She split them into groups, and handed out more frames, each strung with a different arrangement of silk.
"Here’s your problem," she said. "There’s something you need, close to a monster’s web. You have to get it, without the spider noticing you. Study your web. Work out how you’d get to it. You can touch the frame as much as you like. But before you do anything to it, you tell your group what you think it’s going to do."
Owen’s group took a frame to their table.
The strands spread out from one corner and met in a thicker knot near the middle, marked with a small black painted dot. That was where the spider would usually sit. A tiny wooden marker, standing in for whatever they were after, hung near the opposite edge.
Elias looked at it for about two seconds.
"Easy," he said. "Cut the strands between the thing and the middle. Then there’s nothing to carry the vibration back."
"Cutting them would make its own vibration, wouldn’t it?" Marianne said. "Wouldn’t the spider feel that?"
Elias opened his mouth, and then thought better of it.
"I hadn’t thought of that," he admitted.
Eveline had bent down to look at the frame from the side.
"Look," she said. She pointed. "These three strands all run back into the same point. Here. Even if you cut one, the other two would still carry the movement into the middle."
Owen studied the frame.
If this had been a real web, with a real spider, he knew exactly what he would have done. He would have burned the web, or gone straight in and killed the thing before it reached him. But that wasn’t the problem they had been given. The point was not to be noticed at all.
"What if we gave it something else to listen to?" he said. "Disturb the web somewhere on the far side. Draw it away from the marker. Then someone goes in while it’s looking the wrong way."
"I like that," Marianne said. Then she frowned. "But how do we know it goes for the distraction? It might just feel both, and come for whichever’s closer to it."
"We don’t," Owen said. "Not for certain."
"Then let’s try it," Eveline said, "and see."
Elias took the stick and touched the far side of the frame, gently, over and over, while Marianne reached in and began to ease the marker free.
It looked promising. The markers on Elias’s side were jumping.
"Stop," Eveline said suddenly.
Marianne froze.
Eveline pointed. One of the strands holding up the marker ran back toward the middle of the web through a supporting thread they hadn’t looked at properly. Every time Marianne moved her hand, the black dot in the centre trembled.
Owen studied the frame a second time.
They had been so focused on the strands nearest the marker that they hadn’t thought about what those strands were tied to. He had looked at the obvious part and stopped there.
"The support," he said. "We need to come in from a different side. Away from the threads that run back to the middle."
They worked out a new route, one that only touched the looser strands at the edge. Then they tried again.
This time, when Marianne reached in, the black dot barely moved.
"Better," Eveline said.
Professor de Montfort had been drifting from table to table. Now she came and stood at the end of theirs.
"Tell me what you did," she said.
"We got it wrong the first time," Elias said. "We didn’t think about the support strands. All the movement went straight back up through them."
"So we changed our way in," Eveline said. "We kept away from anything that was pulled tight or ran into the middle."
"But it would still depend on where the real spider was," Marianne said. "And what it was doing."
The professor looked pleased.
"That’s good thinking," she said. "All of it." She tapped the frame. "But remember, this is wood and silk. A living spider might ignore your distraction altogether. It might go and investigate. Or it might do something entirely different, depending on whether it’s hunting, or feeding, or guarding a nest." She smiled. "Your plan is a good one because you thought about how the creature senses the world. Not because it’s certain to work. Nothing is certain to work."
She moved on to the next table.
* * *
While the rest of the groups finished, Owen found himself watching the table beside theirs.
One of the frames there had come loose at the corner, and the girl holding it was struggling to keep it steady. A boy in her group reached over without being asked and held it still for her. Then, while she retied it, he pointed to one of the supporting strands.
"That one’s carrying more than you’d think," he said. "Look, it goes all the way up to the top."
His group looked. Then they changed their plan around it.
He didn’t make a fuss about it. He just went back to watching the frame.
When the groups began taking their frames back up to the professor’s desk, Elias ended up beside him.
"That was a good spot," Elias said. "The one at the top."
"Somebody had to notice it," the boy said. "Otherwise we’d still be here tomorrow."
Elias grinned, and they both put their frames down and went back to their tables.
Owen recognised him. He had been in the line on the parade ground, one of the fifty. They had stood in the same formations. But they had never had any reason to speak.
When everyone was back in their seats, Professor de Montfort leaned back against her desk.
"Now," she said. "Has anyone here actually met a Giant Spider? Outside of training, I mean."
A few hands went up.
Elias put his up too. Marianne leaned across the table and pushed it back down.
"All four of us did," she reminded him. "In the examination."
"Really?" The professor looked delighted. "Tell me."
Elias launched into it. Before he had got very far, the ravine had become much darker, the webs much thicker, and the spiders much larger.
"There were not twenty of them," Marianne said.
"It felt like twenty."
"There were six."
"Six large ones."
"Four of them were small."
Some of the cadets nearby were laughing openly. Professor de Montfort let it go on for a moment, then held up a hand.
