I scored 0 on the aptitude test because I refused to take it. One of the professors, a woman who taught Arithmetic, implored me to remember that the test was ‘for my benefit’, that it would help them know what timetable to give me and which classes to place me in, but I refused. Other professors only elicited the same response. One of the admirals intervened, locking me in a classroom and demanding I sit the test and ‘answer honestly’, so I sat the test and made sure to give the worst answers I could. Still, they would not leave me alone. At their fourth attempt, another of the professors sat me down and calmly asked, ‘why?’. Was this out of a genuine fear of failure, or a juvenile sense of rebellion? Was this a natural reaction to a different environment, or because I hadn’t received enough discipline while growing up? I refused to answer any of their questions. For the most part, during that initial week, I hardly spoke at all. The hunger strike wasn’t intentional, but I refused to eat where they ate and the natural result was a rebellious fast. The majors didn’t scare me. Neither did the corporals, the admirals, or the generals. They were equally unsure how to discipline me, because I wasn’t their student, because they couldn’t punish me with drills that I was in no physical condition to take, because my being here at all was a completely foreign concept to them.

The Baron drummed his fingers against his desk, humming, thinking about what to do with me.

“How do we get you to take this test, Avari?” The Baron asked me. “Honestly, tell me what you want us to do.”

There was a portrait on the wall behind him: himself, a woman, and a young boy. The woman was not an elf. Her eyes were pupil-less swirls of colour, and her skin, even in the painting, held a distinct non-elf-like shimmer. She was slender and tall, draped in an opulent purple, one hand on the Baron’s shoulder, her other on the boy I assumed was their son. Her hair fell in long, beautiful waves, fading from a light green to a light blue to a light pink. Ethereal. The Baron didn’t need to turn to see what had so violently snatched my attention. He had no reaction to it. I had questions, millions of them, burning on the tip of my tongue, but a deep, guttural unwillingness to ask. Tell me about that woman. I bit my tongue. Who is she? Where is she from? How have you married her?

I bit my cheek. I bit down so hard that I tasted blood.

“Not everyone responds to honey,” he decided. “That’s your prerogative. If it’s punishment that motivates you, so be it. You will retake this test on Sunday. Until then, you will spend every evening cleaning the Mezzanine. If it is inspected and deemed unsatisfactory, you will continue cleaning until it isn’t. You’ll sleep there if you have to. If Sunday comes and you intentionally fail again, you will continue to clean until you give us – for your own sake, for your own benefit – your true results. Do you understand?”

‘For my sake’; ‘for my benefit’. Their son had white and blue swirls in his eyes, a mix between the Psyche (because I knew these iridescent creatures were known as the Psyche) mother and elf father. What would that mean for him, to be half of each? I could taste the questions in my mouth, but I swallowed them down. Embittered curiosity had been my only meal this week.

“I noted that you’ve finally planted the lavender stems.” He wrote something down on a scrap of paper, left-handed like I was: call in the Villieu boy. “Let’s see if they grow.”

*

An admiral watched me as I stuffed potatoes, ham, carrots and raspberries into my mouth, downing it all with warm sweet water. He watched me when I sat down on the floor by one of the wall-length glass windows, mentally searching for that large pond in the forest, then whispering my meditations in the quiet of the otherwise empty Mezzanine. He watched as I swept the floor, as I tried to, as I struggled to stand up for long periods of time without my walking stick; struggled to hold both the broom and my cane at the same time; as the back-and-forth of the action quickly exhausted me. He watched as other students came to do the same, students outside, pressing themselves against one of the many windows to see me clean their mess: amused, confused, curious. I reached a point when I could no longer move, when I could barely even stand, when I had to hang my head down and wheeze out breaths and wait for myself to regain the energy that even sweeping made me lose. My arms ached. My legs were unstable. My heart could give up, but it would be pathetic to faint from trying to sweep an expansive Mezzanine, of which I had only so far swept less than a quarter of.

The admiral allowed me some moments of rest before I was being forced to my feet and shouted at to continue. It was the early hours of the morning by the time I had swept the entire hall, and then I was pointed to a mop and a bucket and made to re-cover all that ground once again. It hurt me. I had to bite my lip to try and stop any tears of anger, pain, or frustration. Whenever I would fall and lean against a wall, he would give me a handful of seconds before I had to be back on my feet. Even my hand struggled to grip onto my cane. They were all mandated to be early risers, and so when the first group of boys were shuffled into the Mezzanine, I had only just begun cleaning tables. The admiral didn’t let me leave. They watched as I struggled, as I was defeated by an inanimate cafeteria; and then they left to go ride horses or shoot arrows or test their endurance and stamina in any other way, knowing that whatever they could do, I could not.

