Hermes found himself surrounded by eleven children. All of them taller than him.
A voice broke the silence.
"Filthy mongrel." It was a familiar voice — the same one from professor Abano's class. Up close it carried a note of hesitation beneath the bravado. "Did you tell on us?"
"Tell on you about what?" Hermes replied coolly.
"You know exactly what I'm asking! Stop pretending!"
"I genuinely have no idea what you're talking about, young master," Hermes said, with a pleasantly blank expression.
"You—" The boy seemed momentarily robbed of language.
"You rat!" another boy cut in from the side. "You told on us! Coward!"
"Again, I have no idea what you're talking about," Hermes said patiently. "Now. Where is my mattress? Because if someone has done something to it, I am absolutely telling on you."
"You— I'll have my brother deal with you! My older brother is a prefect! I'll make your life a living hell!"
"I couldn't care less," Hermes said. "If you do that I'll tell on the prefect as well."
The silence that followed was profound.
Half a minute passed. Everyone stood very still. It was, objectively, quite awkward.
"You won't," the leader said finally, recovering some of his haughtiness. "If you tell on a prefect you lose seniority. When you become an upperclassman you won't be able to order any junior around. You wouldn't dare."
"I couldn't care less about that either," Hermes said. "You have one minute to produce a mattress before I go find Professor Abano."
No one moved.
Every eye drifted toward the leader. He stood very still, jaw working silently, the expression of someone doing extremely unpleasant arithmetic.
Then, in a voice that suggested it physically pained him:
"Get his mattress from the cupboard! What are you standing around for!"
The group scrambled toward a cupboard in the corner. They hauled out a mattress folded in on itself and began carrying it toward his bunk.
Hermes held up a hand.
"Woah, woah, woah. Wait."
They stopped.
"What now, peasant?!" the leader snapped.
"I don't know what you did to that mattress," Hermes said reasonably. "You could have urinated on it. You could have made love to it." He paused. "I don't know your situation. I'm not here to judge."
The room went very quiet.
"You— that is DISGUSTING! Why would we— you're disgusting!" the leader sputtered, looking genuinely offended in a way that suggested this particular accusation had never occurred to him before and he was unhappy it had occurred to him now.
"Regardless," Hermes continued, unmoved, "I don't trust it. I want your mattress."
"MY mattress?! You want me to sleep on that filthy cheap rag?! Have you completely lost your mind?!"
"Yes and no," Hermes said. "Consider the alternative. I go to Professor Abano. She takes me to Headmaster Roland. You may recall that Headmaster Roland was very recently made aware of my talent as a true seer." He let that land for a moment. "The first true seer in eight hundred years. I wonder what he would do to someone who wronged such a person."
He was lying through his teeth, of course.
But the alpha male leader didn't know that.
The constipated expression that crossed the boy's face was, objectively, one of the finest things Hermes had ever witnessed.
"…Fine," the leader said, through what appeared to be significant physical effort. He gestured curtly at one of the others, who fetched his mattress and placed it on Hermes's bunk. The leader then took that boy's mattress for himself, passing Hermes's original — which did indeed look more like a defeated rag than a sleeping surface — down the line until someone at the end got stuck with it.
Gradually, resentfully, everyone returned to bed.
Hermes lay down.
Oh.
This is an excellent mattress.
He was asleep within minutes.