Chapter 141: Thirty and a Hundred

Penelope had been avoiding a conversation with me.

This would have been easier to ignore if I had not also been avoiding the same conversation.

It had been a week since the Crucible, and we had spoken every day of it. About Selene’s four pages, which Penelope read over my shoulder without being invited and corrected in two places. About the rope across the northern path. About whether anything could be done about Cedric, which we had been discussing in one form or another since the second day of term and which neither of us expected to win.

We had not once spoken about the clearing.

The morning after the Crucible, I had decided that I would be the one to bring it up, and that I would be bad at it. I had spent the week since then proving myself right about the second part by never getting as far as the first.

I found her after lunch on Tuesday.

She was at the long table in Sanctuary’s common room with three stacks of paper in front of her, and the room was quieter than it had any right to be. Cedric had dragged half the class to the training grounds. Lena was at the infirmary. Roland had gone somewhere with Ashwin without explaining where, which generally meant I would hear about it later in unnecessary detail. Mira was probably nearby. Mira was always probably nearby.

I stopped on the stairs.

Penelope looked up, saw me, and looked back down at her papers, which somehow made leaving harder than staying.

I came down.

"What are those?"

"Requests."

"For?"

"Things."

I pulled out the chair opposite her. "Useful."

"I thought so."

The first stack was large, the second smaller, and the third was a single page.

"What happens to the third pile?"

"Those are the ones I’m refusing."

"Only one?"

"So far."

"What did they ask for?"

"A larger training budget."

"Reasonable."

"For decorative targets."

I changed my mind.

She moved another sheet to the second stack and kept writing. I watched her do it, and she let me, and neither of us said anything for long enough that it became clear the silence was mine. I had carried it down the stairs. It was my job to put it somewhere.

"Penelope."

"Mm?"

"You left the hundred points."

Her pen stopped. Not slowly. It simply stopped, the way a clock does when somebody puts a finger on the pendulum.

After a moment she set it down.

"I wondered when you were going to ask."

"I wasn’t asking."

"You usually aren’t."

Fair.

She folded her hands over the page and waited, which is the most dangerous thing Penelope does. Outside, someone from Brightvale was crossing the courtyard with a basket, pursued by someone else. Neither of them looked likely to help me.

"You were close to it," I said.

"Yes."

"How close?"

"Close enough that my hand was already out."

I believed her. From the Gallery, I had watched her walk into that clearing, a small shape at the edge of a pale coin of light, and not long after that I had stopped being able to watch anything.

The end of the Crucible had become uneven in my memory. Some of it I remembered with a clarity I would happily have given back: the heat in the glass, the card, my own terrible handwriting. The rest had gaps in it, and all week other people had been remembering those parts for me.

Penelope was one of those parts.

"You knew what it cost," I said.

"Before I’d finished reading it."

"The board..."

"I didn’t need the board. It was the third card. Three cards is ninety." She paused. "I looked at the board from the path anyway."

"Why?"

"I wanted to see the number."

That was so completely Penelope that for a moment I forgot to be uncomfortable.

"If you’d sealed it," I said, "we’d have finished on ten."

"Still last."

"Still last," I agreed. "By twenty."

"I know the arithmetic, Alash."

"I know you know it. I’m saying it wasn’t about the ranking."

"No," she said. "It wasn’t."

"Then why..."

"The card didn’t say what was wrong."

I stopped.

"It didn’t say where you were hurt, or whether you were hurt, or how long I had." Her voice stayed perfectly level. Penelope’s voice nearly always stays level; it is the rest of her you have to watch. "It said please. I have no idea how to measure please in seconds, so I didn’t try."

A fairly large part of me had spent the week preparing counterarguments. The clearing was safe. Three classes were standing in it. Whatever was wrong with me was half a mile away, and would have been exactly as wrong a minute later. I had several more. Sitting across from her, I discovered that I did not want to use any of them, and that I did not know what to do instead.

Penelope picked her pen back up and turned it once between her fingers without writing anything.

"Five words," she said.

"What?"

"On the card. Five." She did not look up. "You were allowed ten. You could have told me to seal it first."

"You counted."

"It was a short card."

That seemed like a reasonable explanation. I filed it with the other reasonable explanations Penelope had given me over the years, in the place where I keep things I intend to examine later and never do.

"I tried," I said.

She looked up.

