Seven Years

The years went by like beads on a string.

He graduated at seventeen at the head of his class. The Society sent him to the state university on the Rector's own recommendation, and he came back every summer, and in the autumn of his twenty-first year, after a second degree and a quiet dinner with three gentlemen in good suits, he was offered a post at Blackthorne Academy: Master of the Fourth Form, Assistant to the Rector, and, in the old language of the rubric, the Hand.

He took it. There had never been any question that he would.

He was twenty-two now. He was broad in the shoulders and quiet in his manner, with a deep, slow, patient voice and a way of listening that made boys feel they were being weighed on a fair scale. He wore a dark suit in the classroom and a gray cloak in the chapel. He had a house of his own, behind the orchard, with a study full of books and a kitchen that smelled of coffee. He had a savings account. He had a good life.

The younger boys called him "sir" and sometimes, in unguarded moments, "Mr. Hale," and he corrected them gently, as one corrects the children of friends.

He believed in the work.

That was the thing that struck even him, sometimes, in the quiet hours. Not that he put up with it. That he believed. He watched the school bloom year upon year in the warmth of the Guest's favor. He watched the village prosper. He watched the sick get well and the poor get work and the Society's alumni rise in business, in law, in government, with an unbroken, gleaming ease. He knew what it cost. He had paid it himself, every spring and autumn, with his own two hands.

A small price, the Rector had said, for so much good.

He had come to think it a very small price indeed.

…

His mother came to visit in October.

She arrived by car on a bright, clear Saturday with Daniel at the wheel, and Cassian met them on the gravel in front of the house. She had grown thin again. Not frail, only thin, in the way of a woman who has been living a long time on her nerves. She walked with a cane now, a handsome one that Daniel had carved for her, and she leaned on it as she climbed the step, and her eyes never left her son's face.

"Mom."

"Look at you," she said.

He bent and kissed her cheek. She smelled of lavender and a faint medicinal sourness he remembered from the clinic. He held her at arm's length and smiled.

"You look wonderful."

"Do I?" She laughed, quickly. "I feel like an old crow."

They sat on the terrace behind the house, with tea. The orchard blazed red and gold in the slanting light. He talked, easily, about the school, about the Fourth Form, about the Society's work in the county. He told her about the new science wing, about the boys' choir that had won a prize at the state fair, about the Rector's health, which was failing, though the old man still came down for the evening hymn in his slippers.

"It is a great grace," he said. "To be given a place in something so much larger than yourself. I never understood it as a boy. I was so angry then. But I think I was only afraid." He smiled out at the trees. "I think when you stop being afraid, you see that it was all a gift."

He turned his head. His mother was looking at him.

He had never seen that expression on her face. It was a look of such deep and complete dismay that for a moment he did not recognize it. Her lips were parted. Her hand lay on the head of her cane, whitening at the knuckles. Her eyes, those tired brown eyes that had once looked on him with such fierce love, were bright and wide, and in them was something that was both terror and pity, like a woman looking at a child standing on the edge of a roof who does not know it is a roof.

"Cassian," she said.

"Yes?"

She opened her mouth. Then her glance dropped to his right hand, resting on the arm of the chair, to the heavy silver ring with the open hand on it. And she closed her mouth and said, in a small steady voice, "Nothing. It's lovely. I'm glad you're happy."

"I am."

"I know, honey."

Daniel, silent in his chair, reached out without a word and took her hand.

Cassian reached for the teapot. He poured. He asked if she would like sugar. The afternoon light slanted across the lawn and the leaves rattled softly overhead, and he did not think about her face again for a very long time.

…

The Great Vigil came round in the last week of October.

He stood in the nave of the chapel with the Rector's weight on his arm.

The old man had shrunk. His coat hung on him like a sack. His hand, resting in the crook of Cassian's elbow, weighed no more than a bird, and the tremor that ran through it never stopped. But his eyes behind the wire spectacles were still bright, and he held his head up, and his voice, when he spoke, was clear as ever.

"I am too old to do it myself," said Kell. "You must choose the Seal, my boy. It falls to the Hand when the Rector is unable."

"Yes, sir."

"The rule is simple. A scholar who has touched the Name. You have the list."

He did. It lay in the pocket of his cloak: four names, written in the Deacon's neat hand. Four boys, each of whom, in the past year, in some careless moment, had spoken the thing they were told not to speak. They stood in a row in the choir stalls in their gray, white-faced, not meeting his eyes.

Silas Ward, grown gaunt and prematurely gray at twenty-five, brought out the silver bowl. It was small and old and tarnished. In it lay four folded slips of paper.

"Draw," said the Rector.

Cassian put his hand in the bowl.

He felt the paper under his fingers. The slips were cool and stiff. He moved his hand among them. He thought, It does not matter. Whichever. There is no right one. And then he thought of nothing at all, and closed his fingers, and drew.

He opened the paper.

Peter Alden. Age 13.

There was a stir among the stalls. A boy at the end of the row, the smallest, drew a sharp breath. Cassian looked up.

He was a round-faced child, soft and fair, with big round eyes and a cowlick, and his hands were clutching the rail so tightly that the fingers were white. He was staring at Cassian as a rabbit stares at a hawk.

He looked, Cassian thought, a good deal like someone. Like some boy he had shared a room with, long ago, who had sat at the far end of a table, and lent his friend a pen.

He couldn't have said who.

"The Seal is chosen," said the Rector, with immense and gentle satisfaction. "Thanks be to the Guest."

"Thanks be," said the Chosen.

Cassian folded the paper and put it away.