“So, my father let my mother take charge of my education,” Mariella began as they stepped into the cave. “Even though I got my class through her bloodline, she was never a fighter. She wanted to make a proper, sweet young lady out of me.”

  “That’s why you’re so against swearing,” Tybalt observed. “‘Language!’” He smirked as he imitated her tone.

  “Yes, it is,” Mariella said, shooting him a look but smiling as she did. “So, anyway, there wasn’t much in the way of training growing up. Mom taught me the basics of fire magic, but just the very basic stuff. I never used it for anything. Even starting fires in the fireplace. Because we had servants for that. You might say I was a bit sheltered.”

  She definitely won’t be too high level, then. Unless she’s reversed course completely since she started officer training. He was still analyzing for weaknesses, even as he tried to win her over.

  “You had a class, and you didn’t use it?” Tybalt asked, shaking his head with slight exasperation.

  “It’s funny, but my mother pointed out the reason why when I started talking about joining the Army. Even though noblemen want to marry women from powerful bloodlines, most of them don’t particularly like women who actually fight. It’s not the model of a proper, delicate, well-mannered lady who can be an asset to her husband at court. Her plan was for me to be married off around the time I was eighteen, so there was no point in spending time on something that would only be a liability. My latent power was a good enough draw for the husband I was supposed to attract. I didn’t think much of it. That was just the way things were.”

  “What changed?” Tybalt asked.

  Mariella’s expression grew subtly wistful. “I used to hang around my father all the time when I was small. But I noticed that as I grew older, he would spend less and less time with me. At first, I thought it was because Mom and his first wife were popping out more kids, the sons he’d always wanted. I tried to be happy for them. Dad finally had male heirs. I know enough to know that’s important. One day, though, Dad swore in front of me, and when he realized I was there, he practically tripped over himself apologizing. I told him it was all right, he kept trying to explain why he said whatever he said, and he finally let slip that he didn’t know how to relate to me anymore.

  “The proper young lady I’d started to become was an alien creature to him. Related to that, I should tell you that Mom, unlike wife number one, was a political match, after he became nobility. Not that Dad didn’t choose her, but the situation was different. I started spending a little more time with Lena, his first wife, after that. I realized that my father spent noticeably more time with her, too. He could relate to her, because she was his subordinate when he was coming up through the ranks. They had a similar background. Dad and I started to get closer again.”

  I wonder how your mother felt about all that.

  “That’s really interesting,” Tybalt said. “So your father became nobility, and he married someone he used to serve with?”

  Mariella nodded and turned slightly pink. The parallels to their situation were obvious and did not need to be spoken aloud to feel significant. “Yeah. That’s what happened.”

  “How did he rise to noble rank?” Tybalt asked.

  “He got promoted within the Army,” Mariella replied vaguely, shrugging. “Maybe I’ll tell you more about it later.”

  Getting promoted to the level that you’re ennobled? Tybalt thought. That must happen to something like one in fifty thousand soldiers. One in a hundred thousand? Probably less. There should be a decent chance I’ve heard of this guy. But I don’t remember a General Sperry… Colonel Sperry? No…

  “So, that was why you joined the Army?” Tybalt asked.

  Mariella began nodding, but then he continued, with a smirk, “To win Daddy’s approval?”

  “Screw you!” She said it indignantly, but she was smiling. They both laughed even as they continued bantering back and forth.

  “How lady-like.”

  “You’re a bad influence!”

  “Am I wrong, though?” Tybalt asked after their mirth had subsided. “Not judging, but…”

  “It was more along the lines of, I wanted to be more like Lena, the wife my Dad actually admired, rather than the wife he took for alliance reasons. I love Mom, and I think Dad does, too, and she doesn’t feel inferior or neglected, I don’t think. But… I guess a man like him doesn’t really care as much for ornamental, useless women. Or he has a harder time connecting with her. Maybe he thinks that if he says the wrong thing to her, she’d regret marrying him and stop being an asset. So he’s careful about the time he spends with her, which leads to spending less time together. There are relationships like that. The more I thought about my mother’s situation, the more I didn’t want to be like that… So, no betrothal at seventeen or eighteen. Officer training instead. Two years of that, and then… I’m here. I’ll admit, there is something to what you said. I admire my Dad a lot. Being worthy of his approval would mean something. If I could bring honor to the family, I know he’d appreciate that more than anything.”

