“Tu nous comprends pas? Vraiment?"

The French families fled their homeland some generations ago, running from the violence of a Révolution to seek refuge in Elven Land. These French families, rich Aristocrats with money we did not spend and titles we did not recognise – the kindest elves ignored them; the most practical did their best to drive them out. The only one who had considered their French wealth and their French titles, the only one who had been willing to acknowledge their monarchical hierarchy and embedded inequality, was the King.

“Il me regarde comme il me comprend pas. Non…Non, il fait semblant. Regarde ses yeux. Il fait semblant."

New titles were invented and given to these same families. Land was seized and redistributed according to the merits of an imaginary rank. Military was reorganised. Politics became political. The King redefined his role, recrowning himself in a society he had reconstructed. Suddenly, power was centralised. Suddenly, French was taught in all the schools. You would walk down a road in any Southern province and hear only Bonjour.

But this was many generations ago. The French are no longer new. The changes are no longer ‘changes’. A son of a son of a son of a son is our King, and the way he is is the way we now know monarchs to be.

“I know you understand me. Don’t play the fool.”

The sons of sons of sons of these families can especially be found in Military Academies, ‘earning’ titles they would have always inherited. They are easy to know. Even at 13, I understood the boys who had approached me to be the sons of sons of…whoever, set to age into their fathers and do whatever it was the French did. They are easy to know. Their uniforms, deep green and deep blue, bore their family crests, sewn into the fabric with gold thread. The boy speaking, the one with the slicked back hair that varied in shades of dark red and stark white, silver eyes, and sharp eyebrows – his nobility was unmistakable. He looked down on me the way a beast might look down at an ant. “If you prefer Elven,” he said, having switched out of French, “we can indulge you.”

I was surprised he could speak it, that any of them could. Most like him couldn’t. His Elven was heavily accented, his French way of speaking bleeding into an old tongue with flatter sounds. “What is your name?” He demanded. “Your nom.”

I said nothing.

“Your nom.” Another boy, the blond one, repeated. “It means, ah, your ‘last name’.”

In my silence, I turned back to the pond. The three of them followed my gaze, as if waiting for my answer in the reflection of the moon on the water’s surface. They were military boys curious about a stranger in their compound, a stranger without their family crests, their adorned swords, their military uniform. Manon had given me carte blanche to explore the grounds, but instead I’d immediately found myself here, in front of this pond. Behind me was a huge building with some purpose I wasn’t privy to, a building that spat out boys like these three, sometimes older, sometimes younger. They had been the only ones to approach, but not the only ones to notice me.

“You don’t have one?” The red-haired boy goaded. “They allow orphan boys to be Healers? Well, which is it? Orphan, or bastard?”

“A bastard would still have his mother’s name, idiot.” The blond said. His Elven carried almost no accent at all, as if he was as native to the language as I was. “Who cares about the nom? What’s your first name?” He crouched down, roughly jostling me when he stuck out his hand for me to shake. “I’m Laclan. Laclan Stymphalia, but the Laclan is more important.”

The third boy, dressed in a dark blue riding jacket and knee-high equestrian boots, seemed uneasy with me, with this conversation. He didn’t have the red-headed boy’s blasé confidence, or Laclan Stymphalia’s brashness. “Nous devrions partir.” He said. We should leave.

“Your name.” The red-headed boy said, ignoring his friend to snap his fingers at me. “You are here visiting with the other Healers, no? None of them are ever our age. I swear they’re never bastards either.”

“Orphan.” Laclan Stymphalia corrected.

“We don’t know that yet. We might if he had a tongue to speak with.” He laughed to himself. “Have they stopped making orphans with tongues? What are you doing sat by the water, anyway?”

The equestrian boy, “Il faut qu’on parte."

"Gaspard, ta gueule." The red-headed boy continued with me. “How do we even know he’s with the Healers? Maybe he broke in, stole their uniform, and is cursing the lake. The Baron will be impressed if we bring back the head of a trespasser, no? Hey!” He snapped his fingers in front of me again. “Unless you’re truly an orphan or bastard, what is your name? Or your prénom?”

“Can you actually curse lakes?” Laclan Stymphalia asked me, bright brown eyes wide and eager. “You’re a Healer, right? Do you know the Old Tricks?”

And so I said my first words: “We all know the Old Tricks,” except I didn’t use the term ‘Old Tricks’. I said ‘Faeries’: actions performed by the Fae. They all recognised the word, but whereas it was a usual, standard word for me, it made their eyes widen. Laclan with excitement, Gaspard with wariness, the red-headed boy with…interest.

“Moi, c’est Wolfgang.” He said. “Wolfgang Roqueforte-Cilliac de Montaigne. The brute next to you has announced himself as Laclan Stymphalia, of the Stymphalian Battle Elves – he will claim not to care about the nom but he will brag about this later – and the horse boy to my side is Gaspard of the Maison de Villieu. Tell us your name, or we will drag you to the Baron and let him know you’re an interloper. And an orphan.”

Wolfgang Roqueforte-Cilliac de Montaigne. My name was of negligible length when next to his: “Avari.”

They waited for more. There was no more.

Immediately, they conferred with each other, confused by my lack of name, confused by me. Laclan pushed at Gaspard’s knee to make space when he jumped back up, then I could hear him loudly whispering, “C’est un vrai orphelin, ça!” He’s an actual orphan! Gaspard was more sceptical, mumbling that I could just be ‘secretive’. Wolfgang continued to consider me, tilting his head as he did, a beast looking down on an ant.

The North District Military Academy was built on clay land and occupied what could have otherwise been half a town. The architecture was of a type I didn’t know: the building behind me was lined in windows of stained glass, depicting figures I didn’t recognise and embedded words in a language I couldn’t read. As boys had been filing in and out, I had thought, ‘Tell me who that lady is on the window’. Now that these boys were here, I was thinking, ‘Tell me what those words mean. Tell me why it’s in a French I can’t read’, but I bit my tongue, refusing to turn my thoughts into speech, and refocused on the water instead.

“Gaspard a raison,” Wolfgang said. “Il faut qu’on parte. Laisse l’orphelin.” But he tilted his head the other way, still considering me. “Or, he can follow us to the Mezzanine, if he wants.”

