CIRCA 2812

Perhaps this is as good a place to talk about magic as any. It doesn’t really fit into a tidy little parcel in my life. It’s never played a large part, but it’s always been there.

Magic exists. I’m pretty sure that you all know that, even if you haven’t had the opportunity to see it yet. It is rare, even now – and it was even rarer in my youth. The great magics of the previous ages were dying out, and even the so-called ‘lesser’ magics, of weather, of earth, of animal, were by no means common. The highly-prized healing gifts were rare to the point that the Healer’s Collegium and the School of Witchcraft and Wizardry had permanent staff travelling to every corner of every province in the Empire, and not a few client-states, simply looking for it.

As you may imagine, the most likely place you’ll find people with magical gifts is in the noble Houses, in the knights. As a general rule of thumb, the more powerful, the wealthier, the greater the House, the stronger the magic in the family, and the greater number of individuals who have it.

No, that is not coincidence. There’s a reason magical abilities are prized. They’re useful. Very useful.

But they’re not infallible. They don’t give the ability to jump out of the window and fly. Oh, all right, for some people it does. That was a very bad example. No, magical gifts, useful as they are, don’t prevent people from making incredibly stupid errors of judgement…

I was looking enviously at Kay as a little coloured wisp of cloud formed in front of her. She was staring at it, slight movements of her fingers making it move slightly, or change colour.

Then it metamorphosed into a large basket of chocolate, just as Kay collapsed onto her bed, worn out from the effort. Yes, it is possible to create things out of thin air, but according to Kay (who, like the rest of her family, had that said ability) it would be slightly less exhausting to weave the basket, pick the cocoa beans, press the cocoa beans, milk the cows, grow the sugar, and make the chocolate from scratch than it was to simply conjure it up.

That didn’t stop her showing off, though.

We were in her room for the precise reason that it was now just her room. Cassie had shattered her hip in a skiing accident during the winter break, and while it was not exactly life-threatening or even completely disabling, it was equally clear that she would have a bad limp for the rest of her life. It was clear that she wouldn’t be able to stay at the Academy.

Oh, it’s perfectly fine to be injured after you graduate and win your shield, even if you manage to, say, get hurt tripping down the stairs after the ceremony. You won’t be stripped of your title – you’ll simply be shunted off to a desk job – but get yourself damaged before graduation and that’s the end of you. No one graduates from the Academy on anything less than their own merit – and being in anything less than peak physical form is asking for an automatic failure.

By the way, you graduate from the Academy with your knighthood simply by surviving the Trials of Knighthood.

That’s not actually as easy as it sounds.

The room that Justinia and I shared now that we were in the Senior School was slightly larger than the one we had shared when we first began at the Academy, though not by very much. We now had our own desks, a dressing table with a mirror (currently covered with every single beauty fad known to the human race and possibly a few others. All of which, saving Justina’s hairbrush, comb, and single pot of sunburn salve, was mine. So I’m vain. So what), and stand-alone bookshelves so that we wouldn’t give ourselves concussion every time we got out of bed. It was a nice enough room, but we congregated in Kay’s simply because she had room, and didn’t have to move piles of junk out of the way just so she could open her door.

The junk was all piled up on Cassie’s bed.

Kay, perfectionist that she was even then, conjured up the best chocolate in the world. Literally. She felt that the effort wasn’t worth it for less than the best.

I wasn’t going to argue with that.

“How big’s the pool now?” Kay asked, sliding off the bed to sit on the floor.

“Nearly thirty in gold,” Justinia informed her mildly. Kay whistled through her teeth – even by our standards that was a substantial amount of money, more than sufficient to buy enough chocolate to make us disgustingly sick. It was about the cost of a decent horse with respectable bloodlines.

That year, some of the older girls (and a few of the boys, to tell the truth) were laying some fairly heavy wagers as to who among them was going to be the first to bed Kay’s twin.

Yevgen was no longer the annoying little brat with an immature attachment to stuffed toys from our childhood. He was handsome, generally good-natured, polite, charming, musically and artistically talented, athletic, and intelligent. The perfect fairytale prince, in other words. Sometimes he was so perfect he almost made me nauseous – and he would have, had he not been a genuinely nice person, and a very dear friend, one whom I treasured very much. He made me feel that there was something worth hoping for, worth striving for. It wasn’t that he was naïve, exactly, in the way that some people blunder through life with their heads wrapped in pink cotton wool, refusing to see the dark, unpleasant side of life. He knew about it, he saw it – he simply didn’t feel that getting upset or indignant did any good, so instead he channelled his energy into improving it – of course, that’s not to say that he wasn’t prepared to do what was necessary, when circumstances demanded it. That’s what got him sent beyond the back of beyond to pull a completely devastated land into flourishing prosperity in less than a decade.

That and I think that neither the Empresses Vanaria nor Rislyn were entirely happy with someone of his brains, talent, and drive bouncing around the capital with nothing to do, the classically bored, under-utilised younger child, too talented to waste in menial tasks, which would make him resentful in any case, too dangerous for the important ones. Rislyn took a huge risk with Kay – one which paid off spectacularly well for both of them, I have to add.

Even as a teenager, he was a master of self-control. He didn’t even swear unless it was really, really called for – such as the time he dripped solder onto his bare skin during a metalwork class. He had his faults, of course. Unfortunately one of them was being able to conceal his shortcomings extremely well.

He was also, at sixteen, very unusually, still a virgin – trust me, we all knew that for a fact – it’s very difficult to keep that sort of secret in the Academy, where it seems that everyone knows about your conquests before you do.

You may think it hard to believe, given our hectic schedules, that Cadets find the time to do a little extra-curricular Practical Biology, so to speak. We do, never you mind how. Teenage hormones will always find a way.