When it was Laclan’s turn to be served his breakfast, he immediately bee-lined for me.

“Ah, you look terrible.” He held me by my shoulders, stopping me from slipping to the ground. “I heard from the others that you were cleaning. Is it true that you defied all the commanders? Is it true that you defied the Baron? Everyone’s talking about it.”

When I looked up at him, when he saw the expression in my glare, he had to look away. Like Manon, he wore that disgusting cloak of guilt. If I had the strength to push him away, I would have. If I had the strength to even speak, I would have broken my week of silence to say whatever I could to hurt him, to hurt him in a way somewhat comparable to how he had killed me. I was weak. I was only upright because of his support, and even then, when the admiral shouted at him to let me go, when the admiral had to walk over and forcefully yank Laclan away because he refused, I didn’t even have the energy to stay standing. I dropped to my knees, wincing, my hair covering my face so they wouldn’t see.

“It is satisfactory.” The admiral said, once I had cleaned the last table. It was the middle of the afternoon. I was lying in a heap on the cold floor, a floor that had been sullied once again from breakfast, then lunch. It was satisfactory in so far of last night’s dinner no longer being the cause of its mess, but I would be back in some hours, and this would all repeat once again. “When you can, return to your chambers.”

I couldn’t return. I lay there, and night fell, and the students shuffled in and shuffled out for their dinner, no one coming near me even if I heard all their mutters and murmurs and whispers. The tone was different. It was no longer the mock and laugh it had been on my last visit here. Instead, it was confused yet careful, wary, curious.

“Avari,” that same hellish voice, that same damned battle elf, “it’s Laclan.”

I vaguely reached out my hand, wanting to push him away but knowing I couldn’t.

“I’ll do the sweeping and mopping tonight, okay? You just do the tables.”

I lifted my head.

He was knelt down by my body, leaning in like I was some dead animal he was inspecting. He blinked, then poked my shoulder. “Are you…awake?”

I closed my eyes, groaning softly. Barely conscious, still in a tiring amount of pain.

“I’ll be back after my drills to help.” He stood up. Then he ran off and ran back, dropping a small roll of bread in my hands. “Do you want water?”

I nodded.

So he ran off and ran back and brought me a cup of water. It was difficult to sit up, but I sat up and drank it, then began eating the bread, chewing slowly. I didn’t thank him, but I didn’t scowl at him when he waved goodbye. Wolfgang was waiting for him by the door, already focused on me. He looked disgusted and annoyed, and he walked off the second I met his gaze. Gaspard was…here. He was standing by my side, looking awkward and embarrassed, flushed a needless pink, but he put two more bread buns in my hand, then quickly walked off without a word.

I ate them. Then, I slowly stood up, sat down on an empty bench, and waited.

*

He returned.

Strangely, tonight’s admiral didn’t raise any issue about him doing most of the work. “I already negotiated the extra drills I’ll do in exchange for helping you,” Laclan told me, pushing the broom from one end to the other with no effort, with much speed. “When Admiral Rubespont said that I should let you go or ‘face punishment’, I knew I could get Gaspard to negotiate the punishment in advance so that I could help you every night. He’s good at negotiation. He cites their own rules back at them, and I don’t know if they’re impressed or just legally bound, but they listen to him.”

His gun was strapped into its holster, pointed at the ground. It was no more threatening than the gun the admiral had; I might even argue it was less threatening because the admiral’s gun was clearly more advanced than Laclan’s Class A rifle, yet it put me on edge. Even if it had been a blunt kitchen knife in that holster. Even if it had been a spoon. I couldn’t help but be aware of all his movements, every tiny affectation. He was hasty and impatient, but it would be a lie to call him clumsy. There was a violent grace to all his movements, an effortless yet rushed precision. He ran from one side of the Mezzanine to the other with the broom, his shoulder-length hair flying behind him, running fast enough that he had to suddenly stop so as not to crash into the wall. He caught himself and spun around, then ran back, and forward, and back, never falling, never even dropping the broom. The only complaint the admiral made was that Laclan’s hair was ‘unwise’, and so he picked up a bread knife, wiped the butter off on a spare piece of cloth, and without a mirror, without a reflection at all, hacked off half its length and swept the gold locks away with the rest of the food waste.

