Twenty questions. Calen copied them onto the Ministry’s sheets on Day twenty-six, one line at a time, while the kitchen fire was still low.
Every question was about appraisal law. Every answer could be found in the Keep’s own books, if a student had read them.
Question one asked for the three lines of an appraisal. Question nine asked what a Crown Writ could strike, and who had to sign it. Question twenty asked how many clean runs made a Mark, and what made a run clean.
He laid the sheets face down along the long table. Then he set out seven pens in a row and counted them twice.
“The candle goes down to the second notch,” he said. “Then the pens stop.”
“Who says so?” Hesper asked.
“I do.”
“Is that the Ministry’s word, or yours?”
“Write, Dray.”
Hoff came down the table and picked up the top sheet. He read it without moving his lips.
“Did you make it hard, Orrin?”
“It is the Ministry’s law.”
“That is not what I asked.”
“Yes,” Calen said. “It is hard.”
Hoff put the sheet down. “Good. Let the Ministry choke on it.”
Calen had written the paper to find out what the seven of them knew. He had not thought about who else would read the answers. He thought about it now, standing at the table, and he kept his face still.
Hoff went back to the stove and stood with his arms folded. He did not sit. He watched the door, the window and the seven heads, in that order, every few breaths.
“Ives,” he said once, low. “The candle does not wait for the Ministry. Write.”
Dorran bent lower over his sheet and wrote faster.
Nobody spoke for a long time after that. The only sounds were the scratch of nibs and a log shifting in the grate.
Nell wrote small and fast, with no wasted strokes. Then she stopped on question nine and set her pen down on the wood.
“Sir.”
“Yes.”
“May I ask what strike means on this sheet?”
“Remove it. Draw a line through it.”
“Does the line stay?”
“The line stays.”
Nell read the question again. She did not look up. She picked up her pen and wrote, and she did not ask anything else.
Liss sat on Nell’s left and copied whatever she could see. When Calen passed behind the bench, she whispered, “Read the question twice,” because he had said it at the start. Then she read the question twice, her lips moving.
Ysra wrote without crossing out a single word. Her pen did not stop, and it did not hurry. Calen watched it for three lines and then made himself look away.
Tobin took the most time over his answers. At question three he stopped and held his pen above the sheet.
“Sir. This one names a thing.”
“Yes.”
“The thing is a Teaching Method.”
“It is.”
“Then I will write its name,” Tobin said. “I will not write what it does. That is the next question.”
Calen did not answer him. Tobin wrote the name in careful capitals and went on to the next line.
Kade had written his header first, before anything else. He had done it with a flourish, the ink thick and black. Then his pen had stopped, and he had sat with both hands flat on the table and not moved again.
When the candle reached the second notch, Kade stood up. He walked the length of the table and put his sheet down in front of Calen.
The header said Name as on the roll. Under it, Kade had written Duke Kade Ansel, Iron Duke of the Yard. Below that, all twenty lines were white.
“The Duke has signed,” Kade said. “The Duke signs as the Duke.”
“The roll has your name,” Calen said. “Name as on the roll.”
“The roll is a Ministry document. The Ministry has taken my rank. It has not taken my title.”
Calen read the header again. Then he read the twenty white lines.
Zero. Write it down.
He took the Hask Book from his coat and opened it on the table. He wrote in plain figures: Ansel, Kade. Zero.
He did not argue. He did not look at the title a second time. He closed the book.
Kade had braced for the argument. Calen could see it in his chin, which had come up, and in his hands, which had gone behind his back.
The argument did not come. Kade stood very still with nothing to push against.
“Zero,” Liss said from her bench. She said it exactly as Calen had.
Ysra did not look up from her own sheet.
“A blank answer under a name is a refusal, Instructor. Not a failure. The sheet says so.”
“Yes.”
“Then it is recorded as a refusal.” She dipped her pen. “I wanted the word exact.”
Kade walked back to his place. He sat down slowly, and he did not pick up his pen.
Hesper finished first. She put her pen down before the candle reached the notch and sat back with her hands folded.
“Is it finished,” she said, “if nobody has said so?”
“It is finished when I say so.”
“Then say so.”
“Pens down, Dray.”
Liss copied it at once. “Pens down.”
“Am I first?”
“Yes.”
“Did I answer all twenty?” Hesper asked. “Or only the ones I wanted to?”
“You tell me.”
Hesper almost smiled. It was the first smile Calen had seen on her in some days. She carried her sheet to the table, laid it face up, and said nothing else.
Her answers were short. Most of them were right. Beside question six she had written a single question, in her own hand, as if to ask the paper whether it had been answered properly.
Dorran had spilled ink across question twelve. The black had run into the margin and over the edge of the line.
