Chapter 9: Antlers

Ms. Yarrow had the folder open in front of her and both hands flat on top of it. She had already apologized twice for taking up Vesper’s morning.

“The antlers came in six months ago,” she said. “Small ones.”

Vesper waited.

“His father was born of the green — there was an accident, four years back. His mother was human. She got sick and she died two years after that, and his grandmother has had him since. The two of them did all right for a while. Then the antlers.” The folder shifted under her hands. “She isn’t a young woman. There hasn’t been a good day in that house since March.”

“They had somebody look at him.”

“Three somebodies. Two in the county and one in the city.” Ms. Yarrow’s mouth pulled thin. “Not one of them could tell her what she was looking at, so they told her nothing, and she took that. Then the family brought in a practitioner who works with minds, and she sat with the boy half the night, and nothing came of that either.”

She sat back.

“Then somebody heard you’d opened the new room, and the family asked whether they could try him here. I said yes. I have a whole room of children who go home to a mother with a permit on the wall and a father with his own marks in a drawer, and not one of them is going to look twice at a boy with antlers on him. He’s a half-blood and he’s lived with ordinary people his whole life, so he can’t go in with the green-born — not yet, it would be too much for him. So he’s in the new room.” She looked up. “Your daughter’s room.”

Vesper said nothing.

“He doesn’t answer to his name,” Ms. Yarrow said. “He doesn’t answer to anything. His grandmother walks him to the door in the morning, and he goes to the corner past the cubbies, and he sits down and folds. Knees in, arms around them. He’s seven years old and he folds up small.”

“Master Linden.” She leaned forward over the desk. “People say there’s nothing your trade can’t turn out. So tell me what I’m buying, and where to send the bill.”

Vesper had stopped being surprised by that years ago. She’d mostly stopped correcting it, too, because a person who wants a miracle will go and find somebody who sells one.

“There’s nothing in my kit for that,” she said. “It isn’t a sickness.”

Ms. Yarrow’s hands stayed where they were on the folder.

“I’ll come back after lunch,” Vesper said. “I’ll bring marks — the calming kind, four of them. One goes low on the door he comes in through, one goes on the wall behind his spot where he can see it without lifting his head. And keep talking to him. You, the grandmother, whoever has him that day. Talk whether he answers or not.”

“Will that help him?”

“It might help him sleep.”

Ms. Yarrow let out a breath. “That’s something.”

A hand closed on Vesper’s coat.

“Mom.”

Vesper looked down. Rennie had her chin up and her whole face already decided about something.

“Mom, I can be his friend.”

“Okay,” Vesper said, and smiled at her. “Then be his friend. Go and talk to him. All day, if you want.”

“What if he doesn’t answer?”

“Talk anyway.”

Rennie nodded once, let go of the coat, and went out into the hall walking fast, the way you walk when somebody has told you not to run.

Vesper sat another minute.

She was glad. That part was simple and it was true. It lasted about as long as it took her to find the other part, which was not glad at all.

Ives had told her once that a child got to her own fire faster with something already in the goodwill column.

She had never said a word of it in front of her daughter, and she wasn’t going to. Rennie had gone over to the corner because the boy was in the corner, and Vesper wanted that to keep being the reason.

She closed the folder for Ms. Yarrow on her way out.

The room still smelled like paint.

It was early. Most of the chairs at the low tables were empty, and the tall windows on the east side had the whole morning lying across them. In the corner past the cubbies, there was a boy.

Rennie hung her backpack on her hook, and then she saw him, and she stopped.

Knees up. Arms around them. Head down against the wall, so that from the door there was no face in it, only the shape of a person folded small.

She went over slowly. There was a candy in her coat pocket, wrapped in wax paper — Nana kept the tin full, and there was always one more for a pocket. She dug it out and set it down on the table beside his elbow.

“Here,” she said. “It’s for you. Let’s be friends.”

Nothing. Not his head, not his hands.

Rennie stood there for a while anyway.

Then she looked at the top of his head, and that was when she saw them: two antlers, small ones, coming up out of his dark hair.

They were tiny, and they were the best thing she had ever seen on a head. She wanted to touch them so badly that she had to put her hands behind her back and hold them to each other. She’d heard Ms. Yarrow call the antlers a problem, and heard her say something about teaching him to put them away, and Rennie had thought about that all week and still couldn’t work out how a person did it, or why anybody would want to.