Closest to the pond, the clay gave itself to dirt and grass. I stayed fixed on the breeze that was whistling through the leaves, not wanting anything but to be left alone. Gaspard de Villieu walked away first. Wolfgang Roqueforte-Cilliac de Montaigne sauntered after him some seconds later. Laclan Stymphalia lingered, staring at the dirt and the grass and the clay. He stared at me: at my black tunic and my long hair, then at the swirls I had drawn into the earth, swirls I had made in the quiet moments before they had all interrupted me. “That’s the word my grandma uses too, faeries.” He said to me, his voice low, conspiratorial. Then he barked out a laugh. “I don’t need faeries. I’m tough all on my own. Tougher than the nobilité, no doubt. I could beat both Wolfe and Gaspard in a fight on any battleground without even breaking a sweat! Ha! You should stick around. I’ll pick a fight with them tomorrow and show you.” He eyed me again, my tunic and my hair. “Can you fight?”

When we had arrived this morning, despite all my shrugs and glowers and folded arms, I’d not been able to stop staring. It had been just after the dead hours of the morning, yet there had already been young men on the compound, long sharp swords in their hands as they seemed to dance with each other, moving back and forth, side to side, until one of them conceded. There had been boys pulling back large arrows, half the size of their bodies, hitting targets with varying amounts of accuracy. Horse-riding was something I’d long since learnt, but I had seen a woman in a green cloak, in a high kneeling position on a galloping horse but balancing with no issue, and she had drawn an arrow into her bow and shot it to hit an apple off a tree. “Voilà ce que j’attends de vous,” she had told the young men she was teaching, after climbing off her horse. This is what I expect you to be able to do. “The girls at your sister Academy have already mastered it. Don’t fall behind.”

“I can teach you.” Laclan offered. “How long’re you here for?”

I could feel myself bristle at his enthusiasm. I glared at him, but he felt no pain from its heat, only giving me a look that told me he would sit here and wait for an answer for as long as it took. The words were stiff in my mouth, my body still on guard and unsure how a boy like him, a boy like me, reacted in conversations. “We leave at high noon tomorrow.”

“Aw, that’s too early! I’m not up on samedi until, like…I mean, ah, ‘Saturday’ until, um…” It took me a while to realise why he’d trailed off, why his cheeks suddenly tinged pink. It embarrassed him. Clearly, he saw himself as distinct from the French nobility, yet he was still defaulting to their words from their language, thinking of samedi before Saturday. “It’s the one day we can rest.” He mumbled, looking away from me. “Every other day, it’s, um, cinq heures…five thirty in the morning.”

He wouldn’t leave until I gave him some sort of response. Despite his abrasiveness, he was earnest in a way that was uncomfortably disarming. “Pour moi,” I said, staring at the trees that were some several metres away in the distance, leading to a forest that broke this Academy apart from the neighbouring town. “à l’Académie d’Alchimie, c’est huit heures chaque jour." At the Alchemist Academy, it’s 8am every day. “But I like to be up before sunrise.” I paused, before needlessly adding. “I sit by the ponds.”

Some moments had to pass before he understood why I had briefly switched language. Then he gave me the brightest smile, emboldened by my own French, not as embarrassed about his. “So you do speak French!”

Of course. “We all do.”

When he left me, running off to re-join his friends, I returned my attention to the pond. It was flowing to its left, pushing old blades of grass with the current, sometimes rolling around the few stones that would dislodge themselves from the waterbed. Old Tricks, they had called it. I touched the pond with my fingertips, closing my eyes, concentrating hard, resettling into the meditation that the boys had stolen me away from. Only around my fingertips did the water still, and only for some seconds. It could feel my distraction, maybe. The mark of a first-time experience.

My eyes opened again, and I looked at the stained-glass woman in the window. I narrowed my eyes at her, as if the heat of my glare could provoke her name. It provoked nothing.

*

“He enjoyed the journey.” Manon Cotillard said. “It was a day and half stop at the North District Military Academy before we returned here. Nothing happened to him. He might complain but I suspect he really enjoyed the change of scenery. Isolation won’t help him, Ivra. He’s a child. He needs other children.”

It was a three-days’ journey from the North District down to the west coast, where the Alchemist Academy was situated, meaning Ivra Vonglo had expected us back three days ago. As senior Healer, she had been the one to sanction the journey and allow me, for the first time, to accompany the Healers on their expedition. Our arrival home had been as expected. She had cursed Manon Cotillard for being a ‘bureaucratic spy’, a ‘busybody’, a ‘liar with hideous intentions’, before giving me a “hmm!”, as if I had somehow been an accomplice. Today was no better. Ivra was sat behind her teaching desk in one of the classrooms, refusing all of Manon’s appeals and explanations. “He needs to be kept safe.” Ivra countered. “You call hauling him across the Land to a military base ‘safe’?”

“All children need to be kept safe. That’s possible beyond confining him here. It’s a school, not a base. His safety is as important to me as it is to you, Ivra.”

I was sitting on a stool behind one of the alchemy stations, staring at little vials labelled ‘mercury’, ‘frozen air’, ‘pickle juice’ and ‘blood of a Sacred Deer’. The Alchemists always seemed to leave their stations in as disarrayed a state as possible, with dozens of these vials jostled against each other, open notebooks and pens strewn about, suspicious goos oozing next to overfilled pots of ink. The table held a candle that I couldn’t blow out, no matter how many times I tried. It was labelled as ‘permanent fire, test one’. When I touched the flame, it burned, and both Ivra and Manon turned to me when my recoil caused me to bustle against the table.

“He’s more than capable of hurting himself here.” Manon pointed out. I glowered at her, but continued with my snooping. “I think he’s at a good age for us to begin introducing him to the world around us. He’s stubborn enough to be sceptical. He won’t run off with strangers.”

I assumed all medical camps looked the same regardless of their location. Small beds clumped together, the smell of purification, the presence of some nurses, medical experts, and Healers to address wounds, sicknesses and diseases. The medical camp that had featured in this expedition had been in a remote Elven village, and as I’d expected, I’d been charged with sitting in the corner and ‘observing’. I hadn’t even been able to look around the village, because Manon had made me stay by her side, and Ivra had forewarned me not to wander off.

“And I shouldn’t find it suspicious that you managed a day and a half’s stay at the North District Military Academy without an issue?”

“That has nothing to do with him! You know I’m working for us all! In repairing relations, Avari doesn’t factor into that equation at all! He’s just a happy beneficiary.”

“You’re just a state parasite.”

