Mira said yes on the evening of the tenth, which surprised Arthur considerably less than the way she said it. He had expected a negotiation. He had expected the careful accounting she brought to everything, the assessment of whether she would be an imposition and the four-part explanation of why she had concluded she would, and instead she found him in the eastern corridor with her hands folded and said the whole thing in one go before he could get a word in. Yseult had explained the offer. She had considered it for two hours. She would like to come, if the offer was genuine and not politeness, and she would like Arthur to tell her honestly if it was politeness, because she would rather spend eight weeks in an empty academy than four days on a road with somebody who was regretting having asked. She said this at speed and without stopping and then stood there waiting to be told.
ART: It's genuine.
MRA: You're certain.
ART: Mira, I asked Yseult to ask you.
MRA: Yes. People do that. They mean it at the time and then they get eleven miles down a road and start doing arithmetic about beds.
ART: My mother has been asking to meet somebody since September. She's going to have two of you. She'll be unbearable.
Mira nodded once, and then, with the particular stiffness of someone performing an unfamiliar action, put out a hand. Arthur shook it, which felt so absurd that neither of them acknowledged it afterward. They went down to the bursar's office together on the eleventh so that Yseult and Mira could withdraw their accommodation claims, and the clerk on duty made a small note in a ledger and asked for a forwarding location, and Arthur gave the name of a village four days west with one mill in it and watched a man in Solmere write down Hollowell, Astoria in a book. It was, he thought, the first time anyone had written it anywhere official on his account. It looked strange in another man's handwriting. The office had a queue. That was the part Arthur had not anticipated and did not forget afterward. Perhaps forty students in a corridor at eight in the morning on the last day of term, all of them from the eastern provinces, all of them arranging to spend eight weeks in a building they had been trying to get out of for a fortnight. Nobody was making a scene about it. That was somehow worse. There was a fourth year near the front explaining very calmly and for what was clearly the third time that his sister's wedding was in July, and a small second year at the back who had gone entirely silent and was being stood next to by a friend who plainly did not know what else to offer.
YSE: Three hundred and eleven.
ART: What?
YSE: That's the number. I asked. Three hundred and eleven students from Drennick, Eskandar and eastern Lassiter, and every one of them is in this building until September.
MRA: Out of eight hundred and forty.
YSE: Yes.
MRA: That's more than a third of the academy that cannot go home, and the academy has handled it with three lines on a door and a fourth line about meals.
YSE: What would you have had them do?
MRA: I don't know. I'm not saying they're wrong. I'm saying it's the largest thing that has happened at this academy in the year I've been here and it has been handled as a catering problem.
They came out of the bursar's office into the eastern courtyard and Dane Whitlock was sitting on the low wall by the fountain with a bag beside him that he was not carrying anywhere. Arthur had not seen him since the arena. That was eleven weeks. He had thought about it in the way a person thinks about a thing they intend to deal with later and then does not, and he stopped now in the middle of the courtyard with his own bag over his good shoulder and understood that there was not going to be a better moment, because the alternative was September and September was not going to be easier.
ART: Wait here.
YSE: Arthur.
ART: I'll be four minutes.
He went over. Dane watched him the whole way, which made it worse, and did not stand up, which made it slightly better.
DAN: Lyerm.
ART: You're not going anywhere.
DAN: Lassiter. Eastern side. My father's house is nine miles from a port that has been shut since the third.
ART: I'm sorry.
DAN: You don't have to be sorry about the sea.
Arthur stood there. He had not planned any of this and had four minutes and was aware of exactly how badly he was equipped.
ART: I've been meaning to say something to you since June and I haven't, and I've told myself it was because I didn't know what to say, and it was actually because it was easier not to.
DAN: You don't owe me anything.
ART: No. But I've spent a week in a village with a man who said something that stuck, which was take your share and don't take anyone else's. So this is my share. I've had eleven weeks of people saying my name in corridors because of that match, and every single one of those people watched the same eleven minutes afterward, and I've done nothing with any of it except be quiet and let it go on being about me.
Dane looked at him for a long moment.
DAN: What is it you imagine you could have done?
ART: Said out loud that you asked me to yield three times. You did. At six minutes, at eleven, and again after. Nobody has ever mentioned it. It's not in a single version of that match anybody tells, and I was there, and I could have mentioned it at any point in eleven weeks and I have not once.
Something moved in Dane Whitlock's face and then stopped moving.
DAN: That's not going to change anything.
ART: No.
DAN: People have decided what happened.
