Ferrante surveyed the scene of carnage with inflamed eyes. Yesterday, in a flurry of activity, he squirreled away books and scrolls from the library under Lukrezia's supervision. Now, he sat in a tiny stuffy space and the letters swam across the pages deliberately making no sense. And they frolicked. Yes, frolicked, because they seemed to multiply whenever he looked away.
His backside ached from the stiff bench. His fingers itched from the ink stains. How he splotched himself he didn't know, because may the life-giving light have mercy on his soul, he didn't write a single word! Not on the margins—which Lukrezia had expressly forbidden—nor on the virginal scrolls she had provided, nor anywhere else.
He groaned... how could he sit here and not do anything when Elvira... while Elvira... Black pits of Doom, at this rate she'd have fifteen blond grandchildren with the fifth bloody Prince of Oest by the time he came up with something.
Enough!
He jumped up, upending a thick folio... froze with his arms outstretched, ready to catch a paper avalanche. One stack tilted with an ominous hiss, but kept upright, until he sighed in relief. Then it sloughed in a slow, malicious motion.
Ferrante knelt with another sigh and gathered the white sheets. Codices of something, footnotes, appendices, cursive, lots of cursive...
He reassembled the runaway stack, pressed it down with the folio, then tiptoes out of the room, mindful of not slamming the door on the sniggering books no matter how much he wanted to.
Pulling his cloak tighter around himself, he walked through the blooming chestnut and apple trees to the lawn he came to loathe during his sessions with the medical faculty. The unpleasant memories turned the green space into the pits of doom. Overwhelmed by the flashbacks, he'd nearly missed Lukrezia, despite the blazing outfit.
She sat with the tight knot of students, twenty or so, spread in a semicircle under the whispering boughs. In the middle of an impassioned speech, her arms waving, she didn't look much older than the students, particularly when she interrupted herself in mid-sentence, spotting him. The class went on with the feverish scribbling. He felt a pang of compassion—his own eyes glazed over trying to keep up to Lukrezia yesterday.
"Please, develop a counterargument to my last statement while I confer with Scholar Rastelli," Lukrezia said before scooting over to the chestnut tree he sheltered under.
"Lukrezia, this is not working," Ferrante started urgently, "I know I must argue against the Guild's contract in front of the commissioners—"
"First, you must prove that the contract has a direct and immediate impact on you—"
Ferrante groaned. "Precisely, and my mind is numb. I am a knight, not a lawyer! I can't remember three sentences. Oh, whom am I kidding! Two sentences!"
Lukrzeia smiled thinly. "Didn't you say that, quote on quote, 'Degrees and instructions are of no consequence in the matters of heart'?"
Ferrante dropped his face into his palms. "I can't eat, I can't drink... All I can do is shape-shift on command, and it is destroying me. One word out of my mouth—and the commissioners would chase me out of Rotdaam as a pretender. Lukrezia, please! You need to help me."
Lukrezia puffed out her cheeks in exasperation. "Ferrante, we've been through this. If I speak on your behalf, it will come across as sour grapes from an acrimonious woman and a former employee. You'll lose. I outlined the possible strategy for you and indexed everything—"
He tuned out the long, meaningless words pouring out of her mouth. The fresh leaves rustled, the bunches of pink and white flowers swayed over his head. It didn't seem right for the day to be so nice when he was so overwhelmed. Desperately, he pleaded again, "Maybe you know someone else—"
"Nobody will risk their reputation by going against Sonorous' family and the Guild."
Ferrante slumped on the grass, his eyes closing on their own, his arms too heavy to lift on his knees. The icy dread spread from his stomach to his chest, hurting his tired heart. "Then I lost my Elvira. She'll marry Sigvart and light only knows what kind of man he is."
She ignored his words the same way he ignored hers earlier. "But there might be a way."
He straightened up. "Yes?"
A strange lilac shadow formed on her jowls—Ferrante belatedly realized that it went with embarrassment. "You'll have to teach my class for the afternoon."
"Teach?" he squealed.
"Ahem... occupy their time? I need to... ah..."
"Confer with someone?" Ferrante supplied. Lukrezia at a loss for words was a novel experience.
"I need to see my family," she said curtly.
He thought she'd leave, but she scrunched her face. "I was a veritable blister. They were so proud of me for graduating and getting the Guild's job... and I shunned them because it didn't help my career. Now there are amends to be made."