Medical camps looked the same, but Academies? I looked at this alchemy station with its perpetual fire, its vials, its leaves that seemed to push out from between the wooden panelling (labelled ‘invasive greenery, test five’). Our hallways were old, dark brick. Shelves were bursting with annotated encyclopaedias, with huge jars of disconcerting liquids, with the occasional sleeping cat or meandering fox. The alchemy students themselves were always covered in protective cloaks and headwear, vigilant of their own creations. Explosions were common. I suspected Healers were trained with Alchemists for the same reason why wells of water and sacks of sand were kept at every corner of every room, lest there be an all-ending fire.

I looked at our brick walls and thought of the Military’s panelled glass ones. Their hard clay grounds instead of our tough stone. That huge building that had sat opposite the pond, windows of a crying woman holding her hand to her heart, of a man with his head hung down and his arms pinned to a wooden cross. As far as I was aware, this trip marked the first time Manon Cotillard had encouraged a detour so that the Healers could ‘tend to some injured students at the boy’s Northern Academy’. When not being forced to sit in a corner and watch, I had followed Manon around, staring at every new thing, surprised that things could be new at all.

“You wrote to the Academy to arrange this ‘detour’, purposefully coincided it with the trip I allowed Avari onto, and kept this whole scheme your own secret.”

Manon couldn’t deny that. She grimaced. “We have been talking of restoring the relationship between academies like these and academies like…This is besides the point, Ivra. I saw this invitation as an opportunity for Avari to socialise with other children his age, as well as accompany the other Healers on their expedition. In one trip, he’s had two new experiences!”

Ivra couldn’t deny that either.

“A slow introduction would-”

“Slow.” Ivra emphasised. “No more detours for the rest of the year. No more until I permit it.”

A class of students began filing in. The youngest in this class, the youngest Alchemist in this Academy, was 23, and even then she was seen as a sort of ‘prodigy’. Her gold hair was pulled back, her gold eyes were narrowed in on me at what I could guess was her station. Could she kneel on a galloping horse and shoot arrows off trees? Could she endure a conversation with elves her age and not reflexively interpret every word as a trick, an attack? “Bah, va-t’en!” She stood there, folding her arms, and if not for Ivra clearing her throat I would have continued to sit there just to further annoy her for dismissing me so flippantly. She met my scowl with her own. Could the men with swords create her permanent fires? Could they combine ‘crushed flowers of a pink hue’ with ‘still water, collected at 04:04’ to create the bizarre ecosystem that was curling around her station?

I joined Manon at the door, and we walked off together. I had never given it too much thought before, being the youngest, being the only child. I had never considered there was any different way to be, not until now.

*

We had one fox and two cats. I liked the fox. The cats and I had many disagreements. Cat 1, red-furred and blind, always seemed to know just where to sit itself to inconvenience me most. Cat 2, grey-furred and sharp-nailed, always took violent issue with me moving Cat 1 around. The fox, named Fox, was much more agreeable, and so we spent my non-observing hours by any of the many ponds, or further into the surrounding forest by the streams. Today, Fox was sunbathing by the stream bank while I swam against the current, then, when I successfully convinced the stream to follow my direction, as I swam with the current. I had little supervision on Academy grounds provided Ivra and Manon knew I was somewhere in the vicinity, that I was somewhere alive.

At night, I read through one of the encyclopaedias, one on ‘military tradition’ that predated the French settlement. Cat 1 and Cat 2 sat with me, purring and scratching but always following me when I moved from one spot to the next. As soon as the sun set, the Academy would be drenched in a dazed luminous yellow as the Alchemists worked throughout the night, inventing and calculating and triggering explosions. I would be far away, either deep in the forest or nearby one of the ponds. Sometimes, I would see groups trek through, looking for ‘special herb root’ or ‘water collected under moonlight at 11 39pm’. I used the moonlight to read. I used the wind to flicker through the pages. I took long swims in the water when I grew bored. I would fall asleep in a back float, meditating until it lulled me into nothingness. I thought of the youngest Alchemist, and I thought of the fact that the youngest Healer was in his late 30s. Healing was something that allegedly only came to elves after some decades of life. It was an affinity that had to be realised and then built up.

Some of the military boys had been as young as 11.

The Alchemists were incredible bakers for the most part. If they hadn’t discovered their affinity for Alchemy, I’m sure many of them would be enrolled in an Artisan Academy instead. For breakfast, I sat with Manon, licking icing sugar off my thumb from a cinnamon roll, using my other hand to read through another encyclopaedia. Fox was here, munching on the crumbs I was feeding him. Manon was putting my hair into plaits, tutting me for letting the water and wind mess it up. I didn’t push her away.

“I hear you’ve been complaining.” Ivra said to me after lunch, arms folded, eyes narrowed. “You’ve been telling Manon how bored you are to ‘just observe’, hmm?”

I could feel an oncoming lecture. I could also feel a concession. I followed her down the long hallway, enduring her reprimands of ‘patience’, ‘respect’, ‘insolence’, until she finally said, “There is a man with a terrible corrosive burn, caused by a so-called ‘lavender-thought-experiment, test 17’. There’s a reason why I’m so stringent about who has access to lavender – the monthly expenditure spent on those flowers alone is enough to dent the yearly budget.” She kissed her teeth. “The pain is overwhelming, allegedly. He has covered his eyes with some opaque cloth to prevent sunlight from bothering his senses. So, he cannot see. So, he cannot see you.”

The Alchemist, a man with dark purple hair and greying skin, was gritting his teeth in pain. He couldn’t see me when I approached, could only assume that I was an older, learned Healer who didn’t have to feign uselessness and pathetically sit in classroom corners to ‘observe’. The skin of a good portion of his upper arm was puckered and peeling. I whispered my fingers over the burn, and the man writhed in pain, making Ivra immediately chastise me, “Soothe!”. She repeated those tedious instructions in every class she taught, ‘Remember, soothe your patient!’. It was easy to forget, cycling one energy for another, remembering that the ‘patient’ I was healing would feel an absence and immediately interpret that absence as pain. Healing myself was different. Healing others took ‘consideration’.

“Not too quickly.” Ivra said. “Not all at once.”

Advice I disagreed with, because I imagined everyone wanted immediate relief from their pain, and yet when I did this, taking all of the burn away and then quickly funnelling in a soothing current, the alchemist…fainted.

In a follow-up disciplinary meeting, I kicked at the air in front of me, scowling at the ground. “Why ask me to heal him if the others are ‘better soothers’?” I countered. “It’s your fault for making him some teaching moment.” I looked away. “It’s his fault for not just healing himself.”

