The bread at breakfast on Thursday was, by unanimous agreement, worse than it had been on Wednesday.
FNN: They've changed the flour.
BRR: They have not changed the flour.
FNN: Something has changed, Briar. Something in this bread is different and I refuse to be the only person at this table who has noticed.
BRR: You're the only person at this table who has noticed.
FNN: Elsie noticed.
ELS: I didn't notice.
FNN: You made a FACE.
ELS: I made a face because you've been talking about bread for six minutes.
Arthur ate his portion without contributing, which was largely because chewing on the left side of his jaw still produced an unpleasant result and he had decided not to mention that to anyone. Across the refectory, the morning proceeded exactly as mornings did. Somebody dropped a tray near the eastern doors and received the traditional applause. Two third-years were arguing about a lecture schedule. A boy Arthur half recognized walked past with an armful of books and nodded at him, and Arthur nodded back, and neither of them said anything. The posted results had come down from the central board on Tuesday. Nobody had commented on their removal.
Instructor Pratt's morning lecture concerned the provincial distribution of manifestation ages, which was material Arthur found genuinely interesting and which the rest of the cohort found close to unbearable.
PRT: Corvane records the earliest average manifestation in Maeris at four years and two months, which is not, as most of you are about to assume, evidence of anything meaningful about Corvane. It is evidence that Corvane keeps considerably better birth records than anyone else and has done for two centuries.
BRR: So the data's an artifact of the record-keeping.
PRT: The data is entirely an artifact of the record-keeping, Mister Colton, which is a lesson I would like all of you to carry considerably further than this subject.
She turned back to the board.
PRT: Drennick's figures are worse. Eskandar's are worse still. Lassiter has not submitted provincial figures in eleven weeks, which is unusual, and which is not something we are going to discuss today.
She kept writing. Nobody asked. Elsie's arm came out of its dressing on Thursday afternoon. The burn beneath it had gone from angry red to something duller and less alarming, and Julian pronounced it satisfactory and told her to keep it out of direct sun for another fortnight, and she was back in the western training yard before the fifth bell the following morning. Arthur knew because he was there.
He had not gone back to the dawn sessions since the Trial. His body had made that decision on his behalf for the first two days and he had made it himself on the third, and on the fourth he had woken before the bells out of pure habit and had walked down to the yard without deciding to. Elsie was already there.
ELS: You're early.
ART: So are you.
ELS: I'm always early.
ART: I know.
She compressed the wind at her forearms and held it, and he watched her count something silently, and after a while she let it go and shook out her hands and did it again. He did not ask what number she was counting to. He drew his sword and ran the forms, slowly, badly, with a left shoulder that objected to roughly a third of them, and they occupied opposite ends of the yard for the better part of an hour without speaking, and it was, Arthur thought afterward, the best hour he'd had in a week. Corin was not at the yard.
He had not been at the yard on Wednesday either, or Tuesday, which Arthur noticed and did not mention. He appeared at lessons. He answered when spoken to. He sat at the table's far end at meals with Talon beside him, and ate, and left. On Friday, Arthur found him in the western yard at dawn.
He was already halfway through a sequence when Arthur arrived, and he did not stop, and Arthur went to the far end and drew his own sword and began his own forms without either of them acknowledging the other. They trained for fifty minutes in complete silence.
At the end of it, Corin sheathed his blade and stood for a moment looking at nothing in particular.
COR: Your left shoulder's dropping.
ART: I know.
COR: It's going to keep dropping if you keep favoring it.
ART: I know.
COR: Right.
He walked out. Arthur stayed another twenty minutes. Finn lost four coppers on Friday evening betting against the weather. It rained.
FNN: This is genuinely persecution.
BRR: You bet against rain in the wettest week of the season.
FNN: I bet on a CLEAR EVENING, which is a positive and hopeful position to take, and I have been punished for optimism.
MRA: You've been punished for meteorology.
FNN: Same thing, functionally.
Yseult came in from the corridor with her hair wet and a sheaf of diagrams held under her coat, and dropped into the seat beside Arthur, and put the diagrams on the table in front of Briar without preamble.
YSE: The conduit's wrong.
BRR: It's not wrong.
YSE: It's wrong at the third junction and I can show you exactly where, and I would like it noted that I have been saying it was wrong at the third junction for two weeks.
BRR: You've been saying it was wrong somewhere.
YSE: I've been saying it was wrong at the third junction.
BRR: You've been saying it was wrong in the general vicinity of the third junction, which is different, and which I want on the record.
They bent over the diagrams together, arguing steadily, and Finn returned to his grievance with the weather, and Elsie stole the last of Arthur's bread without asking, and the evening went on. Nobody mentioned the Trial.
Not once, across three days. Not the twenty-four minutes, or the four rolls, or the girl in the mud, or the boy face-down on the packed earth with a sword hilt between his shoulder blades and several hundred people watching in silence. It was not avoidance, exactly. Arthur turned it over on Friday night, lying in the dark with his shoulder aching and Yseult asleep across the room, and concluded that avoidance was the wrong word for it.
It was more that the whole thing had been very loud, and that everyone had been standing extremely close to it, and that none of them had yet worked out where to put it. So they had put it down for a while.
The bread was worse on Thursday. Instructor Pratt did not want to discuss Lassiter. Elsie was counting something in the yard at dawn and Corin's shoulder was not dropping and Finn had four fewer coppers than he had begun the week with. That would do, for now.