How could a seamstress help, Ferrante wondered, but didn't ask. Maybe it was her father or someone else in her clan. They didn't have the time, and Lukrezia already looked downcast. Doubting her words would only make things worse.
"Fine," he said.
She separated from the tree, ready to leave.
"Wait. What do I do with your class?"
Lukrezia waved her hand in the air. "Improvise."
"Improvise?"
But she was already in the circle's middle, pointing at him, referring to him as Scholar Ferrante. He wished, she didn't extoll the virtues of learning other cultures' wisdom. He squirmed and smiled, hoping that the gnomes were like him in his youth, happy to take an afternoon off whenever Messer Boprait succumbed to the evils of alcohol.
Then Lukrezia glanced at the sun, frowned and dashed off, leaving Ferrante face to face with twenty pairs of inquisitive eyes.
After clearing his throat, he had a stroke of inspiration.
"Could one of you present the counterargument to the argument that Professor Pomponus gave you?"
As the hush fell on the students, he picked a youth with vivid green eyes in an orange face. "Perhaps you, ah... Student...?"
"Student Hyperion," his victim supplied. "You see, Professor Pomponus was expounding on the necessity of examining emotions, and speculated about their rationality. However, she didn't constrain if it was cognitive rationality or strategic rationality."
And then all the gazes turned back on him. He wondered if he could just shape-shift into a dragon, but the idea made him nauseous. "Yes, yes, good old cognitive versus, ahem... not that."
He looked to the sky where the sun didn't make any significant progress except making sweat trickle down his back. The lovely day still had a long way to go until the afternoon. The cloudless blue and the smell of freshly cut grass had so much energy to it... Wait!
"When in doubt—in human lands, that is—we challenge ourselves with a physical task. Then the mind copes with the intellectual one easier. So, let's run—"
The expressions on the students' faces made him think on his feet.
"Ah, perhaps not run. Let's walk a circle around this field, pondering Professor Pomponous' assignment. If someone has an answer by the time we are back at this tree, great!"
"And if not?" a girl sitting next to Hyperion asked suspiciously.
Ferrante grinned a slow toothy grin.
The students issued a collective groan, but pushed to their feet. This was a familiar ground to him, no different from breaking in the raw recruits of the Order, too often coming with notions that they would charge goblins with sharp swords on day one.
At first, Ferrante led by example, but when he glanced back, the students' line stretched out behind him into something ridiculous. He jogged back, encouraging the stragglers. "Left, then right! Emotions on! Rationality is the key! Left! Left! Right!"
Once everyone gathered under the tree again, Ferrante happily asked, "Well? Hyperion? You have a theory?"
He had to wait for the student to stop rasping... good thing they started slow, two weeks minimum before he can get them running.
What are you thinking? You're not staying this long... hopefully.
"Despite the different standards of rationality, the emotions may fail," Hyperion said.
Ferrante nodded along with the students. May the pits of doom swallow him, if he understood a thing, but it sounded deep. Like something he should say in the courtroom and let the commissioners interpret it however they wish.
However, right now, he faced another challenge: what to do next with his intellectual cohorts. The Hyperion's old neighbor solved that problem for him.
"Scholar Ferrante? I heard that you came here to defend an emotional case against the Guild's rational contract. I mean..." she lifted rounded eyes at him. "That is, you came to defend romantic love."
"That's true," he said. "Here is the essence of my case..."
He started with the day when a certain knight errant with long braids fell upon the trail of a necromancer. How at first, he found the girl to be too bright-eyed, too stubborn, too haughty, and even her freckles bothered him. They were distracting; he explained to his students, particularly the ones running down the sides of her nose.
Then, he said, right when she was digging him out of that shallow grave with the dam about to break, and her lips folded in a tight line, he had an epiphany. He'd miss her, he knew. So, once they had rooted out the Necromancer from his layer, a fortunate 'happenstance' brought them together again. Even then he fought against his growing feelings because he had a monster within him, but he was weak and helped those fortunate happenstances to occur repeatedly.
The students listened, some of them bored and scanning the clouds or leafing through their notes, others caught chins into the palms of their hands, frowned and chewed their lips.
He came to the last battle only a few days ago and the lighting bolts.
"So tell me," he asked his audience, "tell me why a just contract should force Elvira to wed and bed Sigvart, in order to reunite with me?"
