Chapter 166: Everybody Sits Gareth bit first.

He did exactly what he’d said he would. He picked up the loaf at his own place, the very first loaf in the hall, and broke it open with both hands, and a thin curl of steam rose from the crumb. He sniffed it. He looked across two thousand faces. He raised the piece in a little toast.

Then he ate it.

I was fifty feet away, and I saw the exact second it hit his tongue. His shoulders loosened. His jaw stopped clenching. The deep lines around his eyes, the ones cut by a lifetime of casualty lists, smoothed out like a sheet being shaken flat.

"Good bread," Gareth said, in a soft, happy, faraway voice. "That’s really good bread."

He sat down.

"No," I whispered. "No, no, no—"

Then the hall began to eat.

It started in the first rows and rolled back like a tide. Students tore their loaves in half. Steam poured out of them. They laughed, ate, passed butter, and then, one by one, they stopped laughing. They didn’t stop eating. They just got quieter. A low, soft humming rose out of two thousand throats at once, tuneless and warm, like a hive settling down for the night. A girl at the next table was crying quietly into her loaf while she chewed, tears running down her chin, and she didn’t seem to notice. A boy behind her fed his bread to his friend, piece by piece, like a mother bird. Everyone looked so happy. It was the most terrible thing I’d seen all week.

At Cell One’s table, Castor had gone absolutely still.

"Nobody touch it," he said, without moving his lips. "Nobody. Lyra, Pollux. Hands under the table."

"I’m hungry," Pollux said, in a small, strange voice.

"I know."

"It smells so good."

"I know, Pollux. Sit on your hands."

She did, grinding her teeth, a battle maniac vibrating with the effort of not eating a roll. Lyra had her arms around Casper’s shoulders, and he’d wrapped his own around himself, shaking, staring at the loaf in front of him with an expression of absolute misery.

"Valen," he croaked. "It’s calling me."

"Look at me. Look at me, Cas. Not it."

He looked. His eyes were wet.

"Seven open the door," Castor said. I could see the gears turning behind his eyes. "That’s what the baker said. Seven at the head, and the loaves bring the rest. If the seven sit, the door opens. So the first rule is simple." He lifted his chin toward the dais. "Nobody sits in those chairs."

I looked up.

Chairs one through four were already full. Four Cell Representatives sat bolt upright at the head table with half-eaten loaves in front of them, perfectly polite, eyes glazed, humming in time with the hall.

Four down. Three to go. Five, six, and seven stood empty, waiting.

"So we need to stop everyone eating," Lyra said weakly. "Two thousand students."

"Two thousand and one," I said. "Gareth."

"Two thousand and four," Castor corrected. "Four Representatives. And there’s one thing we can’t do."

"What?"

"Be reasonable." He stood. "Pollux. How do you feel about a scene?"

She looked up. Her grin could have cut glass.

"Thank you," she said.

I’ll be honest. I don’t remember who started it. I like to think it was me.

Pollux got the first table. She grabbed the corner, heaved, and sent it over like a trapdoor. Plates exploded. Glass rained. Two hundred freshly poured goblets of wine splashed over two hundred half-eaten loaves, and a hundred students stared down at the wreckage with empty, dreamy smiles.

"MOVE!" Pollux roared. "EVERYBODY DROP IT!"

Pollux snatched a loaf out of a boy’s hand and hurled it at the ceiling, where it burst against a chandelier. The boy burst into tears. "I’m sorry!" she yelled. "I’m not sorry! DON’T EAT IT!"

Castor took the second table, neatly, like a man flipping a pancake, and apologized to the diners as they went by. I took the third. The staff stayed a rod, because I couldn’t afford anything else, but I put it under the lip of the table and heaved, and the whole thing went over in a crash of silver and crumbs.

"Don’t eat it!" I yelled, climbing onto a chair. "It’s not bread! It’s a trap! Drop it! Drop it now!"

Two thousand heads turned slowly toward me.

Not one of them blinked. Not one of them dropped a crumb.

"Please," a girl near the front said, in a mild, dreamy voice. "Please sit down."

"You’re sitting at a table with a hundred dead cultists!"

