Calen counted the Keep before the bread on Day twenty-five. He did it the slow way, with one hand on each door frame, so the count came up through his fingers as well as his eyes.
He started at the far end of the passage, by the cellar.
The dog lay across the threshold where it had lain since Day twenty-two. Its chin was on its paws.
When Calen’s hand touched the frame beside it, the torn ear moved. The eyes came up and followed his hand. Then they went back to the dark gap under the door.
Calen counted it anyway. He did not count it as a person. He counted it as the one thing he had raised, and he left the number in his head.
Then he walked back toward the bend.
At each door he stopped and said the name under his breath, without calling it. He did not knock. He only listened, and he waited until he heard the breathing behind the wood.
Harrow. Nell’s breath came slow and even. It did not hitch once.
He had not yet told her what the casting would be. He would have to tell her before the bread on Day thirty. He did not know yet how he would say it.
Ansel. Kade’s breath was thick and sour, the way it was when a boy had gone to sleep angry and had not been able to stop himself.
Dray. Hesper’s door was dark, and there was no sound at all for a moment.
Then she gave a long, tired sigh, the sigh of someone who had been awake listening for a long time. Calen let it go.
Corran. Liss was copying Hesper’s breath. Calen could hear her doing it, very carefully, in and out.
Dunne. Ysra’s door had no lamp behind it. Her breathing was flat and measured, the breath of a person who had decided how much rest she needed.
Ives. Dorran was awake. He said a soft “Sorry” to nothing, and then he was quiet.
Ash. Tobin’s door opened before Calen’s hand left the frame. Tobin stood in the gap with his blanket around his shoulders and his hands pink and warm.
Calen kept his hand on the last frame and made the count the way Hoff made it, plain and complete.
Seven students. Himself. Two jailers at the ends of the passage.
Ten.
“Seven names, sir,” Tobin said. “You said each one. I heard every name go by.”
“Yes.”
“You did not say the jailers’ names,” Tobin said. “I do not know them. I would like to.”
Calen looked at the boy’s hands. They were steady. The blue had not come back since Day twenty-two, and it had not been asked to.
“Go back to sleep, Ash.”
“I cannot, sir. The bread is coming up.”
It was. Calen heard the hatch slide, and the basket come through, and then the wheels.
Before the cart there was the gate count.
Ear stood on the post with his folded paper, and he read seven names into the cold air. Seven students answered.
Calen stood at the back of the line, where the instructor always stood, and he listened to every answer.
Nobody was missing. Nobody had been added. The count was seven, and it had been seven since the first gate count on Day fourteen.
Hoff wrote the time in the gate book with a short pencil. Then he looked up at the arch.
“Cart’s late,” he said.
“It is not late,” Calen said. “It is the day the box is counted.”
The wheels came in under the arch a few breaths later. Calen heard them before he saw them.
They were wide, the grain cart’s wheels, with broad iron rims. Calen looked at them for a long time. He thought of the narrow track in the frost on Day twenty-two, and he did not say so.
The clerk climbed down with his flat box and his sheet. He was the same thin man, with the Ministry’s wax on his cuffs.
“Forty,” the clerk said, before anyone had asked him. “As recorded. The inspector’s number.”
“Forty,” Hoff said. He had the box on the table already, with the cloth folded beside it.
Ysra came in from the passage and took the lamp from its hook. She held it at the height the clerk needed.
She did not look at the coins. She looked at his pencil.
Hoff turned the key. He tipped the box, and the suns rolled out across the table, and nobody reached to stop them.
The clerk counted them with his thumb, quickly and badly. Then he counted them again with two fingers, the way the inspector had done.
“Four stacks,” the clerk said. “Forty.”
He wrote it down. Then he blotted the page on his sleeve and said, to the sheet, “The grain is paid from the Ministry store. The box is untouched.”
“Untouched,” Hoff said.
The clerk climbed back onto the cart. He did not look at Calen once, and Calen did not look at him.
The grain came off in its two sacks. Ear took them to the store on his shoulders. The cart turned on the cobbles and went back under the arch, and its wheels left a wide track in the frost.
Forty. Calen said it to himself, the way he had said the names at the doors.
It was the number. It had not moved since Day ten, and the Keep had only ever counted it.
Calen kept a second tally, the one nobody else could read. He kept it in his head, the way Hoff kept the bread. He did not write it in the Hask Book, and he did not say it in the yard.
Nell, nothing. Ysra, nothing. Hesper, nothing.
Liss, one against. Tobin, one against. Kade, two against.
Dorran, one for.
Two against Kade was the number he had given him on Day five. He had not changed it since, and he did not like that either. A number that did not move was only a number that had stopped being watched.
