Brienne-le-Château, September 1779
The mathematics room was the one place at Brienne where Napoleone didn't feel like a guest in someone else's country.
Father Patrauld ran his class the way Napoleone privately thought every class should be run: no patience for boys who hadn't done the work, no interest in accents or coats or family names, only in whether the proof on the slate in front of him actually held together. It was the one hour of the day where being right mattered more than being liked, and Napoleone was, without much modesty about it, usually right.
He wasn't always first, though.
"You've made an error," said the boy at the next desk, leaning over without asking permission first. "Third line. You've carried the wrong figure."
Napoleone looked down at his own slate, annoyed before he'd even confirmed it, and then annoyed further because the boy was correct. He erased the line and redid it in silence.
"You're welcome," the boy said, not unkindly, more amused than smug about it.
"I hadn't thanked you yet."
"I could see you working up to it." He grinned, easy in a way that didn't feel like the easy confidence of a Verrier or a Cerisay, less like a boy who'd never lost anything and more like a boy who simply liked people and hadn't yet been given a good enough reason to stop. "Bourrienne. Louis. We've been in the same class three weeks and you've never once asked my name."
"I've been busy."
"So I've heard." Something flickered behind Bourrienne's eyes, not unkind, but not entirely innocent either, the look of a boy who'd clearly heard at least one version of the Verrier story going around the dormitory. "You're the one they call la paille-au-nez."
"I'm aware."
"I don't think it's a very good name for you, if it helps."
"It doesn't particularly matter to me whether it's good."
"No," Bourrienne agreed, studying him with open curiosity now, "I don't imagine it does."
They worked in silence for a while after that, slates scratching, Father Patrauld's voice droning through the next proof at the front of the room. Napoleone finished his work early, as he usually did, and found himself, against his own better instincts, glancing over at Bourrienne's slate instead of simply sitting with his hands folded the way he normally would.
"Your seventh line's wrong," he said.
Bourrienne blinked, checked it, and swore under his breath. "How did you see that upside down?"
"I didn't see it upside down. I see it because I already finished the same proof two minutes ago and yours doesn't match mine."
"Insufferable." But he was already erasing the line, correcting it, glancing sideways with something that looked less like irritation and more like the beginning of interest. "You're fast at this."
"Faster than everyone but Father Patrauld, according to Father Patrauld."
"And humble too. A rare combination." Bourrienne finished the correction and sat back, satisfied. "What are you like at Latin?"
"Terrible."
"Genuinely terrible, or terrible the way boys say they're terrible when they mean they haven't tried very hard?"
"Genuinely." Napoleone said it flatly, without embarrassment, because there was no strategic advantage in pretending otherwise to a boy who was clearly going to find out within the week regardless. "I can read it well enough to suffer through Livy if I have to. I can't write two lines of it without Father Berton wincing."
"Then we've found something to trade." Bourrienne said it simply, like the conclusion had been obvious from the start and he was only now getting around to stating it out loud. "I'm the reverse of you. Mathematics makes my head ache, and I'd rather copy out a page of Cicero for pleasure than solve a single one of Patrauld's proofs. You help me here, I help you there. Nobody has to know it's charity, since it plainly isn't."
Napoleone considered this, turning it over the way he turned over everything, looking for the angle where it cost him something he hadn't agreed to.
He didn't find one.
"How old are you," he asked instead, mostly to buy himself another moment before answering.
"Ten. Since July." Bourrienne tilted his head. "You?"
"Also ten. Since last month."
"A month apart, then." Something in Bourrienne's face shifted, pleased in a way that seemed entirely unguarded, entirely without calculation, which was itself strange enough to Napoleone that he found himself studying it the way he studied everything unfamiliar. "That settles it. I refuse to be outdone in mathematics by a boy only a month older than I am. You'll have to help me now, purely as a matter of principle."
"That isn't how principle works."
"It's exactly how principle works, when I'm the one explaining it." Bourrienne held out his hand, an odd, oddly formal little gesture for two boys sitting on a hard wooden bench in a room that smelled of chalk dust and old ink. "Louis de Bourrienne."
Napoleone looked at the offered hand for a moment longer than was strictly polite, the old habit of weighing every gesture for what it might actually cost him, and found, for once, that he couldn't locate the cost anywhere in it at all.
"Napoleone Buonaparte," he said, and shook it.
"I know," Bourrienne said, grinning again. "Everyone knows. You're rather difficult to miss, for a boy who spends every free hour hiding in the library."
"I don't hide."
"You withdraw very thoroughly, then, if you'd prefer the word."
"I prefer neither. I read." Napoleone said it a touch sharper than he'd meant to, and Bourrienne, to his mild surprise, didn't flinch from the sharpness or apologize for having caused it. He simply waited, unbothered.
"Read with me sometime, then," Bourrienne said, once the moment had passed. "I won't make you talk if you'd rather not. I'm told I talk enough for two people regardless."
Napoleone almost smiled. Didn't, quite. But almost.
"We'll see," he said, which was, for a boy who'd learned by now to give away as little as possible for free, very nearly a yes.
Father Patrauld called the class back to attention before either of them could say anything further, and Napoleone bent back over his slate, the next proof already forming in his mind, aware, in some small and unfamiliar corner of himself, that something about the last quarter hour had shifted in a way none of his careful watching had quite prepared him for.
He didn't yet have a name for it. He only knew that when the bell rang at the end of the lesson, he found himself, for the first time since Ajaccio, not entirely relieved to see it end.