We were now in her office. Ivra leaned on her desk, arms folded, eyes closed. Her skin was so pale, a light, uncanny colour that was self-induced in an early alchemy accident. Her hair, a dark, dark purple that bordered black, was, as usual for the students here, always tied up and away from her face. The wrinkles around her eyes smoothed out when they were closed. When she opened them, her face took on age and experience, age and experience I didn’t have.

“He’s healed.” I muttered. “So what?”

“So, he fainted.”

“Next time, pick someone else.”

“Next time, Avari, listen to instruction. You complain about being relegated to an observational role, yet you consistently prove why. Do you hear me, Avari? Next time – listen to instruction.”

I was in a sour mood even during my nighttime meditation, which Nature could hear and could criticise. Wind whirled around me, pushing my hair into my face, then blowing with enough force to push me over. After meditation, I took off running with Fox the fox, running as fast as I could into the forest, knowing the moonlight would follow me, knowing the wind was quickly catching up. I was running and running until I was finally laughing, in contest with a wind that would always win, and in contest with a fox that would always nuzzle my hair when I collapsed onto the ground, breathless. We stayed out even in the heavy torrent of rain that suddenly pushed itself out of dark clouds. I meditated once more. When I was done, I took off running again, Fox following me, and we circled around the forest once, twice, until I was so tired that when I stumbled and fell, I fell asleep right there.

I woke up once in the middle of the night. Fox had taken shelter under some huge leaves of a grey plant, sleeping soundly. I was out in the open, and I sneezed as I coughed, then I looked up at the sky and pointed at the darkest cloud. “Boom,” I whispered, and so the sky did the same, letting out a huge, defeaning crack of thunder.

*

“Didn’t you realise the rain?” Manon Cotillard was furiously rubbing a towel through my hair. “Honestly, Avari. Sometimes you’re impossible.”

I rubbed Fox with a towel too, then he followed me as I followed Manon into the cafeteria. She watched me eat. “Do you want to cut your hair?” I shook my head. “Why not?” I shrugged, funnelling roast beef into my mouth, then pushing some to Fox. “Is it because of the Monastery?” I nodded. And shrugged again. “What have I said about shrugging? It’s not communicative.” I shrugged again, and she sighed, even if she smiled a little. “Your hair is quite long, Avari. If you keep it long, you have to take care of it.” It was beyond my shoulders, dark brown and bone-straight, even when damp. “Well, I have good news. We’re due another trip next month to a medical camp in Jenispurrai. On our return trip, I’ve arranged for a week-long stay at the boys’ Military Academy in the North District.”

I looked at her, which gave myself away because her smile widened, pleased with herself and that small sign of enthusiasm I’d given her. “Promise to be good?” She asked, holding out her hand for me to shake.

I rolled my eyes, but I used my free hand to shake hers.

*

And so I returned to the North District Military Academy 6 months after my first visit.

The older boys were dressed in dark blue uniform, marching in unison as their commander yelled out instructions. They stopped sharply when he yelled out: “Garde-à-vous!”. They moved, feet hip distance apart and hands folded in front of themselves when he yelled: “En place!”. We walked past, and I shamelessly stared, shameless because none of them seemed allowed to break eye contact with their commander, because none of them were allowed to watch us go by. It reminded me of official state visits to the Alchemist Academy, where we all had to stand outside and watch the King’s officers walk around, scrutinising us, and we would all have to repeat the same tired oath of: “All Elves under the King,” but in French. Ivra thought it was ‘ghastly’, and both she and Manon allowed me to forgo participation. If up to her, she wouldn’t teach a single class in ‘their French’, but even if it hadn’t been mandated, she would have had no choice: some of the Healers arrived speaking only French. Many of the Alchemists had grown up in Schools that only taught in French.

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The accommodation provided to us was no improvement from our last visit. We were given some rooms along an unused hallway with makeshift wooden frames that might, if I used enough artistic license, be interpreted as a ‘bed’. It was a building detached from all others, far away from the stained-glass woman and the pond I liked, instead closer to an edifice that I gathered belonged to the ‘senior officers’. As Manon argued with one of the generals on grounds of the rooms being ‘too small’ and ‘disrespectful’, “même lorsqu’on est ici pour vous aider!” even when we’re here to help you!, I was staring outside the window, pushing myself up to the tips of my toes to see over the pane. The grounds were huge, easily triple that of the Alchemist Academy. A flurry of horses were galloping down an enclosed strip, going faster than I’d ever seen horses before. Riding near the front of the group, recognisable for the contrast between hair so black and eyes so blue, was the Maison de Villieu boy. His name was something I had forgotten, but the names of his friends – I remembered.

The Military Academy’s medical bay was an expensive version of bays I had seen before. Larger yet clinical, pungent with that chemical purifying smell. Most of the first day was spent here, sitting in the corner, ‘observing’ while the true Healers got to work. A waste of my time, as it always was. The journey to the medical bay had been the most interesting part of my day – we had to walk behind the ‘School’ of the Academy, a huge building of bright orange brick that spanned either way for metres and metres, housing what Manon promised me was ‘a million classrooms’. The administrational building was visible on the path too, where the clay cut itself off in favour of patioed stone and boasted statues of elves holding plaques of bronze heralding a military history I knew nothing about.

One of the nurses was glancing at me often, questioning. When Manon had been asked for an explanation of my presence, all she’d done was awkwardly laugh and say, “He’s an apprentice. An observer.” Whatever that meant, it clearly wasn’t an answer that satisfied the nurse who kept looking over at me. Manon was occupied with some bureaucratic discussion with one of the generals, standing closer towards the bay’s entrance than my corner position by the restrooms. She wasn’t by my side to tell me to stay quiet and ‘observe’. The man on this nurse’s table, not a man but a boy – a huge chunk of his arm has been severed off, leaving the white of his bone visible. I looked back at the nurse to see her focused on me.

“Are you able to help?” She asked. “Are you familiar with skin grafts?”

Obviously. I was ‘familiar’ in the sense that I had heard Ivra ramble on about it, about ‘delicacy’, ‘patience’, ‘soothing’, when all it should really take was pressing the flesh to the bone and forcing the skin to repair itself. “The flesh is here, if you are capable of the operation.” The nurse continued. “I will assist.”

Manon was already looking at me when I turned to her. Her fingers were touching her lips, one foot awkwardly in front of the other, both on the verge of calling out or walking over to me. She wouldn’t have to do either. I sunk down in my chair, ignoring the nurse when she asked me again, instead scowling at the clean, expensive limestone floor. Another Healer took my place, one specialised in skin grafts. A true Healer. An adult.

*

“Avari!”