He finished the sweeping and mopping before the clock even struck midnight. By that point, I had wiped down less than half of the tables, even that being a struggle, and so he wiped down the other half without an issue, without complaint. The admiral nodded, judging it as satisfactory, and told us to put all the cleaning equipment away before we left.

Slowly, I dragged the broom into a small storage room while Laclan made vague hand signs by the window, laughing with the boys opposite who were making them back at him. They were beckoning him to come out and join them, but he was shaking his head, pointing inside, pointing to me. “J’suis avec mon ami. À plus tard!” I’m with my friend. I’ll see you later.

When I sat down, having served myself a leftover plate of chicken and grains, he sat down opposite me.

“Did you get my letters? Did you get any of them?”

His handwriting was barely legible, which was exactly what would be expected when looking at a boy like him. In one of the letters, he’d asked me to excuse his grammar because he was ‘failing all his essay classes’, and so the combination of bad handwriting and abysmal French subject-verb agreement had made reading his letters feel like deciphering ancient code. Much of his final letter had been completely beyond me, the only words I had been able to make out being ‘ami’, ‘futur’, ‘Wolfgang’ and ‘rifle’.

“You never wrote back.”

My eyes answered him. My silence answered him. He lowered his gaze, sober and quiet in a way I knew must be rare, before getting up to his feet. “I’ll be back to help tomorrow.” He told me. Then he walked away, not waiting for a ‘thank you’ (not that I had the power to give one), not waiting for an explanation for why I’d never written back, not waiting for me.

*

True to his word, he came back. He came back every night. Relentlessly talkative, telling me about his classes and drills and tricks with his friends, always focused and quick. He didn’t ask about the unanswered letters again. With him saying 1000 words every second, he didn’t have much space to ask me many questions at all. He just rambled in his typical monologue, and I listened in my typical silence. “As soon as you write that test,” he told me, “you can finally start coming to classes. I hope you’re in my Natural Science class, because you’re good at science, right? You won’t mind if I steal some answers during the tests…”. Missing main meals meant I missed the best portions of food, which Laclan was aware of, and so he always folded up his baked bread roll to give to me, and Gaspard would often (very awkwardly) do the same, giving me two. Wolfgang would hang back, never engaging with me beyond our usual scowls, glares, and hand gestures that I now knew meant something akin to ‘va te faire foutre’, but it didn’t take me long to realise that the second bread roll that Gaspard would give me were always his.

Then, Saturday night came around. Gaspard, instead of quickly scurrying off after giving me the bread rolls, stayed by my side. He wrung his hands. His eyes darted from side to side. Then he sat down next to me. He crossed his legs. He uncrossed his legs. He looked at me expectantly, as if waiting for me to begin conversation, then wrung his hands once more when I didn’t. At that age, Gaspard didn’t yet know how to be charming, even if it was more than evident that he had the full faculties to be. “After the cleaning,” he finally said to me, voice a little breathless, speaking in French, “please come to my chambre. Or…or, if you’d rather, I can come to you. Euh. Do you understand me?”

I gave him no response, just a long blink. He looked a little nauseous, but then he repeated all his words in Elven so awkward and broken that, without his prior French explanation, I wouldn’t have been able to comprehend. “My chambre.” He decided. “Whenever you’re done. Lac…Laclan will show you the way, but I’ll shoo him off. Euh. See you then.”

It might have been some dormant form of empathy that made me agree, that made me nod when Laclan later told me that Gaspard had informed him of ‘the plan’ and he would walk me over to his chambre when we were done. Empathy, because Gaspard was blameless in a way that Wolfgang and Laclan weren’t, because Gaspard’s social anxiety had clearly made even speaking to me an arduous task, because when Gaspard walked away after that bizarre conversation, one of the admirals had yelled at him to “Pick up your pace, straighten your posture! You, pretty boy, you!”.

Or it might have been curiosity, because I had spent my initial weeks in this Academy shuffling from my chambre to the Mezzanine and nowhere else. Sometimes I would work on the small plot of land that had been designated as my garden. Sometimes, when it was quiet enough, I would take my meditation by the pond, but I hadn’t explored the grounds in any sort of meaningful way since my arrival. Laclan led me down a path I’d never walked before, away from the fencing and equestrian training grounds and towards the huge residential building, the one with stained glass windows to their French virgin. I had long since lost Misa’s rosaire – somewhere in the Monastery – but I could imagine her holding them, touching those beads in the strange way she always did, muttering out chants that could have been French or Latin.