“Sorry, sir.” He held up the ruined sheet in both hands. The bandage on his left palm had gone grey at the edge.
“May I have a second sheet? Sorry for asking.”
“Yes.”
Calen took a clean sheet from the stack and laid it in front of him. Dorran said, “Thank you. Sorry for the ink,” and bent over it with his tongue between his teeth.
He wrote fast. He had only the length of one more notch.
On his way back to his seat, Dorran stopped beside Kade’s chair. “Sorry, Duke,” he whispered.
Kade did not look up from his white lines. “The Duke is not sorry for anything, Ives. You may keep yours.”
When the second notch came, Calen said, “Pens down,” and the pens stopped together.
Calen graded the sheets at the end of the table, one at a time, with the candle pulled close. He wrote each figure in the Hask Book, not on the paper. Nobody else would read them.
Tobin’s answer to question three was a single name in capitals, with a line under it. Calen gave it what it earned and went on. Ysra’s sheet had no crossings out at all.
Nell’s sheet had one. On question nine she had drawn a line through her first answer and written the second below it. She had left the line where it was.
Calen looked at that line for a while. Then he wrote the figure beside it and did not change the figure.
Then he took a stick of chalk to the board beside the kitchen door. He wrote the order, and not the marks. He had decided that before the paper went out.
The board read, from the top: Dray. Dunne. Corran. Harrow. Ives. Ash. Ansel.
Hesper read it first. “Is first the best,” she asked, “or only first?”
“It is the order.”
“Then why is the order on a wall?”
“Because lists get read, Dray,” Hoff said from the stove.
Ysra came to the board last, with her sheet folded in one hand. She read it once, all the way down, and did not stop on any name.
“The board is not binding, Instructor.”
“No.”
“Good. I wanted it said.” She went back to the table without another word.
Nell found her own name on the board. She looked at it for a while, and then she looked at the bottom line.
She did not say anything about either one. Her hands stayed still at her sides.
Kade read the board from the doorway. He read it slowly, with his lips pressed together.
“Seventh,” he said. “The Duke notes the order.” He turned to go, then turned back. “The Duke also notes that it is a short list.”
Above the basin was a high window. It looked north over the outer wall and the road. Calen saw the grey first, then the shape under it.
A man in a grey cloak sat on the top of the outer wall by the north bend. One boot rested on the stone. The other hung down the outside and swung a little.
A small book lay open on his knee.
Below him, a grey horse stood tied to the marker stone at the road’s edge.
Calen went out into the yard. Ear was already at the foot of the wall stair, one hand on the rail.
“Silverspire,” Ear said. “Same cloak.”
“Yes.”
“Hoff says don’t give him the count.”
“He does not need the count,” Calen said. “He has a book.”
Calen climbed the wall stair. He counted the steps. Eleven.
He counted them because he was afraid, and he did not like that he was.
The man did not get up. He wrote in the book, and his pencil moved in small, neat strokes. Then he stopped, looked along the wall at Calen, and turned the book round so the page faced the yard.
Calen could not read the top lines from the stair. He could count them.
Six names were already written there, in the same dark hand. Then the scout wrote a seventh line, slowly. Ansel.
Calen did not look back at the kitchen door. He did not need to. The new name was close enough to read from the stair.
The scout wrote an eighth. Orrin. He had not covered either one with his hand.
Since the first grey cloak on the outer walk, on Day four, no one outside the Keep had written their names down where Calen could see.
He had taken that for a warning. This was not a warning. It was a list.
“The Ministry thanks the Keep for its paper, Instructor,” the scout said.
Calen did not answer him.
The scout closed the book and put the pencil behind his ear. He went down the outside of the wall, boot first, and untied the grey horse from the marker stone.
He was in the saddle before Calen reached the bottom of the stair. The horse turned north on its own, without a word from him.
Calen watched the grey cloak ride north along the road. The hooves rang on the stones at the road’s edge, then went soft on the dirt.
The cloak grew small between the hedges. Then the road bent behind the trees, and the cloak was gone.
He did not move until he could no longer hear the hooves.
Nell came out of the kitchen door and stopped at the foot of the stair. Her hands hung at her sides.
“Sir. Did he write my name?”
“Yes.”
“Did he write the flame?”
“A book does not hold a flame.”
Nell thought about that. “May I ask one more thing?”
“Yes.”
“Will the Ministry read the book?”
“Yes.” The Ministry read walls, Calen thought. It counted what it could read, and it could read a book very well.
Kade stood in the doorway behind her, with his hands clasped behind his back again. “The Duke has been written down before,” he said, to the empty road. “By better men than this.”
Then he went inside, and the door swung shut behind him.
“Seven names,” Ear said quietly. “And one teacher.”
“Eight,” Calen said.
The rider had all eight names in his book now. He was taking them north.