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[color=#2E2C2C]─[/color][color=#302E2E]─[/color][color=#323030]─[/color][color=#343232]─[/color][color=#363434]─[/color][color=#383737]─[/color][color=#3A3939]─[/color][color=#3D3B3B]─[/color][color=#3F3D3D]─[/color][color=#413F3F]─[/color][color=#434242]─[/color][color=#454444]─[/color][color=#474646]─[/color][color=#4A4848]─[/color][color=#4C4A4A]─[/color][color=#4E4D4D]─[/color][color=#504F4F]─[/color][color=#525151]─[/color][color=#545353]─[/color][color=#575656]─[/color][color=#595858]─[/color][color=#5B5A5A]─[/color][color=#5D5C5C]─[/color][color=#5F5E5E]─[/color][color=#616161]─[/color][color=#636363]─[/color][color=#666565]─[/color][color=#686767]─[/color][color=#6A6969]─[/color][color=#6C6C6C]─[/color][color=#6E6E6E]─[/color][color=#707070]─[/color][color=#737272]•[/color][color=#757474]⋅[/color][color=#777777]⊰[/color][color=#797979]༻[/color][color=#7B7B7B]༒[/color][color=#7D7D7D]︎[/color][color=#808080]༺[/color][color=#7D7D7D]⊱[/color][color=#7B7B7B]⋅[/color][color=#797979]•[/color][color=#777777]─[/color][color=#757474]─[/color][color=#737272]─[/color][color=#707070]─[/color][color=#6E6E6E]─[/color][color=#6C6C6C]─[/color][color=#6A6969]─[/color][color=#686767]─[/color][color=#666565]─[/color][color=#636363]─[/color][color=#616161]─[/color][color=#5F5E5E]─[/color][color=#5D5C5C]─[/color][color=#5B5A5A]─[/color][color=#595858]─[/color][color=#575656]─[/color][color=#545353]─[/color][color=#525151]─[/color][color=#504F4F]─[/color][color=#4E4D4D]─[/color][color=#4C4A4A]─[/color][color=#4A4848]─[/color][color=#474646]─[/color][color=#454444]─[/color][color=#434242]─[/color][color=#413F3F]─[/color][color=#3F3D3D]─[/color][color=#3D3B3B]─[/color][color=#3A3939]─[/color][color=#383737]─[/color][color=#363434]─[/color][color=#343232]─[/color][color=#323030]─[/color][color=#302E2E]─[/color][/center][indent][indent][indent][indent][justify][h3][sup][color=bdbdbd][sup]"𝕲ods' bones!" cursed the third and final of Class E's she-students, who the others had already dubbed Mina—simply Mina—"I thought Death itself might fail to shut her up."

Agalind did not chastise the obscenity pouring from her new companion's mouth, nor cringe thereof; even in the presence of such unladylike conduct did she remain as nonchalant and courteous as always. Instead, feigning a momentary deafness, she put a fingertip between her teeth, and bit down, and thereby liberated that hand of its gauntlet, which she tucked into her sword belt. Reached she then for her pocket watch, reviewing the hands and dials coolly. "Do you suppose we might lunch at the canteen, if we hurried?" she said. "Three hours of walking and speeches and I am so terribly famished."

"We wouldn't even make it through the beer line," Mina bemoaned. "Not after that wretch Wiezlern tried to kill us of old age."

"Yes, most probably. What a shame."

"Tell me about it. I've been holding in a water for the better part of an hour."

"Mina, [i]please,[/i]" Agalind said—giggling, so as to sound less disquieted.

But along the barracks wall, broiling beneath the cloudless sky at its highest noontime glory, sat their own and several other students' luggage; still packed, and tossed into rows. Any porters were long gone, these valuables guarded only by a single residency assistant, clad from scalp to toes in civvies and sunburnt lethargy. Judging from the gaps, many students—entire classes of them, in fact—had come and gone and claimed their suitcases already in the time it had taken Schöst's charge to receive some semblance of a [i]dénouement[/i] to Wiezlern's poetic Epic. They'd still been slogging from hall to hall while the rest of their grade claimed their bunks, aired out their belongings, sprawled, lunched, strolled. The ten, afforded none such luxuries, grumbled and murmured but hurried to their task.