Before you ask, I won’t be disclosing my details. They’re not important. Suffice to say, like nearly everyone else, even I managed to have a head start on Yevgen.

But, back to the topic, like his famously fastidious cousin, Vas (despite all the invitations, Vas was quite picky about who he slept with by choice, with only a few, usually serious, fairly long-term dalliances). Yevgen appeared to be as generally uninterested in that sort of thing as the average mushroom. I imagined that it may have been because of his roommate, the famous Aulan Ithoku, who basically made up for Yevgen’s lack of interest, and quite possibly anyone else’s too. I smile still when I think of that boy – the complete opposite to Yevgen, he was game for practically anyone who was breathing and willing, male, female, confused, knight, cadet, knight, student, undisclosed – he didn’t particularly care so long as they were up for some fun. He steered away from servants, and those who were quite obviously too young, or those who actually had some unwanted disease, but I think that was about it. Sharing a room with Aulan was, I imagined, an education in itself – though later, of course, I found out that Aulan had at least had enough regard for his roommate that his dallying was done outside of their room, with the end result that Yevgen practically had their room to himself for the last four or five years at the Academy.

I remember that I nearly keeled over from shock when I found out that Aulan was getting married – and even more so when he stayed faithful to his wife for the rest of his life. I had been impressed enough that Aulan found enough time for his extra-curricular activities, considering at one point he was conducting seven simultaneous affairs, with none of his partners being aware of any of the others.

He was very useful when he could be roped in to work for the Service. Could he teach me about deviousness.

I don’t think, even to this day, that I knew who started the betting book. It’s not an unusual occurrence, though usually it’s for far more minor things, for far lower stakes – such as who will take the honours in the races, or who will manage to glue one of the teachers to their chair, that sort of thing. It was rarely something so…personal.

Or, as it turned out, malicious.

As I said, very unusually, at sixteen, Yevgen simply wasn’t interested in anyone – which made nearly everyone interested in him.

The betting pool was an open secret, one that nearly everyone knew about. We assumed that Yevgen must have known about it, and was purposefully delaying making any movements of the kind simply to infuriate everyone. He was sensible. He was a lot more down-to-earth than the flippant dilettante image he liked to project. He had sufficient magical gifts that he found it relatively easy to read intent, to be able to detect deception. We assumed that he could see right through the fairly transparent seduction attempts that people were laying in front of him practically every five minutes. We assumed that he knew what was going on.

We assumed wrongly.

I tread warily here. Dama Selera Carloni was an incredibly talented stateswoman, intelligent, loyal, measured, practical, farsighted. Without her, the reign of Empress Rislyn would have been considerably less known for its efficiency and prosperity.

That doesn’t meant that she wasn’t an absolute bitch.

Nothing wrong with that, of course. I am too. It’s a very admirable trait, and a necessary one sometimes.

But not when luring one of my friends into bed for the sole purpose of a little golden metal and boasting rights.

I’m fairly sure she didn’t even like him that much. She never really went for the sparkling golden boys, preferring the calmer, more measured, determined types.

She did marry my brother Rory, after all.

I never liked Selera for the earlier part of my life – though, later, we came to a sort of understanding, a sort of guarded respect – for the very simple reason that she wasn’t a very pleasant person. She was talented, intelligent and beautiful, and knew it – and made sure that everyone else knew it too. It was not enough for her to best almost everyone on the practice field, to ace every test, to have endless swains falling at her feet – she had to humiliate her opponents, to make snide remarks about others’ careless mistakes or grammatical oversights, to brutally reject those who were not to her taste.

No, I didn’t like Selera much. My only consolation was that since she was two years ahead of me, in my brother Rory’s year, I didn’t see her all that much. The Academy was a very big place, after all.

It was early summer, about a month from our exams (ours were only practice ones, and lasted only a week – after which, though we were meant to continue our studies, we usually spent observing the more physical aspects of the Trials – yes, I know, we were morbid – we were also sixteen at the time), and a little more from beginning the Trials of Knighthood for the final-years – who included Rory and Selera. We were procrastinating. Kay was trying some strange technique she found in a ‘non-prescribed’ textbook on magic to see the future – she had some silver on Alejaniadré Gazos taking out the Duxa Prima – and wanted to know whether to increase her stake. 

Don’t try foretelling. It never works. We missed out on 5-1 odds on that girl.

Aleji did quite well afterwards, by the way. Southern military command, two provincial governorships, and a career in the Senate.

After Kay was satisfied that some overbred hulk would take out the first-ranking, she dissolved the little cloud and slid down bonelessly to the floor. She picked up a chemistry textbook with distaste. I don’t know why. She was good at it. Chemistry, that is.

“There’s been a lot of speculation on Selera for my brother,” she said, leaning back against her bed frame, eyes closed.

“I hardly think so,” Justinia, for once, was condescending to gossip. “She’s been so obvious – I can practically see her licking her lips and flicking her hair – he can see through that.”

Actually, he couldn’t. Or didn’t. I’ve never been quite game enough to ask the details.

It was creeping close to exams and the Trials. I think everyone was just a little tense, whether they admitted it or not. I certainly was. Most of us (except for a few die hards – Aulan, for one), had long elected for celibacy and textbooks over creeping around the corridors at night. Truth to tell, those weeks, a whole harem’s worth of devastatingly handsome love-gods from every religion imaginable (alternatively, a couple of the Astenovsky boys – pretty much the same thing, frankly – though Olly was a year younger than me and Vas was off somewhere on his first posting as a knight, on desert patrol. At least that’s what he told me when I asked when he got back. There was no other way (I thought) to explain those burns) could have wandered into my room and I would have snapped at them to get out unless they was bringing some iced lemonade, a toasted cheese, egg and bacon sandwich dripping with grease, a bucket of chocolate ice-cream with raspberry sauce and the answers to the Advanced Physics exam paper.

