Nell went first. Hoff had read the order on Day twenty-five, and the order had not changed since.
The casting took place in the guardroom, because the examiner said the guardroom had a flat floor and a door that shut. The Bureau inspector stood by the window with his silver pin catching the light. He had come up the Ministry road alone, as before, and he had not said good morning to anyone.
Beside him stood the examiner. He was a thin man in a dark coat, with ink on two fingers of his right hand and a leather case under one arm. He opened the case on the table and took out a sheet with a line ruled down the middle.
“Harrow,” he said. “Formula one.”
Nell stood on the line Hoff had chalked on the flags. She did not look at the inspector. She looked at the examiner’s pen.
“May I?” she asked.
“You may speak,” the examiner said. “You may not cast. Say the formula.”
“Formula one,” Nell said. “The hold. Breathe in. Hold it for the count. Let the flame stay where it is.”
“Formula two.”
“The count back. Start at ten. Say each number before the one after it.”
“Formula three.”
“The seal.” Nell paused, and then she went on in the same flat voice. “Put the hand flat on the door. Press until the wood is warm. Then say the word and stop.”
The examiner wrote. The pen made short, neat strokes. He did not look up when she finished, and he did not ask her to say the formulas again.
Calen stood at the back by the door. He had left his note sheets on the kitchen table, under the salt, when Hoff called the casting. He had meant to fetch them. He had not.
The examiner blotted the line and wrote one word at the foot of the sheet. Calen saw it upside down. It was short, it was capitalised, and he had never seen it on a student’s paper before.
Hollow.
“Thank you, Harrow,” the examiner said. He folded the sheet once, sharply, and slid it into the case.
Nell turned her head toward the back of the room, toward Calen. He did not move his face. She looked at the case for a moment longer, and then she stepped off the line.
“The score goes to the Bureau,” the inspector said from the window. He had not turned around. “Not to the class, Instructor. Not to the Keep.”
“Yes,” Calen said.
“Good.” The inspector looked at the chalk on the flags, and at the empty line beside it. “Next.”
The rest of the order went on through the morning, one name at a time. Kade cast formula one with his jaw locked and his chin high, and he got through formula two before he stopped. Hesper answered every formula with a question, and the examiner wrote on her sheet without asking her to stop. Liss copied the examiner’s stance without being told to, and was told to stop, and stopped.
Calen did not write any of their words down. He turned the one word over in his head through the rest of the morning. It did not get any easier to hold.
The inspector came to stand beside him at the door, when the last name had been called. “Does the Keep keep a record of its own drills, Instructor?”
“The Keep keeps the count.”
“Good,” the inspector said, and he did not write that down.
After the casting, Nell came back across the yard alone. She stopped by the trough, where Calen was filling the cup for the drill, and she waited until he looked up.
“Sir,” she said. “What is Hollow?”
“It is their word.”
“May I ask what it means?”
“It is the Bureau’s word,” Calen said. “It is not mine to explain to you. I am sorry.”
Nell nodded slowly, as if she had expected that and had hoped for something else. She did not ask again. She dipped her hand in the trough and dried it on her skirt, and she looked at the stone of the yard wall.
In the afternoon he took the class down the cistern stair.
It ran from the kitchen passage into the dark under the Keep, where the water was kept. The stone steps were wet, and the walls sweated in the cold. The air at the bottom smelled of old iron and standing water.
Below, there was a black pool with a rim of worn stone, and above the pool a roof that dripped. Nobody had lit the lamp down there in Calen’s time.
“Fear drill,” he said at the top of the stair. “You walk down blind. Eyes shut. One hand on the wall. You tell me when your foot finds the next step.”
“The Duke’s eyes are open,” Kade said. “The Duke sees very well.”
“Shut them, Ansel.”
Kade did not shut his eyes. He came to the top of the stair, though, and he had the note sheets in one hand. He had fetched them from under the salt cellar on his way past the kitchen table. Calen had not seen him do it.
“Instructor,” Kade said. He lifted the top sheet to the light from the passage. “You have left your paper lying about.”
“Give it back.”
“The Duke will read it first. The Duke has a duty to the class.” Kade cleared his throat.
He read in the voice he used for the gate count, which he had learned from Hoff and had decided was his own. “Ives, Dorran. Future Title. Speaker of the Long Peace.”
The stair went quiet. Somewhere below, a drip fell into the pool.
“A Speaker,” Kade said, “who cannot climb four steps will not last one day. The Duke only reads what the sheet says.” He turned the page over.
“The Duke wonders what the other two lines say. The Duke will not read them. The Duke is not cruel.”
It was a good joke, if you were not the one it was about. Calen did not laugh. He held out his hand for the sheet, and kept it there.
Hesper laughed. It was one short breath through her nose, and then she looked embarrassed. Two of the others laughed out loud. Ysra did not, but her mouth moved, very slightly, at one corner.
Liss did not laugh. She stood with her arms at her sides and looked at Kade.