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Inside was carpeted green and gold. On the walls were huge portraits of previous Academy members, men in military uniform, men in battle. Further down, women too in the same forms. Many portraits of royal elves, but none before the French arrival. On our way up a marble spiral staircase, there was one specific portrait that caught my eye, larger than the rest: a Psyche dressed as an archer, pupil-less eyes, long hair that fell in beautiful waves of light green then light blue then light pink. Her name – Ophélie de Perse. Noble member of the King’s Archers. Laclan saw that I’d stopped at this portrait, and he peered at it too. “Oh, the Headmaster’s wife, right?”

I bit the inside of my cheek, then forced myself to say: “Tell me about her.”

Laclan frowned, leaning in closer as if her life story would be written on her bow and arrow. “I mean, I don’t really know. She was adopted by the Comte de Perse which is how the headmaster got his title as Baron when he married her. She’s obviously not from the land. Um…That’s all I know. Come on, let’s go.”

We continued climbing. It took some more seconds before I said, “He married a Psyche.”

“A what?”

“A…A Psyche.”

“A what?”

“She…” I couldn’t understand the confusion. “What is she? Not an elf, a…?”

“A Ciel.” He looked at me oddly, like this was an obvious thing to know. “Like, the French word for ‘sky’. Henri!”

Once we climbed the staircase, the hallway was much more populated. Boys running around, in and out of rooms, yelling, laughing, shoving each other. The boy named Henri grinned at Laclan, running over to us with his brown hair still wet. “Did you hear about Robert and the baker?” He asked Laclan, after curiously glancing at me but saying nothing. “Did you hear her father got involved?”

Through the chaos of boys and their noise, I could see Wolfgang at the end of the hallway. He was crouched down with some other boys, smoke billowing of his mouth, the same colour as his eyes, and he passed around the pipe they were all sharing. He wasn’t surprised I was here. When he raised his gaze and met my eye, he looked back at me as if he’d followed my whole ascension up that staircase and down this hallway, as if he’d expected me to be standing right where I was.

“Here is one of the Cilliacs.” Laclan said, pointing to a portrait next to us. In it, a man with Wolfgang’s red hair, with red eyes that Wolfgang only seemed to achieve when he was angry. Ignes Cilliac. He held no weapon. He rode no horse. He just stood there, posed neutrally for the portrait, no demonstration of whatever his skill had been. Laclan knocked on the door next to it. “I’ll show you the portraits of the Stymphalians later. There are so many, and I’ll be the next!”

The door swung open to reveal a nervous Gaspard. He swallowed, then beckoned me inside. “No, not you.” He said, stopping Laclan from entering. “You’re a distraction.”

Laclan took that as high praise. “Of course! How could you have fun without me?”

“We’re not going to ‘have fun’. We’re studying.” He pushed at Laclan’s shoulder. “You can go.”

“What? But…But don’t you want to know about Robert and the baking girl?”

“Wolfe told me about it.”

“Wolfe’s bad at stories. Let me tell you another. What about the rumour that Calex fought a bear in the Andeluze Mountains? In fact, I can study with you both. The written subjunctive, it, ah…it’s a nasty tense, huh? Let me in and teach me or you’ve failed as a friend.”

“You have a million others. Go bother them.”

Laclan winced, clutching his heart. “Ouch.”

Gaspard rolled his eyes, pushing at Laclan’s shoulder again. “If I say yes to you, I would have had to say yes to Wolfe. And he can be worse than you are. Now, go. Avari, please, euh, come in.”

The door was closed behind me.

Gaspard’s room was entirely unlike my own. It was smaller but more thoughtful: the walls were painted a deep, dark blue, the furniture (oak tables, dressers, etc.) was either rimmed or plated in a matching gold. He had bookcases filled with many, many books, titles that I spied to be mostly about legal history or current political legislation. His bed was huge, draped in vinyl, double or triple the size of mine. Above it hung a portrait of Gaspard’s branch of the Maison de Villieu. A mother and father. Three boys, four girls. Gaspard stood as the middle boy, his posture a little more anxious than the rest.

“Pardon the mess,” he said to me, quickly tidying up imaginary clutter. “Please, sit wherever.”

