‘Do you think something’s wrong with him?’ a blond-haired guy about a year older than me asked, lounging on a curved windowsill at the opposite side of the room.
‘He’s not talking,’ someone else said. ‘He just keeps standing there. Maybe he’s mute.’
A girl who looked maybe thirteen – too young to be in the same class as the rest of them, I would’ve thought – came up and stared at me through bespectacled green eyes. ‘Why is he smiling like that? Maybe he’s in one of the dramatism classes and this is his homework.’
Three perfectly sensible theories, I thought, standing frozen like an idiot. Somehow, in between Ferius’s lesson on listening to other people’s eyes and the moment when she shoved me into this room with people who all knew each other, all liked each other, all clearly thought they were important and interesting and that I was none of those things, I had developed a remarkably all-encompassing paralysis.
Say something, idiot. Move. At least just walk out the door.
Where I’m from, students are in the same class from the first time they walk into the oasis until the day they take their trials. It shouldn’t have mattered – it’s not like I’d never dealt with strangers before; it’s just that normally I was running away from them because they were throwing things at me. Talking during those exchanges was strictly optional.
One of the students was waving at me now. ‘Maybe he’s blind?’
I shifted from trying to elegantly withdraw to deciding whether this was, in fact, the most embarrassingly stupid moment of my life.
It was.
Somehow that made me feel better. I had screwed Ferius’s assignment up completely, leaving me only two options: skulk out of there with my tail between my legs and admit to Ferius that somehow, after having faced chaincasters and war mages, after fighting off my own best friend, after overcoming a lord magus – an actual lord magus – that somehow a group of (admittedly very cool-looking) teenagers was too much for me. The only other alternative was to try something different.
What the hell. If I’m going to blow this, I might as well use all the powder I’ve got.
I sought out someone at random, a girl with short, curly black hair sitting with a massive book in her lap. Like the others, she was staring at me, but she’d yet to speak. I let our eyes meet and listened, carefully counting the seconds in my head … one … two … I turned to the others and put a finger to my lips. ‘Shh.’
‘Did he just shush us?’ the guy on the windowsill asked. ‘Are you even a student here?’
‘I’m studying right now,’ I said.
The younger girl, the one with the spectacles and the green eyes, asked, ‘What are you studying?’
I let my eyes drift back to the girl with the book, forced all the confidence and ease into myself that I could muster – and I swear, had there been a wall behind me, my butt, shoulders and head would have been touching it – and said, ‘Art.’
A series of groans filled the room along with bursts of laughter. I let it all wash over me, not responding to it in the slightest. Instead I walked right up to the girl, gave a small bow and extended my hand. ‘I’m Kellen,’ I said.
She gave me a lopsided grin that said she thought everything about me was a bit ridiculous, but took my hand anyway. ‘Cressia,’ she said in a lilting Gitabrian accent. ‘Are you always this weird, Kellen?’
Without missing a beat in the music, I said, ‘Always, I promise.’
Someone clapped me on the back and whispered, loud enough for everyone to hear, ‘You’re on the wrong trail, if you’re looking for love, friend. Cressia’s not … inclined towards … us.’
It took me a few seconds to figure out what he meant, and by that time pretty much everyone was laughing, including Cressia. Okay, note for future attempts at being charming: try not to hit on girls who prefer other girls.
The guy at the windowsill held up his hand as though he was holding a glass. ‘To … Kellen, was it? To Kellen, a man willing to make a daring and valiant effort, even if it came to a somewhat tragic ending.’
‘To Kellen!’ the others cheered.
I grinned and took several bows.
Things actually went not too badly from there. Having established my credentials as a slightly romantic fool, odd but not creepy, who nonetheless kept his cool, I became the object of some fascination. Following Ferius’s method, I made sure to answer most questions with a question of my own, letting others speak, picking up on the things they cared about and generally being the silence between the notes in the song we created together. After a while, I almost began to enjoy myself.
I kept up the ruse of being a distant relative of Seneira’s, using their questions about her to glean as much information as I could about both her and her family. On the whole, they seemed to like her well enough, except that certain patterns came up again and again – a kind of refrain that saw only the mildest variations.
‘Oh, I can’t wait until she’s back,’ one of the girls said. ‘I mean, she’ll have missed a lot of school, but you just know she’ll still be top of the class by the end of term.’
