Calen sat on the upturned bucket until the grey light came through the slats. Then he stayed on it, because the boy had not moved.
Dorran sat against the wall of the stall with his knees pulled up. His bandaged hand rested on his shin. The wrap had come loose again, and the pink line underneath looked darker than it had the night before.
“Sorry,” Dorran said.
“You said that on the stair.”
“I know.” He wiped his nose on his sleeve.
“I cried in front of the Duke. I could not stop. I am sorry for that as well.”
“Crying is not on Hoff’s list of rules.”
“Sorry.” Dorran shut his eyes.
“And the stairs. I am sorry for the stairs.”
“You came up them. The wall first, then my arm.”
Calen looked at the bandage. “That is not a thing to be sorry for.”
Dorran did not answer. Calen had not expected him to.
“Did you count?” Dorran asked after a while.
“On the cistern stair. You counted for me.”
“Yes.”
“Do you count when you are scared?”
Calen did not answer at once. “Sometimes.”
“Are you scared now?”
“No,” Calen said. He had counted the legs of the bucket twice since he sat down. He did not say that either.
In the far stall the horse shifted its weight. Hay rustled. A bar of pale light fell through a crack in the boards and moved slowly across the straw toward the bucket.
“Ask me something,” Calen said. “Not sorry. A question.”
Dorran thought about it for a long time. When the question came, his voice was small, but it did not shake.
“The Duke read my title. Speaker of the Long Peace.”
He looked at his hand, not at Calen. “Is it true?”
Calen thought of the Hask Book, shut in the inside pocket of his coat. He had written the three lines in it on the first day. He had not opened it since the cistern.
“Ask me again on Day forty,” he said.
“Why Day forty?”
“Because by then I will know more than I know now.”
“That is not an answer, sir.”
“No,” Calen said. “It is not.”
Dorran nodded slowly, as if this was about what he had expected. He pulled the grey blanket higher over his knees. It smelled of horse and damp wool.
Calen stood. His knees were stiff from the bucket, and a sharp line of pain ran down one side of his back. He walked to the stable door, where the light was better, and Dorran followed him there and sat down on the threshold with the blanket around his shoulders.
Calen crouched in front of him, close enough to touch, and held out his hand, palm up.
“Your wrist. The good one.”
Dorran gave it to him. Calen laid two fingers on the inside of the wrist, where the skin was thin and the pulse ran quick. He waited for the reading to come up under his fingers, slowly, and then all at once.
The three lines were there. They had not moved since the first day at the cell door, and they did not move now. Calen kept his face as still as the stall wall.
“Your pulse is slower,” he said.
“Is that all?”
“That is all you need today.”
It was not all. Calen did not say the rest. He took his fingers away, and the three lines stayed where they were, in his head, where the boy could not read them.
Dorran looked down at his knees. “Sorry,” he whispered. Then, more quietly, “Thank you.”
Calen took the note sheets out of his coat. Kade had given them back on the cistern stair, folded in half, with the top sheet creased where the Duke’s thumb had held it.
Calen smoothed them flat on his knee. There were seven names on them, and under each name a line of small, tight notes.
Kade had read the first line aloud. The rest was for Calen alone.
He folded the sheets in half, then in half again. He slid them into the small lock box he kept inside his coat. The box was the size of his hand, and its key hung on a loop of string around his neck.
He turned the key. It made a small, flat click.
Above him, a board creaked.
Calen looked up. Liss was kneeling at the edge of the hayloft, her face between two rafters and her hair full of straw.
One arm hung over the drop. Her hand was out in the air, and her wrist turned slowly to the left, a quarter turn, and stopped.
It was exactly the turn he had made with the key.
“Corran,” Calen said.
Liss froze. She looked at her own hand as if it had come to her from someone else.
“I copied it,” she said.
“I saw.”
“You turned it to the left. Then you stopped.”
Her voice was flat and literal. “Did you lock it?”
“Yes.”
“Then the lock works,” Liss said. She pulled her arm back into the hay, and the loft went quiet.
A moment later her head came back over the edge. “Is the key on a string?”
“Yes.”
“Around your neck.”
“Yes.”
“Then anyone can take it off you while you sleep.” She thought about that. “I will not take it.”
“Thank you.”
“I was not going to,” Liss said, and her head went back into the straw.
Dorran was staring at the rafters with his mouth a little open. “She is not allowed up there,” he whispered. “Is she?”
“No.”
“Sorry,” Dorran said, and this time Calen let it go without a word.
Before he stood, Calen opened the Hask Book on his knee. He wrote one line in it, in small square letters.
Ives. Still here. He looked at the words for a while. They were true, and they were not the whole truth, and he closed the book on them.
A few minutes later a shadow filled the stable door. Tobin stood in it with two tin cups, one in each hand. Water slopped over the rims and ran down his wrists, and he did not seem to notice.
“Water,” Tobin said. “From the trough. One for the boy and one for you.”