  “Plus, the Army is a good place to find a husband.”

  The pink in Mariella’s cheeks turned a deeper red. “I swear, I never once thought of it that way! I think you’re the one who’s starting to lose respect for me, instead of the other way around like you were worried about. After I listened to the whole story of your childhood and took your side completely…”

  “I’m not even knocking it. You know it worked for your father and stepmother, so why not you?”

  “I wasn’t trying to find a husband! I could have had a husband whenever I wanted. Weren’t you listening? Joining the Army is something I did for me. To feel that I was contributing to our family’s legacy in the Kingdom. Not for anything like that.”

  “I’m just teasing you,” Tybalt said, grinning and raising his hands defensively. “I respect you, all right?”

  “You’d better. Remember, everything you’re wearing is pretty flammable.”

  “You really love to get me out of my clothes.”

  They shared another laugh, and Tybalt pulled Mariella in a little closer. They were holding hands again even though they were in the slightly tighter confines of the cave, where moving in single file might have made more sense. Despite the pressure of their situation, the atmosphere between them had become very comfortable, and more casual than it had ever been before.

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  She turned to look at him. He darted forward and gave her a chaste kiss on the lips. He followed that with a wink, and she shook her head but looked pleased.

  “I keep thinking I should say something about how we shouldn’t go past holding hands… but the kissing is nice,” she said.

  “It doesn’t hurt anything, so why stop?” Tybalt replied.

  Even hand-holding is probably inappropriate by your standards, right? Proper noble girl.

  Mariella squeezed his hand and said nothing, didn’t even meet his eyes. But he thought she looked happy.

  “There’s no way that earlier was your first kiss, right?” Tybalt said. The only reason he asked was because she seemed almost surprised by how much she liked it. She had seemed noticeably inexperienced, looking back, though she more than made up for it with enthusiasm.

  “Pretty close to it. Remember, I had the proper young lady upbringing… I was under heavy guard during the years when your body is out of control, when you’re likely to make mistakes with lifelong consequences.”

  “But you’re not under guard now,” Tybalt said, rubbing tiny circles over the back of her hand with his thumb. That might have been going a little too far, but it was one of the more intimate gestures he could perform that was technically innocent while being undeniably sensual.

  “No, no I’m not.” She pulled her hand away from his and took a deep breath. “We should really start on the training.”

  “I have so many dirty jokes I want to make about that.”

  They were deep enough into the cave at that point that they seemed unlikely to be spotted by beastfolk casually walking by the entrance, but near enough to the entrance that the light still illuminated their respective facial expressions.

  Mariella smiled thinly and said, “We don’t have much time, so I’m going to move quickly and probably be a little rough with you. Sorry in advance.”

  “That’s almost exactly like one of the jokes I was thinking of.”

  She sighed and shook her head. She was still smiling despite herself, but Tybalt sensed he might be laying it on a little too thick.

  “All right, what’s the first lesson?” Tybalt asked.

  “What’s the nature of your class?” Mariella replied.

  Answering a question with another question. It’s like she’s a professional tutor. That method of instruction was straight out of Tutor Balthus’s playbook.

  “I don’t know it that deeply,” Tybalt lied. “A god gave it to me, but it didn’t come with a guidebook or something. I think it’s most useful for healing, with secondary applications for making tools and fighting.”

  He still needed to come up with a good way to bring up the specific god who had given him the class. Mentioning Lord Mudo was the first step to getting Mariella to understand Tybalt and Mudo’s mission, which would hopefully be part of how he converted her to following in his path and betraying the Kingdom.

  Church and state were mingled in Niet and throughout most of the continent. Kings were thought to have some degree of divine favor. If Mariella could be persuaded that one end of the church-and-state combination was incomplete or even evil, the odds were higher she could be pushed to reject both.

  Only by converting her into the service of Lord Mudo could Tybalt complete his first quest from Lord Mudo’s angel without killing Mariella.

