EXAMINATION

At nine o'clock precisely, the clock on the mantel began to strike, and Soren discovered that he was standing at the window of his study with his hands clasped behind him, listening for footsteps in the corridor.

He disapproved of this so thoroughly that he walked to his desk, sat down, and opened the Prairie tariff report at random. The study was the one room in Vandermere Hall that he had never allowed anyone to redecorate. Its walls were lined from floor to ceiling with oak bookcases, its floor was covered with a worn Turkey carpet the color of dried blood, and a tall window behind the desk looked out on the river, which this morning was wrapped in a gray shroud of mist. A fire crackled in the grate. His cold cup of tea sat at his elbow, a pale skin already forming across the surface.

Dorian knocked twice and opened the door without waiting. "Miss Tamsin Reed, Your Grace," he announced, with a flourish that was perilously close to a bow, and stepped aside.

She came in on a gust of cold air from the corridor, carrying herself like someone entering a courtroom for which she had thoroughly prepared. She wore the same patched brown coat as before, with the ash-ribbon tied visibly around her arm, and her hair was drawn back from her face in a low knot that left the pale branching mark on her neck in full view. Her cheeks were pink with the cold, her gray-blue eyes were perfectly steady, and she walked straight up to the edge of his desk and stopped.

Then she looked at him.

It was not the quick, downcast flicker that every Blighted servant in the house had learned to perform when he passed, nor the careful blankness of the nobility. She looked directly into his eyes with an open, level gaze, as if she were examining an unfamiliar specimen under a lens. It was forbidden. Under the third schedule of the Quarantine Acts, a person of Blighted descent was required to lower her eyes in the presence of a Gilded superior, and Soren, who had once signed a warrant for a stable boy on exactly that charge, felt something go taut in his chest.

"You may sit, Miss Reed," he said, in the voice that had made two Prairie governors apologize for their tone. "I assume you understand that you have just committed an offense."

"I understand that the third schedule requires me to lower my eyes, Your Grace," she said, taking the chair across from him without any hurry. "I also understand that the schedule says nothing about being examined by someone who wishes to assess my competence. It seemed to me that a person can hardly be assessed unless she can be seen, and I'd prefer that you see everything, so that you can't claim later that I concealed any of it."

Dorian, in the doorway, made a small sound that might have been a cough. Soren did not look at him.

"Very well," he said. "Let us begin."

…

He had prepared the examination the previous night, over a bottle of wine he had barely touched, and he had designed it with the same cruelty he reserved for the final stages of treaty negotiations. He started with the structure of Gilded Light, which no unmagical scholar could possibly have studied, and she answered him without hesitating. She explained that a Gilded mage did not so much create light as bend and gather it, and she described the principle of refraction by which a shield could be made to hold a sword's edge. She noted that the old texts distinguished between the light of the mind and the light of the body, and she told him, with a faint, dry smile, that she suspected the distinction was more flattering than accurate.

He asked her to name the six recognized thresholds of Bloodroot healing, and she named them in order, without notes, from the simple closing of a wound to what the older authors called the rewriting of the blood. He asked her to describe the legal basis of the Quarantine Acts, and she cited the Blight Act of 1795, the Ward Amendments, and the Imperial Rescript of the following year, adding that the preamble to the original Act had been drafted in a hurry and contained at least two circular definitions.

"Which two definitions do you mean?" he asked.

"It defines a person of Blighted descent as anyone whose blood carries the contagion, and it defines the contagion as the condition of being of Blighted descent," she said. "It's the sort of thing a first-year law student would be failed for, Your Grace, but nobody has ever examined the preamble closely, because the people who might have done so were not permitted to attend the college."

He tapped his gloved fingers once against the desk. It had been a very long time since anyone had told him that a law he considered sacred was badly written, and what disturbed him most was that his first thought was not to contradict her. His first thought was to wonder whether she had marked the passage in a margin somewhere.

He decided to try something different.

"Allow me to read to you from the Imperial Textbook of Public Health," he said, taking a green clothbound volume from the stack at the edge of his desk. It was the standard text, issued to every student of medicine in the Dominion, and he turned to a page he had marked with a slip of ribbon. "Chapter four, section nine. The contagion of Bloodroot, commonly termed the Blight, is propagated through contact, whether by touch, by breath, or by the sharing of vessels, and is communicable from the afflicted to the healthy with great rapidity. I take it you do not intend to dispute the authority of the Imperial Board?"

"I intend to dispute the footnote," said Tamsin.

He looked up. She had folded her hands on her knee, and her face wore a look of mild, scholarly patience that made his scalp prickle.

"The sentence you've just read is attributed in the margin to Dr. Wilhelmina Hart's Treatise on the Blighted Fevers, which is the source for most of chapter four," she said. "I have read Dr. Hart's treatise in its first edition, published in the year 1794. The sentence in your textbook is not what she wrote. What she wrote was that the sickness is communicable through contaminated water, and she devoted three pages to describing how the water supply of the Hollows camps had been fouled by something in the upper river. The words through contact were added in a later edition, and the water passage was removed entirely."

The study was quiet except for the ticking of the clock.

"I am aware of no such alteration," Soren said coldly.

"I'm certain you're not, Your Grace. It's the kind of thing that is done very carefully, so that nobody who relies on the finished book will ever suspect it." She leaned forward, just slightly, and her voice dropped from the formal register to something quieter and more exact. "Your textbook has a footnote missing. It's a very small footnote, no longer than a line, and it says that this passage was altered from the original in the third printing. The Board must have decided the line was inconvenient. But footnotes matter, Your Grace, because they're where a book confesses what it's hiding."