“Thank you, Tobin.”
“You have not had water since the cistern.” Tobin gave Dorran the first cup and held the second one out until Calen took it.
Then he did not leave. He stood in the doorway with the light behind him and looked at Dorran’s bandage.
“Sir,” he said.
“The sheet has seven names. The Duke read one of them. The Duke said it was a joke.”
“Yes.”
“A joke has a laugh at the end. I listened for one. There was not one.”
Tobin’s voice was very even. “So it was not a joke.”
“It was a title. I have named it now, so it is recorded.”
“Recorded where?”
“In me.” Tobin looked at Dorran again.
“His name is Dorran Ives. I have said it twice this morning. That is all I can do with it.”
Dorran’s cup stopped halfway to his mouth. He did not say sorry. He only looked at Tobin for a long moment, and then he drank.
The bell rang across the yard for the morning count. It was the same bell that had rung every morning since Day one. It sounded thinner in the stable than it did in the yard, and the horse in the far stall lifted its head at it.
Calen stood and waited for the boy to stand too. Dorran took the wall, and then he took Calen’s arm, and they walked out into the cold together.
The trough had a skin of ice along one edge. Dorran stepped around it carefully, and he did not ask why it was there.
The count was at the gate, before the bread, the way the Ministry’s standing order had it. Ear stood by the iron post with the sheet in his hand. He did not look pleased to be there, and he did not look sorry for it either.
He read the names in his flat voice, one at a time, and each student answered.
“Harrow.”
“Here,” Nell said. She stood at the end of the line with her back very straight. Her eyes went to Dorran, and then to his bandage, and then away again.
“Ansel.”
“Duke Kade Ansel,” Kade said. “Present. And not sorry.”
“Ansel,” Ear said again.
“The Duke is present, Sergeant.”
Ear was not a sergeant, and he did not correct him. He made a small note on the sheet and moved his thumb to the next line.
Hoff stood at the end of the row with his hands behind his back. He had walked down from the guardroom without a sound, the way heavy men sometimes did, and he watched the names go by without blinking.
“Orrin,” he said.
“Captain.”
“Can the boy stand?”
“He can stand,” Calen said.
“Then he stands.” Hoff looked at the bandage, and then at Dorran’s face, and then at the gate.
“The list still stands, Orrin. Make sure the boy knows it.”
Calen had heard those words on Day seven and again on Day thirteen. They sounded no different now, and that was the worst thing about them.
“Corran.”
“Here,” Liss said, in exactly Ear’s voice.
Ear looked at her for one long breath. “Stop that, girl,” he said.
Liss did not copy the words. She only looked back at him.
“Hesper Dray.”
“Here,” Hesper said. “Is there a reason you are reading slower today?”
Ear did not answer her. He moved his thumb to the next line.
“Dunne.”
“Present,” Ysra said. “It is recorded.”
Ear looked at the sheet, and then at her, and then he made the note.
“Ives.”
Dorran opened his mouth, and nothing came out.
“Ives,” Ear said again, and this time he looked up over the sheet.
“Here,” Dorran said. It came out cracked.
“Sorry. Here.”
“Louder.”
“Here.”
Ear made his note. “Count is seven,” he said.
He looked down the line once more. “Ash.”
“Here,” Tobin said.
Calen stood at the back of the line with his hands at his sides. He was not on the sheet. He had not been on it since Day one.
The Record still had his name in Crown ink at the bottom of the list. Seven names, every morning, at the same gate. Dorran was one of them.
The bread came out of the kitchen in a basket on Hoff’s arm. Nell moved out of the line before anyone told her to. She took the heel of a loaf from the top of the basket and put it into Dorran’s good hand without a word.
“Sorry,” Dorran said.
“Eat it,” Nell said, and went back to her place.
Dorran ate it. He ate it slowly, the way a person eats when he is not sure he will be allowed to finish.
Every few bites he looked at the gate, then at Calen, then at the bread again.
Kade came down the line on his way to the door. He stopped beside the boy, and he looked at the crust in Dorran’s hand as if it had personally offended him.
“Eat it, Ives,” he said. “The Duke will not carry you up another stair.”
“Sorry, Duke.”
“Do not be sorry at the Duke. Be hungry at him.”
Kade’s mouth moved at one corner, and then it went flat again. He walked on to the gate post without looking back.
Dorran stared after him. Then, very carefully, he took another bite.
Kade had not gone inside. He stood at the gate post with his arms folded, and he kept looking at Dorran and then looking away.
Calen did not know how much of the stable he had heard from the yard. Enough, probably.
Hoff came down the line with his thumb on the gate book. He wrote the time in it, and he did not look at any of them.
The lock box sat against Calen’s ribs. It was heavy, for a box that held only a few sheets of paper. Seven names, and under each name a line that Calen had not yet decided to say out loud.
Nine days until Day forty. He would say nothing more until then, not to the boy and not to the Duke. Then he would answer Dorran where the whole class could hear.