The Faithful

Ten years went by the way a tide goes out: slowly, then all at once, leaving the shape of things behind.

Cassian Hale was twenty-five years old in the autumn of 2036, and he wore the white stole.

He wore it over a plain black coat, and under the coat a gray wool cardigan with leather patches on the elbows, which had been a gift. Rector Ambrose Kell had died in the spring of 2034, in his study, in his leather chair, with a cup of tea going cold at his elbow and his unlit pipe in his breast pocket. He had been found by the Deacon, who said he looked asleep. At the funeral in the chapel, the old man's body lay on the long dark table under the bell, and the Chosen sang the invitation over it, and from beneath the floor came a low sweet sound like a cat purring.

Cassian had delivered the eulogy. He hadn't wept then, either.

He had changed. Anyone could see it. He had put on weight in the shoulders, and his hair was cut close, and his face had settled into a stillness that made strangers lower their eyes. He walked with a slight deliberate economy, like a man carrying something full. His hands were broad and scarred. When he laid them on a table, people stopped talking. He did not raise his voice. He had never needed to.

The school ran smoothly under him. It had, in fact, never run so well. The Chosen came to him with their problems, and he listened, and made his decisions, and was obeyed. The Deacon, white-haired now and thin as paper, stood at his left hand and no longer argued. The new Head Prefect was a gray-eyed boy named Rowan, who looked at Cassian the way Cassian had once looked at the Rector.

There had been two more Vigils since the first.

He did not think about them.

…

Of the roommates, he knew this much.

Ronald Fisk had left Blackthorne at sixteen, expelled for "disruptive curiosity," and gone home to Charleston, where he now worked in a bank. He sent no letters. Once, in 2031, Cassian had seen him in the street in Hollis Creek, a stout, balding young man in a cheap suit, hurrying to a bus. Ronald had seen him too. He had stopped dead, and gone the color of paste, and crossed the street without a word.

Karl Brandt had stayed.

Karl was twenty-seven. He served as the Deacon's aide-de-camp, and kept the lists. He had a small office in the administration wing and a title, Warden of Records, and he had never forgiven Cassian for anything. He was polite. He was punctual. He kept the schedule and the ledgers, and when Cassian entered the room, he rose, and bowed, and said "Rector." His eyes behind the glasses were entirely empty. He had gotten what he wanted, and it had hollowed him out like a worm.

Of Leo Vance, there was nothing.

He had graduated at eighteen, with highest honors, and left the valley the same afternoon. No letters. No forwarding address. His father the Headmaster, grown gray and tremulous, would say only that the boy had gone east. Cassian had asked once. He had not asked again.

He thought of him sometimes, at night. The handkerchief. The note. Choose well.

He did not think about it long.

…

He visited his mother in November.

It was a long drive, eleven hours, in the black sedan the Society kept for him. He had a driver, a taciturn man named Pruitt, who did not play the radio. They crossed three states in the gray dawn. By afternoon, the road dwindled into a narrow lane lined with bare maples, and there, at the end of it, stood the house.

It was lovely. White clapboard, green shutters, a deep porch. A white picket fence, as promised, enclosing a small neat garden of dead marigold stalks and frost-blackened roses. Smoke rose from the chimney. The windows glowed yellow.

She was waiting on the porch.

She was fifty-one, and looked sixty. Her hair had gone white. She stood very straight, with her hands folded in front of her, and when the car pulled up she did not come down the steps. Cassian climbed out, and Pruitt stayed in the car.

"Mom."

"Cassian."

He crossed the lawn. The grass was crisp with frost. He stopped at the foot of the steps and looked up at her, and she looked down at him, and for a long moment neither moved.

She was afraid of him.

He had known it for years. He saw it again now, plain as a signboard, in the way her eyes flickered over his face, in the little quick breath she drew, in the tension of her hands. She was not afraid of what he might do. She was afraid of what she saw, or didn't see, when she looked at him. A smooth, still, courteous stranger wearing her son's face.

"You look well," she said.

"So do you."

"Come in. I made soup."

Daniel had died three years ago, of a heart attack, in the garage, with a wrench in his hand. Cassian had flown the whole Society in for the funeral. It was the kind thing to do. He had paid for the stone. His mother had not thanked him. She had stood at the graveside in her black coat, staring at the fresh earth, and when he'd put a hand on her shoulder, she had stiffened and stepped away.