For Hloþhilde it was no small envy, watching as several of the seven bickered to be the ones to relieve Agalind and Mina of their luggage—the first protesting and are-you-suring; hesitating, then, to the boys' relief, capitulating—and the latter readily discarding her effects into their awaiting clutches. Meanwhile there sat her own bags, all two of them (save for the gift box, which she had wearied of rucking around through the glare and the heat approximately an eon ago), untouched. Smaller than the others', simpler, and so forlorn-looking there creased and sagging against the wall like a pair of old, worn stovepipe boots. Disheartened but resolved not to show it, Hloþhilde swung Hellie's sword beneath one arm, and squatted, and after some struggle had stood upright again with both bags in tow. Their unassuming appearances had deceived her, however: within the bags clattered a great many articles, some of them large and cumbersome all their own; drawing from the girl an astounded groan as she labored to her feet. Wondering whether her sister had packed her off to military school with sacks of ingots from the tinsmith's, Hloþhilde waddled as best she could toward the barracks door, careful not to let her shako tilt clean off her head, wary too of swaying off course as she fought the heft of her cargo with every step. Ere long the bags' bottoms seemed about ready to rip in twain and spill all their embarrassing, girlish contents all over the [i]foyer[/i] floor; so too as their handles threatened to rend clean through her quickly-purpling fingers. All the same, if any boys had noticed her plight then they made no gesture to rescue her thereof.

The stairs proved the day's greatest trial; but with some hobbling (rather Schöst-like in form, as it happened), and enough sweat soaked into her greyish wools to impress a farmhand, Hloþhilde managed it in a single trip, and at the top of the concourse allowed herself her first moment of respite. There, panting and heaving and glistening, she stared long and hard down the halls, each one flanked on both sides and down its entire breadth by identical white doors. And one of them was hers. She told herself that again and again as she foraged for the grit to keep going through the blood drumming in her head, the constriction in her fingers, the throttling heat of her parade uniform. One of those doors was hers. It was hers it was hers she'd earned it or if not yet then by the Champions she was going to.

Heading south from the central rotunda, it was closed when she arrived and so she saw it, writ in wood trim leafed in peeling gold: eighty seven. Her number. Her address for the next year. This she recognized for the names chalked just beneath, upon a slate board in a most tidy and elegant hand:

[i][center]d. GUILLARMES, HLOÞHILDE[/center]
[center]v. MÜßEL, LEUTGARDE[/center][/i]
The latter gave Hloþhilde pause, but she thought that hardly strange. Any one of them would wonder about her newest companion-of-circumstance, that person in whose company (or, at the least, in whose proximity) she was to spend the lion's share of the next year, between classes and balls and platoon drills. In fact, likeliest they already did, all twoscore-and-a-half of the tender freshmen entering this building for the first and seeing their names etched beside the names of strangers on slate boards. Checking for the abbreviated preposition before the family name, to know they doffed their fineries and lowered their eyelids among fellow noblemen's-sons ([i]von[/i] meaning a heartlander, [i]de/des/du[/i] a Westmarcher or Low Countryman; [i]di[/i] belonging to those families hailing from former Rhobardy—once a duchy, then independent—distrusted and despised). The lavishness of any personal effects strewn around the door, around the room; their tastes in art, in wine, in girls, in politics. And on and on. Surely they endeavored to learn, the fifty, what they could about each other ere even thinking to cross that fateful threshold. Searching for that common shore whereon to escape uncertain waters.

For her part, Hloþhilde knew her histories well enough. She knew Leutgarde—queen-consort to Raduwik the Black—and her own namesake to have fought on opposing sides of the same civil war, some eight centuries ago. She only prayed this did not bode ill for her relations with her bunkmate. She certainly didn't [i]think[/i] herself susceptible to superstition; least of all the one which compelled Laachtalian parents to name their children after heroes and kings and conquerors, lest their lives should prove unfortunate, unfruitful, or worst of all—uneventful. Still. When that many people believe something, mustn't there be some germ of truth to it? And if this Leutgarde von Müßel was one such believer, why, she'd be determined to hate poor Tilly before she'd even met her proper, would she not? Prejudice informed behavior informed prejudice; prophecy fulfilled itself.

