Chapter 126: In Full

( James Vellaroux’s POV )

Tristan’s hand was up.

I know that signal.

Hand up, wait.

Hand down, go.

I grabbed the pen.

My hand was shaking so bad the first letter came out as a scratch.

Had to press twice to make it into anything.

No time to think about words.

Didn’t want to think.

Just wrote.

Don’t seal. Help them.

Four.

Didn’t count.

Didn’t need to.

I shoved it through the slot so hard I took the skin off two knuckles.

Up on the board, Vanguard’s number moved.

Zero.

Minus thirty.

I knew it would.

Still hit me in the gut like a boot.

Down in the square the light was all the way up.

A pillar of it, pale, the colour of early morning, standing straight up out of the old stones. The three classes around it had gone quiet. Like people in a temple.

And Tristan’s hand came down.

I stopped breathing.

Too soon.

The card couldn’t have got there yet. And that wasn’t how his hand comes down when he means go.

When he means go it snaps down.

This came down slow.

Tired.

Like a man putting something down he’s decided he doesn’t want to carry.

Then he walked out from behind the wall.

Not low. Not sneaking. Straight out into the open with his arms loose and his palms turned out where they could all see them.

And Vanguard came out after him the same way. Thirty-seven people walking into that square with nothing in their hands.

He was going to help them.

He’d decided that himself.

Before my card.

Before any of it.

Halfway across, he stopped.

Looked down at his hand.

Something was in it that hadn’t been there a second before.

Little cream thing.

He read it.

Then he looked up.

Straight up at the rim.

Straight at this room.

He couldn’t have seen me from down there.

Nobody could.

He looked anyway.

I sat down.

Didn’t mean to. My legs just quit.

Thirty points to tell my friend I didn’t trust him.

And I was wrong.

***

( Elizabeth Aurelius’s POV )

I saw it perhaps a second before it happened.

That is, I have since decided, the least merciful length of time there is.

Long enough to understand.

Nowhere near long enough to do anything with the understanding, had I intended to do anything with it, which I had not.

I had settled that on Saturday night.

The whole square had turned toward Tristan Rhael.

I could hardly fault it.

Thirty-seven people had just walked out of concealment with their palms open, and every face at the Wellspring had turned to watch them come.

Brightvale’s acting leader had half raised an arm, uncertain.

Miss Declair had taken a step forward.

Even from the rim, I could feel the entire square hold its breath around that one gesture.

Everyone was looking at Vanguard.

Except Petra.

Petra Halvern was looking at the Wellspring.

She had been standing perhaps three paces from it for some time, very still, and while the square watched Tristan Rhael cross toward them with empty hands, she stepped forward and laid her palm flat against the light.

The pillar folded down into the stone like a shutter being drawn.

On the board above the glass, Concord’s figure changed.

One hundred.

I did not move.

My hands were clasped behind my back, where I had put them at dawn precisely so that I would notice if they tried to go anywhere, and they had not tried.

I had kept the promise I made myself on Saturday night, and it had cost me no effort whatsoever.

I confess that was the part that frightened me.

I became aware, then, of being looked at.

To my left, through the glass, Sophie Trohan had turned from the basin and was watching me.

Not with anger.

I am not certain Sophie is capable of it.

She looked at me the way one looks at a person who has just received terrible news and has not yet understood it.

Beyond her, James was sitting on the floor of his alcove with his back against the desk.

He was not looking at me at all.

I found that I preferred Sophie.

I kept my face precisely as it had been.

I have practised that since I was six years old.

I do not believe I have ever needed it more.

Because I shall not pretend otherwise, not even here, not even to myself. Had I been standing in that square, I would have done exactly what Petra did.

I would have planned it on the walk in. I would have waited, as she waited, for the single moment when every eye was elsewhere, and I would have taken it, and afterward I would have explained to myself with great care why it had been the right choice.

And it had been. By every rule on that sheet, it was the best move anyone will make today.

I spent the whole of Sunday teaching Petra Halvern to stop waiting for my permission.

She did not wait.

I looked down at the girl in the square, still standing with her hand upon the dark stone, while three classes slowly understood what had been done to them, and I found I could not tell whether what I felt was pride or shame.

I rather suspect it was both, in equal measure, and I do not know yet what to do about that.

***

( Alash Vortex’s POV )

Everybody else was watching the light.

I was watching Cedric’s hands.

It’s a habit.

I spent five years at the border watching people’s hands, because hands tell you what someone’s about to do a moment before the rest of them catches up.

A soldier’s hand goes to his side before he tells you he’s been cut.

A frightened man’s hands go still right before he runs.

Cedric’s hands go red about a second before a room gets loud.

They were going red.

He was stood at the edge of the square, maybe ten steps from Petra Halvern, and he’d seen what she did, and his shoulders had come up round his ears the way they had in the lower training hall eight days ago.

Right before the stone wall.

Right before that sound like a kettle.

The glow round his fingers was getting brighter.

Orange, then red, then that ugly deep colour Fire goes when there’s Force packed in behind it.

I don’t think he was going to hit her.

I don’t think he knew what he was going to hit.

That’s the trouble with Cedric when he’s like that. He doesn’t pick a target.

He just lets go at whatever’s nearest.

Whatever was nearest was about a hundred people.

I had the pen before I’d decided to pick it up.

