Well that's a very bold thing to think of yourself before you've seen the competition, isn't it.

Korva actually is one of the kids who holds the whip sometimes, although not the one who holds it the most often. She almost always gets it after essay tests, which is really pretty necessary for cementing herself as someone who isn't just a total waste of space, because her scores have been slipping everywhere else, lately, sometimes far enough to be in the danger zone herself. Especially in math. Fuck math. 

She's not so far gone as to not take some interest in a transfer student from that far away, but she's also not going to just try to talk to him. What would she even say. 

Well, Julien expects it to be about the same as his old school, which let's be honest, wasn't exactly a brain trust. He doesn't particularly expect anyone to talk to him. He takes the closest available free seat and in lieu of further instruction starts copying down whatever's on the blackboard. History, it looks like. That's fine; it's not like they've changed the textbooks lately. 

Korva will be mildly surprised if the new kid just avoids get whipped in the first week, given the time he must have taken off from school to move here. High-caliber Chelish schools have several assessments a week, across different subjects, so he should have plenty of opportunity to see where he's now behind.

There's no history assessment today, just lecture. They have Infernal practice, which is always terrible, because the teacher will call out questions in Infernal to random students, and if you don't answer quickly and correctly with little enough accent (in Infernal, of course), then another student will give you a swat with a stick across the hands, but that happens so often and to so many people that it hardly means anything, in the grand scheme of things; it's not like what happens at the end of the day. She gets hit three times today, but for being slow, not for being wrong, which she personally thinks is a better state to be in. Magical theory is a lecture. Lunch is fifteen minutes to scarf down a meal or use the toilet.

The real assessment today is in composition, a timed essay on what strategies students can employ in their free time to better aid their studies, which presumably means the newcomer will pass it, if he's not just stupid. Korva doesn't see how you could meaningfully get very behind on general composition just because you took a week or a month off school, if you were doing well to begin with.

And then at the end - the order changes depending on which topics they've had assessments in most recently - they have math. Yesterday they had a geometry assessment, which Korva passed by the skin of her teeth, rising out of the danger zone a while longer. They go over their papers as a class, watching the strongest students rework a few of the problems that the largest numbers of students got wrong.

And then it's time for the beating, which happens almost every day, unless something crowded out the previous day's assessment. The way that beatings work is this: the unluckiest child, the one who did worst on the last assessment, strips naked in front of the rest of the class, and bends over a block (tied or held down, if you can't or won't hold the position yourself). The luckiest, the one who did best, gets the whip, or, at the teacher's discretion, access to a whole slate of different tools, none of them real weapons but all of them quite painful. You don't go for genitals, faces, or hands - they are trying to raise new generations of wizards, after all - but anything else is fair game. Afterwards, they wash the wounds with saltwater - they're not worth spending healing on, not at this stage in their lives, but salt keeps wounds from getting infected, and - probably not incidentally - it hurts like Hell.

Well. Like some tiny fraction of it, anyway.

The child who was unluckiest this time around is a boy. With his clothes off he looks kind of fat. Korva has also already written him off as stupid, so she's not sure it matters much, to see him whipped again. He hasn't been dropped from the class yet, though, so she supposes they have to go through this until he is, at which point one more wall of meat between her and the whip will have been knocked down. The child who was luckiest is a tall, mean boy with blond hair, almost Ulfen-looking, but an undeniably Chelish attitude about things.

There's sobbing today. They don't always sob - even Chelish children are not consistently so weak, not by this age - but this particular boy always does, and it's not an easy whipping, even by Chelish standards, so it isn't exactly surprising. Korva watches it with an expression of calculated boredom, but does glance over at the newcomer at one point, to see if she can guess whether this is better or worse than they get in eastern schools.

About the same, but they use fresh water to clean the wounds. Isarn isn't coastal, and salt isn't cheap. 

The new boy doesn't say much. Galtan children are instructed to switch each other for speaking Taldane in even a hint of their native dialect, instead of the Egorian standard. He's not sure if the other students here have instructions to hit him every other time he opens his mouth, and he doesn't especially want to find out. 

