Malcris let the wrong answer remain on the board while three people defended it.
The first called a delivery a gift. The second said a gift from a great house created an obligation. The third was still explaining what the academy owed its patrons when the professor put down the chalk and asked where the word 'gift' appeared in the document.
Nobody answered at once. I stopped trying to settle my right hand comfortably beneath the desk and looked at the sheet we had been given.
It was a copied delivery record, with the names omitted for the exercise. A date, a description, a receiving mark. Nothing about a gift. The first student turned the sheet over in case the missing word was on the back.
"It isn't a foolish reading," Malcris said. "A delivery can be a gift. But you have begun writing the history of a relationship before deciding what was delivered."
He crossed out the wrong answer neatly enough that it was still legible.