Laclan Stymphalia was standing outside my temporary residence, a huge smile on his face. He punched my shoulder, pulled on my arm, jumped around a little. “We heard the Healers are here! Honestly, you’d think a military academy would have a permanent place for them, right? Do you remember me? We met-”

I nodded. Of course, I remembered him.

He looked no different. Messy blond hair, brown eyes, his military uniform worn as if he was fighting to be free of it. I couldn’t tell if I was small or if he was big, because he was taller than me, stronger, even at 13. “Have they given you a tour? No? I’ll give you one! I’ll give you one right now! Then, we can begin training! Why are you narrowing your brows? Don’t you remember? I promised to teach you how to fight! We begin tonight!”

The tour was confused and disorganised. Clay crunched underneath our feet as he led us around the compound. He pointed to the equestrian trail that spanned so far into the distance that its end point was out of sight, then to stables connected to it, which housed horses so well-bred that “one horse could pay for an entire building! Ha!”. He was unsure if the space opposite was used for fencing, sword-fighting, or lunch parties. The marching grounds was clear and distinct, but when we walked through we were immediately yelled at by one of the officers, as entry outside of ‘officially sanctioned use’ was prohibited. Twice, despite himself being a student here, we got lost. It wasn’t until I very pointedly looked at school building that his eyes lit up, he clapped his hands, and nodded decisively. “Yes! The School!”

The School. Nothing like the Alchemist Academy, but instead well-lit and brightly decorated. Portraits of elves unknown to me hung off every wall, there were swords housed in cages of glass that symbolised some epic battle with names like La Guerre d’Aalia and La Bataille Dix-Neuf, the green wallpaper was affectated with blue adornments and the long rug was thick, blue, soft – it was beautiful. The Alchemist Academy was crumbling. It was old, tired, and each change in season made it groan and sigh and cave in. Some sections were completely unusable. Requests for increased funding were routinely denied. I would often hear Manon and Ivra arguing about it, with Ivra blaming Manon, and Manon blaming her overheads. Part of tolerating Manon’s presence was an agreement that the Alchemist Academy would be aptly compensated, but Ivra would mutter to me about it often, saying the money wasn’t anyway adequate to endure Manon’s trouble. This Academy – I doubted they had any troubles at all.

The Military Academy, I knew it was old. Nowhere near as old as my academy, but old enough for the clean glass walls, the crisp indoor flooring and the gold-coated, unchipped décor to all be symbols of continued financial patronage and upkeep. Alchemy was an old art. An ‘Old Trick’. There were very few students, Healers or Alchemists, from the French noble Families. The consequence of that was evident in every visual way.

“That means, All Elves under the King.” Laclan said to me, pointing to the huge lettering of ‘Omnes Dryades sub rege’. It was that language, the French that I couldn’t read. “We have Latin everywhere. During Mass, they just speak Latin. It’s a headache.”

Latin. “You speak this language?”

“Ha. Not well. I read it. We all do. We all have to.”

He was bored, jumping around, insisting we do something else other than ‘meander around brick bores’. I didn’t complain. Even an incompetent tour assuaged my curiosity. “Let’s find you a sword! Come, come!”

It was a long journey from the School to where the weaponry was housed. I was instructed to wait outside while Laclan snuck in, feigning a need to ‘sharpen his sword’ to be allowed into the building, before sneaking back out with a terribly suspicious grin on his face. He grabbed me and pulled me into a run, only letting us stop when we were fairly hidden, behind the ‘Mezzanine’, which was what they called their cafeteria. “Et voilà!” He pulled out a sword he’d tucked away in his uniform. “Cool, right?”

It was a basic sword, blunt for my own protection. He waved it around in vague but orderly formations. “How’re you going to defend yourself if enemies attack?” He asked, jabbing the sword in the air. “Honestly, you Healers are useless without us.” He stabbed the air again, then, without warning, threw it for me to catch. “And the Academy is useless without me.”

I looked at the sword in my hand.

It was simple, short. The tip was rounded and the sides weren’t sharp enough to cut, not unless I applied pressure. Unlike his, which was adorned with his family crest (a series of birds in flight) , which was longer, sharper. Slowly, I moved it around. There was some resistance as it cut through the air. “Ha, have you never held a sword before?” His smile fell when he realised I hadn’t. “Have you ever seen a sword before?”

“We’re not allowed weapons at the Alchemist Academy.”

“Because you guys are the weapons? The Alchemists, they’re dangerous, right? Like, they can cause danger?”

I moved the sword from right hand to left and felt more comfortable with the change. Laclan seemed more than fine that I only answered half his questions, more than happy to be in a conversation that was more so his own monologue. He angled his arm a certain way and instructed me to do the same, and then he was cutting into the air and I was too. The way he spoke was interesting, almost musical. His accent was more confused than I remembered it being, a lot of hard Elven sounds but softer French tones. It embarrassed him to only know technical words in French, names for the correct standing position, for the type of sword, for the fighting sequences. Still, he spoke Elven with a confidence and ease that the Francophones didn’t have. Clearly, wherever he was from, it was an Elven town.

“No, you’re not using enough…ah…focus? Not enough power! See?” He easily knocked my sword out of my hand. I picked it up, and he knocked it out again. When I moved away from him so I could hold it in peace, he chased after me, pushed my shoulder and knocked it down once again. “The enemy will follow you, Avari!” He kicked the sword up and caught it in his other hand. “Power!”

I wasn’t sure how I would find him the next night, or the nights after that. I refused to ask. When he ran off, either bored or tired or a combination of the two, all he’d said was, “Again tomorrow night! Be better!”. On my own, I lingered for some more moments, turning the sword over in my hand, holding it up so I could see the moonlight reflect of it. Not that I cared, but I was looking forward to trying again tomorrow. Not that it made any difference to me, but I was hoping Laclan kept his promise.

I returned to the temporary accommodation, where Manon was sitting behind a shabby desk and writing in one of those books she was always writing in. At my entry, she raised her hand and smiled brightly at me. “It’s nice here, wouldn’t you say?”

I climbed up to my bunk. “Sure.”

“You were with one of the students?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s good, Avari. I’m glad. I’m very glad. We have another day at the medical bay tomorrow, but you have your night free. Explore as much as you want.”

I stared up at the ceiling, knowing I wouldn’t be able to sleep until she put out that lamp, but also knowing that whatever she was doing was probably important and so I wouldn’t complain, not yet. “I…” I could hear her move slightly in her chair, angle herself towards me to encourage me to continue. “Is…?”

I didn’t continue.

“Oh, Avari.” She sighed. “Goodnight.”

