Chapter 113: Bring Nothing

I did not sleep.

I want to be clear about how unusual that is.

I have slept through a border evacuation.

I have slept sitting upright in a moving cart with a broken wrist.

At eleven years old I slept through the second half of a siege drill and was awarded a formal reprimand that Valerian framed and hung in the training room, where I assume it still is.

Sleep has never once required my cooperation.

That night it declined to arrive at all.

I lay in the dark in Sanctuary with Dream Haven under my head and my ribs complaining every time I shifted, and listened to the building settle, and did the thing I have spent five years training myself not to do, which is think about a conversation before having it.

’You’re awake.’

[I noticed.]

’That wasn’t a question.’

[It wasn’t an answer.]

The ceiling here had fewer tiles than the infirmary.

I counted them anyway.

Ninety-four, and one in the corner that had been replaced at some point by someone who had not matched the colour.

’Have you finished looking.’

[No.]

’Are you going to finish before the ninth bell.’

There was a pause, and it was the wrong kind.

Not the pause it uses when it is being difficult on purpose. The other one.

[I don’t know.]

I lay there for a while after that.

In five years, across a war, three deaths, an illusion, and one extremely unpleasant conversation with my father, I had never heard the System say those three words in that order.

***

The ninth bell is late morning, which meant I had the entire early morning to be awake in, and Sanctuary was generous enough to provide company for it.

Penelope was in the common room when I came down, already dressed, which meant she had also been awake and had also chosen not to mention it.

She looked at me.

"You didn’t sleep."

"I rested horizontally."

"That’s not the same thing."

"It’s adjacent."

She poured something and put it in front of me without asking, and sat down across the table, and did not say anything else for several minutes, which I understood was the most useful thing available to her and which she had correctly identified as such.

Around us, Sanctuary woke up in stages. Someone dropped something in the kitchen. Cedric’s voice carried from two rooms away, reading the third draft of a safety document to an audience that had shrunk considerably since the first draft. Mira came down, glanced at me, glanced at the untouched cup, and said nothing, which from Mira was a diagnosis.

"You should eat something," Penelope said eventually.

"I’m not hungry."

"That also isn’t like you."

"I’m aware."

She turned her own cup slowly on the table.

"He’s not going to expel you."

"I know."

"Then why do you look like that?"

And that was, I thought, an unusually precise question from someone who did not have most of the information.

"Because I don’t know what he’s going to ask," I said.

"So?"

"So I’ve never been in a conversation where I didn’t already know that."

***

The Administrative Wing had the same silence it always had, the specific institutional quiet of a place designed so you could hear your own footsteps approaching.

I arrived four minutes early and waited outside the door, which I do not normally do, and which gave me four minutes to notice that the corridor had a window at the far end with a view of the residential courtyard, and that from here you could see all five residence doors at once.

That was almost certainly deliberate.

The door opened at the ninth bell exactly.

"Come in."

***

The Headmaster’s office was smaller than I had expected and considerably more crowded.

Books, mostly. Not arranged. Stacked in the specific way of a room belonging to someone who knows where everything is and has stopped caring whether anyone else does. A wide desk. Two chairs. A window with the shutters half closed.

Theoran Vale sat behind the desk with his cane resting against it, and did not look up immediately.

"Sit."

I sat.

He finished whatever he was reading, set it aside, and looked at me properly.

Eighty-one years old. Grey eyes. The unhurried attention of a man who has never once in his life needed to fill a silence.

"How are your ribs."

That was not the question I had spent the night preparing for.

"Healing."

"Arkwright’s report says three fractured, one bruised."

"Then you already knew."

"I wanted to see whether you would lie about something small first." He moved a paper an inch to the left. "People usually do. It settles them."

I said nothing.

"Tea?"

"No."

"Sensible. It’s bad."

He poured himself some anyway.

***

He did not mention the light for eleven minutes.

I know it was eleven because there was a clock behind him, and because I started counting at the four-minute mark when I realised he was doing it deliberately.

Instead he asked about the border.

"Five years with Valerian Alzette."

"Yes."

"He doesn’t take students."

"He took one."

"He took one." Theoran turned a page in something I could not see. "Alzette’s reports are unusually detailed. Most instructors send a summary. He sent seventeen pages a season, for five years, and he does not appear to have enjoyed a single one of them."

"That sounds like him."

"He describes you as the least talented physical trainee he has ever taught."

"That also sounds like him."

"He describes you, four pages later, as the most difficult person to make give up that he has ever encountered." Theoran looked up. "He puts those two observations near each other every year. I don’t believe that’s accidental."

I did not have anything to say to that.

Theoran let the silence sit for a while, and did not rescue it.

