The letter came up through the bread hatch, folded twice and sealed in red. It was the first thing the Ministry had sent the Keep that was not bread or a list.
Hoff brought it to the guardroom himself. He held it by one corner, the way a man holds a dead mouse he has been asked to remove.
“Your money, Orrin,” he said. “Or what’s left of it.”
Calen broke the seal. The wax was thick and warm from the Ministry’s courier, and it cracked clean down the middle. The paper inside was cream-colored, and the hand was neat and close, with the Crown’s own curl on the capitals.
To the Keep at Hask, by order of the Minister of Correction.
The grant for the training of the seven, made on the first day of their keeping, is reduced to forty suns. Two hundred and sixty suns are recalled to the Crown’s correction fund. The forty remaining will be kept in the Keep’s locked box and accounted for at the Trial.
Benedek Ashdale, Minister of Correction.
Calen read it twice. The second time he read the word accounted, and then he put the letter face down on the bench, very carefully, as if it might bite.
“Forty,” Hoff said.
“Forty.”
“That’s a month of bread for seven, and no ink.” Hoff scratched the grey stubble on his jaw. “Ministry’ll want their own clerk to count the rest. They always do.”
Liss had been copying the word accounted under her breath since the letter came up the passage. Ysra had said nothing. Dorran had said sorry twice, both times to nobody in particular. Hesper had asked whether forty suns was a number a person could eat.
The clerk came within the hour. He was young, with clean fingers and a satchel that rattled, and he did not look at the students who stood along the passage wall.
He unlocked the Keep’s box with a key from his own belt. He counted the coins out on the table in stacks of ten, and then he counted them again. He wrote a figure in a book. Then he took two hundred and sixty suns away in a leather bag, and he left forty in the bottom of the box.
The box looked too big for them. It had been built for three hundred.
“Accounted for,” Calen said, to nobody.
He did the sum in his head while the clerk’s satchel rattled away down the passage. Forty suns. Seven students. One month of bread, if nobody was sick, and no ink for the Trial. Eighty days after that.
He did not like the answer. He wrote it down that night anyway, in the Hask Book, under the list he had already made.
Kade laughed from the passage, short and dry. “Duke Kade Ansel will be sure to account for his share of the bread.”
Nobody answered him. For once Kade did not seem to expect an answer.
---
The cellar door was still open when the lamps were lit that evening.
The bar still lay in the dust. Someone had swept the dust a little since last night, in a neat half-circle around the iron, the way a careful jailer sweeps around a thing he means to pick up tomorrow. The seal was still cracked. The red wax on either side of the gap had been picked clean with a knife.
Calen stood in front of the door with a lamp in one hand. He had told Hoff he was going to check the lower wall for damp. That was true, as far as it went.
Eleven steps. Twelve. He counted them again, going down. Fear made him count, and he did not stop it.
The cellar was longer than he had thought. The stairs ended on a flagged floor, and the lamp showed a row of square pillars running back into the dark. Iron rings were set into the walls at the height of a man’s hip.
Some had chains through them. Most had nothing. Between the pillars, on the floor, someone had drawn a circle in faint white chalk, and then had scrubbed out part of it, and then had drawn it again, a little wider.
The air was cold and still. It smelled of wet stone, and of the sweet, old flower smell he had noticed at the door.
Shelves ran along the far wall, low and deep. On the bottom shelf were ledgers, a dozen or more, bound in green cloth gone grey at the edges. Calen knelt and pulled the nearest one out. The spine cracked when he opened it.
The columns were ruled in faded red. Date. Name. Cause. Keeper. The last column was mostly blank, except for a small stamp in the margin, a crown with a crack through it.
It was the same stamp he had seen on the Ministry’s first paper, the one that had sent him to the cart.
He did not like that he remembered the stamp so well.
Most of the entries were a line or two. Some had only a name, and a question after it. The hand changed twice down the page, and then once more further on, each one tighter than the last.
Calen turned the pages slowly, with one finger on the margin, until he found a name he did not expect to find.
Harrow, Nell. Prisoner. Age four. Cause: magic failure.
Beside it, in the last column, someone had written a single word. Kept.
Calen read it three times. Then he closed his eyes for one count, and opened them again, because the page did not change.
He put one hand on the nearest iron ring. It was colder than the stone around it. Tobin had said it, in the guardroom, in plainer words. I held something shut. Somebody had held something down here, and somebody else had written down who was doing the holding.
Four. She was four years old, and somebody had written her down as a failure.
