On the other side of the table, Lord Corbie went to Selenay and also demanded the punishment of “the Trainee who started it,” and allegedly was nonplussed to learn that “the Trainee” had already been punished. And that the punishment fit his crime, since all he had done was to bring a fight into the salle and after being reprimanded, had behaved with the proper respect for the Weaponsmaster. The trouncing—with lecture—at the hands of the Weaponsmaster in front of his peers was deemed both painful and humiliating enough, even for Lord Corbie.

And Lord Corbie had been quite taken aback to learn that it had all happened within moments of Kadhael’s expulsion.

Without knowing much about the man, but intuiting a great deal from the behavior of his son, Alberich doubted that humiliation of Kadhael at the hands of “that foreigner” would ever be forgotten or forgiven, but at least there was nothing overt that Lord Corbie could do about the incident. Alberich had exercised precisely the correct amount of authority: he’d been defied, he banished the offender. Not from any other classes at any other part of the three Collegia, only from his own. He had indeed ejected the boy by force—because the boy would have gone on defying him if Alberich hadn’t physically thrown him off the premises. He had not exceeded his authority, and in point of fact, Alberich could have given the boy a taste of what Osberic had gotten, and hadn’t. In fact, Kadhael had gotten off lightly at Alberich’s hands, and not only was there no denying it, but both the Lord Marshal and the Provost Marshal (who was in charge of discipline on and off the Collegia grounds) said loudly and publicly that they would have boxed both his ears until he was deaf.

Nevertheless, Lord Corbie would not like the man who had rejected his son; he would not like the Collegium nor the organization that had given him the authority to do so.

One more enemy… but Alberich was used to those by now. He would have to watch his back, but when had he ever done anything else? And sure enough, within days, there were rumors in the Court about how the Weaponsmaster was abusing his pupils, abusing his authority, treating Heraldic Trainees with indulgence and punishing Blues arbitrarily. A few Blues were quietly absent from his class after that. But there was not a great deal that he could do about that—nor, truth to be told, wished to do.