  “Wrong,” she said firmly.

  “Really?” he said.

  “There’s no way your class is mainly for healing. You’d just be an inferior version of a common healer, only able to work with bones… The gods don’t create rare variant classes just so they can have something that does the same thing as a more common class type. Your class is clearly meant to make you a deadly close combat mage.”

  Tybalt raised an eyebrow. She spoke with such confidence. Her whole demeanor had changed from the light, slightly flirty Mariella of a few minutes previous, back to the serious military lady. Of course, she was wrong about his class being specialized toward close combat, but that was because he had deliberately given her wrong information.

  “I can tell you don’t believe me,” she said, reading his expression accurately. “I was going to try and explain mage combat to you verbally, but now I’m reconsidering that method. I think it might work for you if you think about how your power works for a couple of minutes and imagine how you could apply that energy in a fight. I’m going to rest while you do that. After that, we’re going to spar. We’ll try that for an hour, and if you don’t start to figure it out, I’ll give you some more specific hints.”

  He tried not to look intimidated but wasn’t sure if he succeeded. He felt fairly certain he was about to get his ass kicked. Probably for a full hour. Maybe this was payback for his teasing.

  Mariella stepped away from him, put her back against the cave wall, and sat down, crossing her legs. She closed her eyes, and her body began to lightly glow a gentle orange hue. Tybalt recognized the coloration of Mariella’s mana—consistently shades of red, orange, and yellow, the typical look of fire mana.

  He could tell, as he watched it begin to circulate, that she was meditating.

  Focus on your own mana, Tybalt reminded himself. Mariella just set you a challenge. She’s going to expect you to fight like a close combat mage in a couple of minutes. How exactly does your power lend itself to that?

  He tried to remember the way he had felt when he used Scrimshaw. It was the only skill Mariella had seen him use, and of course, he wasn’t interested in revealing that he could create undead or spread disease right then. So he would have to try something related to Scrimshaw.

  Wait, what about the last time I was in a fight?

  When they’d had their skirmish with the beastfolk, Tybalt had thought quickly and used his fingerbone blades as throwing knives. In addition to throwing them, almost without thinking about it, he had imbued them with mana to enhance their penetration power. It was the sort of thing he might have done before he had a class, only now that he was a mage, his mana flowed through his body more quickly, making it easier to use in combat.

  But defiant necromancer and pestilence mage mana are about destruction, decay, entropy, undoing things, not enhancing them. Did I just instantly convert an inherently destructive type of mana into neutral mana when I went to enhance the bones? Without thinking about it at all?

  That didn’t sound right. He wasn’t certain if he had bothered consciously converting his natural, corrosive mana into neutral mana even a single time since he accepted his classes. Probably not. It was the sort of thing that ought to theoretically be difficult to do without being aware of it, according to Unholy Forces.

  Neutral mana typically enhanced whatever it was applied to. Tybalt’s mana was almost the polar opposite. It would naturally tend to corrode things.

  Wait, that’s not quite right either, is it? When I bring things to unlife, they’re not corroded by that; they’re enhanced. In some cases,it completely stops the process of decay. When I use Scrimshaw on a bone, I’m not degrading the bone; I’m reshaping it. The mana can corrode my body if I don’t exercise proper control, but maybe destruction isn’t the main thing it does…

  “Are you ready?”

  He blinked and realized Mariella had risen to her feet. She stood across from him, her body poised in a combat stance. He swallowed.

  No, Tybalt thought. I need more time. I’m just starting to wonder how complex my power really is, whether it actually works the way I’ve been thinking. I hardly know how to use Scrimshaw on bones as it is. I don’t know how I’m going to apply this skill to an actual fight. Plus, I have to only channel mana in the specific way I use it for Scrimshaw. I have no idea what would happen if I just let my mana do whatever it wants in a fight. Scrimshaw feels very different from Generate Undead…

  There would be myriad challenges to sparring with Mariella while keeping his secret from her and hopefully not looking weak.

  But Tybalt nodded and took a deep breath. Sometimes the best way to learn was to be thrown into a challenging situation. At least Mariella didn’t want to hurt him. Probably.

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