I sat behind his desk. On it was a huge anthology opened to a page on ‘the General Historiography of Extra-Legal Wartime Settlements’. I looked at the dates of the sources referenced, and saw that unlike the encyclopaedias at the Alchemist Academy, they were all very modern, very recent.

“Is…Is there a subject you find especially difficult?” He referred to me using ‘vous’. “We can start with Contemporary Politics, if you wish. Most find that difficult. Or, perhaps, Arithmetic. Euh…I have my notebooks just over here…”

He retrieved the notebooks, sitting on the edge of his bed and then flipping them open to a random page. He looked at me again. “Where…uh…Oh, let’s start with the paper itself, no? Do you remember the first question? What was the topic?”

The page on ‘the General Historiography of Extra-Legal Wartime Settlements’ was filled with names and places I didn’t know, and dates that I didn’t know the significance of. All so modern, so recent. I knew this silence was painful for him, but I kept quiet as I read through the information, as I glossed over terms like ‘recently approved Elven jurisprudence’ and ‘the property-owning demographic of the Junispurrei Counties’. The pages were a pure white, not ink-stained, not folded over, not wizened with dust, age, and multigenerational use. I could see Gaspard was beginning to panic a little at my silence, and so I finally looked back at him. “Could you,” I asked, “tell me about the Ciel?”

“The…?” It caught him off guard, but he didn’t reject the question. He stood up and retrieved a book from the shelf, one named Current Standards of Elven and Otherwise Political Relations, and, after checking the table of contents, opened to a section towards the end. “What about them? What subject does this come under, sorry?”

“The name.” I said. “Why are they called Ciel?”

Again, confused but too awkward to argue, he scanned through the book to see if he could find any answers for me. He couldn’t. So he stood up, paced around for some useless, wasteful moments, announced he would run to the library and find a book on ‘species etymology’, and after 15 minutes, he returned.

“Euh…It…Prior to the ‘influence of the French language’, they used to go by the Elven name ‘Psyche’, which is a slight corruption or misunderstanding of the word ‘pyske’, which is what they refer to themselves as. Of course, ‘Psyche’ then carries philosophical and metaphysical connotations that corrupted the word further when it was carried into the French. ‘Psyche’, a reference to the ‘soul’ or the ‘mind’; these connotations along with their ‘angelic appearance’ led to them being referred to, in French, as ‘de Ciel’, of the sky or of heaven, or simply – Ciel.” He closed the book. “Et voilà.”

I wanted the book in his hands. I wanted to read it all myself. “And the Gotteird Plains?”

It took us many minutes to resolve what I meant by this. Old Encyclopaedias had told me of the Psyche’s ‘notable communities’ in the ‘Gotteird Plains’, plains I couldn’t even be sure still existed, communities I could only guess were long since evacuated. “Can you spell it for me?” So I did, writing it down on a piece of paper to show him. The word didn’t spark much recognition, but he had seen it before, and he knew it enough to know I was pronouncing it wrongly – not ‘Gott-erde’, but ‘Yotarde’. “Think of the G as a Y.” Although he now knew the word I was referring to, he didn’t know anything about the ‘Gotteird Plains’. He found one lone entry in his Current Standards of Elven and Otherwise Political Relations book: “The Gotteird Plains, more commonly known under its French name of: Alluviale.” His eyes lit up, finally reaching a point of understanding. “Yes, I know Alluviale. Not as the ‘Gotteird Plains’, but as Alluviale. It’s where lavender grows.”

“What?”

“Lavender. It only grows in that area. I suppose its technical name is still ‘Gotteird Plains’ because Alluviale is the name of the species of lavender, I think, but if you say ‘I went to Alluviale’, everyone knows where you’re talking about. Euh…lavender. You know that, right? We can’t grow it anywhere else. It only grows in Alluviale. It’s a restriction by nature, I guess.”

Nature did not have restrictions.

There seemed to be more he wanted to say, but he didn’t say it. There seemed to be questions he wanted to ask, on why I was so curious about the Ciel in particular, on why my knowledge seemed outdated by several decades, on why I hadn’t known how to pronounce ‘Gotteird’, a word that was no longer even in Elven use.

“I…” He cleared his throat, because his voice had broken just on the ‘je’. “I’m sorry I can’t speak Elven. I told the headmaster but he said it didn’t matter, that you understand French, but I…I should know how to speak it. How did you learn? In…in your Monastery? Laclan said you grew up as a monk.”