Composition's fine, of course. Infernal's fine. He's a bit worried about math – his old school hadn't covered this – but the other students seem just as confused about everything as the ones back home, so he'll probably be able to catch up soon enough. He's not stupid enough to ask if he can review someone's old notes. If he can't figure it out on his own, he doesn't have much business here, does he? 

He wishes the kid at the front would stop wailing like that. He's trying to hold a model of a cantrip in his head – it's about all he does, when he has any time to think at all – and it's making it awfully hard to concentrate. 

The easterners probably aren't totally pathetic, then. Maybe he'll do fine. It'd be cool if the other kids got him talking enough for her to hear anything about what, if anything, is different on the other side of the empire, but she's not counting on it. 

That's the end of class today, then. She packs her stuff up, she goes home, she eats dinner. She does about four hours of homework. The first three hours, her father watches her, which mostly means slapping her - or sometimes just yelling at her - whenever he notices her staring at something other than her books. The last hour, her mother finally comes home, and settles in to sit beside her, watching her like a hawk. Her mother her nails into Korva's shoulder whenever Korva stops writing, or stops talking in Infernal, when they're doing that. 

It took Korva a long time to realize, after she was old enough to go to school and have homework, that her parents still loved her. Now, at fourteen, she's old enough to understand. You don't put this much effort into someone you don't care about. Her mother would rather be doing a dozen other things, when she comes home this late at night, than force her to do her homework. Her father finds it such a chore to hit her that he sometimes doesn't bother. And yet, even so, they try to push her as far as she can go, no matter what the cost to themselves. They'll never acknowledge it to each other - none of the three of them, as long as any of them live, and never again after they're finished living, either - but Korva knows how to read the bruising and the scratches now. They say, my child, my second and my final child, I love you, I love you, I love to help you grow more than anything else that I could spend my precious hours doing. So grow, my child, and make something of yourself, something better than a lead worker or a counting-house clerk.

Eventually she prays, and goes to bed, and wakes up early enough to go to school and do the whole thing over again.

When Julien gets home, his parents are still out. That's normal. Papa's at the warehouse until almost midnight sometimes, and mama not much earlier. Privately, he thinks they don't need to work half so much. They do good business. They have their own house with eight rooms and a bit of garden, new clothes twice a year, and a new torch with permanent Light so he can study late at night – and the money ran out quickly enough the last time they had a famine in Isarn. (Fine. He knows the real reason they moved to Ostenso. Everyone knows that outside the provinces, it's only the peasants who starve). 

Geneviève and Claude are already looking over their notes, which is good, it means he doesn't have to give them another lecture. He quizzes them each on Infernal grammar and the theology for an hour and only slaps them when they're really egregiously wrong. If they're going to be wizards like him, and make something of themselves, and become strong enough to get out and never come back; they'll need to learn discipline sooner rather than later. Jean-Louis still attends the Temple school, and little Madeleine is almost old enough to start. He sometimes has sudden, violent fantasies of smothering her with a pillow – surely a child of three is too young to be judged Evil.   Right now, they're in the kitchen, harassing the maid, and he doesn't have the energy of the inclination to stop them. 

Julien's a self-motivated kid. At eight, he takes the torch upstairs and starts his own homework. He's made sure to keep up with his lessons and convinced his parents to engage a tutor for their last month in Isarn, so he shouldn't be too far behind in anything except possibly geometry, which it looks like they might teach in a different order. He'll have to do something about that. At least the work's not difficult. 

At ten, he hears his parents come in. Papa asks him if he'll come down for dinner – they do like to eat dinner as a family, when they can – and he says he's busy, and it's even true. The deeper truth is that he's having a hard time looking his parents in the eyes these days. They're decent, and they're doing their best to provide for him. They don't deserve his contempt. He just can't help it. What kind of person knows that Hell exists, knows they will be sent there, and still decides to have children?

At least today there's no risk of Korva ending up the kid on the block, at the end of the day. Not that winning is terribly much fun, either, but it's much, much better than losing.

Today's assessment is in history, which at least isn't physically dangerous (for her, anyway). And there's an announcement that they're going to be practicing their acid splash cantrips on live subjects in two weeks, so if they haven't got acid splash working yet, they'd better get it working soon. Korva doesn't have it working consistently yet, but she can probably get it working in two weeks, if the general lack of anything that isn't school or homework doesn't finish her off first. 

