…or, What Do You Get If You Multiply Six By Nine?

We went to eat at odd times and made it through Sunday without bumping into Missy. It was just me and Marlot at breakfast Monday morning. I’d tried to think inviting thoughts, but no dice. I made a mental note to ask Violet if she wanted to go eat with us sometime.

I knew she had her own friends. I also knew that one of them was Iolana. It couldn’t hurt.

I went over to East Campus a little early. I liked the wooded ambience and the feel of the old house that had been converted to classrooms. I also liked the fact that it had tables and benches in the smoking area. There seemed to be an unwritten rule that smokers weren’t allowed to be comfortable. Khersis forbid anybody smoke and eat at the same time.

“Mr. Bowman,” Professor Bryony said, popping up in front of me as I was lighting a second cigarette. “I was hoping for a word.”

“What’s up, Professor?”

“You’ve a good eye for herbs,” she said. “And I hate to see anything good go to waste. Am I going to see a repeat of last Friday’s performance in my field course?”

“Professor, that wasn’t really my fault,” I said.

She took a long pull on her pipe and then blew two streams of smoke out her nose.

“If I were in charge of the tallfolk, you wouldn’t be expected to behave like an adult when you’re not even twenty-two,” she said. “But I’m not, and you are. If a fella wants to make goo-goo eyes at you for the entire period, there’s nothing that says you have to make goo-goo eyes back.” She patted the top of my knee with her fingertips. “I like you a bit, Bowman, but I don’t play favorites, in the classroom or the field.”

“You could tell him to leave me alone.”

“If you’re saying you’re being harrassed—”

“I’m not,” I said.

“Good,” she said. “But there’s only so much I can do then. I can separate you at the start of the class, but I can’t spend the whole hour babysitting. Besides, he managed to pull a good grade while burning a hole in the seat of your pants with his eyes. I don’t see why you couldn’t do as well or better.”

“Right,” I said.

“Well, I’ve got a classroom to set up,” she said. She stuck her pipe inside her jacket. “See you on the inside.”

I went in a bit later, and was still one of the first. It was Monday. Monday after the first weekend, even. Most of the class looked sullen and groggy. I was a little cobwebby upstairs myself. I hadn’t repeated the previous night’s marathon, but after sleeping in Sunday morning it had been harder to get to sleep.

“No time for snacks today, I’m afraid,” the professor said. “We’re going to be getting into some tricky bits today, so we’re going to get right to it. It isn’t just complicated, it’ll form a foundation for everything else we do in the next two weeks. Er, has anybody seen Miss Honey?”

“Who?” Louis asked me quietly. I jerked my head towards the front of the room. He looked at me in confusion.

“The gnome girl,” I said.

“The professor?”

I shook my head.

“Ah, well,” Professor Bryony said. “I’m sure she’ll pick it up. Let’s get to it, class.”

The subject was the combination of properties from different herbs. It was exponentially more difficult than working with a single herb. The professor used blends of herbal tea as one example, and the blend of herbs in her pipe as another. She took this excuse to pull the pipe out as a “visual aid.” She kept it available in this capacity until the end of the period.

The exercises she gave us were challenging. They required intense mental concentration. Two people managed to start small fires accidentally when they combined reagents too quickly and applied too much energy to them. Once I was sure I had the right way down, I took some time to figure out how they’d done it.

“Have a nice weekend, then?” the professor asked me on the way to the shed.

“Fairly nice,” I said. “Went to see a show in town.”

“Wasn’t the dragons in the park, was it?”

“It was, actually,” I said. “Were you there, too?”

“I was,” she said. “Down in the front. Season tickets. It isn’t all dragons, of course. That’s just their big finish. Where were you?”

“In the boxes.”

She gave a whistle.

“Your Mr. Iason take you?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“Good on you,” she said. “Don’t give your favors away cheaply or he won’t value them. I learned that lesson the hard way.”

“Uh, right,” I said.

“Speaking of, I couldn’t help noticing you’re carrying a bit of extra weight in your ears,” she said. “Those aren’t dwarven, are they?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Sternbauer.”

“You’re a first year, aren’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“You know each other from before, then?”