That earned a couple of chuckles – percussion to the music.
Another one came in, in perfect rhythm. ‘Senny’s an amazing student. It doesn’t matter what subject, she always does well. It hardly even seems like she needs to study.’
Cressia, who I was starting to quite like, was the counterpoint to that melody. ‘You guys are so transparent.’ She pointed at me. ‘Kellen’s just being polite. You think he can’t tell you’re all being jerks to his … what was it again?’
‘Third cousin,’ I said. Cressia clearly didn’t believe I was who I claimed to be. Another reason to admire her.
Toller, who seemed permanently attached to the windowsill, said, ‘Come on, Cress, everybody knows Seneira’s brilliant, but it’s not like she doesn’t have advantages.’
I could see the others looking at me, waiting to see how I’d react. My instinct was to go along with it, to agree and hope it made them like me. My instincts are usually crap. ‘Advantages?’ I said, and then proceeded to laugh as though he’d said the funniest thing in the world.
‘What? What did I say?’
I didn’t answer, instead just smiled at him.
‘Oh … I get it.’ He gestured to himself and the others. ‘You mean because we’re all …’
I nodded.
‘Okay, that’s fair.’
‘What about you?’ Lindy – the younger girl with the spectacles – asked. ‘Are you going to join the Academy?’
I wasn’t sure how to reply. I used to think of myself as a pretty good liar, but somehow I felt awkward about doing that here more than I had to. Thinking back to Ferius’s reply to Master Westrien, I said sincerely, ‘It would be an honour.’
Cressia set her book down on one of the tables with a loud thump and came over to me, walking around me as if I were a sculpture she was analysing. ‘But what subject should our new friend Kellen study here, I wonder?’
‘Devices,’ Toller suggested. ‘He’s got that look – like he’s always trying to figure out how things work.’
‘Possible,’ Cressia said, making another tour around me, ‘but he’s a romantic – we’ve seen proof of that.’
‘Poetics,’ Lindy said. ‘He seems to like sounding clever.’
‘Perhaps, perhaps, but he looks a bit road-worn for a poet or a rhetorician,’ Cressia objected.
Various other subjects were called out, along with reasons why they made sense for me, or didn’t. I waited patiently through it all, not letting them see that every possibility tugged at me, every subject was a possible path in life – to find something, to be someone.
Finally Cressia stopped in front of me. ‘Well, Kellen, don’t keep us in suspense. Who’s right? What subject would you study, were you to be granted entry into the Academy?’
There was no particular answer that would gain me anything, so I gave the only one that could. ‘The one you’re thinking of,’ I replied. ‘The one no one else suggested.’
A hush descended on the classroom, and everyone waited with baited breath.
Damn, but I’m clever sometimes.
Cressia’s smile lit up the room. ‘I knew it!’ She poked me in the chest. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we have a real live philosopher in our midst!’
Toller groaned. ‘Oh, Martius, god of war, please don’t make me have to be friends with a philosophy student.’
Lindy looked suspicious as she peered up at me. ‘He’s spent a lot of time out in the sun for a philosopher.’
‘I’m more of a natural philosopher,’ I said.
She stared up at my jaw. ‘And he’s got a bruise. Several actually.’
I wasn’t sure how to explain that, so I didn’t try. ‘People like to hit me sometimes.’
Toller chortled. ‘Hah! Okay, now I definitely believe he’s a philosophy student.’
I laughed right along with the others, and for the next two hours I listened, told stories, listened, joked, listened some more and even made tentative plans with people I’d never met before – people my own age who lived and studied and had all kinds of futures planned out ahead of them. It would have been easy to forget why I was there, but eventually I realised I’d picked up everything I was going to learn. Also, I’d spotted Beren Thrane outside the classroom doing his best to be surreptitious. His best wasn’t very good.
‘I’ve got to go,’ I said.
A couple of them made a face, and Lindy actually said, ‘Boo!’
‘But you’re going to join the Academy, right?’ Cressia asked. She tapped me on the chest. ‘I believe my colleagues and I have decided that you’re worthy to join our grand company, Philosopher Kellen. Of course, you’ll have to promise to abide by one rule.’
‘What rule is that?’
She leaned over and whispered in my ear. ‘Don’t ever use me as a prop in one of your little puppet shows again.’