"To tell you to seal it first. I sat there with the pen and tried to find ten words that asked for help and asked for the points at the same time." I looked at a faint ink mark near my hand. Penelope makes a lot of ink marks. "There wasn’t one."

"No," she said quietly. "There wasn’t."

"So I left the points out."

"And put please in."

"It seemed polite."

She waited.

Penelope is better at waiting than anyone I have ever met, including the Headmaster, and including several beings who were already old when this world was new. I lasted about five seconds.

"Because I knew you’d come."

She looked down at the page.

That was interesting. Penelope almost never looks away first. I decided not to mention it; the conversation was difficult enough without me winning parts of it by accident.

"You’ve never written that word to me," she said after a while. "Not in four years of letters."

"I must have."

"You wrote ’kindly’ once." A pause. "It was about soup."

"That was important soup."

Her mouth moved. Almost. Then it was gone, and she was looking at me the way she used to look at patient charts at the infirmary, when the numbers on the page disagreed with the person in the bed.

"I got to the Gallery and found you on the floor."

"I was sitting."

"You were on the floor."

"Those aren’t mutually exclusive."

"Your eyes weren’t tracking. Your hands were cold. Daphne Spinster had her hand on your back and looked as though she’d been there some time."

I had nothing useful to say about Daphne Spinster, so I didn’t say it.

"I wasn’t dying," I said instead.

"I know that now."

"I was medically fine."

"Lena told me. Twice." Her head tilted a fraction. "Do you remember what you said to me?"

I looked for it. There was a gap exactly where the answer should have been, and I had learned this week not to fill those gaps with guesses.

"No."

"Four words," Penelope said. "’Sorry about the points.’"

I closed my eyes.

"I nearly left you there," she said.

"That seems fair."

"Then I asked where your pillow was, because it was either that or shout at you in front of four class leaders, one of whom had her hand on your back."

I opened my eyes. She was very carefully not smiling, which on Penelope looks almost exactly like being very carefully furious. It had taken me years to learn the difference, and I was still not always right.

"So," I said, because apparently I was going to insist on it, "one card cost us a hundred and thirty."

"No."

"Thirty for the card. A hundred you didn’t seal. That’s..."

"The thirty was yours," Penelope said. "The hundred was mine."

I stopped.

She had not raised her voice. Penelope almost never needs to.

"You spent thirty points asking," she said. "That was your decision, and it cost what it cost. What I did once I’d read it was my decision, and it cost what it cost. You don’t get to add them together and put your name on the total."

It took me a little longer than it should have.

She hadn’t thrown away a hundred points for thirty. The thirty had only ever been the price of asking. The hundred was what she had decided answering was worth, and she had decided it with her hand already out, in less time than it would have taken her to read five words twice.

"Oh," I said.

"Yes."

I disliked that answer, mostly because I understood it.

I had spent a week working out how to pay her back. I had considered telling all thirty-six of Sanctuary the truth, so that when people asked why their acting leader walked away from a hundred points, the question would land on me instead of her. I had considered things I could do for the class that might be worth a hundred points, and discovered I had no idea what a hundred points of anything looked like outside a basin. I had been doing, very carefully, the only kind of arithmetic I have ever been good at: working out what I owed and paying it before anybody noticed it was owed.

She had just told me it wasn’t a debt.

I did not know where to put something that wasn’t a debt.

"You haven’t told anyone," I said.

"No."

"Roland asked."

"Twice."

"Cedric."

"Once. Then he told me he’d decided it didn’t matter, which means Lena told him to stop." She straightened a page that did not need straightening. "And at least two members of faculty."

I had known about the faculty. I had assumed she was protecting my privacy, and she was. Watching her line up the edges of a page that was already square, it occurred to me that she might also have been protecting hers.

She had not asked what happened to me in the glass, either. Not once in a week. She had decided it was mine, the way she had decided the card was mine, and that had settled it.

I did not tell her about the nine minutes, or the thing that had read me, or the voice in my head that had gone silent while it happened. Not yet. She knew enough to know that something had happened. She had been there afterwards. That was already more than I was used to anyone having.

There was one more thing I was supposed to say. I had known it since the morning after, the way you know a stair is loose. I had simply been walking round it.

"Thank you," I said. "For coming."

It came out worse than I had planned, which was impressive, because I had not planned it at all.

Penelope looked at me for a long moment.

