"Now is not a convenient time, maestra," murmured the headmaster in a low voice I could hear, although I certainly was not meant to. "Does this matter really warrant my attention?"
"If you'll just speak to them, maester."
He looked toward me, as if to say with his gaze that he knew how well I could hear although we were still a thrown book away and they were speaking softly.
Bee leaned her whole body into tugging me, and we crossed the gap out of breath and staggered to a halt before him. Bee [Hilled off her indoor slippers, and this impulsive gesture of respect-removing shoes before an elder-made him smile. We kept our gazes humbly lowered.
"The Barahal cousins may attend me," he said as he tucked Bee's schoolbook under an arm. He offered a courtesy to the mae-stra and, leaning heavily on his cane, made his way across the hall.
Bee tugged her slippers back on and cast such a look at me. "Are you going to help me or hinder me?" she murmured.
I sighed, knowing I had no choice. Like obedient handmaidens in the old tales, we followed him out through the marble portico into the chill of the inner court, a central garden covered by a glass roof. The courtyard was surrounded on three sides by a two-storied stone building that housed classrooms, workshops, and tutors' offices. No sun shone through the glass today; flakes of snow powdered the sloped roof. The noise of the hall behind us receded as a waiting servant opened the door to the library wing, and we entered a somewhat less chilly marble corridor. The headmaster took the wide stairs toward the upper floor, slow progress because of his infirmity. Bee's gaze was fixed on the schoolbook under his arm in the manner of a stoat waiting for the prime instant to steal an egg.
His office was behind the first set of doors in the upper corridor. The servant, who had paced us up the steps, moved around to open these doors so the headmaster could enter without altering his steady advance. The office was spacious, with one wall of windows facing the rose court, a door into an adjoining chamber, and the rest of the wall space lined with bookcases. Mirrors hung on the back of each door, creating corridors of reflecting vision that revealed most of the chamber before and behind me.
The chamber was neither oppressively tidy nor unpleasantly messy but rather graced a middle ground between cluttered and neat. A chalkboard had been pushed in front of one bank of bookcases, facing four chairs. The large fireplace had been refitted with a circulating stove whose warmth radiated through the room. His desk had not a scrap of paper on its polished surface while the big table set beneath the windows formed a topographical masterpiece of stacked books, open books, two globes set on pedestals, and several half-unrolled maps with corners weighted down by scarabs carved out of green basalt. A longcase clock faced the table, its glass door revealing the steady motion of pendulum and weights within. Glass-doofed bookcases held carefully labeled papyrus scrolls in cubbyholes classified according to chronology and subject matter.
On a pedestal in one corner was fixed the severed head of the famous poet and legal scholar Bran Cof. A scan of the chamber, as I saw it reflected within the mirrors, showed me a glimmer of magic like a cowl around the poet's sleeping head but no other sign of magic's presence. I caught the headmaster watching me in the mirror, though. Could he see chains of magic in mirrors, as I could? It was said that mirrors reflect the binding threads of power that run between this world and the unseen spirit world, but the truth of that statement is a secret hoarded by the sorcerers who have the power to manipulate such chains of power, people like cold mages, fire mages, druas, master poets, and the bards and djeliw. I was not one of them. I could not manipulate or handle the chains of magic except on a purely personal leveclass="underline" I could use them to conceal myself, to hear better, and to see in (he dark. And, of course, I could see them in mirrors.
There was only one thing I remembered my mother saying to me, long, long ago, when I was five years old: Don't tell anyone what you can do or see, Cat. Tell no one. Not ever.
I had obeyed her. I had never told anyone, except Bee, because Bee knew everything about me just as I knew everything about her.
The headmaster smiled gently at me in the mirror's normal reflection. I looked away, because it was proper that I look away, being the student and he the elder.
"The cousins Hassi Barahal," he observed in his dry voice, "certainly know of my admiration lor the Hassi Barahal brothers."
Naturally we knew of it, since his admiration paid our tuition.
"Your father, Beatrice, has done the academy board certain favors on whose basis your tuition is excused by the board of directors."
"Favors" being a more palatable word for less palatable activities.
"Obviously your father's journals, Catherine, to which your uncle has provided us full access, have proved invaluable in the academy's quest for a deeper understanding of natural history. Daniel Hassi Barahal understood that scholars seek to unravel, explain, and explicate from scientific principles the workings of the natural world out of purely disinterested motives. That includes the mysteries of mage-craft and its ties to a spirit world said to lie athwart our own. He was something of a scholar himself, if not precisely educated in the academy. Given the mage Houses' notorious and hostile secrecy, which they can back up with actual retribution, such attempts to uncover the worlds' workings seem bound to fail." He paused to glance at the mirrors.
I said nothing. Neither did Bee.
"Yet we scholars are a stubborn crew. It is these circumstances- the information provided by your fathers, each in his own way-that have led me to turn a blind eye to certain reports of your behavior that are not what we would prefer to see in our female students. Allowing girls into the academy at all is controversial, so those young females who study here must conduct themselves at all times with prudence-"
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.