They ate in the kitchen. It was warm and bright, with yellow curtains. She talked about the garden, and the neighbors, and a church group that met on Thursdays. He nodded. He ate. At one point, reaching for the salt, she brushed his wrist with her fingers, and snatched her hand back as though from a stove.

"You were always so warm," she said, and her voice shook. "As a baby. Even in winter. I used to say you were my little furnace."

"I remember."

"You still are." She gave a laugh that was almost a sob. "I'm sorry, Cassian. I don't know why I... I'm sorry."

He sat very still.

"It's all right," he said.

When he left, she kissed his cheek at the door, quickly, and went inside. Through the window, as the car pulled away, he saw her standing at the sink with both hands on the edge and her head bowed. She did not look up.

He did not feel anything. He sat in the back seat with his hands in his lap, looking out at the bare gray fields, and the thought rose in him, with a calm, hollow clarity, she knows.

She doesn't know what. But she knows.

And the house and the garden and the soup were never for her at all.

…

The new boy came on the first of December.

He arrived on the gray intercity bus, as they all did. Cassian was waiting at the gate. He stood in the damp with the white stole over his coat, and the Deacon stood a pace behind, and Ms. Dunmore, enormously old, sat on her stool under the lantern with her tongs and her tray.

The bus stopped. The door hissed.

A small boy climbed down, carrying a duffel bag nearly as big as himself. He was thirteen, perhaps. A thin, dark-haired child with a wary face and big hands, red at the knuckles, hands too large for the rest of him. He wore a sweater that was a size too big. He stopped on the gravel and looked up at the iron gate, and the stone wall, and the black spires against the sky, and he did not cry.

"Thomas Wright?" said Cassian.

"Tommy."

"Welcome to Blackthorne, Tommy."

The boy's eyes rose to him. They were gray, and steady, and tired. He looked at the white stole. At the scar across Cassian's palm. At Cassian's face.

"You're the principal?"

"Something like that."

"My dad said you'd pay for school." A pause. "He said he'd get some money."

"Yes."

"Is it true?"

"Yes," said Cassian. "It's true."

He took the boy's duffel and slung it over his shoulder.

…

He took him down that night.

It was the custom. A new Hand was brought to the vault on the first evening, before the bell, before the dormitory and the cloak and the questions. It was simpler that way. Cassian took the black key from the Deacon, and lit a lantern, and led the boy up the hill through the frozen grass. The chapel loomed. The great doors swung open.

They crossed the nave in silence. They passed the long table and the dark bell and the carved rings. They went through the low door into the vestry, and Cassian knelt and turned the key in the lock, and drew back the iron slab.

Cold air breathed up out of the dark.

Stone steps went down. Narrow, steep, worn in the middle, slick with age. The lantern light wavered on the walls. Cassian went first, and the boy followed, his hands tucked under his arms, his duffel left behind at the top of the stair.

At the bottom, the vault.

It was low and long and silent. A stone chamber, vaulted, lit by nothing. In the middle stood a table of black stone, scarred and stained, and a lectern with a book. The air was very cold. The floor was littered, in drifts, with small dry white things, and the drifts crunched underfoot.

At the far end, in the dark, something lay.

Cassian did not look at it. The boy did.

He stood in the lantern light with his big raw hands at his sides and stared into the dark, and his face went white, and then, very slowly, calm. He turned to Cassian. He was shaking, a fine fast tremor from head to foot, but his voice, when it came, was small and clear.

"Does it hurt?"

Cassian looked down at him.

He saw a boy of thirteen in a sweater too large for him, with a father in a slaughterhouse and a school that would pay. He saw himself at the gate, with a canvas bag on his shoulder and a slip of paper in his fist. He saw a white linen robe lying on the flagstones, and a pair of glasses folded on the collar.

He saw his mother at the sink.

"No," he said.

It was a lie, and he knew it, and it came out smooth as oil.

"It doesn't hurt."

The boy nodded. He put his hand into Cassian's hand, trusting, and Cassian closed his fingers around it, warm and broad and sure, and led him forward into the dark.

He had been saved, and he had become the thing he once feared.

THE END. If you refuse to become one of them, turn back to Chapter 33 and choose again.