Justinia was at her desk, bent over some religions textbook. I’d taken the compulsory Comparative Theology subject in my first year at the Senior school, just to get it over and done with, but most people left it to later – and left it to me to write their assignments, because, quite frankly, for most people there are more interesting things to do than read how some obscure little tribe in the middle of nowhere thinks that the world was created by a worm doing a mime.

I’m a snob. I know.

It was early morning. It’s much easier to study in the morning than the evening at the Academy – of course, that was completely opposite to my natural inclinations, so as soon as I graduated, I quickly shifted to working late and sleeping late. But at the Academy, it was very much working late and rising early. I spent most of my free time asleep.

There was the creak of a footfall outside. Justinia and I were near one of the great staircase that connected all the floors of the girls’ wing – a good and a bad thing – it was easier for us to move as we pleased, closer to the bathrooms, the common rooms, and the exits – but on the down side, others had to move past our door to get to those same things – and we heard every movement on floorboards and stairs.

It sounded different to what we were accustomed to. It was definitely masculine – light, and moving carefully, but unmistakably male. For all that as far as knights go, at least, there isn’t all that much difference between the genders where build is concerned (as a general rule of thumb, the average male knight is perhaps two inches taller than the average female knight, and correspondingly of heavier build, but really not by very much – unlike outEmpire, we’ve never favoured the over-muscled hulk look), there is still a difference in the way we move. It’s something about the joints being put together ever so slightly differently – whatever it was, we could tell the difference between a male and a female footfall outside our door.

Not that it was unusual to have visitors of the opposite sex – it was almost a game to see how often you could visit the current object of one’s affections and still avoid the random nightly inspections from the teachers (same-sex liaisons were considerably easier to engineer, of course, but then again most of us found that weren’t really primarily inclined that way after the first few experiments – not enough challenge, frankly, in my opinion). But a week out from exams was definitely unusual.

I pulled the door open, stepped outside, and Yevgen promptly knocked me over.

I gave him a hard look, then another look behind him at the stairs, which led to the upper levels, the rooms of the older girls.

He had the grace to blush slightly.

“Selera?” I asked, if only because I could think of no one else who had actually been concentrating on him rather than their exam results lately. Selera was pretty much odds-on for a top-fifty placing, so she wasn’t worried about her outcome in the Trials.

He nodded, then left. He looked calm. I only supposed that he had worked out what was going on, and had finally agreed if only to stop the nuisance of everyone drooling over him.

We found out quite promptly the next morning that it had been no such practical arrangement. Selera was crowing quite loudly about her conquest – in very descriptive detail – while collecting the various wagers placed – some for simply being the first to share his bed, others, slightly more specific, about how long she had taken to do it, what they’d actually done, and bets against other contenders. She made quite a bit from it, I recall. After her Trials she bought a very respectable riding-horse with the proceeds (her parents, of course, gave her the traditional gift of a destrier).

I recall Kay was furious when she found out – almost as much at herself as at the tasteless Selera – for simply assuming that her brother was playing along with the game, for not ever bringing up the subject.

Yevgen was an absolute emotional wreck, though he did an admirable job of hiding it. I don’t think anyone had ever played with him quite so coldly like that – well, maybe his mother, but not even Vanaria was so blatant (well, not then, at any rate), and whatever he might have intellectually known of human nature, I doubt he had seen it before then. However, he did an admirable job in pulling through it, even though everyone with even a hint of magical talent could feel the distress fairly leaking out of him. He had a few of the more emotionally-sensitive depressed to the point of tears – but other than that, he pulled through, as I said. 

He even did reasonably well in his exams (he didn’t do spectacularly well if he could help it – life was dangerous enough for a prince with magical gifts without showing that you were no slouch in the brains department too).

That was the time that I hit myself for not paying close attention. It was the last time that I did so wilfully – even though it was because I thought the whole affair rather distasteful. Yevgen was right – unpleasant things don’t go away if you ignore them – the only solution is to face them. That included such irrelevant things as juvenile power-games. If you remember to pay attention to details, and understand how they figure in the grander scheme of things, you’ve got about ninety-nine percent of the job of a diplomat or spy accomplished. Never mind the glamour, the honours, the fame, it is really very little more than simply taking a bit of care.

Of course, the other per-cent is killing people. Who to kill, how to do it, when to do it, and who to have blamed – but I’ve always found that to be the easy bit.

The bit that’s easier to outsource, at any rate.

Another thing – the last week of term, Kay got a new roommate. We had known her slightly – her name was Felera Eriel, a quiet, surprisingly delicate-looking girl who was devastation with her daggers. We hadn’t seen her during the exams, or even for a little before – I had simply assumed that she had a different schedule from us – that wasn’t unusual - there were some times when I didn’t see some vague acquaintances for a year and a half. She and Kay hit it off immediately, and within a week Kay had asked her to spend the summer break at one of the Delmaran country estates with she and the still-pathetic Yevgen.

Of course, as I found out years later, she had been excused from the physical, and had dictated her academic exams from her bed in the infirmary. Ambidextrous or not, it’s very difficult to write with crushed fingers, and even harder to sit up with a broken back.

She had healed perfectly, of course, which was why we didn’t notice. Really, that should have been our first hint that she had more in the ‘special talent’ department than a nice little trick of being able to light candles by looking at them – which was pretty nifty, but not all that much out of the common way.

I can’t do that, by the way. I have to point and click, and even then I usually have to go to bed afterwards with a migraine.

Some people don’t even have to look at the object in question – which has resulted in a few regrettable little incidents when they got distracted.

That summer, though I had little time to wallow in my guilt. I spent it as an ‘observer’ with the north-eastern fleet, under the command of Princess Giselle, Empress Vanaria’s younger sister.

