Chapter 6: A Day Outside

  The academy had a different feeling on a holiday morning.

  Not better or worse — just different. The kind of different that settles into a building when nobody in it has anywhere to be. The corridors were quieter than usual, not the focused quiet of a place between classes but the loose unhurried quiet of a place that had set itself down for the day. Somewhere down the hall a door opened and closed without urgency. Somewhere further away someone was laughing at a volume that suggested they had forgotten to care about who heard them. The smell of breakfast drifted up from the canteen through the stone walls — eggs, bread, something warm — and then faded, and the morning stretched out long and undemanding in every direction.

  Diablo had woken at his usual time anyway. Dressed. Made his bed. Sat at his desk with the pale morning light coming through the narrow window, the grounds below empty and unhurried, the plateau sky a flat grey-white that hadn't decided yet what it wanted to do with the day. He had no particular plan. The quiet was the good kind — the kind that asked nothing of you and expected nothing back.

  He was still sitting there, doing nothing in the deliberate way he sometimes did nothing, when the knock came at his door.

  Not a polite knock. The kind of knock that had already decided you were home.

  He opened it.

  Noctis was standing in the corridor with her bag over one shoulder and the expression of someone who had planned the day before she went to sleep and considered telling him about it a formality rather than a request.

  "We're going to town," she said.

  Diablo looked at her. "No."

  "Yes."

  "I didn't agree to that."

  "You didn't disagree either." She tilted her head. "You've been sitting in this room since you woke up, haven't you."

  He said nothing.

  "That's what I thought." She stepped back from the door and gestured down the corridor with the easy authority of someone who had already won the argument and was simply waiting for him to catch up. "Come on. It's a holiday. You're allowed to exist outside of a classroom."

  "I exist outside of classrooms regularly."

  "The training grounds don't count." She looked at him with those direct eyes. "Come on, Diablo. One day. Town. Back before dark. I'll even let you not talk if you don't want to."

  He stood in the doorway for a moment longer. Then he picked up his coat, his disc, and stepped out.

  "You're not going to thank me," Noctis observed, already walking.

  "No," Diablo agreed, falling into step beside her.

  She smiled at that — not at him, just at the corridor ahead, the small private smile of someone whose expectations had been exactly met.

  ───

  The town sat at the plateau's eastern edge — small, practical, the particular kind of settlement that grows up around an institution because the conditions are right and nobody decides to stop it. A main street, side streets, stalls and small shops and the occasional larger building that had been there long enough to look like it had always been there. The prices were student prices, which meant slightly higher than they should have been and everyone paid them anyway.

  They walked into it at Noctis's pace, which was unhurried and easily distracted and somehow, Diablo noted, covered everything. She stopped at a stall selling dried herbs and compounds and spent four minutes examining things she had no immediate use for before buying two of them. She stopped at a weaponry supply shop and spent even longer on maintenance equipment before buying a cleaning kit. She stopped at a baker's stall for reasons that did not require explanation.

  Diablo moved through the same spaces with the efficiency of someone who had thought about what he needed before leaving. Arrow shafts — good ones, consistent in weight and grain. A new grip wrap. Bowstring wax. He was finished before Noctis had made her second stop and spent the remaining time walking beside her.

  "You already knew exactly what you wanted," Noctis observed.

  "Yes," Diablo said.

  "That must be a very organised way to live."

  "It works."

  "Does it ever get boring? Knowing everything in advance?"

  He considered that for a moment. "No," he said.

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  Noctis glanced at him sideways. "You said that very quickly for someone who considers everything carefully."

  "Some questions don't require consideration," he said.

  She looked at him for a second longer than necessary, the corner of her mouth doing something that wasn't quite a smile, and then stopped at another stall and Diablo waited.

  ───

  The ice cream vendor was on the corner where the main street met the square. Noctis joined the line without consulting him. Diablo joined it behind her.

  They sat on the low stone wall at the edge of the square. The town moved around them — other students from the academy, a few local residents who had long since made their peace with the seasonal influx of young people with unusual power types. Noctis talked. Diablo ate and listened and responded minimally and found, not for the first time, that Noctis's conversation required very little from him to sustain itself and was somehow enjoyable for exactly that reason.

  ───

  They were on the way back when Noctis wandered off the path.

  The path back to the academy passed through a small public garden — old stone walkways, trees that had been growing for longer than the town itself, pleasantly disorganised. Noctis had been walking beside him and then, between one moment and the next, was several feet off the path near the base of an old tree whose roots had broken the surface and created hollows in the soil.

  He stopped. Looked back.

  She was completely still, which was unusual enough that he walked toward her.

