Alone

The first day, he counted.

He counted the stones in the wall (two hundred and eleven, if you included the broken ones). He counted the iron bars across the window (three). He counted the cracks in the ceiling, the flakes of plaster on the floor, the number of steps from the cot to the door (four) and from the door to the bucket (two). He counted his own breaths, in and out, and when he lost track he started again.

It helped. A little.

The room was cold, but not as cold as the dormitory. No one had thought to take away the blanket. It lay folded at the foot of the cot, a thin gray rectangle, smelling of mildew and ancient lye. Twice a day a tray was slid through a flap in the door, low down, near the floor. Bread, hard and dark. A tin cup of water. Once, a dish of cold porridge. Whoever pushed the tray did not speak, and he never saw a face, only a pair of hands in black gloves.

The Bible lay on the cot beside him. He didn't open it.

By evening he knew the sounds. The scrape of the tray. The tick of the cooling stones. The voices of boys passing in the corridor, hushed, hurrying, a footfall that quickened outside his door and quickened again. And at seven, the bell.

DONG.

He lay on his back and listened to the hymn.

It was different from in here. He had never heard it from a room with a lock. Without the others' breathing to cover it, it came through the wall with terrible clarity, voice by voice, syllable by syllable. Venite. An old man's rasp. Hospes. A girl's high thread. Mensa parata est. He could hear the exact moment Tessa Quill's voice cracked, and recovered.

Come, guest. The table is ready.

He put his hands over his ears.

It made no difference. The song was in the floor, in the walls, in the iron frame of the cot. It was in his teeth.

…

The second day, he thought about his mother.

He hadn't meant to. He had meant to think about the Rector, or the Deacon, or Karl Brandt, or how to get out. But the room was small and the hours were long, and his mind, left alone, went where it always went, like a tongue to a broken tooth.

She had worn long sleeves.

That was what he remembered. Not the shouting, not the bruises, but the sleeves. All those summers in Ottley, in the heat, in the stifling little kitchen with the fan going round and round. His mother in a long-sleeved blouse, buttoned at the wrist, moving about the stove with her head down. He had been seven, eight, nine. He had thought it was a fashion. Then one day, reaching for the salt, she had pushed up a cuff, and he had seen the marks.

Yellow and green. In the shape of four fingers.

She had looked at him. She had tugged the sleeve down, quickly, and smiled, and said, "Silly me. Bumped into the door." And he'd said, "Okay." And that was all.

He'd said okay.

That was the thing he could not forgive, in all those years of not forgiving. Not Edward. Edward was a dog, a dumb brute thing. Edward couldn't help it. It was the small boy at the kitchen table, nodding. The boy who understood perfectly well, and said okay.

She used to hum.

He hadn't thought of that in years. When she cooked, when she thought no one was listening, she would hum low in her throat, tuneless, comfortable, some old country song she had picked up from the radio. Patsy Cline, maybe. He had never known the words. In the evenings, when Edward was at the plant, the house would fill up with it: the clink of a pan, the sizzle of onions, the low sweet drift of his mother's voice. For an hour or two the walls seemed to give.

He pressed the heel of his hand into his mouth.

He bit down. Hard. He bit until the skin split and the taste of iron filled his tongue, and he lay on the cot in the gray light with his teeth in his own flesh and tears running sideways into his ears. He did not make a sound.

Okay, he thought. Okay. Okay.

I'll get you out.

I don't know how. But I will.

…

On the third day, they let him out.

It happened at dawn. The bolt rattled; the door swung back. The Deacon stood in the passage, with her lantern and her keys, and said nothing. She stood aside, and he walked past her, through the cold corridor and out into the gray morning. His legs were weak. The light hurt his eyes.

"You will report to the Rector at four o'clock on Saturday," she said. "Until then, you are free to attend lessons."

She turned and walked away.

He stood on the step and breathed. The air was damp and bitterly cold, and smelled of wet leaves and woodsmoke. Behind him the door of the little room had swung shut. His hand ached. The knuckles had scabbed over, black and stiff.

He thought the world would look different. It did not. The courtyard was the same: the gravel, the fountain, the gray figures hurrying to class. The same long shadows under the colonnade. But as he crossed it, he felt it change around him, a thickening, a quiet, like water closing over a dropped stone.

They knew.

Not what he had said. Not what he had translated. But that something had happened, that Cassian Hale, the Hand, the boy in the silver collar, had been taken from his room on a Tuesday and returned on a Friday without his cloak. Boys stepped aside. They looked at the ground. A freshman on the stairs dropped his books and fled without picking them up.