If you’re wondering where my rather famous distaste for gore comes from, you try nailing people to jetties for six weeks and see how your stomach handles it.

Especially when people around you are placing bets on whether they die of drowning first before the effects of gravity take effect.

Princess Giselle wasn’t actually a sadist, despite all the rumours. Believe it or not, she didn’t like most of what she did. She, like most commanders, was practical. She belonged to the ‘show, don’t tell’ philosophy of order. In her case, ‘do not commit piracy because then you will be crucified upon a rickety pier at low tide, and if I’m feeling really nasty, I’ll put in a few strategic shallow cuts in you where you really don’t want salt water to irritate, and calculate the distance so that you’re only up to water to the little space between your nose and your mouth at high tide.’

There’s a downside of the ruling family breeding for intelligence. They’re all very good at mathematical calculations of tides and appropriate distances, as well as being very creative. That’s all I have to say about that.

Did I tell you that I also lost about twenty pounds that summer too? Not being able to eat without bringing it all back up does that to you. I felt like I had some bizarre eating disorder.

It’s not a weight loss plan I approve of. It’s not very comfortable. Luckily, it’s much easier to put weight on than to take it off, so I was back to my normal weight in a few months.

Unfortunately, it took me far longer to get over the other effects of my summer.

If you are curious about how Giselle could be so blatant in her very creative methods of execution, when the Imperial Military has adopted protocols and guidelines in the humane treatment of prisoners and for the protection of human rights, remember that the Empress holds ultimate power, and, as a matter of convention, has always been…not so much above the law, but rather the law itself. Protocols and guidelines have always been just that – recommendations – for all that even by my time they had been so deeply entrenched in the military that the common soldier indulging in a little personal pillaging and mayhem could expect a very hard dressing down by their C.O or even severe disciplinary action if they went beyond the bounds of a little opportunism.

No, the Empresses aren’t bound by such idealist standards of good behaviour, even if it was one of their more noted predecessors who crafted the first Declaration – an Empress known for her pacifism, her idealism, her sense of justice, her progressive stand on social issues. I’ve always found it a matter of supreme irony that she shares my name. My parents had a soft spot for her – after all, they did meet in a history lecture covering her reign. It says a lot about Empress Radanae that her twenty-two year reign can be covered in single lecture.

We’ll leave aside the rumour that her nephew, the Emperor Cirdir, poisoned her morning coffee when she wanted to try to negotiate ‘one last time’ with a group of separatists wreaking havoc in the north. As far as I’m concerned, there’s little historical evidence either way.

If you take out the idealism, then add ruthless practicality and sheer pigheadedness, you basically have Rislyn anyway. What Radanae was to freedom, democracy and the protection of human dignity, Rislyn was to an efficient tax system and everyone minding their own business and getting on with their lives.

No, it’s not terribly romantic comparison, but honestly, who would you prefer running the country?

Since the Empresses aren’t bound to follow guidelines – they’re not, strictly, bound to follow laws, for that matter – they may also grant dispensations to others to disregard said guidelines. Such permissions are given to most of the senior command on a campaign as a matter of course. Members of the Swords, and other specialist units are often expressly exempt from such considerations, as are quite a few knights in senior roles of authority. That being said, of course, generally, in my day, the white belt and silver ring of knighthood gave the bearer free reign to do pretty much whatever they liked in the name of ‘gathering intelligence’ or ‘administering justice’ so long as they weren’t too messy.  It was only if we did such things ostensibly for fun, or went overboard even by the very broad-minded standards of high command that we would be called in for a proverbial ‘slap on the wrist’ – usually just the paying of wergild to the deceased’s family anyway, in lieu of a presentable body for them to burn or bury.

Oh, come on, when was the last time you saw a knight who hadn’t actually openly sided against the Empress prosecuted for anything, much less that over-vaunted, questionable charge ‘crimes against the dignity of humanity’?”

The rumours are true. Most of the ‘interrogators’ attached to the military are knights. Kay (who was rather prissy when it came to personal grooming, to tell the truth, and generally didn’t physically do her own dirty work if she could order someone else to do it – well, I suppose it is difficult to keep long, light-blonde hair clean at the best of times, much less on a battlefield) always found it supremely ironic that Justinia and Lara could basically do whatever they liked to prisoners, down to flaying them alive and then staking them out on anthills by their nailess toes (I don’t think they ever did all of those to the same person, though I wouldn’t wager on it), while Saro, who was otherwise to all intents and purposes equal to the other two, couldn’t so much as slap them unless they punched him first.

Which he never tempted them into doing, of course.

Suffice to say we’ve all broken a few little codes of conduct in our careers.

I should really stop talking about that now, shouldn’t I? Never you mind, there isn’t any proof. Not just insufficient proof, but no surviving evidence at all.

We made sure of that.

You may wonder, when I had seen that sort of unpleasantness before (at least in its broadest application), and when I knew perfectly well that it happened more often that people admitted, that I was so shocked when I found what had happened to Vas and Pippa. Simple. In those two cases, it was in my city. It was in civilization. The perpetrators were civilized people. Not provincials in little huts or floating about on disgusting-smelling boats, not borderline-barbarians I could sneer at, but people I knew, people I invited to dinner, people from my world.

People like me.

Of course, in Vas’s case – even though I had known him for so long, had the evidence right in front of my eyes for a decade or more – he was a magnificent actor – and, in any case, whatever subtle signs he gave out were completely different. I hope to whatever gods you believe in that you never have a chance to compare, but, even though the actual, physical hurts might be exactly the same, the mental and emotional scars are quite distinctly different between the – I suppose you’d call them ‘innocents’ – and those who enter the situation, if not exactly of their own free will, at least knowing exactly what it entails, and being prepared to take the risk.

