Dalliance had just had time to change out of his sweat-stained clothing, complete with horsehair, when his father knocked on the door.

  "Rathers are never late. The school group is leaving now. Get going."

  His family annoyed him. Not just the assumption that he would be late, but also not being able to handle the horsehair-covered dirties, which his mother would be cleaning by hand. And well, they were covered in horsehair and sweat. "What were you doing?" That would inevitably lead to questions, such as, "Were you out there grinding for experience?"—which would be their cover story to Mister Best, but should not be mentioned at all to Da, because if it were, that would be another opportunity to punish Dalliance.

  There was nothing for it. He fell in line behind Miss Thicket Wimple's cart and observed Earnest in line as well, bearing a canvas backpack. Charity’s voice cut in.

  “Whose is that?” he said.

  The backpack was dripping red.

  “Souvenir,” Earnest explained at Charity's askance look.

  Dalliance figured he might as well get it over with. "We were farming experience," he explained.

  "That's stupid," said Charity.

  "You're stupid," shot back Earnest.

  "We know you're not stupid," said Dalliance, intervening rudely. "We don't have very long until the Hunt, and I was getting scared that I didn't have enough practice, that I wasn't prepared," he explained.

  He wasn't entirely lying. He was very nervous. [Prediction] was all well and good, but what if he was going to be predicting that a dragon was about to set him on fire? That wouldn't stop him from being set on fire, and he had recently been worried about that.

  "Oh, what? You're not strong enough?" she scoffed. "Of everyone in our class, you're the one worried about that?"

  "I'm not strong," Dalliance said. "If you want to say I'm something, I'm smart, maybe. But I'm not strong."

  "He's not," agreed Earnest. "We got attacked. We did find something . . . and I beat it to death while he stood there crying like a little girl."

  Dalliance Rather shoved Earnest completely off his feet.

  That this was entirely part of their plan didn’t make the mockery feel any better, but the official story was that he hadn’t received any experience points. Just in case it got back to his Da.

  Charity did not look convinced by that or the rest of their story.

  Neither did Mister Best.

  “I’m the teacher. You’re the student. The argument is OVER. Sit DOWN, Mister Lackey!” shouted Missus Best.

  Despite her lacking stature, something about her posture overbore the strictly speaking taller student, and he sat with a pained grimace. Still healing, then.

  Woebegone had been in a truly awful mood all day.

  Someone had not managed a weapons upgrade.

  It was him.

  “They brought back more than they can use! I need a sword.”

  “You didn’t earn one.”

  “Earnest, one more word, and it’s the dunce cap for you.”

  “By all accounts, these were imperial salvage. Thus: half, by rights, remain with the finder, and half count toward his taxes as a deductible—sit DOWN, Mister Lackey, or I will throw you out and give you a drubbing. This is not the time, nor is it the place, for a toddler’s temper tantrum! You did not complete the assignment, and it isn't the purpose of the school to do it in your stead. Ask relatives. Beg veterans at the tavern. Practice your woodworking as Charity was doing—but this discussion is over.”

  Missus Best shoved the lanky boy bodily back into his desk, where he landed with a thump that was clearly still quite painful.

  Mister Best, from the blackboard, eyed his wife with restrained affection. “Ahem. With that being said—Earnest, you pass. Dalliance, you pass. Charity and Woebegone are the last to qualify: you each have two days.”

  “Actually,” said a male voice from the back of the room, where he’d been leaning against the wall, “I was hoping for a word before class began—”

  “—Mister Troubles, if it’s about Charity, it might as well be done in the open; we’ll hear plenty an earful about it as it is.”

  The man nodded and shrugged out of his knapsack, from which he retrieved a dark leather quiver of very short arrows and a crossbow of gleaming steel. A [Scout]’s weapon.

  “Her uncle’s, on loan for her remaining five hunts. I trust there is no issue?”

  “None from me,” said Mister Best mildly as Charity stood on the spot, face flaming red to the roots of her hair.

  “I said that wasn’t fair!” she moaned.

  “And I said I’d ask,” her father said in a calming tone which was completely wrong for the situation.

  “What is it you always tell me? ‘No means no’ right?!”

  “We need the firepower,” Dalliance said quickly. He found himself in the crossfire of several frosty stares. He bore up under it anyway. “For when we fight something more sturdy than a goblin. I want to go home in one piece.”

  “Rather has a point,” said Sterling. For some reason, it didn’t sound as intrusive when he did it. “Besides—family investment is the whole point of the exercise. Father says—”

  “—Yes, yes.” interrupted Mister Best. He never seemed to want the [Knight] mentioned if he could avoid it. “Suffice to say, the principle is sound. Well, Miss Troubles? Are you willing to risk your classmates’ lives, and your own, on a point of principle?”