He turned back to the front of the ledger and found the date at the top of the first page. It was written in the same tight hand as the last entry, and it was clear enough to read. Year seven of the Crown’s peace.
Calen closed the book. He put it under his arm, and he put the lamp back in his hand, and he climbed out of the cellar with his back straight and his step even.
He did not count the stairs on the way back. He did not need to.
---
Nell was sitting in the guardroom by the hearth, with her good hand around a cup of water. Calen stood in the doorway for a moment before he came in. He had read the word Kept once more on the stairs, and he had decided he would carry it up the stairs and no further.
The fire was low. Tobin was asleep on a blanket in the corner, his arms folded under his chin, his feet bare and blue at the toes. Nell did not wake him. She had been counting his breaths, Calen thought. She did not look up when he came in.
“May I ask a question?” she said.
“Yes.”
“Did you go down the stairs?”
Calen set the ledger on the bench, face down. “Yes.”
“The jailers said the cellar door was open,” Nell said. “They said it in the passage, and then they said nothing else.”
“It was open.”
“Did you find what was down there?”
“I found a book,” Calen said.
Nell looked at it, and then at him, and then at the fire. She did not reach for the book. She was not a girl who reached for things that were not hers.
“May I see your hand?” Calen asked.
“You may.”
She put the cup on the floor and held out her right hand, palm up, the way she had held it on the first night. Calen knelt beside her and rested two fingers on the inside of her wrist, just above the bone. Her pulse was quick and light, but steady.
“May I say yes?” she asked, very softly.
“Yes.”
“Yes,” Nell said.
The reading came the same way it always did, slow and shaped, a set of lines laid one on top of another. He had read these lines once before. He had read them on the first night, in the cold, with the candle gone out.
The first two lines held. They were the same as they had been. He did not need to read them again.
The third line had moved.
[Teaching Method: Unbind]
Calen kept his fingers still. He did not let his face change. He had learned that a face was the first thing a student read, and the last thing a teacher could afford to show.
He took his hand away.
Nell looked at her wrist. She turned it over, and then back again, as if she could see the line written there.
“What is Unbind?” she asked.
“I will show you.”
“Will it hurt?”
“At first.”
She frowned. He had never answered her that plainly before, and he could see she did not like it.
“Will you tell me what it is?” she asked.
“No,” Calen said. “I will show you what it does. Then you will know. That is better.”
Nell looked at him for a long moment, and then she nodded, slowly. She picked up the cup again. Her hand was steady. “May I watch?”
“Yes.”
“May I go to the cellar with you?”
“No,” Calen said.
For the first time that day, she almost smiled. Then she said, “Yes, Sir,” and went back to watching Tobin breathe.
---
The gate at Hask Keep was the oldest thing in the walls. Calen had walked past it every morning since the cart. He had never once stopped to read the stone set above the arch.
He stopped now.
It was full dark. The Silverspire watcher was not on the walk above. The jailer at the gate had lit a lantern and was sitting on a stool beside it, half asleep, with his chin on his chest. Calen stood under the arch with the lamp held low, and he read the plate.
The stone was pale, newer than the walls around it. The letters had been cut by a careful hand, and then filled with black pitch that had cracked in places from the cold.
Hask Keep. Gate re-hung by order of the Ministry of Correction. Year nine of the Crown’s peace.
Calen read it again. Then he counted, because he could not help it. Year nine. The gate had been taken down and rebuilt, and someone had carved a plate to say so.
He thought about the first page of the green ledger, lying face down on the guardroom bench. He had read the date at the top of it twice in the cellar, with the lamp shaking a little in his hand.
Year seven.
Two years before the gate was re-hung.
Nell had been four years old, in a cellar under a Keep that did not yet have the gate it had now. Someone had written her down before this gate was hung, and then had kept her there.
Calen stood under the arch and did not move. Behind him, the jailer’s head came up off his chest, and he blinked at the lamp.
“Something wrong, Orrin?”
“Who hung this gate?” Calen asked.
The jailer squinted up at the plate, then at him, as if the question were a trick. “Ministry. Who else? Pitch cracks in the frost, mind. They never fix anything but the seals.”
“No,” Calen said. “I suppose they do not.”
“Something wrong, then?”
“No,” Calen said.
He did not turn back to the stairs. He did not look at the old door in the wall, the one the new gate had been built to cover. He only stood there, reading the plate for the third time, until the lantern on the stool began to gutter, and the date was the only thing he could see.