A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

Oliver merely shrugged at that. "The Yarmdon do, and our spears struggle against them. A shieldbreaker would prove invaluable on battlefields like that."

"The Yarmdon..?" Karesh tilted his head consideringly.

Oliver noted that Jorah was looking at him oddly, after his comment about the Yarmdon, but the boy quickly cleared his throat, and moved them on from it. "Well then, Ser, if that is all, we had best going… There are still a good number of serving class men to feed – if we dally too long, we'll be on last dinner for weeks," Jorah said.

Oliver nodded his agreement. "Well, thank you for your assistance. I'll see you around."

They bowed to him, and left. It was a good excuse from Jorah. It was something that Oliver hadn't known. From that tidbit of information, he guessed there must have been a few thousand serving class students, if they were being forced to hurry their lunch to house them all. But such wasn't the reason for their stiffness. It was his noble title.

They simply couldn't feel comfortable around him – they weren't allowed to feel comfortable around him.

He sighed at that thought, and looked again for another spot at the table, as he realized that he would have much preferred the company of those boys to the shifting glances, as thinly disguised hostility that he felt emanating from the nobility.

He finally picked an open seat at random, beside a bespeckled girl that seemed to be nearly as much of an outcast as he. She squeaked like a startled rabbit as he sat next to her, but he ignored the reaction, and fell to wondering just how many more friendly encounters he'd be likely to have as rumour trickled down from the nobles and found its way through the serving class.

Would Kaya and Jorah stay away from him once they heard? Did it even particularly matter?

He frowned at the thought.

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And with a glance, he realized that he'd broken the spoon that he was gripping. A brief glance at the girl next to him told him that she'd gone white. She all but fled the bench a moment later.

Well, whatever happened, Oliver decided, even if the whole world turned against him, he would fulfil his promises, and he would seize strength. The thought brought the faintest flickerings of burning rage back to him, enough to warm his heart, and bring a smile back to his lips.

…

…

Oliver's day began in earnest, with the classes that he'd chosen. There were seven such things that he was allowed to choose, and a range of subjects in which to fill those slots. He was surprised by how much of it was the more theoretical subjects, like history, and philosophy, and literature. He had thought the Academy to be a place dedicated to combat, and war.

It had started that way, at least, Volguard had assured him, and true to its roots, there were a number of things that a man could choose if he had intentions on the battlefield.

One such subject was Command – a subject reserved for the nobility. There was also the Advanced Strategy that Oliver had already taken, then there was Archery, Universal Close Combat Training, Swordsmanship and The Art of Duelling, Physical Enhancement and Field Medicine.n/ô/vel/b//jn dot c//om

The last of which he'd chosen merely on a whim. In truth, there were a number of subjects that he would have liked to add to that list. He had wanted to try and train with the spear as a singular thing. He had a hunch that in discovering its strengths, he might be able to further his swordsmanship.

Archery was chosen as a product of Nila, and her proving its worth – though he doubted that he could ever achieve her accuracy – and Field Medicine was chosen for much the same reason, after Nila and her mother had tended to him a number of times.

It seemed to him to be unlikely that he would be able to go without getting hurt in the future, so he figured he might as well get used to dressing those wounds himself, and perhaps he might even have learned something from it.

What he didn't expect was that only women seemed to have such a thought.

He'd arrived at the classroom earlier than expected – another lecture hall, much like the room that Volguard had taught in, only this one had a single spotless steel table under its slate board, large enough to fit a man on.

He'd chosen a seat at the back, in a corner, to take up as little of the bench as possible, after realizing that it would be an ordeal to get anyone who wanted to sit next to him. And in that seat, he'd watched calmly, as the room gradually filled with students.

After the first handful, he'd realized that all of them that had come in were girls. He'd smiled at that, recalling how surprised he'd been that there were women attending the Academy at all. It was only last night that he'd found out the gender ratio was mostly neutral, with a slight bias towards men, at 60% to 40%.

But then as nearly thirty people filled the room, and every single one of them was a woman, Oliver had the grace to feel a little bit panicked. He wondered if he might have chosen the wrong class, and ended up in something more feminine, like sewing.

But to his relief, a man finally walked in, joining the other forty. Only, this man – or boy – seemed just as feminine as the girls, with hair as long as theirs, just as silky, just as shiny, and with a face like a doll's.

By the time the professor had joined, Oliver was having trouble stopping his eyebrow from twitching. His presence in the room was met with faint giggles from the girls that noticed him. The professor – a bald man, with a thickly scarred head – merely acknowledged it with a grunt.