“No,” I said. “We just met.”

She shook her head, looking puzzled.

“What?” I asked.

“You must be one heck of a good, er, sport,” she said.

Tall and long-limbed Mattie Douglas got to the shed about the same time we did. She spotted my jewelry right away.

“Wow,” she said. “Are all of those new?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Must be nice to be able to afford that kind of thing,” she said.

“Now, now,” Professor Bryony said. “I’m sure Mr. Bowman worked plenty hard for them.”

“Thank you, Professor,” I said, as neutrally as I could.

“Oh, did your boyfriend get you those?” Mattie asked.

“Uh, yeah. He did.”

“What a sweetheart,” she said.

Iason was the last one to arrive. He tied, actually, with Thomas Zachary, the only other guy in the class. It was no coincidence; Iason had his hand in Zach’s back pocket. I heard Mattie suck in her breath as the two guys shared a lingering kiss on the path before separating for the last ten yards.”

“Right, we’re heading right in again,” the professor said. “Today we’re doing something a little different. I’m going to give everyone the name of a plant. Something useful, fun, but hard to spot. You need to find it in or around the field, and get an intact specimen. I’ll put you in pairs to make it easier. We’ll go alphabetically. So, Andrews, Bowman—”

“No!” Kira said.

“Excuse me, Ms. Andrews?”

“Excuse me, Professor Swain,” Kira said. “I’m not feeling well.”

“What is it?” Bryony asked. “I probably have something in my pack that can help.”

“Please forgive me, but I think I need the healing center,” Kira said.

“Oh, well, alright,” the professor said. “But bring a slip on Wednesday so I can give you a no grade.”

Kira left without more than a slight nod to acknowledge this.

“So, then, it’ll be Bowman, Collins; Douglas, Iason; Miles, Stevens; and Zachary, I guess you’re with me,” the professor said. “Let’s head out.”

Hannah Collins was more than hot. Almost every girl was hot in some way if you looked at them, but she was drop dead gorgeous. She might have been a model. She could have entered beauty pageants and won them. She had a smile that lit up the room even when we were outside, and platinum hair that elven women would envy.

I couldn’t stop looking across the clearing at Iason.

He was chafing under Mattie’s partnership. That wasn’t surprising. On top of being a woman, she dwarfed him. She moved about with a quiet confidence that was less obvious than his cocky swagger, but harder to argue with. I couldn’t make out what they were saying to each other, but Iason was getting red in the face and Mattie was looking irritated.

“Hey, are you paying attention?” Hannah said.

“What?”

“We’re supposed to be looking for holdroot,” she said.

“I think we should probably check on the other end of the clearing,” I said.

“It says it grows in thin vegetation, where the sunlight reaches the ground,” Hannah said. “It’s all tall grass and weeds over there.”

“Well, maybe we should split up,” I said. “We can cover more ground that way.”

“Okay, fine. Whatever,” she said.

In my defense, I checked the ground for the tiny cluster of pale green leaves that marked the top of a holdroot plant on my way over to where Iason was working. He and his partner had decided to cover more ground, too. They’d achieved the level of rapport where words weren’t necessary.

“Are you trying to make me jealous?” I asked Iason quietly when I’d made my way alongside him.

“Pardon?” he said.

“Being all over Zach like that,” I said.

“You requested I leave you alone until the beginning of class today,” he said. “I obliged you all day Sunday, and he obliged me all night.”

“You didn’t have to show up all lovey-dovey with him,” I said.

“Iamie, you are as cold as a marble tomb,” he said, shaking his head. “I should have taken my pleasure and then kicked him, as they say, to the curb?”

“You didn’t have to kiss him in front of me,” I said.

“I had no reason to think you would mind,” Iason said. “Honestly, Iamie, I would not hurt you for all the world, but you’ve given me every impression that this relationship is less important to you than it is to me.”

“How important is it to you if you kiss somebody—”

“Mr. Bowman!” Professor Bryony called. “Your partner is getting awfully lonely without you.”

“Yeah, well, that’s no excuse for him to act like a dick,” I said quietly to Iason. “Sorry, Professor!” I said out loud. “I was just getting a different perspective.”

