside Circuit and finally breaking free of the crowd by dint of taking the longer way round.

  Earnest didn't drop the conversation, though, waxing eloquent about all the wealth they'd had slip through their fingers since they'd just . . . not butchered the body, given the dungeon heart to Mister Best, and the rest. That it was the whole point of the exercise, Dalliance's argument, didn't shift him in the slightest. They'd left the serpent's horn, and only been required to give up the heart. They'd left the feathers and bones and what-not of the bird, just there on the ground.

  They'd be gone by now.

  "So," Dalliance said, after they'd walked far enough away that the prospect of holding up his side of a conversation was attractive once again. He'd been spoiled by the daily walks behind Miss Thicket Wimple's cart. Spoiled because, even then, the assumption of privacy wasn't foolishness, but a reasonable possibility. In the city, walking along shoulder to shoulder with dozens of people every day, everywhere you went, he'd rapidly begun to feel claustrophobic. "I assume you're bringing this up for a reason."

  "Yeah. Um. Remember when you helped me with that Widow?"

  Dalliance's eyebrows went up.

  "Well, it worked." Earnest didn't look as happy as Dalliance had expected.

  "It worked," Dalliance agreed. "We returned the father's forged document. We honored his dying wishes. That's a good thing."

  "Well, turns out the daughter is well off, and the nephew is penniless," Earnest said. "So we did what we did."

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  "So," Dalliance said, "just to be clear. We, who didn't know the situation, took money out of the hands of the person who needed it and put it back in the hands of the person who already had a lot of money."

  "But the father wanted her to have more money."

  "Yes," said Earnest.

  "And you hadn't checked beforehand?" asked Dalliance.

  "Obviously not," said Earnest, glaring.

  "Okay," said Dalliance. "Honestly, it was still his last wishes, so I don't know why you're worried about it. And I didn't do any prep work myself, so I don't know why I'm surprised that it went wrong. But we shouldn't do that again."

  Earnest looked chastened and nodded. "If I ask for help again, I'll figure it out first."

  "I may have set her skirt on fire," Dalliance said. He didn't know why he didn't think to mention it. "Because I thought . . . well, I don't know. I can't imagine. But I was under the impression that she was a bad guy. I didn't care that I set her on fire."

  "Oh, shit," Earnest said, even more seriously.

  "Yeah," said Dalliance. "My spell isn't apparently meant for stealth."

  "It was labeled as a transport spell, and I just kind of assumed, since you're turning into the wind, that it would be stealthy. And it isn't. And you're a novice, and you disagreed with your priest, and I just kind of assumed you knew better, for some reason. And Charity wasn't even there for the duel, and she just kind of assumes that I had other options. And maybe she's right, maybe I'm right, maybe you're right, but I'm starting to think that assumptions are something I should lay off on for a little while."

  His voice was a little angry, and Earnest looked a little hurt. Dalliance was a little uncaring.

  "Well," Earnest said, "I guess you're not wrong. Points for trying."

  Dalliance twitched. Earnest rolled his eyes. "Five days into the school year, and Charity is already planning an intervention."

  "I talked to her," Earnest said, "and I think she's right. I think it's too easy to write off something we did because we 'had to' as justified."

  "That doesn't work," Dalliance said. "Because if I had to do it, if I didn't have anything else I could do, then that's not me making a choice to do something. If I don't have choices, then I can't be wrong."

  "Yes," allowed his friend softly, "but you weren't right. You said, perhaps inside of your brain, 'I have no choices. I have to do this horrible thing,' and you absolved yourself of guilt for it, but it didn't work."

  Dalliance opened his mouth to speak.

  "I know you're still feeling guilty," interrupted Earnest. "That's not the same thing as being justified in the feeling, not what I'm saying. You just haven't accepted that you feel guilty. You're still trying to work around it. And I've already had this entire argument with Charity, Dalliance. For my own stuff."

  "Okay."

  "So it's okay to feel guilty. That's fine. I feel really guilty that I interfered and cost that nephew the inheritance he was going to get. He's poor because of me, because of what I did. I can feel really guilty and still think I did what I was instructed to do, what I swore to do. And I can even believe that most of the time, doing the things that I did would have a good outcome, and I should do the same thing next time. I can believe all of that and still feel guilty."

  Dalliance nodded. "I do feel guilty," he said. "But I get your point."

  "As long as you do," Earnest said.

  The lift loomed before them, a veritable barge, hanging off the edge of the drop to Water Street. They joined the queue.

  "Anyway, that wasn't even what I was going to ask about."

  Dalliance glared at his friend, who followed him onto the faintly vibrating surface of the lift when it rose to position once again, the guardrail lowering to admit boarders. "Okay. Shoot."

  "So. I will, it looks like, be with this particular priestly mentor for a while, and I can't tier up because I don't spend any time on the wall until I turn eighteen, and I can't select a course of self-study until my next tier."

  "I'm listening."

  "I need to do some hunting. Like we pretended we were doing, back when. Like we've talked about, how sane people would handle the Hunts."

  People near them were eyeing him, but he just turned his back, acolyte's robes fluttering in the breeze as the lift lowered. Water street spread before them like an Imperial Prominade for the Citadel, spray and endless rows of water wheels, flags and foliage, the rising spires of apartment blocks and factory chimneys belching steam. The faint smell of food and the drumming of industry.

  Rainbows played over the lift from the spillover down from the imperial lake as they passed artificer's lamps, the waterfall's mist sheeting sideways in the wind amidst the light drizzle and glinting on blinding-bright jewels.

  "So you want to find something kill-able without insane risk, kill it, see if it gets you experience, and slowly farm your way up while building a backlog of enchanted items out of the kills."

  "It sounds creepy when you put it that way."

  The lift came to a grinding halt.

  "I'll think about it."