Fuck. Julien's usually quite good with cantrips – he can cast detect magic and dancing lights and prestidigitation and mending, and he's sure he'll get message any day now – but he just can't hang acid splash. No. Wrong way to think about it. He has not spent enough time practicing acid splash; two weeks from now he will have. 

Today, he wants to try and get a read on the other students – who's good at what, who's about to fail, who has important parents, which are the teacher's pets, and for that matter which teachers use a whip like professionals and which ones seem to really enjoy it. Hopefully, after he's finished his lessons in politics, backstabbing, and abuses of power, he'll have some time to actually learn magic. 

There are a handful of people who seem to be good at almost everything, and a handful who seem to be barely hanging on, and a lot of people in the middle (and most of the class is clearly behind Julien). There are, of course, still differing strengths within the top handful. The kid who held the whip yesterday is one of the sharpest at math, but only pretty good at infernal. There's another girl who's nearly that fast at math and speaks Infernal that sounds, to human ears, almost without accent.  Behind them are a couple other students who answer a fair number of questions, but it's harder to tell which people are the very best at history or composition or magical theory until you've seen their test scores. 

If you look at Korva during any class except math and Infernal, she's clearly one of the top students, volunteering answers quickly and invariably getting them right; in Infernal she comes off as middling, mostly by being slow, and in math she's leaking traces of genuine distress as she takes notes. She doesn't answer any math questions.

She's also, at the end of the day, the person who holds the whip, having written the best essay the day before. Nobody in the class appears surprised by this. In contrast to yesterday's punishment, Korva is quick and businesslike; she doesn't respond to shouted requests from the rest of the class (and there are some of those), but gives no indication of particular squeamishness, either. Her victim isn't sobbing, but he's not going to have a fun time wearing clothes again tomorrow, either. 

....There's an idea. 

Students caught cheating are typically punished by breaking their non-dominant hand. Caught, of course, being the operative word, since for obvious reasons Chelish students cheat constantly and with great enthusiasm. The possibility of one day losing the use of one's hand – not even the important one, at that – just pales in comparison to the probability of being beaten tomorrow. Besides, being punished for cheating is less humiliating than being punished for weakness or incompetence. 

Julien doesn't cheat. He's never needed to, and even if he did he'd like to keep the use of all his limbs thanks-very-much. On the other hand (hah), helping isn't exactly cheating, is it? And it's not like he's having an off week – if he doesn't catch up now, he's at risk of falling behind for the rest of the year. 

When they're dismissed, he follows Tallandria instead of going directly home. A block away from school, he falls into step with her, and tries his best carrying whisper. 

"I need your mathematics notes for the year so far, just for one night, so I can copy them. In exchange, I'll make sure you don't fail an assessment for the next three weeks. Deal?" 

Oh gods someone is talking to h- oh it's the new kid. Is the new kid a creep. Can she beat off a creep yet. She doesn't even have her acid splash working yet. Hasn't had his growth spurt yet, though, this kid, so she could probably still bite him and run off if he tries anyth- no, she'd just see him at school again, she'd have to bite him and then figure out how to actually defeat him, which is just going to look sad, two wizard apprentices scuffling ineffectually in the street like gutter rats, or something.

He might also not be a creep. He doesn't seem unbearably stupid, or anything, but she supposes it would genuinely be hard, missing maybe several weeks of mathematics and trying to catch up after. 

Korva isn't unbearably stupid either, though, and she has her pride. Not much of it, maybe, but some.

"What makes you think I need it," she says, almost calmly enough to sound actually calm.

She doesn't need him to tell her it's the only class where she doesn't answer questions. 

"I can always get them somewhere else." Not trivially, though, and they both know it. 

Her eyes narrow.

"It's a pretty vague offer you've got, there, anyway. Does it have any actual moving parts, or have you just mistakenly identified me as someone who won't bite your head off if it turns out you're just a lot of hot air."

"I'm good at math, my old school just covered things in a different order. I can show you old assessments if you don't believe me; I've kept them. I'm even good at explaining it, which is more than I can say for Bauza." (Bauza's their mathematics instructor, a worldwound washout with a twitchy eye and – it's obvious even after two days –  deep sense of resentment that his students might one day be more successful than him). "You don't want to fall further behind, do you? I can help." 