“Come walking with me after class,” Iason said.

“Why?”

“Because I want you to,” he said. “Because I haven’t fucked you since Saturday. Because my sword cries out for its sheath.”

“After what you pulled?”

“What did I pull? I’m starting to think that you expected me to put up more of a fight when you said you didn’t want to see me.”

“Mr. Bowman!”

“Sorry, Professor!”

I hurried back towards Hannah.

“If we don’t find this root, I’m kicking your ass,” she said.

“We’ll find it,” I said.

We did, with about ten minutes to spare for digging it out of the ground. We didn’t dig down far enough around the taproot on the first try, and it broke when we tried to pull it out. Luckily there was another one nearby. We got it out just before the professor signaled the end of class. She held me in the field after the others had left. Iason hovered at the edge of it.

“I’m sorry, Professor,” I said once we were alone.

“You got the assignment done so you get an A,” she said. “This isn’t the army so you don’t lose points for being insubordinate, but don’t think I won’t bounce you out on your ear.”

“Sorry.”

“You might be capable of gliding by while carrying on like you’ve been, but the material deserves your attention and honestly, you deserve to do better,” she said. “I’d sooner boot you than let you take home a C when you should have an A.”

“I’ll do better, Professor Bryony,” I said. “I really will. I’m just adjusting to things.”

“I know that,” she said. “That’s why I’m talking to you now, when you’ve still got time to pull your head out of the clouds. I enjoy your company, Mr. Bowman, so don’t take it hard when I tell you I don’t want to have this conversation again. Alright?”

“Alright,” I said.

Iason waited where he was until I got to him, smiling blandly with his hands behind his back. I waited for him to say something. When he didn’t, I walked right past him. He turned and fell into step beside me.

“You really must learn to keep your eye on your course work,” he said. “I know I pose considerable distraction, but it’s hardly fair to endanger your classmate’s grade along with your own.”

“Stuff it,” I said.

“You are in a terrible mood today,” he said. “Did you not have a good day Sunday? I would have done my humble best to cheer you up, had I been around.”

“I don’t want you fucking other guys, Iason.”

He shook his head, clicking his tongue.

“It’s a good thing you are so very pretty, Iamie,” he said. “Otherwise, I might be tempted to leave you when you are being so unreasonable.”

“How is that unreasonable?” I asked. “You don’t want me to fuck other guys, I don’t want you to fuck other guys.”

“Shall I take it that you are now as committed to our future together as I am, then?”

“What, you get to sleep around because you’re more committed to me than I am to you?” I said.

“Yes.”

“And I’m the unreasonable one, somehow.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m glad we are on the same page. Honestly, Iamie, you could very easily have prevented the scene which you found so distressing, had you not made yourself unavailable for half of the weekend.”

“So, you did do it to make me jealous,” I said.

“No, I slept with Zach because I had a need,” he said. “And I was affectionate with him afterwards because I am not a total boor. I would never have chosen him over you, though. You wish for me to be yours exclusively? Then I foreswear the company of other men, so long as yours is available to me.”

“In other words, you expect sex whenever you want it, and if you don’t get it, you’ll look somewhere else,” I said.

“Is something wrong with that arrangement?” Iason asked. “My understanding is that it’s a fairly standard caveat, even if it isn’t stated so baldly.”

“For all that you talk about wanting to get married, you don’t act like you’re interested in it.”

“Then it’s a good thing you aren’t interested in it, either.”

“We aren’t heading towards the campus,” I realized. I stopped walking.

“No,” Iason said. “I wanted you to take a walk in the woods with me.”

“You should have said something!” I said.

“I did,” he said. “When you came towards me instead of taking the path back, I assumed you were giving your assent.”

“You keep getting me turned around, Iason,” I said.

“It is not my fault you have such an alluring backside,” he said.

“Yeah, well, get ready to see it,” I said, turning to head back down the path towards the clearing. “I’m going back to campus for lunch.”

“Iamie, don’t,” he said, grabbing my wrist. “Come with me just a little bit further and I will show you something truly amazing.”

“You mean you’ll fuck me,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “But after that, I’ll show you something else that’s almost as amazing as that.”