ASCENSION NIGHT

Day 0 of 100

The ice on Lake Merrow had been singing since sundown.

Mara Ashgrove could hear it through the great east windows of the Hall, over the string quartet and the clink of glasses and the low rustle of four hundred people trying to be calm: a long thin note, rising and falling, like a wet finger drawn round the rim of a glass. The lake did it every winter when the cold settled in hard. The townspeople called it the Singing. The first-years, who had been told it was a ghost, called it the Singing and kept their eyes on the windows. Mara, who had been told by three separate professors that it was nothing more than thermal contraction of freshwater ice under pressure, had written the explanation in her notebook in the first week of her first term, with the date, and had never once been able to hear it without her skin tightening.

She checked her sleeve.

It was a habit. Her cuff was buttoned; it had been buttoned when she left her room, and when she crossed the quad, and when she took her place in the line of candidates by the Founder's Stone. She checked it anyway. Pale-blue silk, long in the wrist, fastened with seven small pearl buttons that Josie had sewn on with her tongue between her teeth and a running commentary on the poor quality of Mara's needlework. Beneath the silk, on the inside of the left wrist, lay the place where the sigil would be.

Would be. Tonight. At twenty-four.

"Stop it," said Josie, out of the corner of her mouth.

"I'm not doing anything."

"You're counting your buttons. I can see your lips move."

"Seven. They are all there."

"They were all there the last four times." Josie Tull leaned a fraction closer, and the lamplight caught the curls she had pinned up with great violence and little success. She was in green velvet, with a ribbon of gold thread at her throat, and she had the look of a woman who has been told to stand still and is vibrating gently with the effort. "You'll be wonderful. You'll walk up, you'll put your hand on the rock, it will light up like Christmas, and then you can go back to being insufferable. Look at me. Breathe."

"I am breathing."

"You're doing the thing where you breathe in a list."

Mara laughed. It came out as a short, surprised huff, and the girl in front of her, a rosy-faced twenty-one-year-old in white organdy, glanced round with the particular horror of the very young at the sight of an elder in the line. Mara gave her a small, apologetic nod. The girl turned back and straightened her spine.

Twenty-one, thought Mara. That's the age. Twenty-one, in the snow, with your family in the gallery and a gown that cost your father a quarter's wages. And then there's me.

She was the oldest candidate on the floor by three years. She had known it all evening, in the way one knows a stain on a collar. It was in the way the other mothers in the gallery inclined their heads; it was in the careful kindness of the Dean's greeting, at the door, Miss Ashgrove, how very good to see you; it was in the silence that had fallen, a half-second, when her name was added at the foot of the register in the Registrar's slow hand. Late Ascension. There was a phrase for it in the Academy statutes, a respectable Latin phrase that nobody used aloud. In the dormitory they called it dormant. It sounded like a bear.

It had been explained to her, over the years, by various kindly physicians. The sigil, they said, was not a matter of timetable. It woke when it was ready. For some it woke at sixteen, for most at twenty-one, for a few unfortunate late bloomers at twenty-three, twenty-five. A fever in childhood could delay it. A shock. A grief. Did you have a shock, Miss Ashgrove, in your youth?

I had a mother who drowned, Mara had said, at fifteen, to the third of these physicians, in the same voice she used to give the date. And then I had a fever. I don't remember the fever. I don't remember the day. I remember the funeral. I'm told it was nice.

He had made a note.

That had been ten years ago. She had stopped telling people. She had put it away with the other things she did not look at, in a drawer at the back of herself, and she had gone on, and she had done what she did, which was read. She read everything. She had read her way through the Academy library from the basement to the clock tower, with a brown notebook at her elbow, and she had taken a first in Soul Studies at nineteen and a research fellowship at twenty-one, and she had written a monograph on the metaphysics of the Sigil that was praised in three journals and cited, with some irritation, by the man who held the chair. She had a reputation. She was the one who knew all about it, in the way that a woman who has never swum may become an expert on the sea.

And tonight, at last, she would find out whether she had been right.

…

The Hall at Thornwick Academy was the oldest room in Vermont that anyone would admit to.