"If you're offering homework help you can just say that you're offering homework help, and not phrase it like you think you have some foolproof plan to beat the scoring system."

"If I offered you homework help you'd justifiably assume I don't intend to deliver results." 

It's kind of dumb to make your end of a bargain depend on someone else? But that doesn't seem like the best direction to take this conversation in.

"I'm more concerned about how I'm supposed to be sure that I even get my notes back. It'd be pretty inconvenient to have to round up a bunch of other people to beat you up for them."

Julien thinks it's kind of dumb to accept a bargain with someone who has no stake in producing a real outcome, but what does he know. 

"I can copy them while you watch, if you like, but you probably have better things to do with your time. Is there something you'd accept as collateral?" 

"Sure, if you have anything obviously valuable. Your spellbook'd do it."

"...That's obviously more valuable than the notes." 

"Well, yeah, but it's not like I can do anything interesting with it. So if you give the notes back I've got no reason to keep it, right? If you have any better ideas I'll consider them, but it's hard to say what else you care about."

"Spell notations aren't that hard to decipher."

"What, you have a secret cantrip?"

"....It seems unlikely that we have the same cantrips." The game – in everything, but especially magic – is to stay as far ahead as you possibly can. Everyone knows they don't really give you enough time to master your spells in class. 

"I could trade spells, if that's more valuable to you. Or you could just take my ink." 

He could have more ink, but it costs money - and he could also, after all, just ask someone else for their notes. "Sure, if you have a reasonable amount of it to hold onto. Maybe we can trade spells after, if you actually hold up your end of the bargain."

"We'll see. Here's the ink, I'll know if you use it, I can hand the notes back after school tomorrow."

"You better," she says, and gets her notes out.

She's not actually sure that ink is sufficiently irreplaceable to work as collateral, now that she thinks of it, but she'll look like such an idiot if she backs out in the middle of getting her notes out. It's probably fine. Not because she thinks she can trust him, but because he hasn't had the chance to make any friends yet, and so if one of them needs to gather a posse to break the other's kneecaps, she's going to have the advantage there, and he's not stupid enough not to know it.

Well, Julian really didn't expect that to work. It'd hurt to lose the ink, but it'd hurt Tallandria worse to lose her notes; he doesn't think she'll try anything. As for the other part of the bargain – well, if she's willing to accept help from him, she must be really desperate. 

Once he's got the notes, he runs all the way home. He has one night and he doesn't expect to get much sleep. 

Korva feels... worse... about her decisions, by the time she gets home. Her mother would hit her for them, if she found out, and not the normal almost friendly kind of hitting that she does all the time. 

The problem, she's pieced together, by the time she gets home, is that she doesn't know anything about Julien's parents. Maybe they're like hers, barely able to scrape together enough for any extra ink at all, and all too willing to beat her if she messes up in a way that wastes it. Or maybe they're incredibly rich and will just buy him more. The ink costs money, not effort, and when you're a kid these are not the same thing at all. 

So... she just has to hope that it works out. And that if it doesn't, that she can get together some kids to break his kneecaps. Or... whatever part of other kids you're supposed to break, for this offense. They might refuse to help her if they think she's been an idiot? She can just tell them that he stole her notes, though, and then they'll be more likely to unite against a guy who's acting crazy and needs to be cut down a peg and taught how things work here. They'll be more willing to believe her than him; she's not crazy, and they can't know that he isn't.



Hopefully it doesn't come to that. She really doesn't want to deal with all of that.

Julien has the notes all copied by the next morning. It took longer than he'd hoped. Jean-Louis is going through one of those phases where he needs something every five godsdamn minutes, and hitting him doesn't even help since then he just cries, even though he's more than old enough to know better. Julien never made such trouble when he was six. 

He's going to be exhausted in school the next day, and there's an assessment, but it's fine, he'll be fine, he just has to not be the worst, he can manage that. As long as he can keep his eyes open. 

Korva has a mildly miserable night worrying about this, but her parents are none the wiser in the morning. She stops him before classes start; she can't remember whether they agreed on before or after, and she figures that school will be awful today if she has to be in suspense about this the whole time.

"Do you have them?"