Hoff pinned the sheet to the wall at first light, beside the chalk title. Nobody had yet managed to wash the title off.
The sheet was pale yellow and had the Crown’s curl at the top. It went up with four iron nails, one at each corner.
Calen read it before the bread. Then he read it again, standing close, with his hands behind his back.
Trial of the Keep at Hask. Written and casting tests, to be set on Days 1 to 30 of the Test Term.
Each paper scored out of 100. Individual pass: 55.
That was all. The rest of the sheet was the Minister’s name, and a line for the Keep’s seal that had not been filled in.
“Thirty days,” Liss said, behind him. She did not say it in his voice this time. She said it in her own, flat and quick, as if she were counting the nails.
“Thirty days,” Calen said.
“Each paper out of a hundred.”
“Yes.”
“Who reads them?”
Calen did not answer. He looked at the Minister’s name. It was not a question that had an answer on the wall.
Fifty-five. He read the number again. Someone in the Ministry had chosen it the way a locksmith chooses a pin, high enough to be hard and low enough to be possible.
Liss had already copied the sheet. He could see the corner of it folded inside her shirt, and he did not ask to see the rest.
---
The guardroom was the only room in the Keep with a table long enough to lay out paper. The wood smelled of lamp oil and old smoke. Hoff gave Calen the room for the morning, on the condition that the door stayed open.
Calen had four sheets of the Keep’s paper, a pot of ink, thinner than it should have been, and a stub of pencil. He laid them out in a row. Then he sat down across from Nell and waited.
She was sitting very straight. Her bandaged arm was in her lap. Her good hand lay flat on the table, and her fingers were not moving.
“May I tell you something first?” Nell asked.
“Yes.”
She looked at her hand. Her shoulders rose and fell twice, and then stopped.
“On the twelfth night,” she said. “The flame leaned.”
Calen kept his hands still on the table.
“I lit the candle,” Nell said. “I asked first. I said May I, and I waited.
“On the fourth breath it leaned toward my hand. There was no draft. I did not reach.”
“Did you reach?”
“No.”
“What did you do?”
“I counted,” Nell said. “Ten breaths. On the eighth it began to straighten.
“On the tenth it stood up. The wick hissed one time. Then it was only a candle.”
Calen did not say anything for the length of three breaths. Hers, not his. He did not need to count his own.
He picked up the pencil. He held it over the blank sheet, and then he put it down again, very gently, beside the ink.
He did not write it down. She watched him not write it, and he saw her see it, and she did not look away.
“Thank you,” Calen said.
He had not thanked a student before. He did not know if it was a thing a teacher should do. He decided that it was.
Nell’s shoulders loosened by a finger’s width. She did not smile.
She did not say Sir. She only nodded, once, and turned her good hand palm up on the table, as if she were showing him that it was empty.
“Good,” he said. “Now the first formula.”
“Say it first?”
“Say it first. Then write it.”
She took a breath, and then another, and then she spoke. The words were plain.
They were the hold for a flame, the one he had taught her in the second week, with the count built into the end of it. She said each word clearly and did not speed up.
“Again,” Calen said, when she reached the count. “You rushed the last word.”
“Show me again?”
“Yes.”
She said the count again. It was slower this time, and the last word sat in the right place.
When she had finished she picked up the pencil and wrote the formula out on the first sheet in a neat, small hand. Every word was in the right place.
Calen read it through, line by line. One point for each right word, one for the right order, and two for the count, because the count was the part that kept the flame still.
Then he wrote a number at the top of the sheet, and drew a line under it.
38.
Nell looked at the number. “Is that bad?”
“It is not fifty-five.”
“Thirty-eight,” she said, very quietly, the way she said anything that cost her something to hear.
“Yes.”
“Then I will write it again.”
“Yes,” Calen said. “Say it first.”
“Will you tell the Ministry about the flame?”
“No.”
Nell nodded, as if that was the answer she had expected, and picked up the pencil again.
---
The second sheet went faster. The third sheet was the casting for the count-back, the one that let a student stop a flame that had already started to move.
Nell said it. She wrote it. She did not reach for the pencil until she had finished the last line of the spoken part, and when she did reach for it, her hand was steady.
Calen set that sheet aside to score when the ink was dry. He did not look at it again.
Dorran came in next, with his paper held out in front of him like something that might spill.
“Sorry, sir,” Dorran said. “I could not finish the third one. I kept saying sorry to it.”
“Give it here.”
Dorran gave it to him. Calen read the first two sheets and the half of the third. The hand was careful and round, and it was sorry in every line, and it had the right words in the right order.