It had been built in 1731 by a congregation of Calvinist wizards who disapproved of ornament, and the later centuries had done their best against them. Gaslight had been run along the hammer-beams in brass pipes, so that the roof glowed amber under its soot. The windows had been enlarged and filled with leaded panes. The long oak tables had been pushed back against the walls to make a floor, and on them stood silver urns and decanters, platters of cold goose and cranberry tarts, and a pyramid of candied chestnuts that Josie had been eyeing for an hour. Over everything, drifting under the rafters in slow bright rivers, hung the candles. They were not hung. They floated. A thousand of them, unsupported, in long gold ribbons that rose and fell with the music, and shed on the upturned faces below the faint sweet smoky smell of beeswax.

It was beautiful. It was the sort of beauty that was designed to be.

At the far end of the Hall, on a low dais, in a pool of lamplight, stood the Founder's Stone.

She had seen it a hundred times. It was nothing much to look at: a squat block of gray granite, waist-high, flat on top, worn smooth in the middle by two hundred years of palms. There was a hollow on its upper face, the shape of a hand with the fingers spread. Each candidate walked up in turn, in order of age, youngest first, and laid her palm in the hollow, and the Stone woke whatever lay sleeping in the wrist. It was not a spell. It was nearer to a tuning fork. The Founder's Stone had been quarried from the same ledge as the first Sigil-stone in Salem, and it hummed, very faintly, at the frequency of the human soul.

One by one the girls and boys in the line went up.

The first lit like a match. A gasp from the gallery; a rush of applause. The second, a blunt dark boy with ink on his fingers, produced a glowing blue triangle that sat on his skin like a bruise, and the Dean said Lithomancy, I think, and his father was seen to weep into a handkerchief. A tall girl in lilac got a spiral. The rosy girl in organdy got a thing like a small gold fern. Each time the music rose, and the Dean spoke the word, and a clerk wrote it in the register, and the line shuffled forward one step.

"Eleven," whispered Josie. "Twelve. Twelve more and then you."

"Don't count."

"You count."

"I'm counting something useful."

"What?"

"The windows," said Mara. "There are nine on the north side and I've only found seven that are shut."

"Mara."

"It's the draft. I don't like the draft."

"Mara Ashgrove." Josie's voice dropped to a murmur, and she took her hand, quite suddenly and quite hard, and held it. Her fingers were warm. "I'm going to say something and you are going to hear it, because I'm your best friend and I am wearing a corset I cannot breathe in, and I've earned it. You are the cleverest person I know. You're also the most frightened of being looked at. And in about eleven minutes, four hundred people are going to look at you, and I will be standing right here, and I'll be the one clapping loudest. All right?"

"All right."

"All right."

Mara squeezed the hand. She did not trust her voice. She looked up, instead, across the sea of heads and shoulders and floating gold, and let her eyes drift over the gallery, the high wooden balcony where the families sat in rows. There was nobody there for her. She had put that down in the register too, in the box marked Guests: a single dry line, None. The Dean had read it without comment.

On the wall behind the dais, above the Stone, hung the painted portrait of the Academy's first headmaster, a thin severe man in a black stock who appeared to regard the whole business with distaste.

At the back of the Hall, in the shadow of the last window, stood a man she knew.

…

Professor Augustin Pryce had been her tutor for six years.

He was not tall. He was a spare, stooped, silver-haired person of sixty, with a face like a well-read book, soft at the edges, creased in the middle; he wore a rusty black gown and a pair of half-moon glasses that he was always losing. It was said he had once been the most brilliant young researcher in the Bureau of Arcane Oversight, and that he'd left it, abruptly, thirty years ago, and had never explained why. He taught Soul Studies on Tuesdays and Thursdays. He had taught Mara to read a primary source. He kept sherry in the bottom drawer of his desk and made no secret of it.

He was looking at her.

He was not smiling. That was what caught her. Pryce was a man who smiled easily, with his whole face, at a footnote. But now he stood quite still by the pillar with his glass untouched in his hand, and he was looking at her as one looks at a thing one has dreaded for a long time and is now powerless to prevent.

