I couldn't stop smiling.
It was deeply unprofessional. Arthur was almost certainly judging me for it. I found I didn't care. I was sitting in Grand Marshal Meilyn Potan's private residence, talking to her about tactics and magical theory, and she was treating me like a colleague rather than a girl who had once written her name in the margin of every notebook she owned.
Which I had not. I was a professional who happened to respect her work very much.
"Your paper on formations against undead changed how I think about fighting in groups," I heard myself say as I slipped the inscribed copy into my spatial storage. I was going to frame it. Arthur was never going to find out.
"I'm glad it was useful," Meilyn said, and she sounded as though she meant it. "Writing it was the easy part. Testing it was less pleasant. Most of the good ideas in there came from getting something wrong in front of a horde and living long enough to fix it."