All at once eager, anxious, and acutely aware of her scant free time tapping down to nothing with every tick of the clock, she set down a bag and rapped her hand against their door—[i]her[/i] door—once, then again—and when both times no answer came, she eased herself inside, dragging her luggage in behind her like an antlion. And she heaped her bags into the center of the room, and shut the door behind her, and suddenly Agalind and Mina's practiced aloofness seemed so very distant, as did the playful, teasing, yet categorically frustrated efforts of their suitors. Barely audible as a murmur from the far wall. For Hloþhilde arrived upon an empty room; her roommate having abandoned it already, but not before claiming the lower bunk, and staking what parts of the room she'd deemed the choicest (the nearer of two desks; a bedpost, seized on behalf of a heavy woolen greatcoat; most of the hooks by the door). There stood two display stands on a large night table: one empty, the other replete with full parade regalia, buffed and gleaming; helm and sash and gauntlets and [i]aiguillettes.[/i] A few interesting advertisements and lithographs pinned to the walls. The reek of tobacco smoke, and the culprit's half-burnt evidence lain across her desk, spilled from the antler bowl when it had fallen over from its pipe rack. Lamps and matches. A small shelf filled with treatises on tactics, natural sciences, warrior-poetry; and, curiously, sewing.

Hloþhilde placed her new sword on the upper bunk; did not concern herself, for the time, with finding the best place nor the most regal way to mount it. For she had grown much too curious as to the contents of her suitcases. Given what toils and labors she had undergone already—and it was not lost on her that the day was scarcely half burnt—she hoped it was exactly what she suspected; and exactly as restorative. So she shed her fineries—helm, sash, and the rest—mimicked Leutgarde's arrangement as best she could while ordering them upon the second display stand—and hauled the heavier of the two bags up onto the empty desk.

As it happened, she knew her sister well. Beneath a doll from her girlhood, and a supply of womanly napkins, and a few nice pens and all other manner of essentials, Helgeða had stashed enough treasures to count as a small hoard. The bottles she'd wrapped in jute and straw to protect them during transit, but Hloþhilde recognized enough of them from the glass alone—the shapes, colors, and opacities—that she had little need for the concealed labels whatever. [i]Château Moinmarcy[/i]: their house's personal label, crisp, off-dry, and [i]strikingly[/i] citrusy, owing to shady [i]terroir,[/i] early harvest, and ready use of the pomace in the fermentation. (Tall, skinny, and seaglass-green, the bottle.) [i]Eaux d'Aubris,[/i] a dessert wine of matchless quality: apricot-sweet, and yet light-bodied, a little effervescent; hardly so stodgy and syrupy as a port or a cream sherry. As suitable with ripe cheese as with cake and one of Tilly's very favorites (no doubt why Helgeða had packed several bottles). A table red from the Vuererro region; the one father used to ship in by the hogshead right before a banquet. One or two more that Hloþhilde did not recognize. Ones her sister perhaps had meant for them to sample together during their upcoming lunch.

"Damn it, Hellie," she muttered, humiliated yet honored; feeling terribly ridiculous, and yet smiling ear to ear. For what would the others say when they found out the Marsènne girl, true to type, had arrived on campus with well over a gallon of fine wines stowed in her luggage?—and she had not yet even reached the bag's bottom. Would she next dredge up a fine Marsènnish pennyloaf, already buttered? A jar of olives? [i]Saucissons?[/i] Twelve Hells, a whole picnic spread? The first pangs of homesickness were calcifying in her gut like gallstones, but with the hunger, the heat, the whiling of the hour also gnawing, Hloþhilde was not so anguished not to press on.

Another few moments and she'd discovered, inspected, and restored again the contents of the tins buried beneath her civilian clothes. Some homemade—wrapped in waxcloth and packed into older tins—others still sealed, fresh from the stalls and shops of the Vaillons-sur-Monvre. A loaf of [i]pain d'épices,[/i] fragrant with honey and ginger. Dates and cherries and lime wheels [i]glacéed[/i] in their syrups—their glassy shells cracked in transit but still glistening. Little apple and blackberry [i]pâtés,[/i] powdered white as mothwings. Wedges of Souvrental and [i]croûte-des-rubis,[/i] crammed piano-key-tight into the canister. A small wheel of Valagnan.

