Page 103 of Traitor Son

Remin wheeled his horse around and kicked him into a gallop, feeling shamefully as if he were fleeing.

* * *

“It’s mostly counting,” Ophele explained as she walked with Jacot of Caillmar, petting Eugene and watching the page from the corner of her eye. The only boy she had known before was Julot, but she was charitable enough to assume he was not the standard for his gender. “The blacksmiths do different things on different days, so some days they’ll go through more water than others. If you keep count in the morning, you can usually guess how much they’ll need in the afternoon and bring them some extra barrels to get ahead.”

“Keep count?” Jacot asked blankly. He had a pretty face for a boy, with rough-cropped brown hair and bright blue eyes.

“Of how many buckets and barrels they go through. It takes an hour to go the length of the wall and back, so if you keep count of how much everyone is using in an hour, then you can figure out the averages…” Ophele had carefully tracked the numbers in her mind over the months, adjusting the averages over time, and after three months she had become fairly skilled at guessing how much water would be needed where. Efficiency was the only way she could have managed the task. She didn’t have the strength to muscle through it.

But after a while, she realized Jacot was having very little to say.

“I didn’t know there’d be so much reckoning,” he said, his brows knotted. “Dunno if I can do that.”

“Oh.” Ophele blinked and flushed.The Habits of a Ladysaid it was a cardinal sin to make someone else feel embarrassed or uncomfortable, but it had never occurred to her that anyone might not know how to calculate averages. “Oh, I beg your pardon, I didn’t think…”

“No, I can learn,” the boy said stubbornly. “I know my counting. What’s a average?”

Compassion made her braver than she would have been otherwise, to make up for her thoughtlessness, and Ophele began with multiplication and division before she introduced averages, though there wasn’t nearly enough time to do any of it justice as the north end of the wall approached.

“Sure you’re all right, Your Grace?” Jacot asked doubtfully as they turned to head south. “Be my neck, something happens to you.”

“No, I’m quite well,” she assured him, her mind focused firmly on the problem before her. “The six times is where it gets harder, but if you use your fingers as an abacus, it will help. There are lots of tricks you can use to help you remember, like the trick of nines.”

“What trick?” Jacot glanced nervously over his shoulder.

“The sum of any two digits that are the product of nine times any other number equal nine,” she said blithely. “Nine two times is eighteen, right?”

She tried not to be discouraged by the fact that the boy’s fingers jittered at his side before he nodded his agreement.

“Eighteen is a one and an eight.” She held up her own fingers to illustrate. “One plus eight is nine.”

“Yes…”

“Now add nine three times.” It had been a very exciting day when seven year-old Ophele recognized this pattern. She loved patterns, it was like discovering a secret.

“Twenty-seven.”

“And two plus seven is…?”

“Nine.” Jacot’s eyes widened. He was ignorant, but he was not stupid. “And…thirty-six, forty-five, fifty-four, sixty-three, seventy-two, eighty-one, ninety…”

Ophele clapped her hands, beaming.

“See? It doesn’t work with ninety-nine, but then it works again at a hundred and eight, a hundred seventeen…”

“Is there more like that?” Jacot asked eagerly. “I was hoping for some learning when I got here, but all the squires say we got too much work what needs doing to bother.”

“Maybe I could lend you a book…” Ophele faltered as soon as she visualized the books on her shelf. There was nothing there suitable for a beginner.

“No, lady, but thankee kindly. I ain’t quite up to books yet. And I wouldn’t give a f—I wouldn’t care what Sir Tounot’s lads say about anything else, but I am shamed, being so backward at my age.”

“Well, you want to learn, don’t you?” she said warmly. “If you don’t ask, then you’ll never know.”

A noise of hooves trampled the end of that sentence, and as Ophele turned to see the duke rapidly overtaking them, she realized with a start that they had come halfway down the wall already. There was a grimness in his face that sent a warning shiver up her spine.

“We agreed you would only go as far as the north end,” he said as he drew up beside her. On the other side of Eugene, Jacot gulped.

“It’s my fault,” Ophele said instantly. “I told him it was fine. I’m all right, I don’t feel hot or tired at all.”

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