I turned to the side. Why am I always pretending to be an incapable ‘observer’? I closed my eyes. The students here are my age, so why am I the only one at our Academy? “Goodnight.”

*

Laclan found me during my meditation. He plopped himself down and took on my position, sitting cross-legged and making exaggerated hmmm sounds. His patience allowed him maybe half a minute before he pushed at my shoulder, knocking me down, himself jumping up. “Do you pray to the lake everyday?”

I sat back up, annoyed by his constant pushing and pulling, though not annoyed enough to ask him to go away. “It’s meditation.”

“Right.” He looked out at the lake, then nudged me with his foot when I’d closed my eyes again. “Is it fun? It looks really boring.” When I didn’t respond, he nudged me again. “Like what we do in the chapel buildings to Vierge Marie.”

Vierge Marie, the woman in the stained-glass windows. He couldn’t tell me more about it – “I don’t know, it’s a French thing,” – but he was surprised we had no ‘chapel’ at the Alchemist Academy, that we had no stained-glass windows to Vierge Marie, that we didn’t have these mandatory Latin services. “What about religion classes? Like, with normal classes?” He didn’t know how to interpret my silence, whether I meant ‘no, I don’t have religion classes’ or ‘this isn’t even a question worth answering’. “I bet your favourite class is, like, Natural Science, right?” He took my silence as an affirmation. “Knew it! Are you ready to go now?”

It was as easy for him to handle a sword with his left hand as it was with his right. His movements almost felt inherent, as if he didn’t even need to give them any thought, which made him an abysmal teacher. “Just…um…just do what I do!” But I was 13, and I was stubborn, and I was barely willing to emulate Ivra Vonglo, who I knew was an expert in healing, let alone this talkative, brash blond battle elf. Frustration on both our parts was quick in coming. He couldn’t understand why I couldn’t so easily do what he so easily could. I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t either, and I didn’t like being at a disadvantage, and I had never liked receiving instruction. We fought. He could knock my sword away from me with so little effort, could push me down to the ground with barely a tap, and my fury would worsen his impatience. We fought even without the swords. We fought until I was storming away and he was calling me a ‘trouillard!’.

Of course, we met again the next night.

“Can the Alchemists cast spells?” No one could cast spells. “But they’re magic, right?” Science, not magic. “But they’re not like…scientists.” They were ‘like’ scientists. “Have you ever been to the other Academies?” No, I hadn’t. “I’ve only ever been to one, with Gaspard and Wolfe. Wolfe’s ma sponsors this kid at one of the Art Schools. He’s a violinist. Have you ever met a violinist?”

We were sitting by the lake, where he would find me during my meditations. Tonight, he’d brought us cheese and ham and crackers to munch on, and he was talking through a mouth full of food. “Can I ask you a question?”

Other than the million he was constantly asking me? I shrugged.

“Why do you look like that?”

I chewed slowly, then reached for another cracker. “What do I look like?”

“Like…With the long hair. And the eyes. And your skin. You…Wolfe and me, we were trying to guess where you could be from, but it’s impossible to tell by looking at you. Have you ever guessed? Or, like…do they tell you at the orphanage where your parents are from?”

“I’ve never lived in an orphanage.”

“But…But you are an orphan? You’re truly an orphan?”

Again, I shrugged.

He expected me to say something else, to address anything else he’d said. Past the lake, there were silhouettes of tall trees, thick and daunting. The clay cut off somewhere past the stables, turning into bare dark soil, then increasingly thick grassland. I could feel its pull. Here, and everywhere else around the Military Academy, Nature was quiet. I had to strain my ears to hear it, even during meditations, but I could hear its hum in that forest, where it was undisturbed by the chatter of men, by their boots kicking the clay, by their marching and fighting and chapel hours to Vierge Marie.

“I want to go there.”

I pointed to the trees. He followed the arrow of my index finger. “The forest? We’re not allowed there after 16hr. The last time a-”

“Are you scared of the dark?”

He closed his mouth, narrowed his eyes, then opened it again: “Of course not.”

“Are you scared of your generals?”

He immediately bristled at the challenge in my tone. I finished chewing, slowly standing up. “I’ll race you.” I offered.

He took off running. I followed. He was as fast as I’d expected him to be, and even if I pushed myself to my limit, I couldn’t catch up. I felt myself smiling, the wind in my hair, pushing against my cheeks and my eyelids and whisping around me with increasing force, increasing with my proximity to the forest, until we were in the thick of the trees and each branch was swaying in the wind, leaves were flying up and around us, and my hair was flailing around me. He was laughing. I was grinning. “I won!” He said, hands in the air. “Did you feel that breeze? It was like I was flying!”

I felt the breeze. I felt everything.

I felt the light from the moon, from the stars. I felt a rushing stream of water some several feet south. I felt the wind welcome me. I felt the trees, as old as they were, heaving out deep breaths. I felt the wiggle of worms underneath the soil, the flitter of birds in the trees. I felt a flicker of all my nights thus far, all the nights of my life, where I’d be alone but not truly, because whenever I was hit with pricks of loneliness, Nature reminded me of itself, of its company, of its friendship.

I squeezed my eyes shut and laughed a little when a breeze tickled across my cheeks. It ruffled my hair. It whispered between the gaps of my fingers. Laclan was spinning around, laughing loudly as he let himself be pushed around by the gust of wind. It welcomed him too. He didn’t realise it, but it welcomed him just as it welcomed me.

“D…do you want to see something?”

He nodded eagerly. Of course, he would never say no to a request like that. The only hesitance would come from me, because I had never really shown anyone anything before, not like this. For a boy without much patience, he was remarkably patient as he watched me, as he waited for whatever I would show him. I suspected he might be impressed with whatever, if not just because it was me opening up to him. “The plants,” I said, my voice low and my eyes diverted, “do you feel them breathing?”

“What?”

“If you really try, if you really listen and feel, you can feel everything breathing. Try and find it.”

He looked confused but willing, and so he squeezed his eyes shut and posed himself in a caricature of concentration. My heart was running as fast as I had just some moments ago, inexplicably nervous, or excited, of both, because he was engaging with me in a way that no one ever really had, in a way that I’d refused to invite, not since I’d left the Monastery. Sometimes, I would talk to Fox the fox, but Fox wasn’t an elf. I’d sometimes been tempted with Manon, but Manon was an adult, unrelatable, a little unreachable despite her best efforts, a ‘state parasite’. Laclan was…a 13-year-old boy, just like me.