‘Learn’? Manon had taught me French. It had been her first self-assigned task when we’d moved to the Alchemist Academy. She had taught me and I had learnt. I had never ‘learnt’ Elven, just as I’d never ‘learnt’ how to breathe. Our ancient texts were in Elven, our meditations were in Elven: it was all I knew. To even realise that there were other languages to speak and think in had been something of a shock to me. The existence of French, of any other language at all, had almost seemed superfluous, unnecessary.

“You care to learn?”

He nodded genuinely. “Laclan’s a lousy teacher and Wolfe is…Wolfe. But it’s something I should know. Especially as…well…what’s the point in diplomacy if you’re stuck in one language? Uh. Yes, I would like to learn. I…Oh, you’re leaving?”

I was. I was tired and uncomfortable, displaced, and it was too claustrophobic of an emotion to encounter when in someone else’s company. “Well, after the test on Sunday morning, you can tell me how it went? Um. Okay. Goodnight.”

The hallway was just as lively, just as unrestricted about the curfew-less transition from Saturday night to Sunday morning. Before I could close the door, a hand reached out to stop it from swinging shut.

Wolfgang. Next to him, Ignes Cillac was gallantly looking ahead, painted in regal stillness. For the sake of curiosity, I wondered what their connection was: great uncle? Grandfather? But for the sake of my own personal dislike, I didn’t bother asking. “Surprised you haven’t dropped dead from starvation.” He said to me, his first direct words to me since I’d made his Academy my home. “You’re making yourself miserable with all this rebellion. Don’t they teach you anything in bastard houses? Or, was it an orphanage?”

When I tried to walk away, he pressed his hand against the wall next to my head instead, stopping my exit. “You’ve not thanked me for Ulyses.”

Thanked him? “I thought you might be grateful,” he continued, “to come back and see Ulyses gone.”

“Ulyses,” my words were acid in my mouth, and not just from the weariness of my throat: after many days of barely saying a word, engaging in what little conversation I had had put strain on my voice, a soreness in my throat. “You think I don’t much prefer him to you?”

His anger was easy to instigate, staining his silver eyes a bloody red. Laclan and Gaspard were the same height, Wolfgang was some inches below, me some inches below that. He towered over me and relished in that advantage. “He bloodied your face and yet you’re not thankful he’s gone?”

“At your encouragement.”

“You stupid bastard. He would’ve done it at anyone’s encouragement.”

“Possibly.” I agreed. “But it was at yours.”

“Not an argument, I hope.” Laclan appeared, leaning on the wall next to me, staring down Wolfgang. “Just…friend’s talking, n’est-ce pas?”

Wolfgang glared at him, but he moved his arm away obediently, opening Gaspard’s door without knocking and walking inside. Laclan and I both watched the door slam shut. “He’s…difficult.” Laclan told me. “But he’s not beyond hope. Like I said, just need to push and poke and punch and shake…” Like Wolfgang, he opened Gaspard’s door without knocking, going to join his friends. “Will you join?”

I shook my head. He already knew I wouldn’t. “Okay, well, I’ll see you tomorrow, Avari. Goodnight.”

*

In my small garden, I dug deep into the soil and ripped out all the lavender. “I’m sorry,” I whispered, “I’m sorry.” A soft breeze caressed my cheeks. Nature understood. As I held the sprouting lavender in my hands, as I moved them inside my chambre to place on my desk, as I tried to reconcile this claim of ‘lavender only grows in Alluviale’ with the knowledge of the lavender gardens of the Monastery, I kept apologising, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” But Nature understood. It always understood.

*

I was locked in a classroom the following morning. The first question on the paper was: Name the three main towns in the Low Midlands and their principal exports. As an answer, I wrote out, in Elven, a simple yet delicious recipe for rose-water broth.

*

“Do you think this is a trick?” The Baron asked me, truly curious. “We want to put you in the correct classes, Avari. Do you think this is somehow of ill-intent? What do you lose in answering the questions honestly?”

It was another night of cleaning. Laclan was especially full of effervescence, excited for Monday’s ‘special day’ with a visiting philosopher. “Those classes are always the best ones! And we don’t get tested on them! It’s like what I would hear at home, actually. About the ‘state of nature’, about the ‘state of Elf’. The nobilité, they don’t understand. They don’t understand like we do. What do you think about that, about ‘the state of nature’? The whole point about contracts is that both sides agree, right? I mean, that’s what Gaspard says. Ah, it’s so much fun. I’m no Homme des Lettres, but these philosophers, these men of political philosophy – I could listen to them all day.”