ART: They have. I'm going to say it anyway, whenever it comes up, for as long as it keeps coming up. Not for you. Because it's true and I've been quiet about a true thing for eleven weeks because being quiet was more comfortable.
Dane was silent for a while. Somewhere behind them the courtyard was emptying, trunks going out through the eastern gate, somebody's mother arriving with a cart and being audibly embarrassing.
DAN: I threw a punch at a boy who could not move.
ART: Yes.
DAN: I have thought about that every day since and I am not going to pretend the eleven minutes afterward were unearned. Ashby was cruel and Ashby was also correct, and those have turned out to be much harder to hold at the same time than I expected.
ART: I know. He's spent the same eleven weeks on it.
DAN: Has he.
ART: He said it out loud ten nights ago to a table full of people. Not to me. To Talon, who asked him.
Dane absorbed that.
DAN: Tell him nothing from me. I mean that neutrally. I've nothing to send and I'd rather not have something invented on my behalf.
ART: Alright.
DAN: Lyerm. What are you doing this summer?
ART: Going home. Four days west. Two of them are coming with me because they can't go east.
DAN: Which two?
ART: Marchant and Doyle.
Dane looked past him at the two girls waiting forty feet away with their bags, and something in his expression Arthur could not name at all went across it and left.
DAN: That's a good thing to have done.
ART: It's a spare room and a village with nothing in it.
DAN: Yes. That's what I said.
The scattering itself took most of the morning and had no ceremony to it whatsoever, which Arthur had not expected and found unexpectedly hard. Briar went first, on the seven o'clock south cart to Corvane, with a bag that was mostly notation and a small blue-amber crystal in an inside pocket and a very specific flatness about his mouth that Arthur had learned meant boots. He shook four hands, hugged nobody, and told Finn to write to him, and Finn said he absolutely would and then admitted approximately nine seconds later that he had no money for post and would be writing to him in September in person. Corin and Talon left at eight. Corin had a horse, which nobody had known about and which Finn took extremely badly.
FNN: You've had a HORSE.
COR: The horse is stabled in the city and belongs to my father.
FNN: You have had access to a HORSE, for a YEAR, and we WALKED to Beckwith.
COR: We walked to Beckwith because it would have been obscene to ride to a village to carry grain for a man who has no horse. I'd have thought that was obvious.
Finn opened his mouth and then closed it again, which happened rarely enough that Elsie remarked on it afterward. Corin's goodbye to Arthur was four words long. He came over, put out a hand, said September, then. Get well, and shook once and turned round, and Arthur understood by now that this was Corin Ashby operating at the absolute limit of his available warmth and did not require anything further. Talon's took longer, because Talon's always did, and included a genuinely startling hug for Mira that she permitted and then stood very still through, and a quiet word to her that Arthur did not hear and did not ask about. Finn left last, at eleven, on a cart going north that he had negotiated passage on in exchange for unspecified labour that he described as "flexible."
ELS: Where are you actually going?
FNN: Corvane, eventually.
ELS: Eventually.
FNN: There is a version of this journey that involves Portvale for nine days and I am not going to describe the financing.
ELS: Finn.
FNN: It's LEGAL.
ELS: That's not the reassurance you think it is.
He hugged everybody, at length and without any embarrassment about it, and got up onto the cart, and then leaned back over the side.
FNN: Mira.
MRA: Yes.
FNN: You're going to a village.
MRA: I am.
FNN: You are the least village-shaped person I have ever met and I want a full account in September.
MRA: You'll have one.
FNN: A FULL account.
MRA: Finn, I catalogue things. You will have more account than you want.
The cart went, and Finn shouted something else that nobody caught, and then there were four of them standing in the eastern courtyard at eleven in the morning with the academy behind them mostly emptied and four days of road in front of them.
ELS: Right.
ART: Right.
YSE: How far is the first day?
ART: There's an inn at Weald Cross about eighteen miles on. We'll make it by dark if we go now and don't do anything interesting.
YSE: And if we do something interesting?
ART: Then we sleep in a field and my mother hears about it in about nine years and never lets it go.
They went out through the eastern gate at twenty past eleven, four of them, west, and Arthur did not look back at the building because he had spent ten months in it and would spend two more years in it and it was not going anywhere. He did look back once at the city, from the top of the western rise about an hour out, at Solmere sitting white and red and enormous in the valley with the academy on its northern hill, and thought about a boy who had come up that same road the previous September and had not known a single person in it. Then he turned round and walked, and Yseult was already three sentences into worrying about it out loud exactly as promised, and Mira was asking Elsie a precise and unanswerable question about how many people lived in Hollowell.