“I feel…something.” Laclan tried, nose scrunched up, brows furrowed. His hair was so blond but his eyebrows were so dark. He opened one eye, peeking at me. “Like…a pulse?”

“Yes. Yes, like a pulse. Focus on that. Then…look at this.”

I could feel their pulses and align my own breathing with theirs – not so much an alignment of breathing as much as it was just an alignment of being – and I could push myself out in deep exhales as I pulled them in with deeper inhales. Laclan stared. He stared as every plant around me moved with my movements, as I breathed in and breathed out. When I let out a big, breathy sigh, all the plants sagged down with the relaxation of my shoulders, touched the ground in front of them as I folded forward, and then mirrored me exactly when I took another breath to straighten myself up.

His eyes were sparkling. He started jumping up and down. “An old trick! An old trick! A faerie! How do you do that?”

My face was flushing but my skin tone was forgiving enough not to let it show. “I’m not doing anything. It’s nature breathing. And it’s me breathing.” I crouched down to softly run my fingers through the grass. “At the Monastery.”

He crouched down with me. “You learnt how to do that at a monastery?”

I nodded.

“Did you grow up as a monk?”

I nodded.

“You’re so cool!” Laclan punched my shoulder, and instead of glowering, I just smiled a little. I might’ve said it back, because it’s definitely what I thought – he was very cool, too. “Do you have your sword?” I did. We jumped up, ran further through the forest to get a better spot under the moonlight, and then fought and fought and fought.

*

“You’re coming back, right?”

I shrugged.

“You have to. I’ve got to teach you fencing and archery and hand-to-hand. And you’ve got to show me more of the things you can do.”

The wording was strange to me, ‘things I could do’. I had been raised on the Monastery mantra of All Elves can do all things. Whatever I could do, all elves could do. And like I’d said, it wasn’t a thing being ‘done’. It was nature and I moving together. “That was so cool, Avari. I’ve never seen anything like it. Did you notice what the wind was doing when you were moving the plants? It had gone completely still! Then, when you sighed, it all whooooshed. Ah! Make a tornado!”

I couldn’t make a tornado. Or, I could, but I wasn’t yet sure how to call on that much wind with that much force. “I don’t ‘make’ or ‘do’ anything.” I reminded him again. “It’s like...a conversation. Like us talking right now. I’m not making you talk to me, but you’re talking. And the other way around.”

He thought on that. “Hmm.” Then he gave me a big, toothy smile. “Of course we’re talking! We’re friends!”

Friends. I thought of Fox the fox, and Manon, and even Ivra. Friends. Yes. That’s what we were. Or, that’s what we could have been.

*

I was not improving. And I would never improve.

In sword-fighting, at least. I would maybe argue that there were other aspects of my life that had improved in that one week at the North District Boy’s Military Academy. Manon noticed it all before I did, because she would be happy whenever I returned late, dutifully scolding me but sharing her excitement that I’d ‘made a friend’. She said my spirits had ‘lifted’, that my ‘mood had improved’, that I was ‘less antagonistic’. There were only two days left, and admittedly, I was a little sad to go.

We were in the forest again, and even if other aspects had improved, my sword-fighting had remained stubbornly laughable. I couldn’t seem to wield it the way he could. Neither of us could understand why, and the conclusion of ‘natural inability’ was antithetical to both of our personal philosophies. I knew all elves could do all things, and he knew that ‘sword-fighting was basic enough that even a baby could do it’ because allegedly all the Stymphalia began sword-fighting in the womb. In his frustration, he would lunge his sword at me but always miss because he was too good an aim to truly hurt me. In my frustration, I would sulk by a tree and refuse to listen to any more advice or instruction or even conversation.

“You’re leaving tomorrow! And you’re useless!”

I glowered at him. “I’m not useless. You’re a useless teacher.”

“I don’t get it. You must be some child prodigy to be with the Healers when you’re only my age, and you can do that trick where you talk to plants, but you’re so…weak. And I see the other Healers. They’re strong. If you got attacked by bandits, they could fend for themselves. But you’re…”

He closed his eyes and massaged his temple, thinking deeply. When we’d met up at my meditation tonight, he’d given an excited ramble about the visiting philosopher who had talked to his class about ‘the state of nature’. “You know what he said, Avari?” He asked me now. “He said that we all learn best with a true sense of danger. I haven’t actually been trying to hurt you, and you obviously know that, so we’ve got to try something else.”

I wanted to go running again, which was decidedly more fun than waving around a sword. A breeze was cool at my fingertips, and I knew the wind was eager for a race too. I was about to propose we race to the nearest source of water, when he suddenly drew his sword and stood up tall.

“Okay!” He cried out. “Danger!”

My sword was leaning against a tree, not even in my hand. I didn’t have time to grab it, or even the instinct to, not as he suddenly charged at me. Alarm rushed through me, almost knocking me off my feet, but the blow was unavoidable. Right through my chest, right next to my heart, Laclan pierced his sword through me and essentially, by all means, killed me. It was a fatal wound. If not instantly, I would have died in the moments immediately after.

For some seconds, we both stared at each other.

Then my knees buckled and I hit the ground. Laclan began to panic, pulling on his hair, running around the trees and cursing in French. I opened my mouth but I couldn’t speak, not with a sword through my body, and when I touched my tunic, all I felt was wet cloth. I was too overwhelmed to understand exactly what had been done to me, to understand the pain that was touching every part of me, to understand the blood spilling out of me. “Je l’a tué!” Laclan lamented, whining to the moon, I killed him! “J’ai tué un orphelin ! Qui pourrait me pardonner pour ça ? Ahhhh!”

But.

I was not dead.

Not for his lack of trying, but I wasn’t dead, and I didn’t plan on dying, so I sat up a little straighter, pain searing through every imaginable part of me, and then tried to stand up. I couldn’t. I tried again, blood pooling out of me, but I couldn’t. “Laclan,” I whispered, “help me up. Help…”

He was too busy chasing himself around the forest to hear me. I collapsed again, heaving and panting with tears pooling in my eyes. I touched my hand to my chest and forced my mind forward, forced myself to concentrate, and then I tried again. But I couldn’t. It was becoming increasingly hard to move, let alone stand. The pain was confusing me. It was making me dizzy, making me tired, making my vision swirl in front of my eyes. I had a piercing desire for water, for rain, for a lake or a pond; I knew there was a stream nearby. I could hear it rushing, barely audible amongst the cacophony around me – my heart, Laclan, my head.