  The egg sat between two roots — roughly the size of two fists placed together, red with green layering across its surface in patterns that were not quite symmetrical and not quite random. It was warm. Diablo could feel it from where he stood.

  Noctis crouched and held her hand over it without touching it.

  Something moved. Not visibly — nothing cracked or shifted — but a faint resonance in the air, going one direction only. From the egg toward her. A recognition that had nothing to do with hatching and everything to do with having already decided.

  She picked it up.

  She held it in both hands and looked at it for a long moment.

  "It's warm," she said.

  "Yes."

  "What is it?"

  "I don't know," he said. Which was true.

  They sat down on the roots of the old tree, the garden quiet around them, the late afternoon light coming through the branches.

  "It noticed me," Noctis said quietly.

  "Yes. It did."

  She turned to look at him, something uncertain moving across her usually direct expression. "What does that mean?"

  "It means you found it," Diablo said. "Which makes you the mother now."

  Noctis stared at him. Then at the egg. Then back at him with an expression that moved through several things before settling somewhere between acceptance and mild alarm.

  "I'm fourteen," she said.

  "The egg doesn't know that."

  "That's not — " She stopped. Looked at the egg again. Held it slightly more carefully. "Fine," she said. "I'm the mother."

  Diablo said nothing. The egg glowed faintly warmer in her hands, which he decided not to mention.

  They sat in the garden for a while — the easy unhurried kind of sitting that happened when there was no particular reason to move. The town's sounds reached them faintly. The branches moved in the plateau wind.

  "Can I ask you something?" Noctis said after a while.

  "You don't usually ask permission," Diablo said.

  She smiled at that — a real one, aimed at him this time rather than at the middle distance. "What weapon do you use?"

  "Bow," he said.

  She turned to look at him fully. Something shifted in her expression — an attention that was different from her usual easy observation, more focused, more direct. She studied him the way you study something when you are trying to reconcile it with information you already have.

  "Bow," she repeated.

  "Yes."

  "Not a sword. Not Aura projection. A bow."

  "Yes."

  She tilted her head slightly, and there was something in the way she was looking at him — unhurried, frank, with the particular quality of attention that made the back of his neck feel warmer than the egg in her hands. "You're full of surprises," she said.

  "I use what works," he said.

  "A bow works from a distance," she said. "You like distance."

  He looked at her. "Generally."

  "Generally," she repeated, with a small emphasis on the word that he noted and did not address. She was quiet for a moment, still looking at him with that focused directness, the egg warm between her palms. "So what does it feel like?" she asked. "Drawing a bow. What goes through your head?"

  He considered the question with the seriousness it apparently deserved. "Nothing," he said. "When it's right there's nothing. Just the distance and the line and the release."

  "Nothing," she said softly, as though testing the word. "That sounds either very peaceful or very empty."

  "Both," he said. "Depending on the day."

  She looked at him for a long moment after that — not the assessing look, not the curious look, something quieter than both, something he did not have an immediate name for. Then she said: "Train with me."

  "We already discussed that."

  "Properly. Regular sessions. You with your bow, me with my sword." She leaned forward slightly, elbows on her knees, the egg cradled carefully. "Different ranges — it's actually a real tactic. A sword user with a bow user covering distance. We'd be useful to each other."

  "Useful," he said.

  "Among other things," she said, with the calm ease of someone who had put something in the air and was comfortable leaving it there.

  He considered it for exactly the time it required.

  "Yes," he said.

  She nodded once, satisfied, and leaned back. "Good." A beat. "You can thank me later."

  "For what."

  "For today." She gestured at the garden, the town beyond it, the egg in her hands, the general shape of the afternoon. "You would have spent the whole holiday in your room."

  "I had things to do."

  "You had nothing to do," she said, not unkindly. "And now you have this." She held up the egg slightly. "So technically I've improved your day."

  Diablo looked at the egg. Then at her. "You've given me responsibility for an unhatched creature of unknown origin," he said.

  "I'm the mother," she said. "You're the — " She paused, considering. "You're whatever you want to be."

  He said nothing. She smiled and stood, tucking the egg carefully against her side.

  "Come on," she said. "Before it gets dark."

  ───

  They walked back toward the academy in the late afternoon, the plateau air cold around them. Noctis carried the egg with the careful energy of someone who had just acquired a responsibility and was taking it seriously without making a production of it. Diablo walked beside her.

  Above the cloud line, faint in the early evening sky, the two moons were already present — the white one barely visible in the remaining daylight, the red one a suggestion of color rather than a fully committed light. Patient. Unhurried. Doing their work regardless of whether anyone was watching.

  He walked beside Noctis and said nothing and found, with the quiet consistency that had become familiar across the past weeks, that nothing was exactly the right amount to say.