"...heard he cracked," said a voice, as he passed the library arch. "The Rector had to lock him up..."

"...fits of rage. Hit a wall. Broke it..."

"...says he sees things. Claims there's a monster in the cellar..."

He stopped.

Karl Brandt stood in the lee of the arch with three younger boys around him. He was speaking in a low, grave, regretful voice, one hand resting on a boy's shoulder, the picture of a decent senior student sharing a painful duty. His glasses winked. His face was drawn into lines of sorrow.

"...such a shame. He started so well. But I think the strain of it..." Karl shook his head. "Some people simply can't carry a gift like that. I tried to talk to him, you know. I tried to help. I think he's quite unwell."

The three younger boys nodded gravely.

Karl looked up.

His eyes met Cassian's across the colonnade, and for one clean second, before the mask came down, Cassian saw the face behind it. Cool, interested, almost clinical. The face of a boy examining a specimen. Then the sorrow settled back over it like a veil, and he gave a small sad nod.

It was never Ronald, thought Cassian.

…

He found Ronald on the stairs.

The boy was hurrying up from the cellar with an armful of firewood. He saw Cassian, stopped dead, went dead white. The logs clattered from his arms. For a second he stood frozen with his mouth open and his round eyes full of terror.

Then he said, very fast, without moving his lips, "It wasn't me."

"Ronald—"

"It wasn't me. I swear. I didn't tell the Rector. I told Aldous. And Peter Lamb. And, and Henry. I know I shouldn't have. I'm sorry. I couldn't help it. But I'd never, never go to Kell. I'd die first." His voice cracked. "It was Karl. I saw him. Sunday night. He went out after supper. I followed him and he went to Tessa Quill, and they talked for a long time, behind the dining hall. He was—he was smiling."

"I know."

"You know?"

"I figured it out."

"I'm sorry," Ronald whispered. "I'm so sorry. I should've been quiet. I'm such an idiot. I can't—" He stooped and snatched at the scattered logs, shaking. "I can't be seen talking to you. They'll know. Karl's got people watching. He's got Wade Harlan following me. I have to go."

"It's all right."

"It isn't." He gathered up the wood. A tear rolled down his chin. "I'm a coward. I know I'm a coward. I just wanted to say, it wasn't me. Because I wouldn't want you to think..."

He ran.

Cassian listened to his footsteps clatter away up the stairs, light and fast and frightened.

…

Albert was no better.

He passed Cassian in the corridor that afternoon and stopped. Then he made a short sharp noise in his throat, half laugh, half sneer, and said, loud enough for a dozen boys to hear:

"Back from the madhouse, Hale?"

"Albert."

"Heard you hit a wall. Heard you bled all over the floor." He tilted his head, mouth curved, the old arrogant lift. It was a good imitation. "Good. Maybe now you'll learn to keep your stories to yourself."

But his eyes didn't hold. They slid away, to the floor, to the window, to anywhere but Cassian's face. His hands were shaking. He kept his arms pressed tightly against his ribs, and the scarf at his throat had slipped, and for an instant Cassian saw the ring of white marks beneath, glowing faintly in the gray light.

Albert saw him see it, and went rigid.

"Don't look at me," he whispered, and bolted.

…

That night, Cassian lay on his own bed for the first time in three days, under his own blanket, and tried not to feel the weight of the silence in the room.

Nobody spoke. Ronald, in his bed, had turned his face to the wall. Karl lay on his back, perfectly still, hands folded. Albert curled in the corner. The hymn rose, as ever, through the floor.

He pulled the blanket to his chin. His pillow was lumpy. He turned it over, and something fell out.

A small dry weight, wrapped in cloth. He caught it in the dark.

It was bread. A half loaf, still faintly warm, wrapped in a white handkerchief. The same pressed, ash-white cotton he had used to bandage his hand in September. And pinned to it with a bent pin, a scrap of gray paper, folded small.

He opened it by feel. He tilted it to the window, where the lantern threw a pale square on the wall.

Four words, in blunt pencil, in a cramped upright hand.

Don't fight. Pretend.

He lay very still.

Across the room, by the window, a shape lay on its side with its face to the stone. It did not move. Its breathing was slow and even, the breathing of a boy asleep.

Cassian held the scrap of paper in his hand. It trembled.

It was four words. It was nothing. It was the smallest kindness one boy could do for another. But he had been at Blackthorne for seven weeks, and no one had ever once, not once, taken his side.

He lay in the dark with the bread in his hand and the paper pressed against his chest, and the tears ran silently down his face, and his hand would not stop shaking.