She lifted her chin.

It's all right, she tried to say, with her eyebrows. It's only a sigil.

He crossed the floor.

He did it slowly, slipping between the couples, with a murmured word here and there, and he reached her in the end just as the line shuffled forward again, and put a hand on her sleeve. The touch was light. It was so unlike him that she stared. His fingers were cold, and she saw that they shook.

"Mara."

"Professor."

"A word. If you'd permit me."

"Now? I'm eight from the front."

"It will take a moment." He bent his head. The candlelight turned his glasses to two small gold coins, so that she could not see his eyes. "I wished only to say that whatever happens at the Stone tonight, you must not be afraid. Whatever you see. Whatever you feel. You have done nothing wrong. You never did. Do you understand?"

"I— no. What do you mean?"

"I mean—" He stopped. His mouth worked. "I mean that you're the finest mind of your generation, and I'm proud to have taught you, and I would like you to remember that I said so."

"Professor Pryce, you're frightening me."

"No. I'm sorry. I'm an old fool, I've had two glasses and I'm nervous, it's the occasion." He straightened. He tried a smile. It sat on his face like a borrowed hat. "Go on. Go on, my dear. Be brilliant. And—"

She waited.

"Don't look down at the water tonight," said Pryce. "Not the lake. Any water. A glass, a puddle. If it can be avoided."

"Why?"

"Superstition. A foolishness of mine." He let go of her sleeve. "Go on."

He walked away. He went back to his pillar, and stood, and did not look at her again.

"What on earth," said Josie, "was that."

"I don't know."

"He looked as if he'd seen the Dean's ghost."

"He did say not to look at water."

"Well, I intend to look at all of it. I'm drinking the punch." She squeezed Mara's arm. "Seven now. Seven. Breathe, you list-maker."

…

It was strange how quickly it came.

One moment there were eight in front of her and she was fretting over windows; the next the rosy girl in organdy had left the Stone with a fern on her arm and a flushed, astonished face, and the tall boy ahead had gone up, and been lit green, and come down. The music faltered, and found itself, and played on. The Dean cleared his throat. And the register-clerk, a gaunt old man with spectacles on a ribbon, looked down at his book, and then up the line, and spoke her name.

"Miss Mara Ashgrove. Late Ascension. Soul Studies."

There was a pause.

It was not long. It was no more than a second, perhaps two. But in that stillness, in the high amber Hall with its drifting lights, Mara became aware of every one of the four hundred people in it. She felt them turn. She felt the wave of attention come across the floor, from the gallery and the tables and the long windows, a gentle, curious, faintly pitying pressure, like the weight of water on the chest of a diver. She heard a woman murmur, Is that the one? And someone else, Poor thing, at her age.

Walk, she told her legs.

She walked.

It was twenty-two steps. She counted them. The floor was a polished oak, scattered with chestnut shell, and her slippers made no sound; and the candles drifted aside to let her pass, one by one, with a faint hiss of wax. She went up the three steps of the dais. She stood before the Stone. Up close it was larger than she remembered, and colder, with a smell of old rain and iron; and the hollow in its top gleamed faintly, polished by two centuries of hands.

"Whenever you are ready," said the Dean, kindly.

She took off her left glove.

She did it slowly, finger by finger. Her hand was white in the lamplight, and steady, and she was distantly proud of that. She unfastened the seven pearl buttons and rolled the silk back to the elbow. The skin of her wrist was pale and smooth and unmarked, with the faint blue tracery of veins, and a very small scar, no bigger than a grain of rice, that she'd had as long as she could recall.

She laid her palm in the hollow.

For a moment nothing happened.

She felt only the cold: the deep unhurried cold of granite that has stood two hundred winters in a stone building. It crept into her palm. It crept up her wrist. She heard the quartet, faint and far, working through a waltz. She heard her own pulse. She heard the Singing, the thin rising note of the lake, which seemed to have come closer, to be coming through the floor.

Nothing, she thought, with a dreadful cold calm. Of course. Nothing. I knew it. Twenty-four, and a dead wrist, and—

The Stone hummed.

