Then Kip saw some kids he recognized: the boy with the strange spectacles who’d sat behind him in class yesterday and some others from the Blackguard training class. They were the outcasts—Kip could tell immediately. They were the awkward, the intelligent, the ugly, with those Blackguard hopefuls who were destined to fail out early and were merely trying to get in from some vain hope of their own or their masters’. There was, of course, space at their table, and space around them, as if they were contagious. Kip went over.
“Can you read?” the boy asked as Kip came close. His flip-down spectacles currently had the blue lens down over one eye, and the yellow down over the other.
Kip hesitated. Did they not want him? “Um, yes?”
“You need to get to lecture if you can’t. If you can, you need to check the work schedule. Hold on, you had that—Oh, never mind, of course you can read. You told Magister Kadah to go stuff herself.”
“Really?” a homely girl asked.
Kip ignored her and tucked into his food.
“Why are you sitting with us?”
“You looked nicer than them,” Kip said, gesturing with a toss of his head toward the tough boys. “You want me to leave?”
They all looked at each other. Shrugged. “No,” the boy with spectacles said.
“So, what are your names?” Kip asked.
The bespectacled boy pointed to himself, “I’m Ben-hadad,” then to the homely girl, “Tiziri,” then to a gangly, gap-toothed boy, “that’s Aras, and—”
They were interrupted by a girl’s voice. “Hey, did you all hear about Elio getting his halos tapped by the new—” She cut off as she saw Kip.
“And… that would be Adrasteia. Classic, Teia.”
“We’ve met,” Kip said dryly.
Teia opened her mouth, then sat down silently, defeated.
“I didn’t hear,” Aras said. “What, new who? What happened?”
“Aras,” Teia said through gritted teeth.
“What? Was there a fight?” Aras asked.
“I don’t know if I’d call it a fight,” Kip said.
“You? You were in a fight? With Elio?” Aras said.
“You broke his arm in three places!” Adrasteia—Teia?—said.
“I did?” Kip asked.
“Wait, you broke Elio’s arm?” Ben-hadad asked. “I hate that kid.”
“Is that how you hurt your hand?” Tiziri asked. She had a birthmark over the left half of her face. She wore her kinky hair flopped over that way to try to hide it, but it was a futile attempt.
Kip looked at his bandaged hand. He was supposed to get a fresh poultice smeared on it every day. He’d forgotten this morning. He didn’t even know if he could find the infirmary from here. “No, uh, this. I kind of got thrown into a fire.”
“Wait, wait, wait. You have to start from the beginning,” Ben-hadad said. “Aras! Stop staring over there or they’ll know we’re talking about—”
Aras, Teia, Tiziri, and Kip all glanced over at Elio’s table at the same time—and saw that Elio’s friends were all staring at them. Caught.
Ben-hadad scrubbed his chin where his beard was just coming in. “Hopeless,” he said. He flipped up both of the color lenses on the spectacles. He fixed his gaze on Kip, one eye looking slightly larger than the other. Kip had heard of the lenses that corrected bad vision before, but he’d never seen them. It was unnerving. “So,” Ben-hadad said to Kip, “spill.”
“About Elio? He came over and hit me a few times, and I punched him in the nose.”
They waited.
Kip spooned in more gruel.
“Worst. Storyteller. Ever,” Teia said.
“You punched him in the nose so hard his arm broke in three places?” Ben-hadad prompted.
“Look,” Kip said, “it wasn’t a big thing. I was really scared and I knew he was going to hit me, so I—you know? I hit him first. I kind of panicked.”
“And broke his arm?” Teia asked.
Kip shrugged. “He said he was going to kill me.”
Their looks were somewhere between dubious and totally impressed.
Kip decided to defuse it with humor. “I’ve only got one good hand. Now if he comes after me, we’ll be even.”
Not funny.
“Holy shit,” Aras said. “I saw you at the tryouts, but I had no idea you were that good.”
“You don’t look like a badass,” Ben-hadad said. “But I guess it proves you’re a Guile.”
“I heard after the fight was over, you broke his arm because he called you Lard Guile,” Tiziri said. She hadn’t been at Kip’s tryouts, obviously.