Not something I’d personally choose to go through in any case. In my youth, I never realized just how fortunate I was that the issue never came up, at least when it concerned me personally, not once in my very long career.

There are distinct advantages to being the crow among some rather spectacular swans, I’d like to add.

Of course, that awful summer was simply compounded, when I got back to the Academy, to find that Rory had, after their Trials, invited Selera to stay at the family estates, and that my parents liked her. They liked her enough that they were already entering preliminary betrothal negotiations with Selera’s parents regarding property and other such things – a mere formality, as it was abundantly obvious that my oaf of a brother had already made up his mind.

If it hadn’t been clear that this time, at least, Selera was genuine in her affection, I think I might have scratched her eyeballs out (or if it wouldn’t be quite so hard on my manicure). However, in the circumstances, I gave a weak smile, shook her hand, and then went up to Rory’s rooms to weaken the hinges of Selera’s travelling trunks.

Look, I was being nice. I could have cut through the straps of her armour (whatever else I might think of her, she always had very nice armour, too). As it was, all that happened was that some of her formal togas got a bit muddy.

I was an absolute brat when I was sixteen. On the bright side, though, when I started school again, Kay greeted me with a delighted smile and said that her brother and her new roommate were definitely very good friends.

For some reason, even after all these years, after all her grand deeds, the image of Kay that sticks in my mind the most is of an insanely grinning teenage matchmaker with hair flying everywhere.

Better that, I suppose than the clinical report I saw of what she looked like just after she died.

Her hair was a mess then too.

Cowardly of me though it may seem, I was glad I wasn’t there to see it. I prefer remembering the princess as I knew her, that fearsomely intelligent, lively girl with the sunburst of golden hair, or as the statute in the Hall of the Warriors I walk past so often depicts her – handsome, dignified, commanding, not…

It doesn’t matter anyway.

CIRCA 2813

“Excuse me, is this seat taken?”

I turned and raised my eyebrow at the voice. It was a rapidly filling lecture theatre, and it was one of the more popular classes – and most of my classmates would not be quite so hesitant when faced with an available three square inches of space.

He was unfamiliar – well, that was hardly remarkable, for I rarely socialized with my classmates that the Imperial University – partly through choice, partly as the gates to the Academy closed at sundown and I did not have an after-hours pass.

I was able to climb the wall, like most of my peers, but I was hardly going to do that more often than necessary.

You try scaling a 20 foot stone wall without equipment and carrying textbooks sometime.

“No,” I shook my head, and he slid into the bench beside me, fumbling in his bookbag for paper, pen and ink.

It was my second year taking classes at the Imperial University, and I had long found that lectures were not the place for making acquaintances. During lectures, everyone seemed overly determined to ignore all around them, whether concentrating on the lecturer or catching up on lost sleep. Socialising was reserved for outside class, over cheap beer and open-air cookery of dubious sanitation.

I dared a glance over at him. Older than me, but not by much – well, that was hardly remarkable, the standard age of entry into the University was eighteen, which made me a good two years younger than the first-years.

We sat there for a few minutes, in that awkward silence that one always encounters when neither is ready to initiate the conversation for fear of sounding like a complete idiot.

“Ahem,” he coughed, and began, “I’m Saro,” he twisted awkwardly and held out a hand.

I took it “Danae.”

Do you know, after all these years, I can’t even remember what class that was?

We took only two subjects together that first year – history and politics – so it must have been one of them. For the others, he was majoring in archaeology and forensics, and I was taking courses in law and jurisprudence. I saw him often, as I rushed in and out. We did not have the chance to speak often out of class, though I would often find that no matter how crowded the lecture, or how late I was, he always had a spare seat next to him. 

I wasn’t the only knight-cadet taking subjects at the University, of course – though I was the only one who wasn’t taking any Academy ‘book-learning’ classes whatsoever. It was not unusual for knight-cadets to expand their education in other institutions of learning. Anyone with even a fraction more than the minimum of magical talent went to the School of Witchcraft and Wizardry (sadly, not me – though Kay and Yevgen, among others, did), and anyone who had the magic of Healing went to the Healers’ Collegium as a matter of course. Some took advanced courses at the War College or Military Academy (basically, the same thing, but just in two different buildings), though the material they covered wasn’t really all that much of an extension from our own syllabus.

But, of course, the University was where most of those taking ‘extension’ classes went, for all that graduation from the Academy in itself is officially the equivalent of an undergraduate degree in its own right – which means not a thing for most, considering that majority of knights never find the time for postgraduate studies anyway. Most of those who do are female – knights in the diplomatic corps, mainly, though quite a few combat knights who have a series of pregnancies in a fairly short space of time (my mother, for example – there’s less than four years’ age difference between my two brothers, and I’m exactly in the middle) also make use of their increased spare time to pursue academic ambitions. That’s not to say that that male knights didn’t earn advanced degrees – just fewer of them, compared to the women, and those that did were those who spent a lot of time on medical and convalescence leave anyway. 

For me, then 2813 wasn’t otherwise all that eventful. I had no serious injuries, no major crises, and while meeting Saro was, in the long run, very important, at that point he was no more than an interesting, intelligent, conversation partner who was very good at saving me a seat in lectures and very generous about sharing his notes. He also happened to be rather handsome, but I wasn’t that shallow. He wasn’t as aesthetically stunning as quite a few of my peers, after all.

As I stated before, I wasn’t the only knight-cadet taking subjects at the Academy – a few of my friends did – such as Kay and Yevgen, and Lara – though Justinia’s extension classes were, not surprisingly, taken at the Imperial War College.

