Chapter 124: Nineteen Minutes to Spare

I spent the first hour not deciding.

I want to be accurate about that, because it sounds like procrastination and it was not.

I have procrastinated professionally for fifteen years and I know the difference.

Procrastination is when you know the answer and would rather not go and get it.

This was the other thing.

***

I asked Roland first, because Roland was nearest and because he knows everything about everyone and I was hoping that would be the same as knowing the answer.

"Who would you pick?"

He did not hesitate.

"Cedric."

"Why."

"Because he’s the strongest person in the class who’s allowed in, and because he’ll be so frightened of doing it wrong that he’ll be careful for eight straight hours, which is the only thing that’s ever made Cedric careful."

That was a considerably better answer than I expected.

"And the problem with it?"

Roland thought about that.

"He’d stop thinking if something went badly," he said. "Not panic. Stop. He’d pick the loudest thing in front of him and hit it, and it would work about half the time, and the other half..."

He did not finish it.

He did not have to.

We had both been standing in the same training hall four days ago.

***

I asked Mira second, on the back stairwell, which is where she is.

She did not open her eyes.

"You’re asking the wrong question."

"I’m asking who."

"You’re asking who you can bear to watch." She shifted slightly. "That’s a different question and it has a different answer and you already know both of them."

"That’s unhelpful."

"It’s precise. You’ve confused the two before."

I stood on a stairwell being correctly diagnosed by a girl who has spoken to me voluntarily perhaps four times, and decided that I preferred Roland’s method.

***

I went to the Administrative Wing at eleven.

Not because I had decided.

Because the corridor outside the submissions office was somewhere I could stand without anybody asking me anything, and I had run out of other places in the building where that was true.

The academy assistant at the desk was the same one who had delivered the summons to my room eleven days ago and had not waited for a reply.

"Vortex."

"I haven’t got it yet."

"You have fifty-one minutes."

"I’m aware."

He went back to his ledger with the air of a man who has watched four class leaders come through that door already and had opinions about the order.

I stayed in the corridor.

***

Selene found me there at twenty past.

She did not ask what I was doing. She has never once asked me what I am doing, which is among her better qualities and which I have started to suspect is not politeness but method.

"You’re going to ask me a question," she said.

"I have several."

"You have one that matters."

She was right, and I disliked that, and I asked it anyway.

"Where is he?"

Selene did not pretend to misunderstand.

"Not at Zenith."

"Since when?"

"Four days."

***

I stood in a corridor in the Administrative Wing and did the arithmetic in front of a professor who had almost certainly assembled it for me deliberately.

The competition was approved before term.

The clause about five specific people was written four days ago.

And the man who asked for that clause left the academy on the same day he asked for it.

"He wrote it and then he left."

"That is a sequence of facts arranged in an order," Selene said. "I have not added anything to it."

"Where does he go?"

"Nobody knows. Nobody has ever known."

"Somebody must summon him."

"Three kings have tried."

She said it without any particular emphasis, which made it worse.

"Then who is running the Crucible?"

"Professor Darius designed the arena. I designed the Wellspring mechanics. The Headmaster approved the scoring." A pause. "The Hermit designed one sentence, and we are all still arguing about it, and he has been eleven hundred miles away or dead for four days and has not been available for comment."

"That’s an unusual pair of options."

"With him they generally are."

***

She left me there.

I stood in the corridor for another eleven minutes, and then I went in, and by the time I reached the desk I had known the answer for a considerable amount of time and had simply been refusing to look at it directly, which is a habit of mine and one of the two or three worst things about me.

The assistant slid a card across.

One line for the class.

One line for the name.

Here is what I was actually doing for two and a half hours.

Not choosing.

Avoiding a specific memory, which had arrived at approximately half past nine in a corridor, immediately after somebody said four in the afternoon when everything has gone wrong and nobody is watching, and which I had been shoving back down ever since with steadily decreasing success.

***

I came home from the border at fourteen.

There was a reception.

Of course there was.

House Vortex does not permit a returning heir to simply walk into a building and lie down, however much that heir would like to, and there were one hundred and forty guests in the great hall and my father at the top of it and an entire evening organised around the fact that I was not dead.

I got about forty minutes into it.

Then something happened that I am not going to describe, because it was small and stupid and involved somebody’s perfectly ordinary comment about the beastkin situation at the border, and because describing it would require describing what it did, and I have not managed that yet in two years.

I stopped being able to be in the room.

I did not make a scene.

I want that understood.

I have never made a scene in my life.

I simply stood near a window with my hands behind my back and discovered that I was not able to make my face do the thing it is supposed to do, and that one hundred and forty people were about to notice.

Penelope crossed the hall.

She did not look at me.

That is the part I keep.

She walked past me entirely, and spoke to the Duchess about something involving the seating, and within four minutes an entire section of the evening had been rearranged, and my father had been drawn into a conversation with two men from the eastern district, and somebody had opened the garden doors, and I was standing in a doorway with nobody looking at me at all.

I sat in that garden for an hour.

Nobody came to find me.

I understood, at some point during that hour, that this was also her.

She never mentioned it.

Not that night.

Not the following week.

Not in two years.

I have given her approximately forty opportunities and she has declined every single one, and I am not certain she knows that I know.

It was, as it happens, four in the afternoon.

***

I picked up the pen.

’You know this is the sentimental choice,’ I told the System.

[No.]

’No?’

[It is the sentimental choice and the correct one. Those are permitted to coincide. You find that suspicious because it has almost never happened to you.]

’That’s uncomfortably close to insight.’

[I have been paying attention for fifteen years. Occasionally something adheres.]

I wrote it.

CLASS FIVE.

PENELOPE DECLAIR.

The assistant read it, stamped it, and put it in a box, and did not react at all, which I appreciated more than I can reasonably explain.

Then he looked up.

"Nineteen minutes to spare."

"I’d like that recorded."

"It has been."

I was two steps from the door when he spoke again.

"Vortex."

I turned.

He had a drawer open.

He was not looking at me.

He had the specific careful expression of a man carrying out an instruction he does not understand and has decided not to think about.

"There is something for you."

"From the Headmaster?"

"No."

He put it on the desk.

A single folded sheet, unsealed, with nothing written on the outside.

"It was left four days ago," the assistant said. "With instructions."

"What instructions."

"That it be given to you on the day you submitted a name. Not before. Not after."

The corridor behind me was empty and the office was quiet and somewhere outside one hundred and eighty-seven people were arguing about Wellsprings.

"Who left it?"

He did not answer that, which was an answer.

***

I took it outside.

I am not entirely sure why.

Something about opening it in a room with a stamp and a ledger in it felt wrong, so I walked to the low wall on the west path where I had sat at half past nine, and I sat down in the same place, and I unfolded it.

Four lines.

The handwriting was small and old and extremely steady.

---

You will want to use all three.

Keep the last one.

Not for them.

You will know when.

---

I read it four times.

’System.’

[I see it.]

’He wrote this four days ago.’

[Yes.]

’Before the rules were published. Before I was told there were three.’

[Yes.]

’Before I had a name to submit.’

A pause.

[Yes.]

I sat on a cold wall with a pillow under one arm and a piece of paper in my hand, in a courtyard full of people who were going into an arena at dawn, and I read the third line again.

Not for them.

Which meant that a man who had been gone for four days, who king cannot summon, who had seen gold come out of the ground forty-one years before anybody thought to tell me about it, had sat down in a room somewhere and worked out that at some point during tomorrow, in a sealed gallery where I would be able to see everything and reach nothing, I was going to need to save myself.

And he had not told me from what.