"All right," she said.

"That’s all?"

"What would you like me to say?"

"I don’t know."

"Then all right seems adequate."

I considered that. "Fine."

"Fine."

We had reached the most emotionally healthy point available to either of us, and I was ready to leave while it was still intact.

Then Penelope said, "I would do it again."

I stayed in the chair.

She was looking at her papers now, not at me.

"The hundred points," she said. "I’d leave them again."

"That’s a bad strategy."

"Probably."

"We came last."

"I remember."

"Minus ninety."

"I have the final score written down."

"Of course you do."

She finally looked up. "Would you?"

I knew what she meant. The last card. Thirty points. Five words and a please.

I could have thought about it longer. I didn’t.

"Yes."

Her face softened, barely.

"Probably," I added.

It disappeared. "Probably?"

"I’m trying not to encourage this behavior."

"Which behavior?"

"Throwing away a hundred points."

"You threw away ninety."

"Not all at once."

"That does not improve it."

"It shows restraint."

"It shows you had three opportunities."

I frowned. She was getting better at this, which was worrying.

"Thirty is still less than a hundred," I said.

"Your last card was worth more than thirty."

"Mathematically, it wasn’t."

"That isn’t what I meant."

"I know."

That stopped us both. The words had come out before I had thought much about them, and neither of us seemed to know what to do with them once they were out.

Usually, when people had conversations like this, there was supposed to be some larger conclusion at the end. An apology. A promise. Something changed forever. We had none of those. She would do it again. So would I, probably. Apparently that was enough.

Penelope reached for her pen. I stood.

"Although," I said, "Roland probably knows something."

"Roland always knows something."

"Usually the wrong thing."

"That has never once stopped him."

True.

I had reached the stairs when she said my name. I looked back. She was holding up a sheet of paper, and I immediately became suspicious.

"What?"

"Tomorrow."

"What about tomorrow?"

"Weekly report. The Headmaster."

"I know."

"You forgot."

"I remembered eventually."

"I reminded you."

"That may have contributed."

She crossed the room and put the sheet in my hand.

Theoran. After lunch.

Underneath it, in smaller writing:

Do not sleep through it.

"This is unnecessary."

"You missed the first one."

"I was resting."

"You were asleep."

"Very deeply resting."

"The distinction has not improved with repetition." ℴℴ𝘮

She walked back to the table. I looked at the paper, and then at her.

"Did Nadia teach you this?"

Penelope froze for perhaps half a second. Then she kept walking.

"No."

That sounded unconvincing.

"She did."

"Go upstairs."

"That isn’t an answer."

"You have reading."

"I don’t."

She slid a sheet from the first stack to the edge of the table without looking at it. "You do now."

Conversation over. Apparently she had learned that part from Theoran.

I went upstairs.

\*\*\*

The System waited until I reached my room, which was either considerate or suspicious.

I put Dream Haven on the bed, sat down beside it, and looked at Penelope’s reminder again.

[You handled that better than expected.]

’Don’t.’

[Don’t what?]

’Whatever this is.’

[Praise.]

’You should stop.’

[I was attempting something new.]

’It doesn’t suit you.’

[Noted.]

I put the paper on the desk. There was a pause.

[You meant it.]

I didn’t answer.

[That you would send the card again.]

’I know.’

The System went quiet. I picked the pebble up from the windowsill, tossed it once, and caught it.

’She meant it too.’

[Yes.]

That was all. No joke, no comment about points, nothing about Penelope. For once, the System knew when to leave something alone. I was beginning to suspect it had always known, and had simply chosen not to.

I lay back with Dream Haven under my head, and then remembered tomorrow. The reminder sat on the desk, visible and difficult to misunderstand.

I closed my eyes.

[Do not.]

’I haven’t done anything.’

[You are about to sleep.]

’That’s usually what closing my eyes means.’

[Your report is tomorrow.]

’Tomorrow.’

[You said that before the first report.]

I opened one eye. ’Whose side are you on?’

[Currently Penelope’s.]

Traitor.

I moved the reminder from the desk to the table beside my bed, where it would be impossible to miss. Probably.

Then I closed my eyes again.

Thirty points. A hundred points. Neither number mattered as much as it should have.

That was probably bad leadership. Or good leadership. Theoran would have an opinion.

Unfortunately, tomorrow I might have to hear it.