I should make the point now, though, if you don’t already know, that few of our university classmates were aware of our status  - it wasn’t something that came up in casual conversation, and we weren’t immediately distinguishable from any other accident-prone undergraduates, not even by apparent age – as a general rule, cadets tend to look a little older than they truly are, just as most mature knights tend to look a little younger than they truly are. The first is due to the tight schedules and continual mayhem that is the Knights’ Academy. The second is due to sheer, unalloyed vanity. Vas wasn’t exaggerating very much when he mentioned that I started looking about twenty-five when I was thirteen, and would still look about twenty five when I was fifty.

Not that he was still alive when I was fifty – or even when I was twenty-five in truth, for that matter.

However, 2813, was important for other reasons – politically, because it marked the re- emergence of the targeting of the Empress and Imperial family by mainstream generalist assassins (as opposed to family members having a dispute about succession) – where previously they had been considered untouchable, and those disgruntled with the Pax Imperia took out their frustrations at a more local level – local leaders, Governors, Senators – even though it wasn’t, of course, generally acceptable behaviour – it was, at least, an expected and ever-present part of political life.

It was personal because three of my dearest friends were most profoundly affected by the shift in the standards of political practice.

Sir Jesal Astenovsky, Consort of the Empress Vanaria, Rislyn, Kay and Yevgen’s father, died that spring when partisans seeking secession from some gods-forsaken province I hadn’t cared about since I took my geography and cartography subjects set upon the Empress on her way back from a short ride out of the city with her consort. They didn’t have more than cursory escorts – and those were riding some distance from them – because both were accomplished fighters in their own rights - and the whole point of their little incognito trips out the city was to give her a little privacy, a little space to herself – which even she needed, once in a while.

Sir Jesal threw himself between Vanaria and her would-be assassins – there was no time, no space to allow the drawing of swords when they converged upon the Empress. Even though between them, he, Vanaria and their two bodyguards took care of the attackers with reasonable efficiency, one of them had taken the advantage of surprise when they had angled a sharp, poisoned dagger deep into his side.

Officially, of course, it’s always been stated that he died in a ‘hunting accident’ – though, anyone who is within even spitting distance of any sort of importance has known the truth of what happened that day, more than three-quarters of a century ago.

For a little while, the death of Jesal had nearly everyone in a state of shock – for he had been popular, like most Consorts – possibly because most Consorts tend to have, for want of a more eloquent description, fairly similar qualities and personalities. In the main, they’ve been highly intelligent, completely devoted to their wives (to the point that the vast majority of them were lifebonded to their respective Empresses - which is why, if you notice the genealogies, no Consort has ever outlived their Empress), magically gifted (which is why, by anyone’s standards, the Empresses always have rather handy little party tricks), talented military commanders, politicians – but most of all, they’ve tended to be calm, measured, and genuinely – for want of a better word – ‘nice’ – men (for some reason, though, unlike the intelligence, military talent, and magical gifts, that aspect rarely seems to be passed on to any of the children – Yevgen was very much the exception – objectively speaking, though I love them dearly, neither Kay nor Rislyn were particularly pleasant people the way that their little brother was).

Without exception, too, they’ve also tended to be rather spectacularly attractive too – which accounts for that self-same characteristic of nearly all Delmaran Empresses and Princesses.

That afternoon, quite unusually, I actually had a little time to myself. One of my lectures at the University had been cancelled – and, of course, knowing the University bureaucracy, neither I nor my classmates had known until we arrived to a rather tattered piece of paper haphazardly tacked to the door of the lecture hall.

For once, I had no huge backlog of work to catch up on, no additional instruction sessions in the more ‘knightly’ pursuits  - I was having an unusually good run with sharp pointy things that year – so I had the hour set aside for the history lecture free.

It was a fine day, so I sat with Saro and a few of my other University friends on the lawn near the lecture theatres, basically procrastinating. As I have perhaps mentioned before, none of them, not even Saro, were aware that I was a cadet. It wasn’t something that readily became a topic of conversation, after all – though, as a side benefit, I also learned a lot more than the usual cadet, enclosed in the Academy, would.

By that, I don’t just meant gaining additional knowledge on the political theories of the twenty-sixth century, either.

It’s always been taken as a given that the Imperial University is home to a certain amount of intellectual and philosophical objection to the whole Imperial system. There was hardly any point in constructing such a centre of learning, of gathering the best and brightest minds in the Empire, without expecting them to use said minds in some sort of questioning of the entire structure and world that they inhabited. There’s always been a certain amount of leeway given to both students and academics that isn’t always extended to the more general citizenry of the Empire as far as dissent has been concerned. My time at the University was the first time that I had truly encountered significant differences in attitudes regarding the Empire – for while knights, and cadets have a certain amount of cynicism and sarcasm regarding our world and our role in it – at the end of the day, it suits us well, and, no matter we might gripe and grumble in our inadequate tents at the end of a day on a muddy battlefield, it would not occur to us to seek anything different.

In the main, I listened, fascinated, as my peers espoused opinions that I personally thought little short of treasonous, but were to them perfectly reasonable, even laudable. I noticed that Saro rarely said anything at all when these subjects started – which was my first clue, later confirmed, that whatever his background, it was one which had a vested interest in the continuing status quo. They were things that a knight would never know unless they functioned undercover as spies – which I never did – all my ‘information gathering’ was done completely in the open – it’s just that most people were never observant enough to notice.

I enjoyed those few months, where I could, if only for a few hours a day, imagine that I was, to some degree, ordinary – that I was not scion to a powerful knightly House, that my fate was not set out from the wintry day that I was born – where people who would have different fates from me, people from different worlds, accepted me as one of them.

Like all good things, it didn’t last. It lasted, quite ironically enough, until the afternoon that Sir Jesal Astenovsky was murdered on a quiet, little-used road leading into the city.