…

It was not a sound, at first. It was a pressure. It rose from the granite into the bones of her hand, a low, steady vibration like the purr of an enormous cat; and then it was in her arm, and her shoulder, and the roots of her teeth. The candles above the dais stopped moving. The music, somewhere behind her, wavered, and went out of tune. In the gallery a child began to cry.

And her wrist began to burn.

It was a thin bright line of heat. It ran across the inside of the left wrist, from the pulse to the bone, like the stroke of a hot wire; and where it went, light came up through the skin. She watched it. She could not look away. A line of pale silver-blue, then another, branching, crossing, drawing itself in a delicate fan of struts and points, like frost growing on a windowpane. A snowflake. A six-pointed one, no larger than a coin, perfect, exquisitely fine, with a small clear star at its heart, shining on her skin like a drop of moonlight.

A murmur went through the Hall.

"Oh," said someone in the gallery.

"Three-armed," said the Dean, in a hushed voice. "A tri-radial crystal. Very unusual. A very, very fine—" He stopped.

Because the light had not stopped.

It should have settled. All the others had: the line drawn, the shape fixed, a calm glow that dwindled to a steady gleam and sat there. Hers went on. It brightened. The silver-blue deepened to a hard glittering white, and the white began to flare, and the tiny crystal on her wrist threw out a ray, and another, and the whole of the dais flooded with a cold sharp light that threw her shadow behind her like a black blade across the floor.

Too bright, she thought. It's too bright, something is wrong—

And then she heard it.

Crack.

It came from the wrist. It came from the heart of the crystal. A long, thin, shivering report, high and glassy, such as one hears on a pond in January when a fissure runs from bank to bank under the skin of the ice. It went through her. It went through the Stone, and the floor, and the hammer-beams of the roof; she saw the candles shiver in their ribbons. She saw the Dean's face go gray. A fine white line had appeared in the sigil on her arm, a hairline fracture, running from one point of the snowflake to the opposite, dividing it clean through the middle.

It's cracking, thought Mara, quite lucidly. The sigil is cracking. That's not possible. Sigils don't—

"Remove your hand, Miss Ashgrove," said the Dean sharply.

She tried.

She could not. The Stone held her. It was a gentle grip, not a painful one, a sort of warm insistent pull, like a hand closing round her own; and as she strained against it she felt the light go out of her wrist, in a long cold flow, as water drains from a basin. It went into the granite. The granite drank it. And the crack in the crystal widened, and the Hall was ringing with the sound of splitting ice.

Behind her.

She heard it behind her. Close, at the nape of her neck, so near that the fine hairs rose: a breath. Slow and soft and perfectly distinct. The breath of someone standing immediately at her back, quite still, taking in the air through parted lips, and letting it go.

She whirled.

There was nobody there.

There was only the Hall, and the drifting candles, and four hundred faces upturned and white. There was the Dean, a pace away, with his hand half-raised. There was the dais, and the dark wood, and her own long shadow lying on the floor. No one stood within five feet of her. She stared at the empty air. And the sigil on her wrist gave a last sharp pulse, and went dim, and the Stone let go.

She snatched back her hand.

…

"Well," said the Dean, after a long moment. His voice had lost its warmth. "That was— irregular."

"What happened?"

"I confess I'm not sure. It will be for the Examiners to say." He had taken out a handkerchief and was patting his forehead. "A very strong reaction. Too strong, in point of fact. It will, I think, settle. Let us hope. Register the sigil, Mr. Pell, and note the— the fracture."

"The fracture, sir?"

"The fracture," said the Dean, and turned away.

Mara looked down at her wrist.

It was there. A snowflake of silver-blue, with three long arms, fine as a spider's web, dull now, faintly gleaming, as if seen through frosted glass. The thin white line still ran across it, from point to point. She turned her arm over, and it caught the light, and for an instant she thought she saw, deep inside the frost, a second glimmer: a red, small spark, like a coal.

Then it was gone. Only the snowflake remained.

She stood very still.

