Chapter 69: THE WRONG HAND

Kallow read the order twice, which was once more than anyone in the room wanted her to.

She read standing, with her back very straight and the paper held at the distance a person keeps from something they would like to be wrong. Nobody interrupted her. Even the fox stayed quiet. Its tail had gone out like a snuffed wick and it was pressed so close to Kael’s neck that its whiskers tickled his ear.

"Well?" Sable said at last.

"It is a sealing order." Kallow lowered the sheet. "The Academy is declared an anomaly site. Nobody in, nobody out, students confined to their dormitories. I am to take custody of —" she found the line with her thumbnail — "’the program materials, and all persons named in the file of Senior Instructor Aldris.’"

"That’s us." Sera Val’s hand went to her collapsed hair. "We’re the persons. I’ve never been a person in a file before. It’s much less glamorous than I expected."

"It’s less glamorous," said Eiran, "if the file was written by someone who doesn’t know you."

He held out his hand. Kallow, after a pause, gave him the leather case instead of the letter. Eiran turned it under the candle, and his face did what it did when he read things, which was nothing. Then Kael saw something small and crooked slide into it, like a man tripping on a stair he’d climbed a thousand times.

"The stamp’s my mother’s office. That’s real." Eiran tapped the red wax. "But she loops her K. She’s looped it since she was nine. This one is just a K."

"Hurried people change their handwriting," said Lira. "I do. Mine goes completely to — "

"You’re always hurried."

"Not that kind of hurried, Sable."

"I could be wrong," Eiran said.

Lira’s head snapped round. "Don’t say that. I say that."

"I’m borrowing it."

"You can’t borrow a catchphrase!"

"It’s a very good one," said Eiran, with great dignity, and Kael caught the twitch at the corner of his mouth and understood that Eiran was joking because the alternative was not joking.

The door opened without a knock. Vareth stood there with his crushed ledger, and the part of his hair that had been standing up had now gone flat with sweat.

"A sealing order for this Academy requires three signatures from the board," he announced. "Mine is one of them. I haven’t signed anything."

"The Committee’s authority supersedes the board," said Kallow.

"When the Committee signs. This is a stamp." He opened the ledger and tapped a page. "I would remember. I count everything."

"You would make a very difficult clerk," Kallow said.

"I have been told." Vareth straightened. "I also have a rider in my front hall who requires lodging, a meal, and a thorough accounting of his horse. I intend to give him all three, in great detail. I shall want his name, his unit, the horse’s name, and the horse’s opinions. This will take as long as it takes."

Kallow looked at him for a moment. It was the longest look she’d ever given a person she hadn’t been assessing.

"A reply that takes as long as it takes," she said slowly, "is technically still a reply."

"Precisely." Vareth shut the ledger. "Please don’t ask me what I’m doing. I’m having a bureaucratic moment."

He left. Sera Val watched the door swing closed and said, in a small, awed voice, "I want him to be my uncle."

"Everyone does," said Aldris, "after the first fifteen minutes of conversation with him. Nobody ever asks again."

Aldris had put both hands on the desk, flat, and when he spoke it was in the voice he used for things he’d rehearsed for a very long time and never wanted to say.

"Today was going to be the decision. We were going to sit here, and talk it through, and you were going to choose." He looked from face to face. "That has been cancelled. I’m sorry. It was cancelled by someone who isn’t me."

"There isn’t a tomorrow, apparently," said Sable.

"Five now, then," said Torven.

Sable turned her head. "That’s not how that works."

"It’s a flexible schedule."

"Nobody’s going to decide anything sealed in a dormitory," Kael said, and they all looked at him. He hadn’t meant it to come out like a statement. "I mean — if we’re going to choose, we should be somewhere that isn’t a cage. Pack. Just in case. Then we’ll find out what the choice is."

"Just in case," said Lira, "is the most dangerous phrase in the language."

"I’m aware."

"I’ll pack," she said, and was gone before the sentence finished.

The dormitory had never looked so small.

Torven’s bag was already open and he was folding things into it with the care of a man who had once been shown how and had never forgotten. Kael watched him fold a shirt into a perfect rectangle and then, without comment, reach over and begin doing the same to Kael’s.

"I can fold my own shirt."

"It’s very wet."

"It’s damp."

"It’s a damp shirt that’s going to be a wet shirt in a pack." Torven kept folding. "Your boot has a puddle."

"It had a very bad evening."

Eiran’s pack was already finished, sitting neatly by his bed.

"How is yours already finished?" Kael said.