It was the end of the hour, and I had enjoyed a lively debate about how the Senate was no more than a completely inadequate, almost insulting smokescreen when the Empress held complete and utter power (actually, when you get Empresses as strong-willed and capable as they ones we’ve had recently, that’s pretty much the case – though not even they will say that in public). I was waiting for Kay and Yevgen, who were due out of their classes, for we were to walk back to the Academy together (before you ask, no, my University friends did not know who they were – neither ‘Berenice’ and ‘Yevgen’ were unusual names, and, besides, younger Imperial children never made public appearances before they became knights – besides the fact the Vanaria never even mentioned them in public – many people weren’t even aware that she had younger children until they graduated from the Academy).

Then, Vas rode up, followed by other members of the Palace Guard. They had two spare horses with them. 

That was unusual in itself – by tradition, only knights, and knights on duty at that (though we interpreted that very loosely) are permitted to ride within the bounds of the city, much less within the grounds of the University itself. It was another gripe of my new friends.

Vas rode up in complete knightly panoply – golden destrier, gleaming armour, velvets and all – quite unusually (at least, I thought so at the time), his second-year assignment was in the city itself, as a member of the Palace guard. His timing could have been better, but I noticed, even the most socialist of my new friends could not say any of her strident objections to the whole rigidity of the class system, of the entrenched power of the knightly houses, possibly as she was struck by the complete perfection of the image he presented – truly the fairy-tale knight, and for a moment, I think, Vas could stir up the old concepts of honour, chivalry and duty in the most radical activist.

He dismounted quickly, in the elegant fluid motion that was so much his trademark, but the expression on his face was grim. He did not acknowledge the others, but went straight to me.

If I hadn’t known better, I would have accused him of doing it on purpose.

“Where are Kay and Yevgen?” he asked me desperately, “I need to find them now,”

“Right here,” came a familiar, though rather out-of-breath voice at my shoulder. There was a muffled, ‘humph’ as Yevgen ran into his twin from behind. They had been in the same class – civil engineering – just before.

No, before you ask, I didn’t get any qualifications in anything of the sort. Yes, I know perfectly well how to build bridge or fort or wall without having it fall down on me, but, to be quite frank, it bores me silly. Why else do you think that I prefer not to go on military campaign?

Well, aside from preferring the comforts of a decent bed, regular meals, and a plumbing system, to grubbing around in a mud-hole, of course.

“Get on the horses,” Vas was continuing, speaking rather quickly, “you have to come with me – now!”

“Why?” Yevgen asked his cousin, but he did not object as he placed a hand on the saddle of the horse a guard led to him and sprang lightly up. That, more than anything else betrayed his status – trust me, no other group of people can do that particular trick – even the famous nomadic horse-peoples use stirrups and abhor the blatant showing-off that we indulge in.

I was strikingly aware of a few very accusing looks – though the expression in Saro’s eyes was simply one where I could see that a few little clues he had picked up regarding my cadet-friends and I were making sense.

‘There’s been an accident – your father – now come!” Vas turned to me, and in that instant, for the barest fraction of a second, he stopped, and stared – so brief that I did not notice at the time, though it played over and over again in my mind in later years – before remounting, again, not using stirrups.

I don’t know why we all do that – of course I could, and I could until I was well into my forties, but they invented those little steel loops for a reason. Oh well, the oddities of knights are a subject well beyond my comprehension.

“What has happened?” I barely recognised my own voice.

Vas sent me a slightly harried glare. “There’s been an…accident…” he said curtly, “You should go back to the Academy,” his voice was clear – and he ignored the even more accusatory looks from my friends.

I must have sent a furious stare back. “That’s an order, Gavrillian,” he said firmly, before nudging his horse to canter away with Yevgen, Kay and the others.

What could I do? I said something with false cheer about seeing my friends at the next lecture, noted that Kay and Yevgen had dumped their bookbags on the ground, picked them up, and started on the long walk back to the Academy.

 Vas had been looking at Saro, of course. Whatever else had happened that afternoon, that was when they first met.

It was lonelier at the University after that – though my friends forgave me (I think) for not being completely upfront about myself, neither were they quite as forthcoming, and, after my family name became more widely known, there were many more people who flocked to me, wanting to claim my acquaintance.

CIRCA 2814

Our final year at the Academy was focused on our Trials of Knighthood, our rankings, and who would take part in the Display.

It was then, as it still is, as far as I know, the most important event in our young lives. Passing our Trials meant graduation from the Academy. It meant full status as a knight, as an adult, as a noble, as a full member of our House. It meant the absolute, final, end to whatever childhood we ever had.

Basic Mathematical Processes

Question 1. Find the integral of;

a)  ∫(x4 –2x2+3)/x2 dx

I snorted. It really hadn’t been worth studying that morning.

1/3 x3 – 2x – 3/x + c, where c is a rational number

Fine, they did get a little bit harder after that, but not all that much. Despite the rumours, neither Intermediate nor Advanced mathematics is particularly difficult, certainly not as much as people claim. Do them. You’ll never use the concepts unless you build siege engines and castles, but they’re very nice things to know anyway.Comparative Theologies and Religious Traditions

Compare and contrast the extent to which the concept of an afterlife influences social and moral codes in four different regional belief systems.

It could have been worse. The previous year had been asked to write a critique of the underlying themes of death and rebirth, and its importance in the development of belief systems (notice that whoever set those exams never called them ‘religions’).

What can I say about the rest? I’m sure you’ve seen bits and pieces of it in all these years – centuries, rather - that it’s been public. I hear that tickets to the fencing bouts, go for hundreds on the black markets, for all that they’re meant to be simply a copper coin for one or another of the city charities. The physical part of my Trials passed in a blur – probably because my head was still spinning from the academic written and spoken examinations and the infernal ‘extra-curricular’ exams which involved alternatively wandering around an art gallery talking about the works, playing and listening to music, and all sorts of rather unnerving things that seemed to have very little to do with being a knight, defending justice, upholding the Diadem and all. As far as the physical went – well, it was hardly pleasant, but that’s not the idea – swimming in the artificial river around the Old City, infernal cross-country runs, rockclimbing, abseiling, rowing, long-distance rides on unfamiliar horses – then, of course, the armed and unarmed combat.