  She was not. Mister Best, who had been somewhat frosty toward Earnest and Dalliance so far that morning, offered Dalliance a wink he took as forgiveness for the trouble with the swords.

  Woebegone waited until Mister Troubles left before starting up again and was quickly escorted out by the ear, by a now incensed Mister Best, paddle in hand.

  Class proceeded without him.

  The chalk skated across the board: +Wit, Earnest Verity.

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Mister Best's looping handwriting was, as always, immaculate. "Class, I regret we must take an unplanned detour into the expenditure of points. Briefly. Those of you with the [Pupil] class, you'll already be aware of your newfound faculty with memorization. Earnest, while I am well aware of your aspirations towards the King's Collegiate, I must impress upon you that yours is very much the path less traveled by.

  "Without the ability to memorize, [Pupils] have . . . even as you continue to attempt to raise your Wit, you will find yourself sorely outclassed in the particular environment of a schoolroom, where the [Pupil] class comes into its own. Some exceptional among you may be able to make the class work outside, by either dint of long practice, or of extra material assistance, or perhaps even intelligent skill choices. But the fact remains that the [Pupil] class was designed for the classroom. Those who do not have the [Pupil] class and cannot merely memorize with a glance must spend, well, the amount of time that a human normally takes to learn something, which in the extremely abbreviated course taught in this classroom is a significant disadvantage.

  "I’m being blunt because I am trying to make sure you go into this as clear-headed as possible. Because if I had my way, the topics covered in my course over this scholastic year would be taught over the course of four years, and I wouldn't change the grading scale in doing that, if that tells you anything about my perception of the difficulty of apprehending this much coursework this quickly.

  "As you are friends with Dalliance and are not a [Pupil]—this being common knowledge, as you stated it earlier in the year—I would recommend, with his agreement, that you participate in self-study, and allow his memory to supplement yours. But also, I fear you will likely be left behind. Which is not to say you won't learn anything worth knowing. I have designed this course such that those who make a passing grade—that being a D or better—will at the least have their basic numeracy, literacy, and the basics of rhetoric. However, for a full education, I simply don't have anything else to offer.

  "For the rest of you in the class sitting here smirking at poor Earnest here, your parents should have told you, but I will reiterate: you are in more hot water than he is. There are three slots for the King's Collegiate. Three of you may graduate and continue on to the King's College, unless your parents somehow procure the funds themselves." He paused, his eyes flicking towards Sterling. "Mister Worth, hand down."

  "This is a significant detriment to someone of the [Pupil] class, because if you cannot continue on to become an [Academ], then you are instead a failed [Pupil], capable of becoming a [Scribe] or a [Soldier], or some other similarly lesser classes. Having made it all the way into the Academy, one can still fail. The path to [School Teacher] requires one to fail to attain their doctorate, if I may be brief on the topic.

  "So, for those of you feeling too confident, I will remind you that there are seven students still in competition for three slots.

  "With that being said, let's get back to our earlier discussion on beasts, their intellect, and the harvesting of cores . . . "

  It was a sunny day, even late into the afternoon, as class let out.

  "Look sharp, Rather," said Sterling. "I want you on my right for the second hunt."

  Dalliance nodded uncertainly. That was not exactly how he had hoped for things to go. Ideally, they would have forgotten he existed by now. No such luck. But then, at least it seemed to be a positive thing. Effie, on her way out the door behind Sterling, quirked a corner of her lips at the implicit compliment but didn't comment, which could have meant anything at all.

  Da had left out a hoe, waders, and a coverall—old oiled leather, but still pretty good. Dalliance had had to use it several times before, and this time, like every other time, he would find them to be tolerably waterproof. Da had no reason to think that there was a need to test for a new leveling up of his attributes, and so was just assigning him normal labor. In this case, removal of weeds and brush from the little canal where water—drinkable water from an outflow of the river—passed under the fence in a long loop. The fence had been dropped down by several strands and staked into the riverbed—creek bed, really—but that didn't mean it was perfect at keeping out weeds that the cows would want to eat, since they would lean through the fence and break it. Removing those was generally Dalliance's job, as it would be today.

  There was blessedly little to do. What looked like a completely overgrown fence, when he had chopped it all back, was only three knobby, thick vines. Once he chopped the roots, he was able to peel them off the fence and then surrender them to the tender attention of the herd of cattle that had gathered around him while he was so involved. Cattle enjoy kudzu.

  It was still light outside, and he was done with his chores. As he tramped back to the house to put up his waders, he saw his sister. She had traded the nicer dresses that their mother, Chastity, made her wear—dresses fit for visiting with company—and was instead wearing a set of what he would almost have called pants, but he didn't know what they were actually called, beneath a light petticoat, beneath a sundress and hat. Matching, of course. Chastity wouldn't allow for anything else. And she had a hatchet in one hand.

  "Where are you going with that?" Dalliance asked.