It surprised me. It had always surprised me, that Laclan saw himself more like me than like Gaspard and Wolfgang. Despite his own family wealth and sacred lineage, despite owning vast amounts of land, despite it all: he thought he was like me. He had a last name that was arguably more recognisable than 90% of the other boys here, a name that inspired reverence with a history that could be read about and known – and I had no last name at all.

“I wrote to my grandma about how we’re friends – you and me – and she said-”

“We are not friends.”

I didn’t need to say more than that. I didn’t need to say it more than once, either. We weren’t friends. He wasn’t helping me clean the Mezzanine out of ‘friendship’. He wasn’t protecting me from Wolfgang’s bullying out of ‘friendship’. He wasn’t friends with me out of ‘friendship’. His guilt had spiked his sense of altruism; his want for forgiveness/redemption was fuelling his incessant niceness, and his pity was bending itself into fake interest. We weren’t friends. It seemed more to his benefit than mine that I couldn’t even find the words to speak about what he’d done to me, but him helping me clean the Mezzanine hadn’t magically made me forget. To stab me was impulsive, but forgivable. To leave me there was-

“My favourite philosopher,” he said after a while, staring at the ground as he ran over it with soapy water. “His name is Jubespirthe. I’ve even written to him once, asking when he’ll come. He wrote this huge book on the origin of morality. It’s banned in this Academy, because it’s ‘blasphemous’, but some other academies have access to it. I read it last summer. It’s incredible, Avari. Incredible.”

He didn’t talk much that night. His mood had quietened drastically, but he continued to clean dutifully. When he was done, he gave me a small smile, then walked off without a word.

*

The first time I wrote out a truthful attempt at an answer was for a practice question Gaspard gave me: list out and describe five types of sedimentary rock. He had his pen dipped in ink, ready to correct my mistakes, but then he grimaced. He pulled on his hair. He looked at me in…fear? Then refocused on the paper in front of him. Eventually, he revealed: “You’ve written this in Elven.” Of course. “I…I can’t read Elven. And the professors, they only accept assessments in French – and I would know because Wolfe once got in trouble for writing out all his homework in Latin – so, for practice, could you…euh…write this out…um…in…French?”

I…I couldn’t.

I stared at my Elven words, at technical words I knew from encyclopaedias of science (and I was confident in these answers because I doubted rocks had changed much since the formation of this world), and I did not know their equivalent in French. I could read French fluently, because Manon had taught me to read French fluently, but I had never had much practice in writing it. Gaspard was waiting, and I was gripping the ink pen in my hand, waiting with him.

It didn’t take Gaspard long to realise the reason for my inaction, and for him to then realise why I refused those aptitude tests, why I would continue to refuse them.

“Will you teach me Elven?”

What? “Now?”

“Yes. From, uh, your answer. Could you teach me? As you explain the Elven to me, we can make a translation in French. So I can understand it. The book I gave you last night, the one on contemporary geopolitics, if you write out an Elven summary for that too, you can help translate it into French so, um, so that I understand.”

My immediate instinct was to refuse, but his wording disarmed me, his willingness disarmed me. I had devoured that contemporary geopolitics book in one day, and it had been a story before my eyes, tracing how current policies were inspired by old Elven moors, watching the continuation of a story I’d read about in encyclopaedias so ancient that they might have predated the Alchemist Academy itself. The state had refused a budget increase and Ivra had refused French texts, and so the result was me now, learning this all for the first time, having to swallow so much of my pride down that it could choke me outright.

“You make the translation,” he said to me, “and I’ll add notes if I need to clarify something for myself.”

I took the piece of paper that he gave to me, still hesitant, still on guard. But then, I wrote. I wrote it all in the French I could manage, and he took it from me and added little notes whenever I’d made an agreement mistake, or a grammar mistake, or used too weak or too strong a word depending on context. And afterwards, he thanked me. A genuine ‘thank you’. I couldn’t say the same to him. I couldn’t say anything at all.

“You’ll write the test this Sunday,” he said to me, correcting my next answer. “I’m sure of it.”

Sunday came. I was locked in yet another classroom. The first question on this paper was Describe the climate, rock formation, and main export of the North District (naming at least 4 sub-counties). And so I did. In written French, I did.