"Since the boot." Eiran didn’t look up. "I thought something would happen. I didn’t know what. I find it comforting to be ready for things I can’t name."

"That’s the most anxious thing you’ve ever said," said Torven.

"It’s the most honest thing I’ve said all season."

"It’s still anxious."

"Both can be true."

The fox, meanwhile, had decided that packing required supervision.

It dropped off Kael’s shoulder and inspected Torven’s bag first. Torven’s bag was orderly. The fox found a rolled pair of socks, pulled them out, and dropped them in Kael’s pack.

"Those were already packed," said Torven.

The fox looked at him.

"Right. Inspection."

It moved on to Eiran’s pack, which was finished, buckled, and aligned with the bedpost. The fox looked at it for a long moment, found nothing to object to, and seemed almost offended.

"Don’t," said Eiran, without looking up.

The fox turned, tail high, like a customs officer who had been told there was contraband and had taken it personally, and trotted straight out of the open door.

"Where’s it going?"

"Somewhere it shouldn’t," said Torven, already moving.

They caught up with it at the end of the corridor, where the boys’ wing stopped and the stairwell began. A board hung beside the landing, lettered in the Academy’s most disapproving hand: NO STUDENT BEYOND THIS POINT AFTER LAMP-LIGHTING.

The fox walked under it without breaking stride.

Kael stopped dead at the line. "We can’t go up there."

"Rule eleven," said Eiran, arriving at his elbow.

"There’s a clause for fire," said Torven.

"Is this a fire?"

They all looked at the fox’s tail, which was currently lit.

"Technically," said Torven, and went up the stairs.

The girls’ corridor was quieter than theirs and, Kael noticed, a good deal cleaner. The fox went down it with great purpose and stopped at a door standing ajar. It slipped through the gap. A moment later it slipped out again with a hairpin in its mouth.

"That’s Sera Val’s room," Eiran whispered.

"Why are you whispering?"

"I don’t know. It seemed correct."

The fox deposited the hairpin in Kael’s coat pocket, gave the pocket a pat, and moved on to the next door.

This one was wide open. The room inside looked as if a small, well-meaning storm had passed through it. Blankets hung off the bunk. A coat had been abandoned mid-sleeve. A single boot lay on its side beneath it, as if it had fainted.

Kael stayed in the corridor with his toes exactly on the threshold. "I’m not going in."

"Nobody is going in," said Torven. "We’re observing."

The fox’s tail flickered, small and focused. Then it put its whole head into the boot. The boot, to its credit, resisted for about two seconds, and the fox backed out with an expression of tremendous dignity and a wooden button gripped between its teeth.

Kael stared at it. "That’s the button."

"Which button?"

"The one nobody remembers her owning."

"Does she own it?"

"It was in her boot, Torven."

"That’s not proof of ownership. That’s proof of boots."

The fox trotted over and dropped the button on Kael’s shoe, then looked up at him as though it had just solved a murder.

"No," said Kael. "It’s hers. Put it back."

The fox did not put it back. It nudged the button once, with one paw, toward his pocket.

"Why," said a voice behind them, "are three boys standing outside my room?"

Lira stood at the top of the stairs with an armful of what might once have been a travel cloak. She looked at the open door. She looked at the boot. She looked at the button.

"Why is my boot on the floor?"

"It fell," said Kael.

"It fell toward the fox?"

"It’s a very persuasive fox."

She leaned closer. "I don’t recognize that."

"It was in your boot."

"Then someone put it there."

"Who?"

"I don’t know! That’s the problem with things in boots!"

The fox, now sitting on the windowsill with its tail curled around its paws, looked from one to the other. Then it yawned, as if the matter were closed.

Lira stared at it. "It’s not even sorry."

"It’s never sorry," said Torven.

"That’s what makes it so effective," Eiran added.

"Fine," said Lira. "Keep it. But if it turns out to be important, I’m blaming all of you."

"Understood," said Kael.

"Especially the fox."

Lumis sneezed.

Back in the dormitory, Kael tipped the button into his pack. It landed beside the hairpin, the socks, and the dented soup spoon, which the fox had by now dragged across the floor in both forepaws and deposited on top of everything with a look of enormous accomplishment.

"That’s the soup spoon," Torven said.

"It’s going," said Kael.

"It’s sentimental."

"It’s a spoon."

"It’s going," Torven agreed, and handed him a folded shirt.

The pack clinked, somewhat smugly.

He found a pen in the bottom of his bag and sat down on the edge of his bed with a sheet of paper on his knee.

Father, he wrote.