  She sniffed, falling in line next to him. "I'm old enough to use a hatchet." In point of fact, being ten, their father had decreed that she was old enough to use a hatchet. Their mother had disagreed and said that ladies shouldn't need to use a hatchet. The fact that she herself had helped build some of the fences around the barn was apparently of no matter to Chastity Rather. Do as I say, not as I do might as well be her motto.

  "You're going to The Place," accused Dalliance.

  She scowled at him. "The Place" was what they called it because there weren't any signposts, and saying, "the northwestern part of the fence which goes right up to, but not quite to, the boundary line near Earnest's property," was too long. The Place was spongy, the ground often wet, especially after it rained, and grew invasive saplings and weeds galore, especially the square, hard-stemmed ones. The things most often it would be worth tramping around in the waders for. The coveralls would give him an advantage.

  He tossed the hoe into the barn as he passed. Truthfully, he would try to get it before Da saw it. He snatched the hatchet from Whimsy's hands. "Did you bring the twine?" he asked.

  She glared at him but produced a small bundle of waxed twine. The wax was important. It made sure that if you tied a knot with small, weak little-girl hands, the knot would nevertheless not come undone. Whimsy was rather good at knots.

  As they arrived at The Place, Dalliance began the search for the perfect stick, but she had beaten him to it and simply went and stood in mute entreaty next to the perfect sapling. Sadly, three blows and it came down. Five blows and the top came off, and then he bent it in the middle. It was springy. It would be a perfect bow.

  They had begun making bows possibly two years before, possibly one. Earnest had said that it had been four years, but that was impossible because Whimsy would have been six, and there was no way that she could have been tying booby traps and loading them with arrows at six years old. Was there?

  As she worked the knots at the top of her new bow-stick, he searched for one for himself. A thicker stick looked promising if he trimmed off the bottom a little, and he fell to with a will.

  "I'm sorry," she said. The words came out of the blue. He looked up. "I'm sorry," she repeated herself. "I've been trying to get used to the idea of everything, but I don't want to marry Mister Durance. I hope his wife gets better, and I can just stay here. And when I get the System, I'm going to be an [Archer]."

  "An [Archer], hey? That's a bit rough-and-tumble for you."

  "Women are great archers," she argued,

  "No, I know that," he admitted. "I know two. They're really . . . impressive." He wasn't sure which words his brain had just skipped over without allowing him to consider saying them.

  "I'm going to be just like them," she said fiercely. She stepped through the bow-stave that she had prepared and hooked a loop over the other end, expertly bending it with the back of her knee and her rib cage instead of trying to wrestle with the wood like a novice might. She twanged the string, and it hummed dangerously, like a wasp. She began to pull up weeds. Each square-sectioned twig was the perfect arrow shaft, and at the end of each, a root ball covered in sticky mud—the perfect arrowhead, assuming you didn't want to kill your siblings. When she left traps, that assumption was up in the air. He had found hawthorn-thorn arrows on some of her booby traps before. He'd never been prouder.

  Hurriedly, he went ahead and bent his own bow, which made a higher-pitched sound when he plucked the string. Despite being a larger piece of wood, and a longer string, it was under substantially more tension. Unlike a real bow, stick-bows don't have any sort of notch for the arrow, which means you have to turn them sideways to shoot. He had had no idea what the proper stance was at the archery butts, but this he could do. He plucked up the equivalent of a quiver full of "arrows" in as many seconds and made it behind a large tree before the first clod-arrow exploded next to him.

  "When someone says they're sorry," she told him, "you're supposed to say, 'It's okay'."

  "You're right," he admitted. He snapped off a quick shot, but she was hiding behind a tangle of trees. "How about this?" he said. "I'm sorry that I didn't believe you and told you that you shouldn’t get married to stinky old men."

  A dirt-clod arrow caught him dead center of his chest when he leaned out to make another shot.

  "That's not a real apology," she said. "Even if you were right, it wasn't a real apology."

  He didn't feel like making a real apology. She was going through ammunition fast. Wait a second. He looked at his pile of arrow shafts. "You stole half of my arrows!" he accused.

  She giggled. Her giggle was not from where she had been standing earlier. She was moving. She was going for a side shot. Dalliance didn't know the word 'enfilade,' but he would have recognized the concept if someone had mentioned it to him. When she stepped out from behind the tree, his arrow took her full in the hat, knocking it off and staining the light cloth with red clay.

  "Headshot!" he crowed.

  She grinned savagely, and he saw his mistake. Her arrow caught him in the hip. "You winged me," she explained happily, "but that was a kill shot. So . . . for someone who tiered-up and got the System, you're not really making a strong showing," she told him.

  "Is that so?" he demanded dangerously, and opened the System and enabled [Prediction]. A dozen ghostly Whimsys darted in and out of cover, firing root-ball arrows at him from a dozen different directions.

  The game got a lot more serious after that.