By the afternoon drill, the wall by the gate had a title on it.
The letters were chalk, a hand high, and they ran uphill across the grey stone. Someone had pressed hard on the capitals, and the dust had smeared into the mortar.
Duke Kade Ansel, Iron Duke of the Yard.
Ear saw it first. He was a broad guard with a scarred ear and a short temper, and he leaned on the gate with his thumbs hooked in his belt.
He read the wall slowly, moving his lips, and then he laughed. It was a loud laugh. It went along the wall, and two of the others laughed with him.
Then Ear saw Captain Hoff’s face, and he laughed louder, as if he had meant to all along.
Tobin came to stand beside Calen. He read the wall with his lips moving, slowly, the way he read everything. “That is a long name,” he said.
Calen said nothing to that.
Kade stood a few steps from the wall with his hands folded behind his back. He did not laugh. He read the letters once, from the first capital to the last, the way Calen had seen him read the Ministry board on the hall wall.
He did not look at the guards at all.
Calen counted them without meaning to. Six guards on the wall and at the gate, and Hoff by the door. Seven students in the yard, and one of them was not laughing.
Six guards. One of the seven is not laughing. He did not know why that was the number that came first.
“Line up,” Hoff said. “Pairs at the trough. Nobody touch the wall.”
The class shuffled into line. Nell stood behind the trough with her good hand around her bandaged arm.
She was not looking at the chalk. She was looking at Calen, and when he met her eyes she looked away first.
Liss did not move with them. She stood at the edge of the drill with her arms folded, and she was watching Ear.
She had been watching him since the first laugh. She did not blink. Calen had seen her do it on the first day, in the hall, when a guard had dropped a bucket and she had looked at him until he picked it up.
Ear shifted his weight back onto his heel. He let his right hand hang down near the short club at his belt. He tilted his head a little to one side, as if he were bored and wanted the gate to know it.
Liss put her weight on her back heel. She let her right hand hang at her hip, near nothing. She tilted her head to the same side, at the same angle, and kept it there.
Ear saw her.
He stopped laughing. He looked at her for a long moment, and then he stepped off the gate.
It was half a pace, no more. It looked as if she had shoved him, though she had not moved her feet at all.
“Show me again,” Calen said.
Liss did. Her weight went back, her hand fell, and her head tilted. The stance was so exact that for a moment Calen could not tell which of them he was looking at.
Ear stepped back again. This time the two guards by the wall stepped with him, not quite meaning to. Nobody on the wall laughed after that.
“Stop that, girl,” Ear said.
“Stop that, girl,” Liss said, in the same gruff tone.
Hoff’s head came round. He did not say anything. He only looked at Calen, the way he looked at a crack in a wall he did not want to pay to fix.
“Liss,” Calen said. “Pairs.”
She unfolded her arms and went to the trough. Ear was still looking at her. He did not lean back on the gate again for the rest of the drill.
Hoff came along the line as the pairs formed. He stopped beside Calen and spoke without turning his head. “The list still stands, Orrin.”
“I know it does,” Calen said.
Hoff walked on before he could say anything else.
It had not been the copy that frightened him, Calen thought. Anyone could copy a stance if they watched long enough. It was that she had got it right the first time.
Calen wanted to tell her to stop. He wanted, more, to know who had taught her to watch like that. He did not think it had been the Keep.
---
Hoff nodded at the hall door, and the class began to file in. Dorran stopped on the step to look back at the wall, and his lips moved as he read.
“Three steps to the door,” Calen said, not loudly. “Count them.”
Tobin walked past him with his hands folded. He counted under his breath, and Calen heard the number three and then nothing.
Calen did not count. He had counted the drill, the wall, the guards, the stones in the yard. He did not need to count the door.
Liss came up the step last. She stopped in front of him and said it back to him.
“Three steps to the door,” Liss said. “Count them.”
It was his voice. It was flat and dry, with the same small pause before count.
Calen did not correct her.
He looked at the crack in the step by her foot. Thirteen days, he thought.
Thirteen mornings at the same gate. He had not once thought of the gate as a thing that might be counting back.
“Show me again,” he said.
Liss looked at him with her head tilted to one side. Then, without a word, she walked the three steps to the door, counting under her breath.
She turned at the frame and came back to stand beside him, and she did not tilt her head once.
Liss went in without being told.
Kade was waiting at the foot of the step, by the wall, with the chalk title over his shoulder. He did not come close. He waited until Calen came down within a few steps, and then he spoke in the voice he used for the Ministry’s clerk and for nobody else.