I touched the blood around my wound, where the cloth was most soaked, where the sword was still inside my body, then I used all possible strength and scratched the grass and soil with my other hand, trying to bury my fingers into the earth. I wanted to listen but I was overwhelmed, too many thoughts but not enough. I wanted to listen to the pulse of nature, to the birds in the trees, to the wind that might have gone still – I was doing all I could to align my body with the earth and stop the blood from flowing out of me, but my mind was scrambled, and I was in more pain than was bearable, and every inhale and exhale lay an exhaustion on me that felt like death.

I couldn’t heal myself. A sword in my body, a debilitating pain in my veins – I couldn’t even remember how.

“Avari,” Laclan was beside me, gently kicking my body with his foot, “t’es mort?” Are you dead?

“Not yet.” I whispered. “Bring a Healer.”

He must have paused, because when he next spoke it felt like being woken up. “I…if…If they find out that I was here, in the forest…If they find out what I did to you, they…”

“Anyone. Get anyone. Or…or take me to the stream.”

“What?”

“I can hear it. Take me there. Then push me in.”

“I can’t drown you!”

“Please.” I was still mostly a stranger to good manners. I had only said ‘please’ or ‘thank you’ in the most begrudging, ungrateful way I could manage. In that moment, I meant it with all the earnest I was capable of. “Please. Laclan, please hurry.”

“I….I’ll…” He ran off. He tore down the forest path, running with the speed of a thousand Stymphalian battle elves. Blood must be welling in my lungs despite me delaying its spread, because as I coughed, I choked out red, and as I breathed, I breathed out the same.

The night was cold. And it was long. And I was alone.

As nature further cooled down, I found myself cooling with it. Losing heat, and consciousness, and losing a body that should have long since been dead. The pain was driving me to delirium. I could feel myself both in my body and out of it, as if I was a hollow form with its consciousness hovering somewhere above, watching a boy with eyes too green and hair too long as he occasionally spasmed, as he coughed blood, as the grass around him all seemed to lean in his direction but could themselves offer no substantial help. I could see that same boy during his nights at an Academy far from this one, arguing with two cats named Cat 1 and Cat 2, conspiring with a dark red fox that was his best friend, his only friend. I could see that same boy meditating day and night by any water he could find. Avari, meaning ‘water-born’. He’d been retroactively named by the monks when they’d realised his affinity for the element. Almost, he could see Delphia, the monk who had raised him, who had herself died, who was now kindly watching him die.

But he was 13. He was stubborn. If he didn’t want to die, there was nothing death could do about that.

It took me slipping in and out of consciousness several times before I realised the rain. It was a drizzle at first, then a thunderous torrent, and it fell all over me, washing my blood into the soil below me, making me colder, making me shiver, making it harder to fall back asleep, and by that point I desperately wanted to sleep. I’d been awake for too long and it was too much pain for a conscious body, but I forced my eyes open, and even though my mind could only churn out unintelligible babble, I was forcing it to stay active. Hours must have passed. Every minute was an agonising reminder that my life should have long since left me. In those hours, I whispered two things. The first, more than a little useless, “Laclan?”. The second, for the rain and the grass and the soil, “Thank you.”

“Oh, merde.”

More words, but from another voice. By this point in the night, in my suspended death, I could no longer see. Even my hearing was unstable. I felt movement in my wound, an attempt to pull the sword out, but I used all my energy to push the word ‘no’ past cold lips. The sword was stopping the worst of the blood flow, at least. It could be worse. I could have died hours ago.

“You were attacked? We have no time. I’ll call a Healer.”

“No,” I forced out again, “No. The stream. Push me in.”

“Quoi?”

“Please. Do it now.”

I didn’t immediately register any difference in the air and the ground until a harsh breeze stung my face. A lot of my body had gone numb, either from the shock or the pain. The body that was carrying me was running, aided by the wind, and it wasn’t Laclan because it wasn’t as fast. It didn’t ask for further explanations. It didn’t risk wasting more time. I was flung into the air and engulfed by cold water when I came crashing down. I blinked until I could see – not a stream at all, but a huge lake – as my dark red blood stained the clear water I was surrounded by. In a pain so searing that the sensation alone might have killed me, I pulled the sword out of me. Then I swam further down.

Time lost me completely.

The sun had long since risen when I climbed onto the lake bank. I collapsed onto the mud, water streaming out of every inch of my clothes. The red-headed boy was still here, the boy with the endless list of names, and he woke immediately at my presence. He watched as I dropped the sword onto the ground, and he picked it up, examining it for ownership. He found the family crest. Wordlessly, he slid it into his own sheath.

“Did you heal yourself?”

“I’m a Healer.” I winced as I spoke, my chest crying out. “We can all heal.”

He didn’t respond, just stared at me. He looked distrusting, suspicious, vaguely irritated, as if there was something I had done wrong, as if this was all an Old Trick about to expose itself. When he stood up, he didn’t offer me a helping hand. “I saved your life.”

“I know.”

“That’s the story. I saw you moments after you had been attacked by an agresseur inconnu, and saved your life. We’ll go to the medical bay, they’ll look after the rest of your wounds, but you’ll tell them that I’m the hero, okay? Nothing about Laclan, d’accord?”

I had no reason to agree. None at all.

“Consider it a favour earned.” He said, voice terse. “A big one.”

“I don’t seek favours from-”

“Don’t spit stupid orphan riddles at me. I don’t know what they teach you in bastard houses, but in the real world, you need favours.” He had never seemed to fit his body as a child. He had a young face. Even when he slicked his hair back with all the gel in the world, his cheeks were rosy and chubby, his fingers clumsy and sticky. But he talked like a politician at the King’s Court. He talked like the world was about to be his, like he was just in the final rounds of negotiation. He held his hand out. “Je t’en donne ma parole. You will be able to cash in a favour from me, a favour from the Roqueforte-Cilliacs. Je t’en donne ma parole.”

I give you my word.

I took his hand, allowing him to pull me up. It was a slow, arduous walk to the medical bay. Manon rushed over to me, immediately scolding me despite her fierce hug, and I slumped against her body without meaning to, hearing of the ‘search party’, the ‘scare I had caused’, ‘how I should know to be back before…’.

She touched her hand to her mouth, seeing the poorly-healed deep wound in my chest. Another Healer crouched by me, then caught me when my legs could no longer let me stand. They asked what happened. They asked how I had drained so much of my energy. They asked about this fatal wound through my chest and through my back.

They asked how I survived.

Wolfgang Roqueforte-Cilliac de Montaigne. He saved my life.