“It is not a joke word,” she said.
“It is the Duke’s joke,” Kade said.
“Speaker is not a joke word,” Liss said again. She said it in the same flat tone Kade had used, and then she stopped. She had heard herself do it. Calen could see that she did not like the sound of it.
Ysra spoke from the back of the group, precise as a clerk reading a sentence. “The sheet was read aloud, Ansel, in front of the class. That is a disclosure. It will be recorded as one.”
Tobin had walked to the edge of the pool. He stood with his hand on the wall and looked up at the roof. A drop fell from the stone and hit the black water with a small, clear sound.
“Four,” Tobin said quietly. Another drop fell. “Five.”
Nobody asked him to stop.
“Shut your eyes,” Calen said to the stair. “Now. Go down.”
They went. Hesper went first, with her hand flat on the wall and her face very still. Ysra went second. Liss counted her steps in a whisper.
Dorran went fourth. Kade came last, with his eyes wide open and the sheets still in his hand, and his steps were slow and very straight.
Dorran put his hand on the wall. He put his foot down on the first step, and then the second, and the third. Then he stopped on the fourth step, with his toes over the edge of it and his bandaged palm flat on the wet stone.
“Sorry,” he said. His voice was very small in the dark. “Sorry.”
Nobody spoke.
“Sorry,” Dorran said again. “Sorry, Duke. Sorry, Instructor. I cannot find the next one.”
“Breathe out,” Calen said from the top of the stair. “On the count.”
“Sorry.”
“Dorran.”
“Sorry.” Dorran’s knees bent. He sat down on the fourth step, heavily, as if someone had pulled a cord out from under him.
His shoulders shook. He made very little noise. His breath came in short hard pieces, and each piece had the word in it. “Sorry, sorry. I am so sorry.”
Kade had stopped two steps above him. He looked down at the boy on the step, and for once there was nothing formal in his face at all.
“Ives,” he said. “The Duke did not mean—”
“Sorry,” Dorran said. “Sorry, Duke.”
Kade’s mouth closed.
Calen went down the stair. He went slowly, one hand on the wall, and he knelt on the step beside Dorran without touching him. The boy was shaking all over now, his good hand clenched on his knee.
“You are on a step,” Calen said quietly. “That is all. It is wet, and it is a step. It is not a sentence.”
“Sorry.”
“Stop saying it. Breathe out. I will count it for you.”
“I cannot find the count,” Dorran whispered.
“Then I will find it,” Calen said. “One.”
Dorran breathed out, and the breath broke in the middle. “Sorry,” he said, and then, very faintly, “two.”
“Good. Three.”
Tobin’s drops fell into the pool behind them. Nobody else on the stair moved. When Calen looked back, Liss had her hand on the wall and her eyes shut, and she was counting with them, one breath behind.
By the time Dorran had reached the count of twelve, his shoulders had come down an inch. He still could not stop saying sorry, and he did not try to stop anymore.
“Up,” Calen said. “We are going up. Not down. Take my arm.”
“Sorry, sir.”
“Take the wall, then. The wall is fine.”
They climbed out of the stair into the passage. Hoff stood at the top, by the kitchen door, and he looked at the boy’s face for a long moment. He said nothing, which was the first kind thing Calen had seen him do all week.
The light from the kitchen door was yellow and ordinary. Calen walked Dorran across the yard, past the trough and the chalk line and the grey post with its two old knots still hanging low. They went on to the stable at the far end of the Keep, where the straw was dry and the air smelled of horses and wet wood.
Calen sat Dorran on an upturned bucket by the stable door. He did not close the door. He crouched in front of the boy so that their eyes were level, and he waited until the shaking had slowed, and then he waited until it had almost stopped.
“Sorry,” Dorran said.
“Enough.”
Tobin came to the stable door a little after, with a tin cup of water from the trough. He set it in the straw beside the bucket without a word, and then he went back to the yard. He had counted the drips all the way up, he told Calen later. He had not counted the boy.
“Sorry.”
“Look at the door,” Calen said. “Tell me three things you can see.”
Dorran looked. It took him a long time. “The door,” he said. “The bar. A piece of straw.” He stopped. “Sorry.”
“That is three. Good.”
Calen had read the boy’s three lines on the first day, by touch, at the door of the cell. He had written them in the Hask Book that night, and he had not looked at them since. He had not needed to. He had not thought the words would ever be read out loud, in a cistern, by a boy with a sheet in his hand.
Dorran looked at his bandaged palm. The wrap had come loose at one corner, and a thin line of pink showed under it, where the heel had closed.
“Sir,” he said. His voice was very quiet now, quieter than it had been on the stair, and it was steady for the first time all day. “Sir, may I ask one thing?”
“Yes.”
“The sheet.” Dorran did not look up. “Is my name on the list? The one from the first day. The execution list.”
Calen said nothing.
The straw shifted in the stall behind them. A horse blew out through its nose, long and slow. Calen did not answer him.