“Master Orrin. I am told the Ministry has taken note of my title.”
“Who told you?”
“Ear,” Kade said. “He was very clear about it, once he had been shown how to stand.”
Calen glanced at the wall. The letters were already smudged where a sleeve had brushed them.
“The Ministry reads walls,” he said. “It counts what it can read.”
“Then it will count me.”
“Yes. It will write your name in its book. Under the title.”
“And what do you keep, Master Orrin?” Kade asked. “Since we are being honest about our names.”
“A rank they took away from me.”
“Then keep that too,” Kade said, and did not smile.
“Under the title,” Kade said, as if he were tasting it. “Good.”
“Let them write Duke in their book, Orrin. Let them find out they have a duke in the Keep.”
“A duke on a wall is a count they can keep,” Calen said. “A duke who keeps quiet is harder to find.”
For a moment, Kade’s face did something Calen had not seen it do before. It was not a smile. It was closer to surprise, and then to something tighter, as if a clerk had just added a column wrong and Kade had caught it.
“I keep the title,” Kade said.
“Then keep it.”
Calen did not tell him to wipe the wall. A title on a wall was not Calen’s to take.
He thought, for a moment, that a man who wanted to be counted by his own name was not the most dangerous kind of prisoner. The quiet ones were the ones who took notes.
Kade turned his back on the chalk and walked off toward the hall, with his shoulders very straight. Calen watched him go. Kade did not look at the wall again.
Hoff sent a guard with a wet rag. The guard scrubbed for a long time. The chalk went grey and spread, but the capitals stayed where they were, pressed deep into the old stone.
Dorran came down the step to stand beside Calen. “Is the Duke in trouble, sir?”
“Not yet,” Calen said.
Dorran said sorry, though he had not done anything, and went in.
Calen stood a moment longer at the foot of the step. Ear had gone back to the gate, and he did not lean on it again. The chalk stayed where it was, while the drill went on around it.
---
The hall had changed while they were outside. Someone had put a paper on the long table by the water jug and weighted its corners with two cups. It was a Ministry sheet, pale yellow, with the Crown’s curl at the top and the Minister’s name at the bottom, in the same neat, close hand as the letter about the forty suns.
Calen did not go to the table. He had read enough Ministry paper for one life.
Hesper came in slowly, with her eyes on Calen’s face. “Did the wall count us,” she asked, “or did we count the wall?”
“Sit down, Hesper.”
He went to the bench by the stove and sat down. The stove was cold. Nobody had lit it since the bread.
Liss went to the water jug.
She stood beside the table for the time it took to fill a cup. She did not touch the paper. She only looked at it, once, the way she had looked at Ear, and then she turned and walked to the bench with the water in both hands.
When she sat, she reached into the front of her shirt and took out a folded scrap of grey paper. It was the back of a grain chit. She laid it on the bench between them and smoothed it flat with two fingers.
“I copied it,” she said.
“When?”
“When I got the water.”
“How long did you look?”
“As long as it takes to pour a cup,” Liss said. “Then I stopped looking.”
Calen unfolded the chit. The paper was clean and cold, and it smelled faintly of the Ministry’s wax.
The writing was small and very even, in a hand that was not hers but was nearly exact. He could see where she had stopped to breathe, and where she had gone back to check a word. She had not left out a single comma.
He read it through once, slowly. Then he read it again, looking for the place where the copy was wrong. There was none.
Ministry of Correction. Daily order to the Keep at Hask.
The seven will be counted at the gate each morning, before the bread. Each name to be called. Each student present, or accounted for.
Absence to be reported to the Minister by noon, with cause.
Calen read the words accounted for twice. He had seen them once before, in a letter about money, in a line that said forty suns would be accounted for at the Trial.
The bread, the gate and the name called aloud were each small on their own. Put together, they made a list.
He looked at the paper on the table by the jug. It was too far to read from the bench. He did not need to.
“Accounted for,” Liss said quietly, in his voice again.
“Is it true?” Liss asked.
“It is written,” Calen said.
“It is written,” Liss said back to him, and waited, as if she expected him to add something.
Calen folded the chit along its old crease and put it inside his coat, where the Hask Book was. He felt the edge of the paper against his ribs. He did not say anything for a long time, and Liss did not ask him to.
The gate was a hundred steps from the hall door. He had walked it every morning for thirteen days. He counted the steps in his head, the way he did when he was afraid, and this time he did not stop at a hundred.