Chapter 2: The Honors Wall

The air outside the east door was warmer than the hall and smelled like cut grass and hot asphalt. Cal shifted his bag to his other shoulder and let the crowd carry him down the front walk. Otis came alongside him with his bag strapped high and his hair already coming loose.

“I’m going to run the forms you insulted,” Otis said.

“You’ll run them wrong.”

“Then they’ll be wrong with conviction.” He peeled off at the fork by the science building, still talking, his voice carrying back over everyone’s heads. “Fifth row, Cal. Remember.”

He was gone before Cal could answer.

The walk from the science building to the front gate took four minutes. Cal had timed it in February out of nothing better to do. Everyone he passed either looked at him or made a small point of not looking, and both were work. A girl in front of a group of three said something to her friends with her hand near her mouth and then, because the sidewalk was narrow, had to step aside and let him through, and she did it looking at his chin.

He was used to the chin.

Then the gate.

There was a crowd at the gate most days, and it was thickest at this hour, when the last bell emptied the building and the buses idled at the curb with their doors open. Nobody was waiting for a bus. They were all facing the same wall.

The Honors Wall stood just inside the gate, behind a low iron rail, dressed in pale stone: names in rows, names above names, dates cut small. Some of the older rows had gone soft at the edges and been re-cut, and you could see where the mason’s letters didn’t match the ones above them. That part was ordinary. Cal had walked past it for four years and mostly registered it the way you register a fire hydrant.

The part that wasn’t ordinary sat at the top of the wall in a bracket of dark metal: a block of clear crystal about the size of a fist, throwing a thin column of light down onto the stone.

Inside the light, a girl was standing.

Nadia Brant, in the school uniform, white shirt and the blue short cape that nobody remembered wearing once they had graduated, one hand on her hip and the other resting on the grip of a heavy sword. She was not moving. The crystal had taken her at the end of her second year and would keep her that way, and the light gave her the standard polished look, every edge cleaned up.

Cal looked at the hand on the sword first, because that was the part they had got wrong. She had always held a grip with her thumb laid along the guard, low, like she meant to hit something with the pommel before she bothered with the blade. The image had her thumb wrapped. A technician hadn’t been watching. Two years, and the wall had her standing with her thumb in the wrong place, and there was never a day the rail in front of it was empty.

The gold in her eyes had survived the translation, at least. That was the thing people mentioned. In the light the color was flat, but the image had caught how she looked at the space in front of her: the way she looked at a door she was deciding whether to open.

Under the image, cut deep and filled with something darker than the stone:

Nadia Brant. Tier Nine, light. Halcyon Academy.

And below that, smaller: Recruited after two years, before advancement examinations. First in Fairhaven County in a hundred years.

The crowd was doing what it did every afternoon.

“Nine,” a boy at the rail was saying. Junior patch on his bag, the posture of a person delivering a fact for the first time. “Do you know how many Tier Nines the Guild registers in a year?”

“One,” said his friend, who had clearly heard this before.

“One. And she’s nineteen.”

“Twenty in October.”

“She could be in an office in the capital tomorrow. She’s here.”

“She’s not here,” the friend said. “She’s up there. That’s the whole point of up there.”

A group of girls had pushed closer to the rail, and the small one with her hair in a braid was pointing at the image’s hand.

“Is that the ring? Look. Is that the ring?”

“Which hand?”

“The one on the sword.”

“Lots of people wear rings.”

“It’s got the crest on it. The Vane crest. The tower and the two —“

“It’s a light,” said the older girl beside her, in the voice of somebody who had explained this before and expected to have to explain it again. “It’s not a photograph. You don’t see a crest on a light.”

“I can see it.”

“You can see what you came here to see.”

“She still wears it, though,” the braided girl said, and there was a small shifting of bags in the group, a couple of heads turning to check whether anyone official was in earshot. “Priya’s cousin works in the house. She says she still wears it.”

“Priya’s cousin works in the kitchen.”

“Priya’s cousin is in the west wing on Tuesdays.”

A boy behind them, not looking up from his phone, said, “She runs the place. She’s going to wear the ring.”

“She doesn’t run it.”

“Name somebody who does.”

Nobody named anybody. A boy in a Track Two hoodie, working through a bag of something, said, “She was their student. The Vanes’. From when she was eleven. That’s why she’s the one in the west wing, and that’s why—“ he tilted his chin at the wall, “—she’s up there.”

“His parents were the youngest Sovereigns in the country.”

“Ten years,” somebody said. “An old name, a stake in the Warden Front, ten years, and it’s one of the Five Houses.”

“And then three years with no word.”

“No bodies.”

“Every quarter the trade papers say somebody’s buying up Vane paper. Every quarter. That stops being a rumor.”

“It stops being a rumor when it stops being every quarter.”

From further back, not unkindly, somebody said, “Eight months. Eight months since they read him and got nothing.”

One of the boys at the rail had said nothing for the whole exchange. Track One blazer, the good one with the piping. He turned his head and looked at Cal with the willingness of somebody who had just been handed a reason.

“Heir to what,” he said, not loud.

Two of his friends laughed. One of them had the decency to make his into a cough. The braided girl turned around and saw Cal and went brick red.

“He’s right there.”

“I know,” the blazer boy said, and did not lower his voice, and did not turn around, and did not move off down the sidewalk like a person with somewhere to be.

Cal moved up two steps, and the crowd adjusted around him without quite looking at him.

He had heard the version of his own life that got told on these steps. He had heard it often enough that it had gone smooth like a coin, and he did not need it twice in one afternoon.

Not pity. He could have handled pity; he’d had eight months of practice at it. It was closer to appetite.

The rest of it, the crowd kept for the days when he wasn’t standing there.

She had come to the house at eleven and been taught in the east room with the good light and the bad chairs, and she had sat at their table three nights a week for years.

And she was engaged to be married to him.

No paper had ever been put in front of him. The story was that his father had said it out loud at a dinner party, once, to the wrong people, and that the house had never taken it back. Nobody had asked Cal to sign anything. Nobody had asked him anything at all. On the front steps it was a fact, and facts on the front steps didn’t need paper behind them; they needed a story, and this one was old, and nobody with the authority to contradict it had ever bothered.

Nobody in that crowd had ever been put on the ground by her. Nobody had spent a summer being taught to hold a sword by a girl two years older who corrected his grip by stepping on his foot, who didn’t talk while she worked, who once, after he had complained about a drill for the fourth time, took the sword out of his hand and did it eleven times without stopping and handed it back and said, Now you’ve seen it done. They knew the crystal. He knew the thumb.

He had a stupid impulse, standing there, to say it out loud. Her thumb’s wrong. Whoever made that thing wasn’t watching.

He didn’t. It would have been a gift to them, and nobody on that rail had done anything to earn one.

He stood a while longer and let them have the back of his head. He did not walk away quickly, and he did not give the boy in the blazer anything that could be reported at dinner.

The buses pulled out one after another and took some of the noise with them. The light in the crystal did not change. Nadia Brant went on standing with her hand on a sword she had probably never carried in that particular way, looking at whatever was in front of her.

Cal turned and went out through the gate.

He went left, because the house was left—down the hill past the bank and the two coffee places and the corner where the bus stopped that he no longer took. The west wing was already lit at four in the afternoon, three windows on the second floor, and somebody up there was working late on a Tuesday.

He crossed the street and started down.