The Price of Not Knowing

He walked the boy across the yard himself.

It was the custom, but it was not the custom that moved him. It was the thought that no one else should do it. The prefects were kind enough, in their way. But Peter Alden was thirteen years old, and he should not be led to the chapel on the arm of a stranger.

"Are you cold?" said Cassian.

"A bit."

He took off his own cloak and put it round the small shoulders. The silver collar stood up around the boy's ears. Peter looked down at it, startled, and then up at him, and a little color came into his cheeks.

"Thank you, sir."

"It's all right."

They crossed the lawn together under a thin new moon. The grass was white with frost. Behind them the Chosen came in two long lines, with their candles, singing softly. The wind had a bite in it. Ahead, the chapel rose out of the dark, with its red slits burning.

"Sir?"

"Yes?"

"They said I'd be given the grace." Peter's voice was very small and very polite. "They said that tonight, if I was good, I'd be allowed in. All the way in. Is that true?"

Cassian looked down at the round face.

He had been asked this before, he thought. Not by this boy. By some other boy, in some other autumn, in some other place. Or perhaps he had only imagined it.

"Yes," he said. "That's true."

"I won't be hurt?"

"No."

"You promise?"

"I promise," said Cassian gently, and put a hand on the boy's shoulder, and felt it relax. "You'll be part of something very great. You'll never be frightened again."

Peter smiled.

…

The door of the chapel stood open.

Light spilled out of it, red and low, and the smell of the Hearth came down the steps to meet them: iron, clay, a sweetness underneath. Cassian stopped at the foot of the stair. The Chosen drew up behind him in a hush. Above their heads the great bell hung in its frame, and the wind went through its mouth with a faint hollow note.

He looked at the child beside him.

Peter had lifted his face to the light. The red glow lay on his round cheeks and on the wet black of his eyes. And in that moment, for the length of one breath, Cassian saw something move in them.

It was the look of a boy standing in a white robe in a stone passage. A boy without glasses, who said he could see better now. A boy who said, Hello. Who had said, Thank you. For that time.

The name rose to the top of his mind like a bubble to the top of a glass.

Albert.

His hand tightened on the child's shoulder.

Something cold and bright went through him: a crack of light under a door, a hair's-breadth of gap in a wall. For one heartbeat he stood on the steps and knew that something was wrong, terribly wrong, that the thing he held in his hand was a boy and the thing he was leading him to was a mouth. He knew it as one knows a word on the tip of the tongue.

His lips parted.

"Hand?" said the Rector's voice, thin and sweet, from the door. "Is something the matter?"

The light flickered.

The gap closed. It closed gently, like an eye. The moment passed over him and was gone, and he stood on the steps with his hand on a child's shoulder, wondering what it was he had been about to say.

"No, sir," said Cassian, and smiled. "Nothing at all."

He led the boy up the stairs.

The door of the chapel closed behind them. And somewhere under the floor, in the dark, with a sound like a long and satisfied sigh, something began to breathe.

He never doubted. Not that night, nor any night after. He lived to be an old man, honored and loved and utterly at peace, and he never once asked what he had done. And that, of all the things that were ever done to him, was the worst.

THE END. If you want to know what you did, turn back to Chapter 51 and choose again.