He crossed it out. Wrote it again, in case the first one had been a mistake. Looked at it. He had written to Destan a handful of times since the Academy, each letter shorter and more careful than the last, and in one of them he had put a sentence he hadn’t known the truth of until he’d already sent it. I have found people worth being around.

The fox leaned over his shoulder, took the pen in its teeth, and ran.

"Hey!" Kael lunged. The fox dodged, leaped onto Torven’s bed, and sat on the pillow with the pen held up like a trophy.

"Give it."

The fox looked at him. It twirled the pen once, slowly.

"That is evidence," said Torven, from the doorway where he had apparently been standing for some time.

"It’s a pen."

"It’s the only pen you have. You were about to write something and you looked terrified."

Kael sat back down. His face was warm. "I didn’t know what to say. I don’t know if it’s the kind of thing you write down."

Torven crossed the room and sat on the opposite bed, which put them knee to knee in the small space. He didn’t say anything for a while. He just waited, which was the thing Torven did best.

"I’m going north," Kael said finally, slowly. "I’m not alone."

"Say that."

"That’s all I have."

"Is it true?"

"Yes."

"You chose to tell him," Torven said. "That’s enough."

The words went through Kael like warm water. He had heard them once before, on a cold wall in a courtyard, and had not understood then how long they would keep working.

The fox dropped the pen into his lap.

He wrote it down. Four lines. He signed his name, folded it, and put it on his pillow where Vareth would find it, because Vareth found everything.

They gathered at the door of the fifth-floor office with their packs, six of them breathing a little too loudly, and found that Aldris had a plan.

It was not a good plan. It was, Kael thought, the best bad plan anyone could have had.

"There’s a gallery," Aldris said. "Under the north wall, beyond the pond. The Institute dug it for the instruments. It used to carry readings from relay stones buried along the lattice. It has been sealed for a very long time." He drew a small iron key from inside his coat. It was black and bent at the shoulder. "The people who built a festival to take a reading also built a service door. Every instrument has one."

"You kept the key?" Sera Val said.

"For longer than the building has had a roof."

"That’s a ridiculous sentence," said Sable.

"It’s an accurate one."

Kallow was standing at the back, a little apart. She hadn’t spoken since Vareth left, and she was holding the sealed case in one hand while the other held the order, folded small and tucked against her ribs. She had the look of someone who has just realized the floor she’s standing on is a different floor than the one she paid for.

The fox, perched on Kael’s shoulder, went rigid.

Its tail lit. Not the soft candle of before but a white, spiking flame, and every hair on its body stood out. It stared at Kallow’s coat with a fixed, unwavering gaze.

"Lumis," Kael said. "What — "

The fox leaped.

It crossed the room in a single bound and landed on Kallow’s shoulder with a small, undignified oof from the Inspector, who was not a person people landed on. It thrust its whole face into her coat and came out holding a second sheet of paper. It had been folded in half behind the first and then folded again. Kael could see at once that she had never unfolded it.

"I haven’t read that page," said Kallow. She sounded, for the first time since he had known her, entirely ordinary. "It was the covering sheet. Procedure."

"Read it," said Aldris.

She unfolded it. The paper rattled slightly. Kael watched her eyes travel down a list of names. He knew them by the shape of her mouth as she took each one: his, Lira’s, Torven’s, Sable’s, Eiran’s, Sera Val’s. Aldris’s, last in the column, underlined twice.

Then her mouth stopped.

"There’s one more line," she said.

"What does it say?" said Lira.

Kallow didn’t answer. She turned the sheet toward the candle.

— and the small one, if it has arrived. "

Nobody spoke. On Kael’s shoulder, where the fox had returned, a tiny sneeze broke the quiet like a dropped plate.

───────────────────────────

[System — Alert]

Document: second sheet

Ink: older than the wax. Wax: older than the lanterns.

Rider: left before the fox arrived.

Hold: Someone wrote that line before there was anything to write it about. I’d like to tell you it was a guess. I’d be lying.

───────────────────────────

"That’s impossible," said Lira. Her voice cracked. "The rider left before any of us knew it existed."

"I didn’t know it existed," Kallow said, very quietly. "Nobody on the Committee knew it existed." She held the paper out in front of her as if it might bite. "I had no folder for it. I told you that."

"My mother’s office," Eiran said. "Someone used my mother’s seal, and my mother’s stamp, and wrote someone else’s hand across the case." His voice had gone very flat. "And whoever they are, they were expecting a fox."

— ◆ —

— End of Chapter 69 —