[i]Valagnan...[/i]

This alone she did not place back in its tin; did not stash away again beneath the pile of chemises, with the rest of the treasure-hoard; her hands, possessed of a will all their own, refusing to part with the precious parcel lest it melt away like a morning dew once divested of her touch, returned to the memory whence it was conjured. Valagnan. She pressed the marinated grape leaves between her fingers, brittled by the journey, strewing a scant few crumbs across the desk, yet still holding. She raised the wheel to her nose. Sour and peppery. Creamy and herbed. Time and distance and the box had muted the aromas but not extinguished them—[i]could[/i] not extinguish them—not those halcyon dreams which had perfumed Hloþhilde's every moment at the castle she had once called home.

"Had once" called home?

The thought petrified her, beastly in its sharpness. Was it already no longer hers? (Then was it she who'd forsaken it, or the inverse?) This she did not yet dare interrogate—not with class encroaching all the nearer, not when she had need of her composure—but when came time to first cut into the precious wheel and taste it, when the creaminess and the dried herbs of the [i]garrigue[/i] and the soured rind all scented her throat, Hloþhilde suspected she would have her answer. So she placed the stuff into tin and tin inside her roomiest undershirt, squirreling it at the very bottom of her suitcase, even as she left the rest of her gifts unattended atop her desk. (Her bunkmate or any other thief could have at the rest if so possessed by boorishness but not the Valagnan, anything but that.) A desk barely staked as her own; a naked wall not yet so; a grandfather clock nibbling up the seconds and spittooning them into the past. Cluck. Cluck. Three years, it clucked to her, her only company for the next several minutes. Three years.[/SUP][/color][/sup][/h3][/justify][/indent][/indent][/indent][/indent][center][color=#2E2C2C]─[/color][color=#302E2E]─[/color][color=#323030]─[/color][color=#343232]─[/color][color=#363434]─[/color][color=#383737]─[/color][color=#3A3939]─[/color][color=#3D3B3B]─[/color][color=#3F3D3D]─[/color][color=#413F3F]─[/color][color=#434242]─[/color][color=#454444]─[/color][color=#474646]─[/color][color=#4A4848]─[/color][color=#4C4A4A]─[/color][color=#4E4D4D]─[/color][color=#504F4F]─[/color][color=#525151]─[/color][color=#545353]─[/color][color=#575656]─[/color][color=#595858]─[/color][color=#5B5A5A]─[/color][color=#5D5C5C]─[/color][color=#5F5E5E]─[/color][color=#616161]─[/color][color=#636363]─[/color][color=#666565]─[/color][color=#686767]─[/color][color=#6A6969]─[/color][color=#6C6C6C]─[/color][color=#6E6E6E]─[/color][color=#707070]─[/color][color=#737272]•[/color][color=#757474]⋅[/color][color=#777777]⊰[/color][color=#797979]༻[/color][color=#7B7B7B]༒[/color][color=#7D7D7D]︎[/color][color=#808080]༺[/color][color=#7D7D7D]⊱[/color][color=#7B7B7B]⋅[/color][color=#797979]•[/color][color=#777777]─[/color][color=#757474]─[/color][color=#737272]─[/color][color=#707070]─[/color][color=#6E6E6E]─[/color][color=#6C6C6C]─[/color][color=#6A6969]─[/color][color=#686767]─[/color][color=#666565]─[/color][color=#636363]─[/color][color=#616161]─[/color][color=#5F5E5E]─[/color][color=#5D5C5C]─[/color][color=#5B5A5A]─[/color][color=#595858]─[/color][color=#575656]─[/color][color=#545353]─[/color][color=#525151]─[/color][color=#504F4F]─[/color][color=#4E4D4D]─[/color][color=#4C4A4A]─[/color][color=#4A4848]─[/color][color=#474646]─[/color][color=#454444]─[/color][color=#434242]─[/color][color=#413F3F]─[/color][color=#3F3D3D]─[/color][color=#3D3B3B]─[/color][color=#3A3939]─[/color][color=#383737]─[/color][color=#363434]─[/color][color=#343232]─[/color][color=#323030]─[/color][color=#302E2E]─[/color][/center]