Soren set down the green volume on the desk. He did it slowly, so that his hand would not betray him.

"Miss Reed," he said. "I have heard enough. You may go."

…

She rose at once, without protest, inclined her head the exact depth that etiquette permitted, and turned toward the door. At the threshold she paused and glanced back over her shoulder at the cold cup of tea on his blotter, and he saw her lips part as if she meant to say something about it. Whatever it was, she thought better of it.

When the door had closed behind her and Dorian's boots had faded down the corridor, Soren sat for a moment without moving. Then he got up, crossed the room to the tall oak bookcase that stood against the east wall, and drew from behind a row of treaty compilations a key that he kept on a chain inside his waistcoat. It fit the lock of a narrow glass-fronted cabinet on the lowest shelf, one that his valet believed to hold nothing but old regimental dispatches.

The cabinet held eleven books. They were the ones he had taken from his mother's rooms after her funeral, when the household staff were busy with the black crepe and nobody thought to ask what the young Grand Duke had tucked under his coat. He drew out the fourth, a battered brown volume with the spine peeling, and carried it to the window, where the gray light from the river was strongest.

A Treatise on the Blighted Fevers, by Wilhelmina Hart, M.D. The date on the title page was 1794.

He found the chapter on transmission and read it twice, running his gloved finger along the lines, with the cold light flickering on the page. The language was plain, almost severe. The contagion is not, as the vulgar suppose, a thing of touch or breath. I have sat at the beds of thirty-one of the sick, and have taken their hands, and have suffered no ill effect. It is communicable through contaminated water, and through nothing else that I have been able to discover. The cause is to be sought in the river.

There was no footnote anywhere on the page. The three paragraphs about the Hollows camps were exactly where she had said they would be.

He stood for a very long time with the book open in his hands and the fog moving slowly across the window. He had read this volume as a boy, tucked in a window seat, and had never noticed this passage, since at ten years old he had been far more interested in the illustrations of ferns. That a girl from the Hollows had read it, and understood it, and then quietly set it down in front of him as a challenge, felt less like an insult than like a hand reaching out of the dark to turn his head.

…

He had not thought of the evenings in many years.

His mother had read to him in the window seat of her morning room in the winter, when the snow lay thick on the cliffs and the household was at supper. She read in a low, unhurried voice with a trace of a foreign accent that he had never been able to place, and she stopped often to ask whether he understood. She had a way of reading a sentence as though she were turning it over to examine the underside, and when she came to a passage she liked, she would pause and say, Listen to this, Soren, listen to how clearly she says it.

He had thought, until this morning, that he had forgotten how she did that. He had not known that the memory was only waiting for someone else to say a sentence in the same tone, with the same dry precision, the same patient delight in being exact.

Listen to how clearly she says it.

He closed the book and returned it to the cabinet. He locked the glass door and put the key back on its chain. Then he sat at his desk, drew a clean sheet of paper toward him, and wrote a short note in his small upright hand. He folded it twice, sealed it with a dab of plain wax, and rang for a footman.

Ambrose Finch arrived twelve minutes later, a little out of breath, with a smear of ink across his cheek and a plum-colored waistcoat buttoned one hole out. He bowed hastily to the room in general, nearly collided with the fire-irons, and apologized to them.

"Your Grace sent for me?"

"Mr. Finch, I understand that the Archive maintains a number of reading rooms that are restricted to members of the Board," said Soren.

"Several, Your Grace. I'm afraid the Board is rather jealous of them."

"Reference Room B is one, I believe. It houses the pre-Purge medical collections." He did not take his eyes from the archivist's mild, spectacled face. "I would like you to give the key to Miss Reed, the Princess's tutor. You will tell her it comes from the Archive Board, in recognition of her scholarly interests, and you will not mention my name to her or to anyone else."

Finch stood very still. For one moment, no more, the vague amiability left his features, and something sharp and weighing looked out from behind the spectacles. Then it was gone, and he blinked and smiled his gentle absent smile.

"The Board is always pleased to encourage a serious student," he said. "May I ask, Your Grace, whether I should expect her to find anything in particular?"

"I expect her to find whatever is there," Soren said. "That is the point of a library."

"A very sound principle," murmured Finch, and withdrew.

…

The mist was lifting from the river by the time Soren was alone again. He went back to the window and stood watching the pale light spread over the water, with the fire ticking behind him and a faint odor of woodsmoke and cold tea in the air. The Gray Cough lay somewhere upstream of that river, in the Hollows, behind the lines of the Wards and the testimony of three hundred years. He had never once questioned why the doctors did not look at the water.

Your fear is a matter of footnotes, he thought absurdly, and then wondered where the phrase had come from, since she had not said it. It had simply assembled itself in his mind in her voice.

He took a clean sheet of paper and wrote, at the top, in the cramped neat handwriting that he used only for private notes, a heading that he had never expected to write about a member of his own household:

Threat assessment of Miss Tamsin Reed: still unresolved.

He sat looking at the words for some time. A gust rattled the glass in the window frame, and from the schoolroom wing, far down the corridors, came the faint sound of a child's laughter, rising and falling like a bird. It occurred to him, dimly, that he was smiling, and that his face had forgotten how to do it, so that the expression felt stiff and strange, like a coat that had been folded away in a trunk for a long winter.

He did not notice that the smile had been there for several minutes. It was the first one in many months, and he had not even been aware that he was missing it.