Alasdair has often speculated that Dylan's brain must be powered by the working of his jaw, like a mill stone being turned by a water wheel.
If he has to cogitate on anything especially difficult, he will begin chewing on whatever's closest to hand, whether it's the end of his calligraphy pen, the buttons on his shirt cuffs or, most frequently, his actual hands. The ends of his fingers are always swollen and bloody, and he's gnawed so thoroughly on the hanks of hair closest to his face that they're noticeably shorter than all the rest. Today, he's favouring what little remains of his thumbnail, and the rapid clicking of his teeth suggests that he's finding their latest maths problem taxing.
When Da asks them to put their chalk down and calls on Dylan to given his answer, he goes as white as a sheet, looking as though he might well pass out from sheer horror of it all.
He dislodges his thumb from his mouth with a loud pop that sounds like a cork being pulled from a bottle, and his breath rushes out after it in a shuddery gust. "Twenty-seven," he says in a quiet little mouse squeak of a voice.
Da has a number of telling habits himself, such as cleaning his spectacles if he's fighting the urge to laugh, and tapping his feet in no particular rhythm whenever he's contemplating an issue that's trickier than most.
When he repeatedly smoothes his long moustaches, as he is now, it is indicative of some minor agitation.
Dylan looks up at Da and his face crumples into an expression of abject misery. "Or maybe twenty-eight," he says, slightly desperately. "I wasn't sure, Da. And… And…"
Da springs forward to pat Dylan's shoulders consolingly when they start to hitch. "Hush, Dyl," he says in a soothing tone. "It's all right. Let's take a look at your workings out together; I'm sure we'll be able to see where you took a wrong turn."
Alasdair waits until Da and Dylan have their heads bent together over Dylan's slate before leaning across the kitchen table and asking Caitlin in a whisper, "What did you get?"
"Twenty-seven," Caitlin whispers back, smiling wryly. "I got muddled up halfway through and forgot whether I was supposed to be adding or subtracting. I guess I chose the wrong one."
"Me too," Alasdair admits, angling his slate towards his sister so she can see the large twenty-seven he has written at the bottom, underlined twice in a fit of false bravado.
Arthur, who had clearly been straining his ears hard in order to eavesdrop on their conversation, suddenly announces to the room at large, "I got forty-three."
Da smiles at him encouragingly. "That's right, Art," he says. "Very well done."
Arthur leans back in his chair, his own mouth unsmiling but the rest of his face radiating out enough smug satisfaction in his own cleverness to more than make up for it.
"Here," Da says, getting up from his crouch beside Dylan and moving to the large piece of slate he has propped up against the dresser, "let me show you all how I would work through this problem."
Alasdair tries to concentrate on the glide of Da's chalk across the slate, he really does, but his mind seems determined to slip off along its own path, regardless of his efforts.
He's never had a head for numbers, at least in their pure form. They tend to just drift away from him if he doesn't have something solid to tie them to; some real world meaning that he can parse in terms of observations he's made. When Da asks him to figure out, say, how far an arrow would fly if it were fired from the top of a twenty foot tower, he can give him an answer with ease, whereas the same question couched in terms of angles and parabolas leaves his head a whistling void bereft of thought.
At first, he's relieved when he hears the muffled tinkling of the little brass clock in Ma's laboratory, chiming out the hour, but the feeling is fated to die in the same instant that he remembers which lesson is due to come next in Da's schedule for their day.
Gallian, the one subject he dislikes more than mathematics.
Dylan and Da look delighted, however. Da, because he thinks the language is 'sublime' and gets sent into raptures at the mere idea of it, and Dylan, because he was the one that picked the book they're in the process of reading, and it sets him to sighing, too, if for completely different reasons.
Frankly, Alasdair can't understand what Dylan sees in it. There hasn't been so much as a raised voice in its pages thus far, never mind a duel to the death or anything of the like; just a whole load of people having witty conversations in a succession of parlours and drawing rooms, and expending far too much effort on rhapsodising over the beauty of one another's eyes.
He'd complained about it to Ma once, but she'd just shaken her head fondly over what she called Dylan's 'romantic soul' and then told him that whilst he might find such considerations tedious now, in a few years time, he'd likely be just as preoccupied by that sort of thing as his brother is now.
Though Alasdair usually trusts Ma's opinion on most topics, he (very privately) believes she's talking out of her arse on that score. He doesn't recall ever finding anything particularly fascinating in any face beyond the expression upon it, and he can't imagine that changing any time soon.
Still, Dylan's voice is nice enough to listen to, despite the ridiculous phrases he's currently spouting. Even more so than when he's speaking Imperial, it soars musically, making Mlle. Guillot's tedious musings on Mlle. Lacroix's fine figure sound almost like a song.
Da stays as still as a statue, eyes closed in contentment, whilst Dylan reads through a few passages in Gallian, and only stirs into life when Dylan embarks on his translation of them, offering the odd correction here and there.
Alasdair's Gallian recitation afterwards, however, is marked throughout by Da's interruptions – ''Mag-ni-feek', Aly, not 'mag-ni-fick'', ''par-fay', not 'par-fate'' – even though his own translation is apparently flawless. He finds the whole process incredibly frustrating, as he can never seem to get his tongue to move around the words in the right way, despite having memorised the proper pronunciations of them long since. They stick and snarl and emerge sounding leaden and misshapen, no matter how hard he tries.
To be honest, he doesn't know why Da continues trying to teach him in the face of his obvious ineptitude, as it seems very unlikely that he'll ever have reason to converse in Gallian with anybody.