She could hear Josie, from the floor, saying her name. She could hear a murmur rising in the Hall, a sort of thickening of the air, the sound of four hundred people deciding what they had seen. A woman was crying. The quartet had stopped altogether. Somewhere in the gallery a man cleared his throat, loudly, twice, and said to nobody, "Well, I never."

I am not going to be sick, thought Mara. I'm not going to faint. I am going to walk down these steps, and take Josie's hand, and go and find some water, and I am going to write all of this down, with the time.

She put her glove on. Her fingers were quite steady. She was prouder of that than of anything she had done in six years.

It was then that the doors opened.

…

They were the great west doors, double oak, banded with iron, which were never opened on Ascension Night except to admit the Visitor. They opened inward, both at once, with a boom that went round the Hall like a cannon-shot, and a gust of snow came in with the wind. The candles guttered and leaned. The cold struck her face. And in the doorway, black against the white of the storm, stood a line of men.

They wore gray.

Long gray greatcoats, belted, to the knee. High black boots. Gray caps with a small silver badge. Each carried at his hip a short, ugly, brass-bound firearm that Mara had seen only in the Bureau's printed bulletins, and a lantern with a blue glass, which hissed. There were twelve of them. They came into the Hall in a double file, and the crowd drew back from them as a tide draws back from a rock, and the snow melted in dark patches on the oak.

Wardens, breathed someone. The Wardens.

They halted. At a gesture from the foremost, the file split and spread, and took up its place along the walls; and the man who had given the gesture came on alone across the floor.

He was tall. That was what she saw first, because he was a good head above the others. He walked without haste. His coat was gray like theirs, but longer, and heavier, with a high collar turned up against the cold; there was snow in his dark hair, and on his shoulders, and on the silver star pinned to his breast. His face was lean and hard and unsmiling, the face of a man who has not slept in a week and has long since stopped expecting to. He might have been thirty. There was a scar through his left eyebrow. His eyes were the gray of river ice.

And they were looking at everything.

She felt it as he came. It was not a stare. It was something much stranger: a kind of passage, a slow light sweep, as though he were reading each person he passed, not their faces but something behind the faces, something she could not see. She saw a man in a tailcoat flinch. She saw a girl put a hand to her breast. She saw the old Registrar take off his spectacles, quite unconsciously, and polish them on his sleeve.

Soul-Sight, she thought. She had written a chapter about it. She had never seen it done. He is looking at us. Not at us. Through. He sees the lights.

He reached the foot of the dais.

He stopped. He inclined his head to the Dean; she heard him say, in a low, level voice, with a faint trace of the hill country in it, "Dean Whitcomb. I apologize for the intrusion. The Bureau has had a report. A disturbance at this address." A pause. "I felt it from the ridge."

"An irregular Ascension, Captain Rooke. Nothing more."

"Which candidate?"

The Dean hesitated.

And the man in the gray coat turned his head, slowly, and his eyes came up the steps of the dais, and stopped on her.

…

She would remember it afterward with great exactness.

She would remember the beeswax smell, and the cold, and the thin ringing in her ears. She would remember the weight of her glove against the new-made sigil, which still stung, faintly, like a nettle. She would remember Josie, somewhere below, drawing in a sharp breath; and the blue lantern hissing on the stone; and the way that for the length of a long inhalation the whole of the Hall fell away, and there was only a gray gaze, and the quiet.

It did not travel. It did not sweep. It stopped on her, as a hand stops on a door.

He looked at her for a very long time.

Something moved in his face. She could not tell what. It was not recognition; that was impossible; she had never seen him in her life. It was something more like the expression of a man who has been listening to a clock for many years and has just heard it miss a beat. His brows came together. The scar through the left one drew white. His lips parted, very slightly, and then closed, and she saw the muscle tighten along his jaw.

He was looking at her wrist. At her face. At a place in the air just beside her shoulder, where there was nothing at all.

What do you see? she thought, wildly. What is it? What do you see?

"Captain?" said the Dean.

Rooke did not answer. He had not taken his eyes from her. And in the gray of them, for a moment, quite plainly, she read something that no sane person could have mistaken for anything but alarm.

He frowned, as at a sum that would not come out.

As at a thing that was wrong.