The Price of Warm Bread

By Wednesday, Cassian had been given a pair of boots.

They were good boots, black calfskin, soft as a glove at the ankle and lined with wool. They had appeared at the foot of his bed on Tuesday morning, wrapped in brown paper, with no note and no name. His old sneakers had been taken away while he slept. In their place, a gray cloak that fit his shoulders exactly, a new wool blanket, and a cake of real soap that smelled of cedar.

He stood in front of the bed, holding the boots, and felt the way he'd felt at nine years old when a stranger gave him a candy bar outside the plant.

Nobody gives you anything.

"Put them on," Ronald breathed from the next bed. He was sitting cross-legged on his mattress with his mouth slightly open, staring at the boots as if they were a gold bar. "Hale. Put them on."

"They aren't mine."

"They're in front of your bed. They're size nine. You're a size nine." Ronald's tone suggested that this was a mathematical proof. "I've been here two years and I haven't gotten a new sock."

Cassian put them on. They felt like standing in warm water.

Karl, sitting rigidly on the edge of his own bed, did not look up from the shoe he was polishing. He rubbed the leather in tight, hard circles, and the cloth squeaked.

…

It went on like that all week.

The cook in the basement kitchen, a greasy man who had once flipped coins at him, gave him a heavy white plate of roast pork at Monday lunch, the sort of food that appeared on Sundays at the Chosen's table and nowhere else. Cassian looked at it. The cook looked at the wall. "Eat," the man said, in a strangled voice, "please," and bowed his head so low his chin touched his chest.

Teachers who had hurried away from him for three weeks now stopped. Mr. Calloway, in Local History, paused at his desk during the Tuesday lesson and looked directly at him for the first time in a month.

"Mr. Hale," he said. "A pleasure to see you in class."

And then bowed. A little, jerky, nervous dip of the head. Behind him, the rows of students stirred like wheat in wind.

By Wednesday he'd stopped counting. Doors were opened. The yellow line in the courtyard seemed to bend, subtly, in his direction, as though the staff who patrolled it had lost track of where to stand. At the stone arch of the library a young teacher stepped aside to let him pass, one pace, two, and then, with a visible effort, stopped, and pressed herself back against the pillar again, three paces away, her eyes huge with the effort of not doing what her body wanted.

She had wanted to come closer.

That was what chilled him. Not the bowing. The wanting. A woman who had spent weeks terrified of him now looked at him the way a drowning person looks at a floating spar.

I haven't done anything.

He thought of the warm thing that had risen in his hand. Of the wrapped head bowing. He thought, What do they think I am?

And at the long table beneath the arched east window, Tessa Quill watched him eat his pork with a face like carved stone.

…

She caught him on Wednesday afternoon, in the passage behind the music room.

It was a narrow stone corridor, little used, the sort of place where students went to be hit. He heard her step behind him and had time to turn before she shoved him in the chest, hard, with both hands.

He hit the wall. His new boots skidded on the flags.

"Don't," Tessa said.

He raised his hands. He didn't fight back. She was seventeen and a head shorter than he was and she'd cut her hair with something very sharp. In the gloom she looked like a knife. Her eyes were red-rimmed. Her fingers trembled where they had pressed into his cloak.

"Don't you dare look at me like that."

"Like what?"

"Like you deserve this." She spat the word. "I've been in this school four years. I've sat in that chapel on my knees for eighty-four nights. I fed that boy's dove, I drilled his Latin, I wiped his nose when his mother sent him a letter calling him a disgrace—" She stopped. Her breath was ragged. "He was mine, Hale. Albert was mine. I picked him out of the freshman line the day he came off the bus. I said, that one. That's a good one. And you stroll in off a bus three weeks ago with your dirty collar and your hands—"

She grabbed his bandaged hand. He yelped. She yanked it up between them, the gauze already spotting with fresh red, and stared at it with bared teeth.

"This," she said. "That's what you have. Some scar. A dirty cut." Her voice shook. "And they look at you like you're God."

"I never asked for any of it."

"No," Tessa said. "You didn't. That's what makes it worse."

She dropped his hand as though it had burned her. For one second he thought she might cry. Instead she wiped her face on her sleeve and stepped back and was a prefect again, cold and straight and closed.

"It was meant to be me," she said. "Whatever it is. Whatever they're planning to do with you. It was supposed to be me, standing in that circle, and now there's no room for me in it."

"Tessa—"

"Don't say my name." She turned. Her cloak whipped behind her. "You haven't earned it. And you're going to wish, very soon, that you'd never come."

She was gone before he could ask what she meant.

…

Albert came back that night.

Cassian heard the door and sat up. Two Prefects stood at the threshold, white-faced and silent, holding a lantern; between them, a small figure in a nightshirt, swaying, with a folded gray scarf wound around his neck. The Prefects set a small wooden trunk on the floor. One of them said, almost kindly, "Lights out, Sterling. Sleep well," and they went.

Albert stood in the middle of the room.