-
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After the trial by Gallian ends, Da gives them a free hour to do with as they wish. They all lunch on bread, cheese and a little of the ham Mr Beilschmidt had traded Ma in exchange for a bottle of willow bark pills, and then Dylan retreats to their shared bedroom to read ahead in the dreadful Gallian book; Arthur to Ma's laboratory, probably to complain about how Gallian sounds like someone hawking up phlegm, as he always does, and that his dullard siblings are holding him back in his pursuit of mathematical excellence.
Alasdair and Caitlin take up the wooden swords Mr Carriedo had made for their birthday the year before, and go out into the back yard to spar.
When they were younger, seeing that they had a real thirst for it, Da had dug out two foils from his university days and attempted to teach them the form of sword fighting that he had learnt himself. Fencing had been a disappointment, however; far too bound by rules and not a technique that seemed as though it would be useful on a battlefield, pitted against men and women in full armour.
So, the twins had set out to teach themselves what they wanted to know without Da's help. They'd saved together their pennies, bought a battered old book about military training, read it from cover to cover in a single sitting, and then devised their own regime of drills and practice sessions.
Alasdair can't be sure that he's improved appreciably in the two years since then, however. No matter how precisely he thrusts his sword, how quickly he ducks, or parries, or moves his feet, he still has failed to beat his sister in a single one of their mock fights.
Today, she knocks his sword aside easily on his first swing after they've warmed up, swerves around his second, and as he's moving his arm back to make a third, darts in quickly on his right side, where he's unprotected, and sweeps his legs out from underneath him with a lazy hook of her own.
He falls heavily, cracking his head so hard against the flagstones below that the impact sounds as loud as a thunderclap to his own ears, and his vision blacks out momentarily. It bleeds back slowly, like an paint being dribbled across the front of his eyes, and, for an instant, Alasdair wishes it hadn't returned, because the first thing it reveals is Caitlin's triumphant grin.
"Maybe you shouldn't join the army, after all," she says, digging the point of her sword into the most prominent part of his collar bone. "Fighting like that, you'd probably get chopped to pieces in short order. I'd hate to have to bring you home to Ma and Da in a bag, little brother."
She only ever lords those twenty minutes of seniority she has over him when she's sent him sprawling. She isn't usually a sore winner about anything else, but Alasdair can think of no other reason for it other than adding a little salt into the wounds of his defeat.
He scowls at her, bats her sword aside, and tries to push himself upright. A dull ache builds inside his skull as his position changes, and he has to settle for remaining in a low crouch when it threatens to get unbearable, his chest pressed against his bent knees.
"Are you all right?" Caitlin asks. "You look like crap."
Before Alasdair has chance to reply, Caitlin roughly parts the hair at the back of his head and starts prodding at his scalp. The pain makes Alasdair's stomach spasm violently, bile scorching the back of his throat.
"Shit," Caitlin breathes unsteadily. "I'd better go and get some of that Arnica tincture from Ma, otherwise you're likely going to have a lump the size of my fist there tomorrow, Aly."
Alasdair stares down at the floor as she hurries away, concentrating on breathing evenly and not throwing up, and by the time he hears footsteps approaching again, he feels settled enough to risk lifting his head again.
The sound hadn't heralded his sister's return, it appears, but Dylan's arrival, and he stares down at Alasdair with wide, damp eyes, his bottom lip caught up between his teeth.
"You're hurt," he observes pointlessly, after a moment's silent fretting.
"I'm fine," Alasdair snaps, sharply enough that it causes Dylan to snatch back the hand he was tentatively reaching out before it can make contact. "Just had a little bump. What are you doing down here anyway? I thought you were reading."
"I've finished," Dylan says, a little morosely. "I hoped I might be able to play with you and Cait for a bit before we go back to our lessons."
"We're not playing, we're training."
The very suggestion annoys Alasdair, though he's not entirely sure whether it's due to the misconception itself – which his brother persists in no matter how many times Alasdair corrects him – or Dylan's continual need to be included in everything that Caitlin and Alasdair do. He's always tagging along after them, getting underfoot and trying to ingratiate himself with their friends, and it infuriates Alasdair at the best of times. He has absolutely no patience for it now.
"Piss off, will you?" he snaps. "I've got a bad enough headache as it is; your yammering's just going to make it worse."
Dylan's eyes turn glossy with tears, but he does take a step back. He pauses before taking another and says in a soft, wavering tone, "I overheard what Cait said to you earlier, and… You're not really going to join the army, are you, Aly?"
"As soon as we turn nineteen and they'll take us, we're both going to sign up," Alasdair tells him, because he's bound to find out eventually anyway, and it makes no odds to Alasdair whether it's sooner rather than later. "I'm counting down the fucking days."
The trip to the lake Da had taken Caitlin and Alasdair on when they were eight had birthed a desire in him to see more of the world than the small patch of Britannia defined by Deva's walls, and he'd likely travel the length and breadth of the Empire, serving in the army. Besides, Alasdair doesn't want to work in a shop, or down at the mill or tannery, and Old Town is hardly bursting with alternative employment opportunities. He might not be as skilled with a sword as he'd like, but he's strong, and Ma thinks he'll grow up to be as tall as her Da was, so soldiering seems to be something he might actually be good at.
"Maybe I'll come with you, too," Dylan suggests, seemingly forgetting that he cries every time Ma has to set down mousetraps and gets out of breath just from running up the stairs to their bedroom.
"Naw, I don't think the army's the right place for you, Dyl," Alasdair says, chuckling despite his pounding head. "You'll have started your apprenticeship with Ma by the time we leave, and Wart'll probably want to work with Da on his book, so you'll doubtless be fine without us. Cait and me, though? I can't think that of anything that might keep us from wanting to go."