He put it on the pile without scoring it. He would score it when Dorran was not standing in front of him.
Tobin came next. He did not bring a paper. He sat on the bench by the door and asked, in his careful voice, what a passing count was.
“Fifty-five,” Calen said.
“Out of how many?”
“One hundred.”
Tobin thought about that. He looked at the pile of sheets, and then at the ink, and then at his own folded hands.
“Then it is more than half,” he said. “It is just over half.”
“Yes.”
“Is a test a count too, sir?”
“Yes.”
“Does the count start at one?”
“Yes.”
“Then I will count it,” Tobin said, and he did not ask anything else.
Hesper put her head round the door frame before she came in. “Does the Ministry read the papers,” she asked, “or does it only read the numbers on them?”
“It reads the numbers.”
“Then why are we writing the words?”
Calen did not answer. Hesper looked at him for a moment, and then she came in and sat down without asking, and she did not ask anything else either.
Kade came to the guardroom door last. He had his own paper rolled in one hand, tied with a piece of red thread. He had clearly been holding it up for the passage to see.
He did not come in. He stood in the doorway with the paper raised and his other hand on his hip, the way a herald stands at the gate of a town he has no intention of entering.
“Master Orrin,” Kade said, loud enough for the passage. “The Duke has submitted his paper for scoring.”
“Put it on the table.”
“The Duke does not put things on tables. The Duke presents them.”
He untied the red thread and unrolled the paper with a snap. He held it out, and then he read it aloud, in the same voice he used for the wall.
“The Duke has written the hold for the flame, the count-back, and the sealing of a door. All three in the correct form. All three in the Duke’s own hand.”
Calen took the paper. He read it through once. Kade’s hand was quick and slanted and sure of itself.
It had made two mistakes in the count-back and one in the sealing, and it had not crossed out a single word.
He wrote the number at the top. He did not hurry it.
61.
“Sixty-one,” Kade said, to the passage, to the wall, to the drill yard beyond the window. “Sixty-one, Orrin. Write that in the Ministry’s book.
“Underline it twice. Let them see what a duke can do when he is not being taught to hold a candle.”
Liss, in the passage, said, “Underline it twice,” without moving her feet.
“It is in our book,” Calen said. He did not look up. “That is the only book it needs.”
Kade turned his back and went out. He did not close the door. The passage carried his laugh for a long time, and then it carried nothing.
Calen wrote the two numbers in the Hask Book, on the same line, one above the other. Harrow, Nell: 38. Ansel, Kade: 61. He did not underline either of them.
---
Hoff read the rule at the afternoon drill.
He stood at the gate with the sheet in his hand, and he did not pin it to the wall. He held it out at arm’s length, the way he had held the first letter from the Ministry. He did not look at the words while he read them.
He knew them already. He read the last line in the voice he used for orders that had already been decided.
“Class rule,” Hoff said. “Read by Ministry order, so nobody says they did not hear it.”
The seven stood in their pairs by the trough. Calen stood at the end of the line, a step behind them, with his hands at his sides. He did not count them.
He had counted them at the gate every morning since the memo. He knew the number.
“At least four of the seven must pass,” Hoff read. “With fifty-five or better, on the written and casting tests.”
Nobody moved. Dorran’s hand went to the cuff of his sleeve.
Hesper looked at the gate and then at the sky, as if she were checking the weather for a number. Tobin stood very still, his hands folded, his bare feet on the cold stones.
He was not looking at the sheet. He was looking at the boy beside him, who was looking at the ground.
“The Duke will be one of the four,” Kade said, from the end of the line. “The other three may do as they like.”
“Duke,” Liss said, very softly, and then she stopped.
Hesper raised one hand, just high enough for the guard to see it. “If it is four,” she asked Hoff, “does the fifth one count?”
“No,” said Hoff.
“Then the fifth one is only standing there,” Hesper said, and she put her hand down.
“If fewer than four pass,” Hoff read, “all seven students are executed. Their teacher with them.”
Liss said it under her breath, exactly as Hoff had said it. “Their teacher with them.”
The yard went very quiet. Even the guard on the wall seemed to lean closer to hear.
Calen counted the papers in his head. He had scored two of them: thirty-eight, and sixty-one. The rest were still drying on the guardroom table, with Dorran’s apology in every line.
One pass, he thought. Kade’s sixty-one. The rule wanted four.
Hoff lowered the sheet. He folded it once along the Ministry’s crease, and then again, and he looked at Calen across the length of the yard.
“Four of seven,” Hoff said. “Or all of you. The Ministry does not do halves.”