"Battlefield triage at eleven. Aegis Healer by twelve. A diplomatic incident with the bear clans at thirteen that I have read three separate accounts of, none of which agree except on the part where three beastkin escorts died and you did not."

’System.’

[I’m here.]

"You were fourteen when you came back," Theoran said. "Fifteen when you arrived here. In between, according to the household records, you slept a great deal and did very little."

"That’s accurate."

"I’m sure it is." He set the paper down. "I’ve been doing this for a long time, Vortex. Students who have seen what you’ve seen do not come back and do nothing. They come back and they push. Every one of them. They train until something breaks, because stopping means sitting still with it."

He looked at me.

"You came back and you slept."

The clock behind him kept going.

"That is either the healthiest response I have witnessed in forty years of this work," Theoran said, "or it is the most disciplined act of hiding I have ever seen a child perform."

[He is not guessing.]

’I noticed.’

***

"The light," he said, at the twelfth minute.

"Yes."

"Darius’s report is four lines long. He’s usually thorough. He wrote four lines because he could not find words for the rest of it and elected not to invent any." Theoran picked it up. "Gold, not green. Originating between Vortex and Vellaroux without contact. Geometric propagation across approximately eleven feet of floor. Duration under two seconds. No residual mana signature."

He set it down.

"That last part is the one that concerns me."

"No residual signature."

"Mana leaves traces. Always. Every attribute, every skill, every spell cast by every student in this building for two hundred years has left something behind that can be measured for at least an hour afterward." He folded his hands. "Darius took readings within ninety seconds. There was nothing. Not a weak trace. Nothing at all, as though the event had not occurred."

I understood, then, why the message had said to bring nothing.

He had not wanted an artifact in the room.

"What was it," Theoran said.

And here was the moment I had spent the entire night constructing seventeen versions of, none of which I used.

"I don’t know."

Theoran watched me.

"Say that again."

"I don’t know what it was. I didn’t intend it. I’ve used that skill five times and the other four were green and ordinary and left traces, and I have no explanation for why the fifth one wasn’t."

"You were injured."

"Yes."

"Some skills behave differently under stress."

"Yes."

"You don’t believe that’s what happened."

"No."

He nodded slowly, and to my considerable discomfort, he did not look suspicious.

He looked as though he had just confirmed something unpleasant.

"I believe you," he said.

"That’s good."

"It is not good. If you had lied, I would be dealing with a student concealing a skill, which is a discipline problem, and I have handled several hundred of those." He picked up his tea, looked at it, and put it down without drinking. "Instead I am dealing with something that happened inside one of my students that he did not cause and cannot explain, in front of seventy-five witnesses."

***

"What happens now," I said.

"Nothing."

I waited.

"That’s not a trick," Theoran said. "I’m not restricting your skill. I’m not assigning you an observer. I’m not reporting this beyond this room, because a report requires a category, and there isn’t one."

"Then why am I here?"

"Two reasons."

He leaned back.

"The first is that I want you to understand that you are no longer invisible, and that this is permanent. Whatever arrangement you had with the world, where people looked at a boy with a pillow and decided he wasn’t worth the attention, ended on Tuesday. Seventy-five students watched a floor light up underneath you. You will not get that back."

I had known that.

Hearing it said out loud in a quiet room by a man who had no reason to soften it was different.

"The second," he said, "is that it will happen again."

"You don’t know that."

"I’ve been alive a long time and I have never once seen a thing like that happen only once." He picked up his cane, not to stand, just to hold it. "When it does, I want you to come here first. Before the rumours, before your friends, before whoever it happens in front of decides what story to tell about it."

"Why."

"Because you are fifteen, you are carrying something you have not named to anyone in this building, and the only person currently helping you carry it appears to be yourself."

’System.’

[I have nothing to add.]

’That’s a first.’

"I’m not asking you to tell me what it is," Theoran said. "You wouldn’t, and I’d think less of you if you did it easily. I’m telling you that when the weight of it becomes a problem, this office exists, and the door is not difficult to open."

He looked at me for a moment longer.

"You may go."

***

I made it halfway down the corridor before he spoke again.

"Vortex."

I stopped.

He was standing in the doorway, leaning on the cane, and for the first time that morning he looked like a man of eighty-one rather than an institution with a pulse.

"Alzette’s final report," he said. "Last page. He wrote that in five years you never once asked him for anything for yourself."

"That’s probably true."

"It is true. I checked." A pause. "He listed it as a concern."

Then he went back inside and closed the door, and left me standing in a corridor with a window at the end of it, looking at five residence doors and one very old question I had been ignoring for most of a mortal lifetime.