“I don’t want to be brilliant, I want to be reliable,” Brice retorted, rubbing the back of his neck. “Well, Abi’s the most likely of us to be right, so—”

Abi laughed. “I think the answer lies in the notes we all took. I think Master Ketnar spent a little too much time at the tavern last night--he sounded like he had a hangover. Let’s compare those first.”

Sure enough, they’d all misrecorded something in Master Ketnar’s lecture; by comparing all four sets and applying some logic, they figured out where they’d each gone wrong, and finally all arrived at the same answer when they applied the corrected notes to the problem.

“All right, we’ve done this forward, now let’s do it backward,” Rudi said, in that tone that told Abi that he was going to do the problem that way even if they didn’t. Of the four of them, he was the most thorough. She sighed inwardly; Rudi had a way of making you feel guilty if you sat there slacking while he worked. So they all put their heads down and joined him.

The refectory, or dining hall, was always a good place to get together to work between meals, and it wasn’t that bad during them as long as you picked a table well out of the way. Abi would have liked to suggest that they all work outside, but it wasn’t practical. Too many sheets of notes to blow away, too much scribbling on slates, and sitting crosslegged on the hard ground, with your head bent over your slate wasn’t nearly as comfortable as sitting at a table. Of course, they could have brought pillows and rugs, but pillows and rugs suggested lounging, and if they did that they’d never get the assigned problems done.

Brice was the last to finish, laying his chalk aside with a sigh—no need to compare answers this time, they were all working toward the information they’d been given, and they already had that written down. “And that’s the last,” he said. “Now can we go sit in the warm grass while Abi reads history to us?”

“Meet you by our tree,” Abi said, gathering up her notes, her sheet of written answers, and her slate and chalk to take them up to her room for safekeeping. None of them ever left anything behind to be picked up later. No one did. Although the “Collegium Prankster” incident had happened years ago, before Abi was born, even, no one ever left so much as a scrap or a book behind where it could be stolen or defaced. The details had faded in most peoples’ minds by now, but not some of the lessons learned from the incident.