He hoped she was joking. He smiled uncertainly as they stepped out into an empty level, not far up. She walked him down the hall and opened an oak door to a barracks. “Find an empty bed,” she said.
There was no one inside, empty pallets stretching from wall to wall. At the foot of each one was a chest for personal items.
“Please tell me there isn’t some kind of pecking order for who gets what bed,” Kip said.
“There isn’t some kind of pecking order for who gets what bed,” she said in a monotone.
“You’re lying?” he asked.
“Correct.”
“What’s the worst bed in the room?”
“In the back. Farthest from the door.”
Kip began walking to the last bed when he realized something. He stopped. “I don’t really have any stuff.” He only had a cloak, the ornate knife box, and the knife.
Samite cleared her throat.
“What?”
“You’re not going to class armed.”
Oh hell.
“We’ll also be taking you to the tailors to get you Chromeria garb.”
What was he supposed to do? Leave a priceless dagger in a barracks? Samite only knew that he had a knife. They’d just left a war zone, so that was no surprise. But if he showed it to her, she’d surely report it. He had to make it uninteresting even to her.
“I’m going to, um, have to take off my shirt to get my knife off. Can, uh, you turn your back?” Kip asked.
She turned her back, without even making any cracks or grinning.
Kip moved quickly to his pallet and stripped off his shirt and untied the dagger. He pulled the shirt back on and folded his cloak clumsily. He opened the chest. Inside was a thin, folded blanket. Kip set the cloak and the dagger box into his chest, and put the chest at the foot of the bed.
“Done yet?” Samite asked.
“Um, no! Just a minute.”
Kip looked over the beds. There were maybe sixty pallets in the room. The unoccupied beds-those nearest Kip-were unmade and had the chest underneath them. The occupied beds were made and had the chest at the foot.
There were no hiding places, just as there was no privacy.
Kip tucked the dagger under the mattress. He made the bed quickly, trying to smooth out the wrinkles so the lump wasn’t obvious. Then he started walking back toward Samite.
“So you know,” Samite said, “best way to get something stolen is to hide it under your mattress. It’s where the bullies and thieves always look first.”
I’m terrible at this! I should have told my father about the dagger. Even if he took it away from me, that would have been better than having some sixteen-year-old butt fungus steal it. Damn it, mother, couldn’t you have given me a locket?
Kip went back to his pallet, grabbed the dagger, and looked around. He walked down five rows to one of the unoccupied pallets, opened the chest under that bed, and tucked the knife under the blanket. Better than nothing. He slid the chest back under the bed, grimacing.
“Fantastic,” he said. “What’s next?”
Next was the tailors’, where Kip had to strip down for the fitting. The tailors were women. One of them was attractive, and as she knelt in front of him standing in his underwear, he could see straight down her cleavage. He spent the next half hour staring at the ceiling and praying. And just when Kip was finally leaving, thanking Orholam that his body hadn’t done anything to mortify him, the other woman cleared her throat and handed him an extra pair of clean underwear. “You can wash them once in a while,” she said conspiratorially. “And your armpits, too.”
He almost died.
They made him go sponge bathe-he angrily waved off the slave who tried to help him-and change into his new white tunic and new white pants, and new underwear, and a tower slave took his clothes to the barracks. Then they went and registered with some official who made Kip sign his name on a bunch of forms, and then Samite took him to the dining hall where he was allowed a very small and very fast lunch, and then she showed him where the toilets were on each level of the towers.
And then she took him to his first class. “I can come inside or I can wait outside. Your choice,” she said.
“Outside. Please, outside.” He was already embarrassed enough that he had a bodyguard. He looked into the lecture hall, trying to hide his nerves, while other students streamed past him. He was hungry. What wouldn’t he give for a pie right now. He asked, “Anything I should, uh, know?”
“You’re expected not to know anything.”
Ah, then I might even exceed expectations.
Chapter 12
“Every time you draft, you’re hastening your death,” Magister Kadah said. She wasn’t yet middle-aged, but she already seemed wizened, mousy, with hunched shoulders, hair that hadn’t seen a brush or a pick in weeks, green spectacles on a gold chain around her neck, and a thin switch of green luxin in her hand. “Your death doesn’t matter, but depriving your satrap of an expensive tool does. Your death doesn’t matter, but depriving your community of what it needs to survive does. We who draft are slaves. Slaves to Orholam, to light, to the Prism, the satraps, and our cities.”
Cheery sort. Kip tried to keep his expression neutral as he sat in on his first class at the Chromeria.
“Lies first, lessons later,” a boy said behind Kip.
“What?” Kip asked. He looked over his shoulder. The boy was, oddly, wearing clear spectacles with thick black mahogany frames in front of thicker black brows. The lenses made one eye look bigger than the other. But more intriguing than his Ruthgari looks-curly light brown hair, small nose, tan skin, brown eyes-were the mechanical spectacles themselves. Two colored lenses, one yellow, one blue, rested on hinges, ready to be clicked down over the clear lenses at a moment’s notice.
The boy grinned, seeing Kip’s stare. “My own design,” he said.
“It’s genius. I’ve never-”
Something struck Kip’s desk with a sound like a musket shot. Kip almost jumped out of his skin. He looked at the green luxin switch in the magister’s hand. She’d slammed it across his desk, missing his fingertips by a thumb’s width.
“ Master Guile,” she said.
She let the words sit in the air, announcing to anyone in the class who hadn’t known who he was that he was indeed a Guile, and she knew it.
Next she proves she doesn’t care.
“Do you think you’re better than the rest of the class, Master Guile?”
The temptation was strong, but Kip had his orders. He was to do well in his classes. Getting kicked out of them would not help him achieve that. “No, Magister,” he said. He thought he even made it sound sincere.
She wasn’t an imposing figure, neither tall nor wide, but she loomed over Kip’s seat. He leaned as far away as his seat allowed. “Do we understand each other, young man?” she asked.
It was an odd way to put it, since she hadn’t made any explicit threat, but she didn’t have to. “Yes, Magister,” Kip said.
“Discipulae, I’m sure you’ve noticed your new classmate.” The way she said it made it unclear whether or not she was referring to Kip being fat. There were a few nervous titters. “His name is Kit Guile and-”
“Kip,” Kip interjected. “Not a woody tub for toys, a tubby wooden boy.” He knew it was a mistake as soon as the words were halfway out of his mouth.
“Ah. Thank you. I’d forgotten that gutter Tyrean has its own definitions for words. Put out your hand, Kip.”
He extended his hand, not quite guessing why he needed to do so until she cracked the green switch across his knuckles.
It yanked his breath away.
“Don’t ever interrupt a magister, Kip. Even if you are a Guile.”
He looked down at his knuckles, fully expecting them to be bloody. They weren’t. She knew exactly how hard she could hit with that thing. At least she’d hit the knuckles of his right hand. His raw left hand would have been far worse.