Page 40 of The Headmaster’s Binding

The instrument case stood open on a trestle at the dark edge of the candlelight, level on its brass feet. It had been below since Wednesday. That is where my good news went, the afternoon I declined to audit it: the case that sat over my college all term was carried down ahead of the harvest, to take the measure of what the working lifted out of him. The office does not merely take. It weighs. Every needle behind the glass stood hard against the far end of its travel. One had gone past the end, and stayed.

"Two of yours will go up that stair on other men's shoulders," Wren said. "A floor has cracked that held for nine centuries. And there is a bound pair in my inspection, which is a thing I have read of in the older instruments and never once shared a room with. My mandate contains one sentence, Headmaster. You know the sentence."

"I know the sentence."

"Then you know what tonight is, if I write it plainly."

"An irregularity." The word did not cover it. We both stood there while it failed to.

"Request the ruling," she said. "Tonight, over your own name, before the office reads the night in mine. A man who reports himself chooses the first sentence. It is the only sentence he chooses. It is not nothing."

I wrote the request standing at the trestle, on paper Neave produced from the case's lid as though the case had expected to be asked. Eleven lines. I reported the working, the detonation, the crack, the feeding. I reported the binding: performed by myself, forbidden, witnessed, holding. I requested an emergency ruling as to the disposition of the pair. In the field that asks how the latent came to be assessed, I wrote: revealed under the working. I record that my hand was steady in that field, and I record nothing further about that field tonight.

Neave took the page up the thirty-one steps without a light, carrying the tray without one degree of tilt. Wren stayed one minute longer. She looked at the man on the slab, at the breathing, at my hand where it had gone back to his sternum without consulting me, and she said, "Sixty years," and nothing else, and went up after her assistant into the dark.

* * *

The two hurt officers went up on shoulders. Nobody's shoulder came near him. He is my charge; as of twenty-two minutes past one that is not sentiment, it is the oldest doctrine left standing in this room; and I picked him up off the slab myself, one arm under his knees and one under his shoulders, his head finding the hollow of my collar with the accuracy of a thing coming home to a hook, and I carried him toward the stair.

I had intended Corbett. His own bed, his own lamp, his own locks: the version of tonight in which I remain only its officer. I got him to the third step before the binding corrected my intention. Distance is now a wire run between two sternums. At four yards it hums. I did not go looking for what it does at forty. The Lodge, then. My own bed. Doctrine may enter that however doctrine likes.

There are forty-one doors between the undercroft and my bedroom, counting the one at the stair foot that has no handle on its inner face. I know because I counted them, and I must enter the counting itself, because it was not mine. Counting is what he does, to stay inside a room. Somewhere near the ninth door I noticed the count arriving in his cadence, tallying the doors as they gave way, and I let it run, because my arms were full of the rest of him and the count was carrying its share.

Croft had the doors. The gatehouse stood dark tonight because a paper he could not refuse had moved him off his own gate, and he was back at his post now with the whole ring of keys, and what he said, holding the seventeenth door, was, "Sir." I will not translate it. It does not go into other words without getting smaller.

We crossed the quad in the last of the night. The fog lay level on the lawns and let us through. Above the east range, one window in the guest suite was lit, and I did not look at it past the once required to know it was hers.

* * *

There is a chair in my bedroom that came with the Lodge. It stands on the near side of the hearth, angled to face the bed, and in nine years I have never sat in it, because a man who lives alone has no use for a chair that watches a bed. I put him under my own blankets, and I built the fire up from the night before so that the room would be warm and not warming, and I sat in the chair.

Behind my sternum, where twenty-six years of order used to live, there is a second heart. That is not a figure of speech, and I decline to make it one. Through the first hour it ran fast and light and shallow, the heart of a man running somewhere in his sleep, and mine would not settle for hearing it. Between four and five the two of them negotiated. I could not tell you the terms. Mine slowed, or his rose, or the wire between them shortened until slack went out of it, and they came to rest a half-beat apart, his answering mine the way the far door of a corridor answers the near one. Then not even the half-beat. I sat in the watching chair with two pulses in my chest, and the college was silent above its fed dark, and I did the accounting a man does when the books are burned.

Near five, my own mind asked me a question in a shape I do not use. I file; I do not itemize. The question arrived numbered, an item, in his cadence, from the country behind my sternum where the vault now stands: what does he look like when he laughs. It is his question. I would put the station on it; it is some early entry in that green notebook, struck through, no doubt, and filed as never having happened, and it is loose in me now, asking itself in his voice. I did not answer it. I know the answer. Two men in this room know what I look like when I laugh, and only one of them was awake for it.

Here is what I do not know, entered in order. I do not know what the office will rule, or whether the ruling will treat him as an asset or as an appetite. I do not know who convened my station around me, or whose voice said one quiet syllable on the cloister walk at twenty minutes to ten. The walk and the hour are not knowledge I gathered; the binding handed me his last waking minute, unasked, the bond's first involuntary gift, and I do not yet know what it will hand me next. I do not know what he will say when he wakes, or in what order he will hate me, or whether the man who permitted himself one page about December still exists to spend it. The candle on the small room's sill has burned to its socket by now, and I do not know whose hand lit it.

I know where he is.

I said it aloud, to the room, to the record, to whatever lies under this college listening with its meal inside it.

"I have you. That is the last thing I am certain of."

Chapter 19

Thomas

Iwoke up certain of exactly one thing, and it wasn't mine.

I want to be precise about the order, because the order is the whole story of that evening. Before I knew where I was, before I knew when it was, before I remembered the slab or the tape or the blue, I knew that somebody in the room was sorry. Not sorry the way a card is sorry. Sorry with enough pressure to fill the room: guilt with a pulse in it, and under the guilt a long cold shelf of fear, and under the fear, banked way down where its owner clearly believed I couldn't see it, a warmth aimed at me that I recognized the way you recognize your own handwriting. I'd felt it once before, for eleven seconds, through my palm on his chest in the rain.

I opened my eyes in a strange bed and said, "Get out of my chest."

He was in a chair by the fire, angled at the bed, and he looked like a man who had been sitting in it for years. No jacket. Sleeves still rolled from whatever the small hours had needed from him. Blood dried at one nostril, which on any other man means a fight and on this one apparently means Thursday.

"You are at the Lodge," he said. "You have slept fourteen hours. Nothing has been done to you while you slept, and nothing will be."

"Done to me." I sat up too fast, and the room tilted, and his hand twitched on the chair arm, a whole aborted lunge in one inch of movement, and I felt the fear spike in him as if it were my fear, which is when the fury arrived, right on schedule, wearing its boots. "That's a hell of a verb, coming from you. Somebody drugged me off a footpath. Somebody taped me to a rock in your cellar like a tarp on a woodpile. Somebody opened a tap in the middle of me and started pouring me out into the floor, and then you, personally, you put your hand on me and moved in. I can feel you. You're in my chest like a filing cabinet fell through the ceiling. Which part of any of that was I asked about?"