Page 12 of The Headmaster’s Binding

Against: no money. I've watched this campus for two weeks the way I watch everything, and nobody's flush, nobody's furtive about packages, nobody's eyes are wrong in the way that trade makes eyes wrong. No product. Not a smell, not a pill, not a rumor of one, and grad students cannot keep a secret that's fun; they can only keep the other kind. And the big one, the one I keep bumping into in the dark:

Leah Brandt did not leave my office high. She left vaguer. Whatever's being taken around here, it isn't being swallowed. It leaves people lighter. It takes the reason out and closes the skin over the hole, and there is no market I've ever heard of where the product is a four-minute cry you can't explain and a thank-you for a conversation that never happened.

Item twenty-three: "who's sitting this term." Leah went sideways on a Thursday. The word is a noun here. Find out what it's a noun FOR.

I thought about asking the cohort. I got as far as drafting the casual version in my head, hey, weird question, what's a tithe around here, and then I played the tape forward: the room shutting the way it shut over M. Vane, Hannah's pen stopping, Wes building a joke over the hole at speed, like a man throwing boards over a well. And a colder thought under that one: the woman in the green scarf had looked at me like I was a thing she'd be asked about. If my questions caused her to be questioned, I'd be the one who did that. I put the casual version away.

I looked at that last line for a while, and then I did something I want credit for: I went to bed. Growth.

* * *

Wednesday was the first formal faculty dinner of term, hall, gowns, candles, the works, and somebody's seating chart put me at the Headmaster's right hand.

I know it wasn't chance, because I watched the chart do its work. There's a board in the antechamber with the placement on it, calligraphy and all, and the man ahead of me, a chemist with seniority and a face for it, looked at the board twice, the second time with his glasses up, like the board had said a rude word to him. Elena found me over the sherry, followed my eyes to the chart, and made a noise into her glass that in a lesser woman would have been a whistle.

"Well," she said.

"It's alphabetical," I said. "Probably. Somewhere in there, alphabetically⁠—"

"Mercer," she said, "I've sat these dinners eleven years, and the last new hire who sat at that elbow was a Nobel shortlist." She patted my arm. "Chew slowly."

There was a stranger at the far end of the high table, a small gray woman introduced somewhere in the announcements as a visiting fellow, history of institutions, a name I didn't catch and nobody around me seemed to have caught either, and she watched the hall the way a proctor watches an exam, and I want it noted that I clocked her before anything else that evening happened, because afterward the evening was mostly one thing.

He was already seated when they brought us through. Dark gown over the dark suit, candlelight doing to his temples exactly what you'd expect candlelight to do, and when I sat he said, "Dr. Mercer," in the voice, the one that makes my surname sound like an appointment I'm early for.

"Headmaster."

"How stands the case against me?"

I'd promised him a longer conversation about my Boethius chapter at the welcome dinner, two weeks and one corridor ago. Of course he'd kept the thread. He keeps everything; I was starting to understand that the way you understand weather, by getting rained on.

"The case is troubled," I said. "Witnesses keep defecting."

"Which witnesses?"

"Boethius, mainly. I reread book three this week to use it against you and it took your side. I'm considering perjury."

"You would not be the first." He turned his glass a quarter turn, squaring it to a line on the linen only he could see, and I watched the hands do it and made myself study the salt cellar. "State the argument at its strongest."

So I did. That's the thing I'd forgotten about him between meetings, the thing the want-log keeps failing to file: he doesn't flatter you by agreeing, he flatters you by aiming. I gave him consolation-as-honest-transaction, the cell in Pavia, philosophy showing up precisely when rescue doesn't, the whole spine of my monograph, better than I'd given it at my own defense, because at my own defense nobody's gray eyes were doing that.

He heard all of it. Then he said, "The man they executed was not the man they arrested."

"That's—"

"The charges were unchanged. The cell was unchanged. The sentence was carried out." He said it the way other men hand you a receipt. "Everything the world would call the situation was identical, and the man was not. On the evidence, I would call that a rescue."

"You'd call it a rescue that ends on an execution."

"Name one that does not," he said, "eventually," and picked up his fork, and I sat there hearing my own heartbeat over a hall of two hundred people, because we were not talking about Boethius, and I could not for the life of me have told you what we were talking about, only that the floor of it was a long way down.

The candles between us needed trimming. One flame stood up tall while I was looking at it, taller than a flame that size has business standing, and I remember it because I was staring at anything in the world that wasn't his hands.

We fenced through three courses. It's the only word. Fencing has rules, that's what makes it fencing and not fighting: you go at each other exactly as hard as the form allows and no harder, and the form that night was collegiate small talk, and we bent it like a pair of professionals. The library's serials dispute: he defended the committee system so dryly it took me a full minute to be sure he was mocking it, and I still wouldn't testify either way. My seminar: he knew Priya's surname and June's age and that Wes had a bet going about Lady Philosophy, which meant he'd either read my enrollment list closely or asked somebody, and both of those answers did things to my pulse that I declined to examine. I told him about the duck carved into my seminar table. He said the duck predated him. I said that seemed unlikely. He said, "Very little here troubles itself about likelihood," and that one I wrote down in the dark of my own head, word for word, to keep.

Once, between the fish and the lamb, I tried the flat of my blade on the far end of the table. "Your visiting fellow. History of institutions. Which institutions?"

"Ours, at present."