"Let’s try it differently," she said. "When you went in. How did you move through their territory? Did you notice anything about how they reacted to things around them?"
Owen spoke up.
"We heard someone shouting for help inside," he said. "There was web everywhere, over the branches, across the rocks. When something moved deeper in, I saw the strands shake. I thought that if we touched them, the rest of them would know where we were. But we went in anyway. Lady Loxley was caught in it, and Lady Harcourt was trying to cut her free. The spiders came out of the rocks and down from the webs when we got close."
"Did you notice which disturbances they reacted to?" the professor asked. "Before they attacked?"
Owen thought about it.
He had been watching the two big ones, and the girls, and where to put his feet. Whatever had happened in the web while he fought, he hadn’t been looking at it.
"No," he said honestly. "I was mostly trying to stop them reaching anyone. I couldn’t tell you what set them off."
The professor didn’t seem to think any less of him for it.
"That’s all right," she said. "You survived it. All four of you. That counts for a great deal." She looked around the room. "But that’s the point of this class. When you understand how a creature notices you, you have more choices. Sometimes the best thing you can do with a monster is not fight it at all."
Owen sat with that.
His sword, and everything the Infinite Arsenal gave him, meant he could beat things most fighters couldn’t. But that didn’t mean every encounter had to end with something dead. Not if there was a better way.
He thought about the rifle.
Its reach was enormous. He could hit something before he ever stepped into its territory. But that noise. In a place like that ravine, one shot would have told every spider in it exactly where he was. And whatever else lived nearby.
If he knew how a monster sensed things, he would know far better when to use the rifle. And when to keep it out of sight, and go quietly. And when not to go in at all.
* * *
Professor de Montfort went back behind her desk.
"Your first assignment," she said.
A few cadets groaned quietly.
"In your groups, pick an ordinary monster. Something from the Academy’s approved references. Then write me a short field report on it. Where it lives. How it hunts, how it defends itself. How it senses things. Where it’s weak. And what precautions you’d take before going near it." She looked around at them. "And then tell me how all of that would change what a military patrol did if it ran into one."
She held up a finger.
"If you copy the entry out of a bestiary and hand it to me, I’ll know. That isn’t what I want. I want you to take what you know and turn it into decisions."
The reaction was mixed. Some of the cadets were already leaning toward each other, arguing about which monster they knew best. Others looked less than thrilled about writing reports after a lesson spent poking at spider silk.
Elias turned and looked at Owen, with the hopeful expression of someone waiting for someone else to volunteer to be in charge.
"You’ve perfected the art of avoiding paperwork, haven’t you?" Marianne said.
"I was thinking about how best to divide the work," Elias said. "That’s all."
"First, we should choose a monster we can all write about," Eveline said. "One all four of us know a bit about."
"Agreed," Owen said. "Let’s look at what references they have first."
The professor asked them to bring the rest of the equipment back to the front. She checked the silk frames herself as they came in, holding each one up to the light. When one boy almost bent a frame trying to stack it on top of another, she caught his wrist gently.
"Careful," she said. "That silk is very old, and very fragile. If it snaps, I can’t replace it." She took the frame from him and laid it down flat. "Thank you for stopping."
Owen watched her.
She was nothing like Pike, or Shaw. Her classroom was looser, louder, and full of things in jars. But she missed nothing. She had known exactly what every group was doing. And she wanted them to think before they decided anything.
He realised he was already looking forward to the next lesson.
"Next time," the professor said, as they began to gather their things, "we’ll be looking at a different side of monster behaviour. I’ve got some wonderful specimens put aside for it."
She sounded thrilled.
Elias looked considerably less so.
* * *
"Do you think the next ones will smell worse?" Marianne asked, as they came out into the corridor.
"I would honestly prefer not to find out," Elias said.
"We still need to pick a monster," Eveline reminded them.
The corridor was crowded with cadets spilling out of other classes. Footsteps and voices bounced off the stone, and somewhere behind them an instructor was calling after someone who had left a book behind.
"Giant Spiders," Elias said. "Obviously. We’ve already fought them."
"Knowing how to kill one isn’t the same as knowing how it behaves," Marianne said. "Which is the entire thing she just spent an hour telling us."
Elias started to argue, then gave up.
"Fine," he said. "That’s fair."
"We could go to the study rooms later," Eveline said. "See what they actually have before we choose."
"Let’s do that," Owen said.
He had enjoyed the lesson far more than he had expected. And he wanted to know what the Academy’s records said about some of the other things he had fought.
It had given him a different way of thinking about hunting. Not just how to kill something, but whether he needed to, and how to get close to it, and when to draw a sword and when to keep the rifle out of sight. He could see that it was going to matter, out on whatever expeditions were waiting for them.
"Do you think," Elias said, as they turned the corner, "she’s going to bring a whole spider next time?"
"Maybe a whole nest," Marianne said. "With the eggs still in it."
Elias stopped dead in the middle of the corridor.
"I’m not going," he said.
Owen laughed and kept walking.