Without his glasses he looked a different boy. Smaller. His eyes, enormous and unfocused, drifted from face to face, from Karl, stiff and rigid, to Ronald with his hand over his mouth, to Leo watching from the window. Last, they settled on Cassian.

Something moved in Albert's face. A flinch. A grimace. A flash of rage, shame, and some other thing, a raw naked helplessness, that was gone so fast Cassian wondered if he had seen it.

Albert walked to his bed, sat down, and turned his face to the wall.

The bell tolled. The oil lamps in the corridor blew out one by one. The hymn began, rising out of the earth in its long slow current.

Cassian lay with his eyes open. Half an hour went by. An hour.

"I didn't ask you to."

The whisper came from the dark corner. Hoarse, thin, and furious.

Cassian turned his head. Albert was lying on his back, staring at the ceiling, the scarf bright against his throat. He hadn't moved. His lips scarcely did.

"Nobody asks. Nobody does it. Do you know that? In the whole history of this place nobody's ever grabbed hold of it and pulled." His voice cracked. "I saw it when it let go. I saw its head bend. It looked at you like—" He stopped. "You think I'm grateful? I'm not. I'm so angry I can't breathe."

"Okay."

"Don't say okay."

"What do you want me to say?"

"I want you to say it was a mistake." Albert's voice trembled. "I want you to say you were drunk or stupid or you didn't know what you were doing. Because if you did it on purpose, if you chose it, then I'm just... then I'm..."

He stopped. The hymn rolled on through the stones.

After a long while he said, so quietly that Cassian almost didn't catch it, "My father hasn't written. Not once. I wrote him eleven times." A shaky laugh. "Eleven. And a stranger from a pig farm carries me out of the dark."

"I'm not from a farm."

"Then I'm sorry." He said it quickly, like pulling a splinter. "About the other thing I said. In the cafeteria. About your dad."

Cassian lay very still.

"I didn't know it was going to be real," Albert whispered. "Any of it. I thought it was a club."

Then he turned over, and did not speak again, and Cassian heard him begin, softly, to cry.

…

Dana's letter came on Thursday.

Ms. Dunmore carried it to him in the corridor outside Room 202, at the full stretch of her arm, between two fingers. The envelope had been slit along the top and neatly re-folded. No attempt had been made to hide this.

They read my mail. The thought was cold and clear. And they want me to know.

He read it in the back of the library, in a corner of the stacks. Her handwriting slanted, hasty and warm.

> Cassian, honey. Your mother is sitting up and eating Jell-O and complaining about the Jell-O, which Dr. Patel says is the best sign possible. Daniel is here every day. He says he found a little house in Illinois, white fence, a garden. He wants to bring her there when she's ready, and I'll be honest, I think she's going to say yes.

>

> I wanted you to know the hospital bills were taken care of. A letter came from the school, from some kind of medical fund. Paid in full. Everything. Daniel was mad, he said he didn't want charity, but I told him to take it. I hope that's okay. I hope I did right.

>

> Be careful, sweetheart. It's too good, isn't it? I keep thinking that.

>

> — D.

He read it twice.

Then he sat with the page on his knee and listened to the sound of the library, the tick of the radiator, the slow footfall of Pike somewhere in the aisles.

Paid in full.

He had been in the corridor three nights ago with blood on his hand. He had been lying in a dark room two nights ago, listening to a boy cry himself to sleep. And already, behind his back, a stranger had settled the debt that could have crushed his mother for the rest of her life.

It should have felt like a gift. It felt like a hook, set so lightly in the flesh that he hadn't noticed it go in.

"Don't pay for the phone."

He jumped. Pike stood at the end of the aisle with a book clutched against his chest, pale as paper, his glasses crooked. He did not come closer. He kept his eyes fixed on the shelves above Cassian's head.

"I'm not here for the phone."

"Good. Then you'll leave it alone. And you won't tell me what happened Friday night, because I won't hear it." The old man's mouth worked. "I heard enough. The whole library heard. I've been shelving books for four days and my hands won't stop shaking."

"Mr. Pike—"

"They're watching you, boy." His whisper cracked. "Every one of them. I've seen them in the stairwells. I've seen Silas Ward stand at the foot of the east stairs for an hour with his eyes shut. They're being very kind to you. Don't you see? Nobody ever gets this kind unless they want something that's worth more than a pair of boots."

"I know."

"Do you?" The old man took a step, then stopped. "Whatever it is they offer you, whoever asks. Ask what it costs. Ask twice. And don't let them tell you it's free."

He turned and shuffled away between the shelves, a thin gray hunch in a brown vest, and did not look back.

Cassian folded Dana's letter and slipped it into the notebook, behind the crumpled slip of paper with the ICU number.

Outside the narrow window, the dusk was coming down over the valley. The oak woods stood black against a sky the color of a bruise. Far off, on its bare hill, the chapel tower rose into the dark with its ropeless bell.

Somewhere inside it, something that had bowed to him was waiting.