Free Steelhands (2011) by Jaida Jones, Danielle Bennett Page A

even though I hated leaving a job unfinished, I hadn’t managed to teach my class from the previous term anything worth a damn. I guessed that was weighing on my consciencejust a little bit, not to mention how much the idea of doing it for another two months was sticking in my throat like a fish bone.
    Another part of it was the dream I’d had in that weird part of dawn when dreaming gets a little too keen and a little too detailed for a man’s liking—about the day we’d received word from whatever lackey was in charge that day that the dragons,
our
dragons, were being disassembled, and no, we wouldn’t be seeing what remained of them again.
    But never let it be said Owen Adamo spent his time lingering over
dreams
. He just took his crankiness out on the poor cannon fodder first-years in his lecture room, instead.
    My lecturer’s assistant was a Margrave’s son who’d gotten out of joining up for the war effort because of some loophole about the importance of his studies meaning he was needed more at home than out there on the field. It’d worked out well for him to exploit it because it was doubtful he’d have been able to find the balls to actually kill a man in real combat. He was obsessed with strategy nonetheless and considered himself something of an expert on the matter, which meant he didn’t like my style of teaching one bit. His name was Radomir—not Radimor, as I’d called him for the first two-thirds of our first term together because I didn’t have room in my head for the names of people I didn’t like
or
trust—and I found that ignoring him worked best.
    I cleared my throat. It was one minute before the lecture was supposed to start, and the last of the lost, lonely little stragglers were filing in and taking their seats. I could feel a few of them staring at me, no doubt taking this class so they could gossip about the man teaching it rather than discuss the fine art of war or anything. Anyway, it was obvious that near to none of them had the head for any decent thinking. There was one in the back who was already asleep, and I didn’t know if I was more or less disposed to liking him than I was to the few who’d crowded around the front row, leaning forward like so many carrion birds, ready to eat up what I said and never once question any of it.
    But it wasn’t too fair-minded of me to judge them before they proved they were the idiots I suspected, now was it? There were a few keen faces among the rabble—a girl with red hair and sharp green eyes and some ink on her nose being one of them, as well as a towhead who might’ve served himself none too bad in the war itself if he hadn’tclearly missed the age of conscription by a year. Maybe these ones could prove me wrong, and I welcomed the challenge.
If
you could call it that.
    “Right,” I said. “Get all those papers and pens and inkwells and the like
off
the desks; there won’t be any note-taking in this class. Not today, and not for the next two months.”
    I enjoyed the moment of shock they
all
displayed at that, then waited for the chaos of paper being shuffled and inkwells being bottled up to calm down, so I could have the rest of their full attention, or whatever half attention passed for it.
    “I’m no professor,” I said. “If you learn only one thing this term, which you just might, I’m certain it’ll be that. I’m going to be calling on the lot of you at random, and the way you pass is through contribution. Thinking, then saying something. Extra points for anyone who says something not necessarily smart, but
interesting
. So I’m expecting you all to listen. You lot in the back, tell me to speak up if you can’t hear anything.”
    Out of nowhere, a hand lifted. It was the first willingly raised hand of the term, and I quietly said a prayer that it wasn’t some know-it-all looking to impress the rest of the class while fluffing up his own ego. I took the owner of the hand in.
    It was the girl I’d had hopes