Chapter 122: Eventually Is Not Monday

Here is what I felt, in order, in the second and a half before I answered.

First: nothing.

A clean, cold, entirely empty second. The way a hall goes quiet before everyone decides to smile.

Second: a certificate in my hands, and a room full of kind voices.

Third: my father setting a pen down.

Fourth, and this is the one I am least proud of, and the one I am writing down anyway:

A very small, very precise voice that said *they are not wrong.*

I have carried that voice since I was ten.

It is not loud.

It never says anything cruel.

It simply produces, at intervals, a completely accurate summary of the arithmetic.

And then waits.

I have never once argued it into silence.

***

What I said was, "Sit down."

"I’d rather..."

"Sit down, Marren. You are going to be standing for three days, and I would like ninety seconds of that not to involve looming."

He sat.

Delia sat faster.

***

"You’re right," I said.

That surprised both of them.

Which was the point.

And which is also the only honest way to begin.

"B potential. Nineteen of you will pass me. Some of you already have. Ashwin’s core moved last week and mine did not, and we both know it."

Marren opened his mouth.

"I am not finished. If this competition is a measure of who will be strongest in ten years, then you should not be taking instructions from me, and I would say so in front of the Headmaster."

I allowed that to sit.

"Is it?"

He frowned. "Is it what?"

"A measure of who will be strongest in ten years."

"...We don’t know."

"No. We find out on Monday."

I picked the list back up, because my hands wanted something to do and I was not going to let them select what.

"That is my entire answer. But you asked it properly at the end, so I will give you the rest."

***

"Potential is growth rate."

One finger.

"Professor Selene said so in the first lecture. Eleven people in this class wrote it down and stopped believing it before dinner. It tells you how quickly somebody climbs. It tells you nothing about where they are standing on Monday morning."

Second finger.

"Eventually, all of you will pass me. Eventually is not Monday."

Third.

"And on Monday somebody will stand in a room and describe a competition that nobody has been permitted to prepare for. Which means it will not be won by whoever strikes hardest. If it were, they would have told us to train. They deliberately did not tell us to train, and then they gave us a weekend of nothing to be certain we understood that."

I lowered my hand.

"You are not being asked to accept me because I am strong. I am not strong. I have never been strong, and I am not going to pretend otherwise three days before something dangerous."

I looked at him.

"You are being asked to accept that somebody made a decision. And that the last decision he made of this kind placed a class of thirty-six people with no weapons and no advantages into first, against four classes that had both."

***

Delia said, "Then why isn’t he here?"

And there it was.

I had four answers prepared. I built them on Friday night in the dark, in the order I intended to use them.

*He is unwell.*

Technically true.

*He is recovering from three fractured ribs.*

Also true.

*He has been awake for three days and is no use to anybody.*

True, and closer.

*He trusts me.*

That was the fourth.

That was the one I had been saving.

I should be truthful here. I had been looking forward to saying it. I turned it over on Friday night the way one turns over a good line, and I liked the shape of it, and I liked what it would sound like in a room.

I opened my mouth to say it.

And did not.

***

Because I was thinking, suddenly and without permission, about three letters.

He wrote to me from the border for five years.

Badly. Rarely. Mostly about weather and food and a man called Valerian who apparently did not believe in sleep.

Then, when he was thirteen, three letters arrived in a row that were about nothing at all.

Not short.

Long. Longer than anything he had sent before.

Extensively, carefully, exhaustively about nothing.

In handwriting that had gone wrong in a way I had no name for at the time and have one for now.

And when he came home, a year later, there were three names he did not say.

I know there were three because I counted the gaps.

I count things he says.

I have never told him that I also count the things he does not.

***

"He is not here," I said, and my voice had gone somewhere slower than I intended, "because if he were here, he would have to choose."

Marren blinked. "Choose what?"

"Which one of you stands where he cannot reach."

The common room had gone quiet.

I had not noticed it happening.

There were considerably more than two people listening by then, and I suspect there had been from the beginning.

"Whatever indirectly means on Monday," I said, "it means he will be somewhere else while thirty-six people are somewhere dangerous."

I made myself finish it.

"He has done that before. Not a competition. Somewhere real. It did not go well, and he has never spoken about it. Not to me. Not to anyone in this building. Not once in two years."

Marren had stopped being unpleasant somewhere in the previous thirty seconds and had not yet determined what to be instead.

"You want to know why it is me," I said.

"...Yes."

"Because I am the only person in this class he could hand it to without weighing the rest of you against each other."

I folded the list.

"He did not choose me over you, Marren. He chose me instead of choosing."

***

I sent them away after that.

There is a point past which a thing stops being a conversation and becomes an audience, and I have never enjoyed being looked at while I am correct.

Marren stopped at the door.

"For what it’s worth," he said, "I’d have picked Cedric."

"Cedric would have picked you."

He considered that.

"That’s worse," he said.

And left.

***

I worked until nine.

The barrier group ran until the light went.

Roland reported that two of the four can pack a wound, that two of them are extremely confident, and that the confident ones are not the same two.

Lena corrected my medical list twice more and then apologised, unnecessarily, and I told her not to, and she did it again an hour later.

By evening Sanctuary had a shape.

Not a strategy.

Nobody can build a strategy for rules that do not exist.

But thirty-six people knew where they were standing, and who was standing beside them, and what they were to do first when somebody finally told them to do something.

That is not nothing.

That is, in fact, most of it.

I did that.

It will not appear in any window. There is no measurement for it and no certificate and no rank, and if you placed my status beside every other person in that yard I would come out below thirty-five of them.

I did it anyway.

And it worked.

I am going to allow myself one sentence about that, and then continue.

***

I went up at half past nine to tell him.

I had a list of things to be angry about and I had refined it all day, and the best one was no longer about the eleven words at all.

*Two of your own class asked me why you were not there. I had to answer it for you. I did not know the answer myself until I heard it leave my mouth.*

I reached his door.

It was ajar, because he never closes it properly, because closing a door is an action and he is opposed to those on principle.

The room was dark.

He was on his back with one arm across his eyes and that appalling pillow half beneath his head, and he had not moved since I looked in at two.

Which I did.

And which I will deny.

Fully asleep.

Not the three-days-awake version. Not the one where he lies there with his eyes open and pretends.

Properly gone.

The way he slept in a garden at ten years old with silver hair spread across his arms and a maid beside him who looked as though she might faint.

I stood in that doorway for a while, holding an excellent, carefully constructed, entirely justified grievance.

And put it away.

***

I am not going to tell him about Marren.

I have not told him since. I do not intend to. And I am aware of exactly what that makes me.

He would do something about it.

That is the problem.

He would do something quiet and effective and slightly terrifying, Marren would never learn it had happened, and I would have to watch a boy who has not slept in three days spend energy he does not have on a matter I had already handled.

So he does not get to know.

I went back downstairs, moved a lamp to the table beside the stairs, and worked until nearly midnight.

Because somebody had to.

And because he asked me to in eleven words and was infuriatingly, entirely correct about which of us is better at it.

***

Mira came down for water at some point, looked at me, and said nothing.

I appreciated that more than I expected to.

"He’s asleep," she said, on her way back.

"I know."

"He hasn’t been. For three days."

"I know that too."

She paused on the stairs.

"Does he know you’re doing this?"

I did not look up from the page.

"No."

"Are you going to tell him?"

I thought about a letter that arrived in a month when I had been frightened to open it.

Three paragraphs about Master Valerian.

A complaint about pillows.

A complaint about soup.

And not one word about the only thing I had been able to think about for a fortnight.

"When he asks," I said, "I am going to tell him it was easy."