I suppose I should be grateful that I wasn’t hurt beyond a few bruises and a couple of splinters when my lance broke in the jousting. We had a relatively casualty free year – only two outright deaths – one drowning during the swimming, another accident in the jousting, and three serious injuries that resulted in death nonetheless. In a class of a thousand and twenty-four, it wasn’t really all that bad – some years have twenty deaths in the swimming section alone.

My performance was hardly spectacular – solid, you might say - my arrows hit the inner ring of the targets, I made a respectable showings in sword, dagger, and unarmed combat. I did very well in all the equestrian components. I managed well enough with spear and axe – in all, a good, solid performance. I knew that I wouldn’t get the ‘proper’ title of a top-ten ranker, but I had known – we had all known – for years that I would carry off the academic title.

I finished ninety-eighth. Good enough, I suppose, though one always has the nagging doubt that one could have done better. I suppose that everyone from Kay down would feel that way.

In a way, though, I was grateful that I didn’t have a ‘proper’ title, that I didn’t make it into the top ten overall (after some careful calculations, I surmise that I probably finished about 180th in the combat, i.e. ‘real knight-stuff’ section). I wasn’t sure if I could handle the after-graduation formalities without disgracing myself – and I don’t just mean the parties.

The Display was the same then as it is now, and had been for decades and centuries before. The great arena, with a crowd of over a hundred thousand (this was before they built the extra stand). Those condemned to die. The top ten knights of each year, riding into the sand to execute.

The sand, stained with blood.

To die at the Display is meant to be one of the ultimate punishments, for the most heinous of crimes. To be ruthlessly mowed down by a young knight who has, in all probability, never killed before, trampled by the steel-shod hooves of an unblooded young destrier. The secondary purpose of the Display – aside from the usual deterrence arguments for capital punishment – is to demonstrate the skills of each years’ knights, the warriors and soldiers who are sworn to uphold the Empire.

Unlike a conventional execution, done with comparative dignity and discretion in a prison courtyard, this is in the full glare of the sun, with crowds to see your disgrace. Your body is ground into the sand, then your remains are unceremoniously carted out and burned with all the others on a communal pyre, your ashes dumped in the rubbish heap, not even returned to your family the way most criminals’ remains are.

It’s not a pleasant fate.

I shall be the first to admit that not all who go there deserve their deaths. That not all who deserve such a humiliating end get it. I’ve watched many far more discreet executions, of those far more horrendous that the ones that even Justinia and Kay killed that bright sunny afternoon.

Justinia was the Duxa Prima, first-ranked of our year, and had only barely edged out Kay. I had wondered about the wisdom of my friend in demonstrating her skills so clearly, when she was the younger daughter – but I gathered that Kay knew the game she was playing, and knew the risks she took. Besides, I suppose that her own pride would not have tolerated anything less than the best performance that she was capable of – unlike others who have deliberately answered questions incorrectly, slowed down in races, or shot arrows astray to lower their rankings.

I was in the Gavrillian box that afternoon, with Rory and my parents. They weren’t too disappointed with my absence from the proceedings, the way Rory had been when he had missed out (he’d ranked twenty-fifth in his own year – a killer literature essay question, he told me – so academic marks did make a fine difference). It had been readily obvious that I wasn’t ‘true’ Duxa material for years, so they were just happy I’d made it out alive, relatively unharmed (only a few bruises, a massive hangover from the celebratory party afterwards, and of course, my still-sore, newly tattooed ‘recovery mark’ – a representation of my new personal shield at the juncture of back and neck, meant for easy identification after battle) and with a published ranking.

I wasn’t the only observer from my year, of course – nearly everyone else who could still sit up was there, and a few who couldn’t – the most famous was poor Yevgen, of course. He had the rather dubious honour of being the highest-ranked ‘badly injured’ of us all – he finished seventeenth in our year, with two shattered legs, more broken ribs than I would wish upon anyone, and generally, looking as though he’d been dragged through seven particularly unpleasant afterlifes face down.

He was drugged up to the teeth (probably to the point of seeing pink whales and blue rabbits) and prettied up enough to sit in the Imperial Box, though, though he really should have still been in the infirmary. Had he been coherent, he would have said that he wouldn’t have missed his twin’s moment in the limelight for anything, but, as it was, I doubt he was aware of very much through the drug haze. It was important for Vanaria to show that her offspring were resilient and strong.

Even if Yevgen wasn’t really all that far from gasping out his last on the spot. His breathing was shallow and laboured, and you didn’t have to look terribly hard to see that under the plastered-on makeup he was positively grey.

I always maintain that the overdose of opium they gave him that afternoon, and for some time after the event, weren’t accidents, no matter what the claims. Truth of the matter is, the medics ‘realized’ soon afterwards that they’d had the dose far too high – and, moreover, had kept him on it for far too long, no matter how bad the pain.

Whatever happened to knights being able to bear a little hardship, I’d like to know? Until about a century ago, most field hospitals didn’t even stock pain-killers that did anything short of knock someone unconscious so that they could be tended to without thrashing about and tearing out their stitches or messing up their splints.

His addiction didn’t last long, only a few months, but withdrawal is never pretty. We should have been there for him, the way that we should have been there for him when the older girls were playing with him. It was another time that had failed him. We begged to stay, all of us – Lara (of course), Kay, Justinia, Aulan (surprisingly enough, he wasn’t off seducing someone at that precise minute) – but there was no response. After the standard few weeks break, we were expected to take up our duties as full fledged knights, serving in provincial garrisons.