“Your antlers are really cute,” she said.

Nothing.

The others came in after that, in twos and threes, and she went to meet them, because that was what you did.

Almost everyone in her room was a practitioner’s child, like her; the green-born had their own rooms across the yard. Some of them were dressed up, in the long coats their families wore at home or in little jackets with the house mark stitched small at the pocket.

“Morning, Rennie.”

“Morning.”

She knew all of them from the week before. She said everybody’s name back and got everybody’s name right, and when the room was full she went and sat down at her table, next to the girl who had been put there too.

“All right,” Ms. Yarrow said, standing at the front. “New room, new rules. There are four of them and I’ll say them once.”

She looked along the tables, and every child in the room sat up straighter, because that was the effect Ms. Yarrow had on a room.

“There are four classrooms in this building. This one was asked for by the land spirit, which is why the windows are as good as they are, and why the work that comes out of it had better be worth the trouble. If your mothers ask, that’s what you tell them.”

Rennie kept her mouth shut and looked at her hands, and then once at the window — glass, trees, the hill going up behind them, all of it ordinary — and then back at her hands.

A boy in the front row put his hand up without waiting to be called on.

“Ms. Yarrow, I already know how to take the green in. Can we do real things? Marks, wards, anything.”

His mother was a practitioner too. He’d turned out no good at alchemy, which was the family thing, and very good at marks, and he had told every child in the room about it at least four times.

“Everybody in this room can already take the green in,” said a boy behind him. “It isn’t special.”

That one had a short blade lying across his knees. Everyone knew he was going to be a blade, like his uncle, and he sat like somebody who had already passed something.

The girl at Rennie’s table had gone red all the way to her ears.

“I can’t,” she said. Then, mostly to the tabletop: “I can’t do it yet. My dad says you have to feel for it. There isn’t anything to feel. It doesn’t have a color or a smell or anything. I’ve tried about a hundred times.”

Rennie reached over and patted her on the shoulder.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I’ll help you. We’ll go slow. My mom says little kids aren’t supposed to hurry.”

“Really?”

“Really.” Rennie wasn’t making it up. Mom said it all the time — you only got to be little once, and you could spend it sitting still with your eyes shut, or you could spend it eating and sleeping and playing, and Mom knew which one she wanted for her children. Mom hadn’t started taking the green in until she was fourteen years old, and Mom was the best there was.

The part Rennie left out was why she and Wren had started early — Wren was littler than she was — and that was a home thing, and home things didn’t get talked about at school, and she’d known that since before she could spell it.

The girl next to her let her shoulders down.

Later, the morning turned into introductions. One at a time, up at the front: your name, what you liked, what you were going to be. They all took it as seriously as anything Rennie had ever heard. Nobody laughed at anybody. Rennie watched Ms. Yarrow while the fourth one was talking and saw her pressing her lips flat together, which was what grown-ups did when they were pleased.

After, Rennie went back to the corner.

Three of the others came with her the first time. They said hi. They told him their names. One of them asked what kind of things he liked, and then asked it again, louder. Nothing came back, and they drifted off to the box of blocks and the window, and by the end of the morning it was only Rennie.

She knew his name by then. She’d asked Ms. Yarrow at the water fountain. Colm. He was two years older than she was. His mother and his father were both dead.

She didn’t ask him about that. She didn’t know what you said, so she said other things.

“Do you think I’m annoying?” She had her arms folded on the table and her chin down on them, so that she was looking at the candy, which was still sitting where she’d put it. “Mom says I talk too much. Nana says Mom talked too much when she was little, so I guess it runs in the family. Nana made that one. She makes the best things. Next time I’ll bring you one of her biscuits — they’ve got different things inside and nobody knows which is which, not even Nana.”

Which got her thinking about whether she could carry biscuits for two people at once: this boy, and the boy from the store, the one who hadn’t taken her candy either, the one Mom had written a card out for.

She talked about that for a while too, out loud, in case it turned out to be interesting to somebody.

Then she was thirsty, and she got up and went back across the room at a run.

So she didn’t see it.

Behind her, Colm lifted his head, and his eyes followed her the whole way — across the room, up onto her chair, the water bottle, the drinking, and back again. Then they came down, and stayed on the table in front of him.