It was not a good tally. It was the one he had, and on Day twenty-five it had not moved since the first week.
At dinner Calen stood at the end of the long table and said the three rules.
He did not raise his voice. He did not need to.
The seven of them had the rules by heart, and they had heard them said a dozen times. He said them anyway, slowly, one at a time, the way a man reads a sum back to be sure of it.
“Every drill starts with the count said aloud. Every count, from the first swing to the last.”
“Every count,” Liss said, copying him. Then she looked at her bowl.
“No one touches a training blade unless Captain Hoff’s guard is watching. Not for a minute. Not to look at the grip.”
Tobin held up one finger, then another, then a third, and folded them down again. He did not say anything. He only counted the rules, not the people.
“No one trades food, paper or blades with the guards.”
“Not a crust. Not a pencil. Not a sheet of ink.”
Hesper had her chin on her fists. “Does a casting have a winner?” she asked.
“It has a count,” Calen said.
“Then who does the counting?”
“The examiner.”
Ysra, in the middle of the bench, lifted her head at the third rule. “That is the only one with a price,” she said precisely. “Are you going to say the price too, Instructor?”
“No.”
“Good. It is already on the table.” She went back to her bowl.
Calen looked down the table.
Kade sat at the far end with his hands flat on the wood and his chin up. He had eaten his bowl. He had eaten his bread too, from the second basket, the one Hoff had brought in from the hatch without a word.
Dorran leaned toward Calen with his bandaged palm in his lap. “Sorry, sir,” he said. “He has not said one word since the cart.”
“I know.”
“Sorry,” Dorran said again, and went back to his bowl.
Calen waited for him to say the Duke was not interested in rules. He waited for the sarcasm. He had an answer ready for it.
Kade said nothing at all.
It was worse than the sarcasm. Calen did not say so. He picked up his spoon, and he put it down again, and he went back to the passage.
After the last lamp, when the passage had gone quiet and the jailers were at the far end with their keys, Calen sat on his cot with both books on his knee.
He did not open the Hask Book. He opened the Ledger, the one with the blanks in it.
He wrote the first line in neat, quiet figures, the way he had been taught to write a valuation. Then he wrote the rest under it.
Echo, thirty. Echo, seventy-five. Two Echoes in use.
Foundation, ten.
Real PP, one hundred and fifteen.
Rank, one. Initiate.
The Ministry’s paper still said Rank Four. The paper said the Halvane credential had been stripped, and that the stripped man had no value to the Crown.
Calen looked at the two numbers together, the paper and the Ledger. Neither one was lying. They were only saying different things.
Blanks, two.
Under the figures he wrote one more line, then he looked at it.
Day thirty. Casting. Seven names, one order.
He crossed it out, and then he wrote it again, because the Ledger was for what was true.
He looked at the line for a long time. He could not remember the first thing he had said to Tobin on the board, the morning the boy had held six counts.
He could remember that he had said something. He could remember the feeling of it, the words coming out of him cold and certain. The words themselves were gone.
He closed the Ledger. He did not show it to anyone. He put it inside his coat, next to the Hask Book, and he did not tell Nell, or Tobin, or Hoff.
Calen had thought he would feel something about the number. He felt only the cot under him and the cold of the stone wall at his back. Rank One, and one hundred and fifteen, and seven students alive in a passage with a dog across the door.
The hall door opened after the last lamp was out.
Hoff came in with a sheet in one hand and a pin in the other. He did not light a lamp. The light from the passage fell across the board and the pine stools and the sheet.
He pinned the sheet to the post by the stove without looking at it.
“Ten minutes, Orrin,” he said, to the dark. “Then bed.”
He took his hand from the sheet and read it aloud, in the voice he used for the gate count. It was flat and clear, with no pause for anyone to answer.
“Day thirty. Test Term. Casting, the Keep at Hask.”
“The order of the casting, as set by the examiner.”
He cleared his throat.
“Harrow,” Hoff read. “First.”
Nell’s voice came from the far end of the passage. It was very quiet, and it was perfectly steady.
“Sir. May I ask one thing?”
“Yes.”
“Will the casting be a flame?”
“It will be a flame.”
“Then I will hold it still,” Nell said, and her breathing began again behind the wood, slow and even, counting.
Hoff did not look toward her door. He turned the sheet over and went on reading, down the list, one name after another.
“Ansel. Dray. Corran.”
“Dunne. Ives. Ash.”
Calen had taught her the gap and the knot. He had taught her to wait for the second word. He had no answer for what a casting examiner would ask her to do with a flame, and he did not like that he had none.
Tobin, from the passage, said, “Last. Good.”
“The Ministry does not do halves,” Hoff said. He folded the sheet once, sharply, along the crease. “Harrow first.”