I’d like to say I thought about the note first. I didn’t. I thought about a rising sound, and a wall of stone, and how long it takes to cross forty feet, and I wrote:

Stop Cedric. His hands. Now.

Five, I think.

I wasn’t counting either.

I pushed it through the slot.

Sanctuary went from nothing to minus thirty and I didn’t care, and I’m going to go on not caring about that for the rest of my life.

Down in the square, Penelope stopped.

She looked at her hand.

Read it in about a second.

Then she turned round and walked straight up to Cedric and took hold of both his wrists.

She didn’t pull.

She didn’t shout.

She just held on, and said something up into his face that I couldn’t hear and would honestly give quite a lot to know.

The red went out of his hands.

Not all at once.

It sort of drained, the way the colour goes out of a coal. His shoulders came down.

After a bit he pulled one hand loose and put it over his eyes, and she let him, and kept hold of the other one.

I sat back.

My heart was going like I’d just run up the side of the basin.

[Intervention used. Two remain.]

’I know.’

I put my other hand back in my jacket, where it had been all morning.

The paper was still there.

Two left.

Keep the last one.

Fine.

That was fine.

I still had the last one.

I’d only used the first.

I didn’t let myself think about how quickly that had happened.

***

( Sophie Trohan’s POV )

Brightvale got robbed, and I watched every single second of it, and honestly the robbing wasn’t even the worst bit.

The worst bit was watching all thirty-six of them work it out, one at a time.

Because you could see it happen!

First the ones right up by the Wellspring went all stiff, and then the next lot out, the ones who’d still been smiling at Vanguard, stopped smiling, and then the ones at the back who had no idea what was going on kept asking, and somebody kept telling them, and every time somebody got told you could see them sort of fold in on themselves a little.

Oh, it was awful.

It was really, truly awful, and I’d have given anything, anything at all, to be down there walking through them.

Touching shoulders.

Saying names.

Saying it’s fine, it’s only the first one, we’ll get the next one.

I couldn’t.

So I watched Marta instead.

And Marta didn’t do any of that.

Not one bit of it.

She stood completely still for about three seconds.

Then she said something short, probably something rude, because it’s Marta, and she turned her back on the Wellspring and the square and Concord and the whole lot, and she pointed.

South-east.

At the river.

And Brightvale went!

Just like that.

No speech, no comforting anybody, nothing.

She pointed and they went, and I think the walking helped more than anything I could have said, because it’s hard to feel quite so horrible when you’ve got somewhere to walk to.

I laughed out loud, a bit wobbly.

And then I saw Hollis.

He was right at the very back.

He hadn’t moved.

He was stood there on his own in the middle of the square with his arms wrapped round himself, and everybody had just sort of flowed away past him, and he was stood there the way he gets in crowds, the way he gets when it’s loud, and I knew, I absolutely knew without hearing a thing, that he was humming.

My hand was on the pen before I’d even thought about it.

I got as far as writing his name.

Hollis.

And then I stopped, because thirty points.

Thirty points for one boy standing still, when Brightvale had nothing, and it would put us under zero, and I’d be doing it in front of everyone in here, straight after I’d watched James do the same thing and be wrong.

I looked back down.

Marta had stopped.

Twenty paces toward the river, right at the front of everybody, she’d stopped and looked back over her shoulder, and she’d found him.

And she said something to the girl next to her, and she turned round, and she walked all the way back across that square on her own.

Not fast.

Just walking.

And she took Hollis by the elbow, the way you do when you don’t want someone to feel like they’re being steered.

And she brought him along.

I put the pen down.

I looked at the card with one word on it, just Hollis, and I folded it in half so I didn’t have to look at it, and put it face down on the desk.

I didn’t have to send it.

Marta saw him all on her own.

And that was exactly why I picked her.

The realist.

The one who says no.

And it was working, it was working exactly how I’d hoped, and I was so glad.

I was so, so glad.

And a little bit of me, the bit I try very hard not to listen to, quietly wished that just once somebody down there had needed me.

***

( Daphne Spinster’s POV )

I read the board.

Concord, one hundred.

Greywall, twenty.

Brightvale, nothing.

Sanctuary, minus thirty.

Vanguard, minus thirty.

Greywall was second.

Two small Wellsprings on the riverbank.

Ten each.

Taken in the first half hour while the others went to the square.

Nadia did it the way page three said.

Second.

It would not last.

I watched the square empty.

Three classes had gone in and come out with nothing.

Two of them with less.

They would not walk back to their gates and wait for the afternoon.

They needed points, and they needed them before Concord got further ahead.

The nearest points in the basin were on the river.

There were five more blue Wellsprings along that bank.

All of them within a few hundred paces of where Greywall stood.

Brightvale was already going south-east.

Their girl had pointed that way.

Then Sanctuary turned.

Declair still had a hand on the Vale boy’s arm.

She was looking at the river too.

Then Vanguard.

Rhael walking slowly at the front.

The card still in his hand.

Three classes.

Hungry.

All going to the one place in the basin where somebody was standing alone.

Greywall.

I looked at my three cards.

I had not touched them all morning. I had not planned to before the afternoon.

I touched the top one.

One finger.

The glass beside me was warm.

I could feel it from a hand’s width away.

Like standing near a stove.

It was not warm at dawn.

I did not look at the others.

I did not need to.

In every box along this room, someone was watching three classes walk toward the river.

All of them knew who was standing at the end of it.

Mine.