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! 1 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 toyou\" 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."
"It is curious," she agreed. "You would think a man falling in love would write paeans about the fine eyes of his beloved. But perhaps it was later, in the midst of the crisis on the ice, that they-"
A tremor in the floor alerted me. I lifted a hand to warn her. I heard, as she did not yet, the halting step-tap of the headmaster approaching the door. We composed our faces and pretended to be looking out the windows at the bare branches of autumn trees in the rose court. The door opened. The servant entered first, holding the door for the headmaster, who limped in with a preoccupied frown on his face. He seemed surprised to see us.
"Are you still here?" he asked. "Forgive me. I meant to dismiss you. Did I speak to you about the wisdom of not antagonizing the mage Houses, maestressas? Even in so small a way as imprudent speech?"
Bee's eyes had gone wide as china plates, and her chin trembled. The headmaster was no longer carrying her sketchbook.
"You did, maester," I responded promptly, seeing Bee was in no condition to speak. 'I'll guard my tongue. It was ill-considered of me. I beg pardon."
"Ah, well, then. Best you go down to luncheon." A smile flitted and vanished on his seamed face. "I believe there is yam pudding. My favorite!"
The servant had crossed the chamber already and opened the outer door for the headmaster. We had to follow him down the path offered.
5
But that did not mean that, once out in the corridor, I could not feign a broken ribbon on my slipper, pretend to lose my footing, and therefore be obliged to kneel and fuss to make things right. Bee, leaping at once into the gaps between my beat, begged the headmaster to go on ahead and we would catch up as soon as the torn ribbon had been jury-rigged.
He and his servant went on, leaving us behind just as we'd hoped.
"We have to get back in and find it." Bee used the tone of voice that, like a stake, always impaled me to the wall.
"Both the headmaster's office and the formal library are specifically off-limits to unchaperoned pupils. We already know that the headmaster's dog is roaming loose among the books." I rose. With my height, I towered over her. "Can you imagine what will happen if we're caught in either place?"
"I'll go alone." She pressed her left hand to her bosom but fixed her right around the door's handle and misquoted the famous words of the great general Hanniba'aclass="underline" "'I will either find a way, or make one.'"
"Very pretty," I muttered. "Too bad the even more decorative Maester Amadou is not here to admire your fetching pose. Only, you should have your right hand raised in the manner of an ora-tor declaiming."
She looked at me, all honey. "It's not locked."
I could smell luncheon's distant promise. I was so hungry. But there was no one in the corridor. Either find a way, or make one.
"It will be on your head," I muttered.
I adjusted my schoolbag's strap so it wouldn't shift. Then I bent to listen at the keyhole, hearing no sound from the chamber beyond except the ticking of the clock like the swing of fortune: triumph, disaster, triumph, disaster. I lifted a hand, she turned the handle, and we slipped inside. She closed the door and let the handle rise with a faint snick. The chamber lay eerily empty. The poet's head looked merely like a remarkably lifelike carving. Even so, I kept thinking its eyes were about to pop open and spot us sneaking where we weren't allowed. We slid quietly across the polished floor-many years of fencing practice had honed our ability to move smoothly-and at the far door, I again listened at the keyhole.