"Well," the girl with the dreamy eyes said, "the clauses state that the marriage is to Sigvart, not you or any other suitable candidate of her choosing."
"Let's walk another circle and maybe one of you could point out any flaw in her argument."
Ferrante looked at the sky—the sun moved quite a bit! He was winning.
After the march, Hyperion rubbed his ankle and said, "Scholar, I think one might argue that the practical purpose of the contract, its spirit versus its letter, was to secure the dynastic marriage and succession in Gallicia. Elvira is no longer a princess. Ergo, the contract's purpose had changed if not fulfilled, hence there is ground for amending it. Not dissolving it, just... refining. It wouldn't put the Guild on the spot so much."
Hyperion shrugged, looking at his groaning classmates. "What? Do you have anything better?"
They didn't.
"Class dismissed," Ferrante commanded. "Wear more comfortable shoes tomorrow, without the heels and buckles."
He didn't think Lukrezia would set him to teaching again, but some of their footwear looked like torture devices. He was a paladin, sworn to help the innocents wherever he could.
And then he broke into a run, with their whispers trailing after him.
He has a complex problem to run this fast... it's a human thing, you know. Aha.
***
Lukrezia knocked on his door just after he had cleared his narrow cot and snuggled between the paper mountains. He sighed, made himself decent and let her in.
Her eyes shone with unspoiled tears and fervour. "Here," she said, fishing a golden stud out of her pocket. "This is for you, courtesy of my mother the dressmaker, and my uncle, an unlicensed arcaneist."
"What is it?" He scooped the earring gingerly—it seemed like a plain golden pin, but knowing the gnomes, it could be rigged to explode. "And what's an unlicensed arcaneist?"
"A self-taught practitioner of the arcane arts, looked down upon as a charlatan by the educated elite." Lukrezia sighed and went on. "They are all so proud of me. Even more so now that I'm teaching at the University. Why was I so blind? Why was I ashamed for so long and for the sake of whom? Tybalt and his ilk? Bah."
Ferrante figured that she had better answers to these questions than he might have offered. He had more than a fair share of embarrassing relatives and with Arman... with Arman it could end in the worst way imaginable. Arman has the makings of what Elvira called a marauding dragon... so he had a moral responsibility as a paladin to, perhaps... but one family tragedy at a time.
So he shrugged away the gloomy premonitions and stared at the pin. "Why did you need your mother to help us?"
Lukrezia pointed at a scarf embroidered with beads that wrapped around her throat. "She found something that fit my style to put the matching pin on."
Ferrante's eyes bulged. Style? What style? But, in all fairness, there was no way anyone could spot the pin on Lukrezia's clothes. He looked for it, and he couldn't see it in the clash of colors and decorative elements.
"The pin would let you hear my voice from a distance. Then you can just repeat everything I say to the Commissioners. A genius invention brought to you by the Pomponous family! Do you want to test it?"
Ferrante took out the small loop earring with a green garnet and put Lukrezia's family pin in.
"Can you hear me, Ferrante?" Lukrezia's voice boomed in his ear. At the same time, he could hear her whispering it a few paces away from him.
He winced. "It works a little too well."
"We'll fine-tune the arcane spell," Lukrezia boomed again, making him rip the stud out of his ear.
"That won't be necessary if I go deaf," Ferrante muttered, but Lukrezia didn't listen, shuffling and stacking the papers. Then the pen dipped into the ink, and notes came flying. She hummed as she worked.
Finally, his looming figure got her attention. "Oh, I think it would be more efficient if I worked on campus. My house is too far away and using the public portals is exhausting."
You asked for it, Ferrante thought. "Be my guest."
And then he crawled into his bedroll without undressing. It wasn't the first time he slept in his clothes, but normally it was with a sword to hand, not listening to a riled gnome mutter a few paces away, "And let's see how you'd like that, Tybalt..." and "If you say this, I am going to make you choke on it, Tybalt..." and the like legalese-based attacks.
Just before he drifted off, a worry crawled through his head like a centipede. You are forgetting something, you are forgetting something... something important.
He sat bolt upright on his cot. "Lukrezia? One of your students suggested that since Elvira is no longer a princess, the contract holds no practical value to continue the dynasty. Ergo, the amendment is justified."
Eh, did he get it right? He tried blinking the sleep away, but it didn't help. Probably he got it right. It made sense to him, at least at the time.
"Hmm," Lukrezia said. "Hmm, we'll see."