"Please sit down." A boy beside her. "It’s so nice here."

"Sit," said a third. "Sit, sit, sit."

It spread across the room, a whisper turning into a chant. Sit. Sit. Sit. Hands reached for me from the nearest rows, gentle, warm, patient. I jerked back and the rod cracked against a chair, and for the first time in a very long time, I was scared.

Valerian, Aurelix whispered, thin and frightened. There are too many of them.

"I know."

Don’t hurt them. They’re not themselves.

"I know, Aurelix."

"Seize that boy!"

The voice cut across the hum like a scalpel. I knew it before I turned.

The Doctor was standing on his chair at the head table, small and pale in his stained coat, one finger pointed at me like a prosecutor. The two Inspectors had risen on either side of him, hands on their sword hilts. They weren’t humming. They hadn’t eaten.

Of course they hadn’t.

"That boy," the Doctor announced, in a ringing voice that carried to the back of the hall, "was seen in the kitchens last night, where five staff were murdered in their sleep! That boy has been seen near the granary, where five more were slaughtered by the Ghost! That boy forged the seating cards on this very table, and I have the proof in my coat!"

My stomach dropped through the floor.

"He’s made a mess of the Founders’ Feast," the Doctor said, and his voice quivered with delighted outrage. "He’s overturned tables. He’s spoiled the bread. And he’s put every student in this hall in danger, for reasons I fear are dark."

The Inspectors came down off the dais.

"That’s a lie!" Pollux shouted.

"It’s a very good one," Castor said quietly. "Well done, Doctor."

The hall’s chant swelled behind them. Sit. Sit. Sit. The Inspectors drew their swords. Gareth, glassy-eyed, smiling gently from his chair, raised a hand and let it fall, and the guards at the doors began to move in.

Open the notch, Aurelix said, very small. Valerian. Just one. You’d win in a breath.

And then Valen’s gone, I thought. In front of two thousand witnesses. And the Doctor gets every word of it for free.

I kept the guard shut. I raised the rod instead, like a clerk with a bad idea.

"Inspector." A boot hit the floor in front of me, and a rapier slid out of its sheath with a long, clean whisper. Solene stepped between us in her good grey coat, straight as a pin, and her point settled under the older Inspector’s chin without a tremor. "He’s a clerk with a cracked rib. I can personally vouch that he didn’t forge a thing."

"Representative—"

"I can also vouch that the bread’s wrong. You haven’t touched yours. Why not?" She smiled at him, and it wasn’t kind. "Take one step and I’ll start keeping a list of you."

The Inspector’s eyes flicked toward the Doctor. The Doctor said nothing. He only smiled wider.

It bought me four seconds. I’d never been so grateful for four seconds in my life.

I’d planned for a lot of things. I hadn’t planned for being the villain.

"Valen!" Lyra cried. "Casper!"

I whirled.

Casper had stood up.

He’d shaken off Lyra’s arms like a coat. He stood in the aisle with the loaf in both hands, eyes wide and shining, the thumbprint under his left eye open and wet and glowing. His mouth moved, and a different voice came out of it. Soft. Patient. Warm as an oven.

"It’s time," the Giver said, through him. "It’s time for dinner."

He started walking toward the dais.

"Casper!" I leapt off my chair. A guard grabbed my arm. I twisted, drove the rod into his gut, and he folded. A second guard hit me from the side, and I went down on my knees in the spilled wine. "Casper! Stop!"

He didn’t stop. He climbed the three steps of the dais like a sleepwalker, slowly, serenely, and pulled out the chair marked with his name.

CASPER.

"Don’t!" Lyra screamed, and she was running, but Pollux caught her around the waist and held on, sobbing. "He’s going to sit!"

Castor was already moving. Pollux was crying. Mirain stood frozen at her own chair, her hand pressed flat against her coat where the loaf was, and her face was a white mask. I could hear it from here. A thin, sweet humming from inside the cloth, singing her name over and over.

Casper put a hand on the back of the chair.

I got one leg under me. I looked up.

And across the whole length of the hall, two thousand faces, smooth and calm and smiling, turned toward me at once.

"Seventh," they said, in one voice. "Sit."