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A bell tinkled.
My stomach growled softly in response, but it was not the luncheon bell but a lighter handbell rung from the adjoining room. For an instant, that aged and solemn face looked startled, then concerned. As swiftly as a curtain is swept closed, he concealed his feelings beneath a meaningless polite smile.
“Wait here, maestressas.”
Still clutching Bee’s schoolbook beneath an arm, he limped to the door and, as the servant opened it, vanished into the adjoining room. We caught a glimpse of close-packed shelves of books before the servant closed the door behind both of them. Bee and I stood alone in the headmaster’s office, except, of course, for the sleeping head of Bran Cof. A rumble of voices drifted from a far chamber, but I wasn’t close enough to the inner door to pull apart the words.
“Do you think he just forgot he had it? Now what will happen?” Bee said in a low, fierce voice.
“He’ll page through and see the seven hundred small and large portraits of Maester Amadou’s pretty eyes and perfect jaw and braided hair. And before him, Maester Lewis with his red-gold hair and elevated brow and narrow chin. You’ve filled up reams of paper and ten or twelve schoolbooks with sketches of the best-looking young men in the academy.”
For once she did not spit fire. “I don’t care if people laugh at me for that. I’ve never cared what other people thought.”
True enough. “Then what matters so much to you?”
Her gusty sigh shuddered in the room, and for an instant I caught an echoing shudder of movement, eyes drifting as in dreams, beneath the closed eyelids of the poet’s head. I tensed, a shiver of cold crawling down my back, and stepped closer to Bee to clasp her hand.
What if he opened his eyes?
“I don’t know how to explain it,” she murmured, squeezing my hand. She hadn’t been looking at the head. Maybe I had imagined what I had seen. Bran Cof’s enchanted head had last been known to speak over one hundred years ago, on some arcane legal matter.
“Bee, we promised to always tell each other everything. What worries you so much about what’s in your sketchbook?”
The door into the adjoining room opened. We both jumped like children caught by the cook with honey cake stolen hot from the pan. As the headmaster’s assistant walked into the room, we offered a hasty courtesy to cover our embarrassment. His cheeks pinked—easy to see because he was albino—as he offered a more elaborate courtesy in return.
“Maestressas, I did not know you were here.” We called him the headmaster’s dog, not kindly. He hailed from a distant eastern empire beyond the Pale, and indeed one could discern his Avar heritage in his broad cheekbones and the epicanthic fold at his eyes. Rumor whispered that as a child, he had been rescued by the headmaster from death under the spears of the Wild Hunt that rode on Hallows Night. If true, the story explained his utter devotion to the old scholar.
We folded our hands politely before us and smiled at him.
For a moment, he looked ready to faint, for I am sure we appeared like two vultures biding our time until the dying cease their inconvenient thrashing. Then he glanced at Bee, his face curdling to such an unseemly shade of red that I conceived the horrible notion that the poor young man believed himself in love with her. Naturally such an infatuation was utterly forbidden between any of the teachers or their assistants and one of the academy’s prudent and virtuous female pupils, even if she was going to turn twenty and reach the age of majority in just under two months. Even if she had a mean left hook. Even if she had shown the least interest in him, which she had not.
“I beg your pardon,” Bee said so sweetly the words stung. “The headmaster instructed us to wait for him here. Will he return shortly?”
Her smile was too much for him. He croaked out a garbled word and bolted back the way he had come, wrenching the door closed behind him.
“Bee! Was that necessary?”
She stared at the door as if her gaze alone could splinter it into a thousand shards. “You know how I have always had such vivid dreams. I’ve started drawing them out to help remember them by.”
“How can you draw a dream?”
Her color was high, and her hands were clenched. “I had to try to make some sense of them because the details haunt me! I don’t even know why, and it doesn’t matter, but I can’t bear to have people looking—I can’t explain it. I didn’t even show them to you!” Tears welled in her lovely eyes. I knew when Bee was bluffing, and this wasn’t it.
I grasped her hands. “When he comes back in, you cause a distraction, anything to get him to put the book down and shift his attention elsewhere. I’ll sneak it into my schoolbag.”
Nodding, she let go my hands and wiped her cheeks. The longcase clock’s pendulum ticked. Ticked. Ticked. Ticked. Bee stared at the poet’s head as if daring Bran Cof to open his eyes. I couldn’t bear looking in case he did, so I let my gaze wander to the chalkboard. It had been recently erased, but I could still read traces of figures and words as a geologist can read down through layers of sediment and rock. The Hibernian Ice Sheet Expedition: Lost, no bodies or wreckage recovered. The Alps Ice Cap Expedition: Turned back by ice storms. The First Baltic Ice Sea Expedition: Remnants rescued after a year missing. The Second Baltic Ice Sea Expedition: Lost, no bodies or wreckage recovered.
“I wonder who that lesson was for,” said Bee. “It’s strange to look at that and remember that both your father and your mother were members of the First Baltic Ice Sea Expedition. That they were the ‘remnants rescued after a year missing.’ Them and, what, ten others?”
“Three others. Only five survived out of the twenty-eight who set out. I think I’ve read my father’s account of the opening months of that expedition a hundred times. ‘No man has ever crossed the tempestuous Baltic Ice Sea or set foot on the towering and inhospitable Skandic Ice Shelf.’ No woman, either, for that matter. Fifty-four journals he wrote and numbered. That’s the only time he mentions my mother.”
She made a face. “Probably because the next two volumes are missing.”
“Yes,” I said peevishly, “the very ones covering the rest of the expedition, when any idiot who can do math—”
“That would be you.”
“—can draw the conclusion that I was conceived in the latter months of that very expedition.”
