Chapter 8 Called and Claimed
Four hundred and six people are about to hear what my father was worth, and I’ve done the arithmetic four times since I woke up, and it comes out the same each time: worse than yesterday.
I do it once more anyway, buttoning the coat, because four times isn’t final and five might be.
Salvatore’s letter said a number. The registrar’s sheet said a number, close but not the same, rounded somewhere in the gap between what a man is worth on paper and what a man is worth to the family that spent him.
I have never seen the actual figure the Undercroft will read out this morning.
In twenty minutes, four hundred people I’ve never spoken to will know it before I do.
“You’re doing the thing,” Junie says, from the other bed, where she has been not-quite-dressed for eleven minutes because she keeps starting a sentence and abandoning it for a different one. “The buttoning thing. You did all four already, top to bottom.”
“I’m checking they’re straight.”
“They’re straight.” She pulls her hoodie sleeve down over her knuckle and doesn’t push her glasses up with it, which is how I know she’s rattled—Junie fidgets forward, into things, and this morning she’s folding herself smaller.
“Isa. I heard it in the dining hall. Both sittings. People who don’t know your last name know your last name. ”
“I know.”
“Do you want—” She stops, starts again. “You don’t have to look like you don’t care. Nobody’s grading you on it.”
“I am.” I get the last button through its hole and it sits exactly where the others sit, which is the only part of this morning I’ve managed to make true by wanting it. “I’m the only one grading me on it.”
Cairnwood black has no weight to it until you put it on with nothing pinned to the collar, and then it has all the weight in the world, because everyone who passes you on the quad reads the bare collar before they read your face.
No house. No standing. A girl in a uniform that fits a category nobody has a polite name for.
I’ve worn it four weeks now and this is the first morning it’s felt like a costume instead of clothing.
Room 214 does its part to make the morning worse.
The radiator’s been knocking since six, throwing off a smell of hot dust that never quite clears no matter how far we crack the window, and the cinderblock behind Junie’s head has been painted so many times it’s gone soft at the corners, like the wall itself has given up having edges.
Somewhere down the hall a shower runs too long and somebody’s speaker starts up and dies again.
Ordinary. Loud. None of it knows what today is.
My hands are cold. I flex them once, in my coat pockets, and put them back where they were.
“I could walk down with you,” Junie says. “I don’t have anywhere better to be for another forty minutes.”
“No.” It comes out faster than I mean it to, so I do the thing I do and slow the rest of the sentence down to make up for it.
“I want to walk into that amphitheatre looking like a person with nothing to hide. If I show up with company, that’s the first thing anyone reads. Backup means I think I need it.”
“Do you?”
“Doesn’t matter what I think I need. Matters what four hundred people decide they saw.
” I pick my coat off the hook—my mother’s, wrong season, always packed anyway, though I’m not wearing it, just checking the lining’s still stitched shut the way my hands check things now without asking me first—and put it back.
“I have a plan. I can’t pay the balance.
Ashgrove is coming for me at the match whether I stand for it or not.
So I stand for it, on my own feet, before anyone has to drag me there.
That’s the version of today I get to author.
It’s not a good version. It’s the only one that’s mine. ”
Junie doesn’t say anything clever back. She just looks at me the way she looked at me the first ninety seconds we ever spoke, like she’s cataloguing something she plans to bring up later, and says, “Okay. Go be terrifying, then.”
I go be terrifying.
The walk from Wren House to the Verge is four minutes if you don’t stop, and I don’t stop, and it still costs me the whole four minutes to notice what’s wrong with it.
Nobody looks at me directly. That’s the wrong way to say it—people look at me directly all the time, the ordinary kind of looking, a stranger clocking a stranger on a path.
This is different. This is people finding something urgent to check on their phones exactly as I pass, or turning to say something to whoever’s beside them a half-second before I’d have caught their eyes.
It’s the specific choreography of a crowd that already has an opinion and doesn’t want to be seen holding it.
The first morning on this headland, a man knelt on gravel with his hand wrong and two hundred students walked past without changing pace, and I thought that was the strangest thing I’d ever see people do in public. This is worse. That crowd didn’t know anything yet. This one does.
I count the not-quite-lookers between the quad and the chapel range.
Eleven by the time the ground starts to slope down toward the amphitheatre.
I stop counting after eleven because the number stops being information and starts being something else—no longer a fact I can hold, just a shape the whole morning is taking.
The air off the Sound this early in October has a specific bite to it, wet and metallic, the kind of cold that gets under a collar before it gets anywhere else, and I feel it now at my throat where a pin would sit if I had one to keep the wind off.
The Verge takes the rest of it up through the soles of my shoes before I’ve even found my seat—granite holding October the way it’s held every October since 1809, cut hollow in the centre of each tread by two centuries of people sitting exactly where I’m about to sit.
The tiers are already three-quarters full, low talk running under the surf that never actually stops here, close and constant, and I know from four weeks of watching this place work that the acoustics only run one direction: a voice on the floor comes up clean, but nothing said above the second tier carries anywhere at all.
I find a spot in the general tiers, unaffiliated, no bloc to sit with, and I sit down before anyone can offer me a better seat or a worse one.
Salvatore is visible from here—three tiers down, angled toward the Ferrante-adjacent knot of Providence men he keeps close on Rite days—and he does not come to me.
I don’t go to him either, and that’s the part that catches, walking distance from where I’m sitting, filed under strange before I can file it under anything else: I have never once, in four weeks on this headland, failed to go get the information before the room could ambush me with it.
I could cross three tiers right now and ask him outright what he’s arranged for the match.
He’d tell me something. Maybe not the truth, but something, and something is what I run on.
I don’t move.
I sit with my hands in my pockets and watch Maksim Zharov instead, seated with the Ashgrove delegation, pale under a sky that isn’t doing him any favors, touching the chain at his throat once and settling.
He looks like a man who already knows exactly how this morning ends for him, which is either very good news or very bad news, and I can’t tell which from here, and not being able to tell is information in itself.
The proctor is already at the podium. I hold still. That’s the whole plan for the next ten minutes—hold still, give the tiers nothing to describe afterward—and it is not actually a plan, it is the only thing left when a plan runs out.
The roll is alphabetical and it is boring, which nobody warns you about.
Balances are read the way a school reads absences—flat, procedural, a name and a figure and the next name—and for twenty families it means nothing to me, a rhythm I could fall asleep inside if I weren’t counting the joints in the granite step in front of me instead.
Six visible from where I sit. I’ve counted them four times already and the number hasn’t changed, which is the point of counting them.
Aldric. Two hundred thousand, settled by the son present, applause held.
Bishara. Nothing owed, a formality, a name read for the record and nothing more.
Colville. A number I don’t catch because I’m three joints deep in the granite by the time it lands.
None of it is mine yet. I let it wash past the way I’d let weather wash past, and I keep my eyes on the stone, and I do not look for Salvatore, and I do not look for Maksim, and I hold both of those facts in my head at once like two coins I’m not allowed to drop.
“Ferrante. Anthony, deceased. Balance to Isadora Maren Ferrante, sole heir. Called at the Reckoning, twelfth of March.”
No pause before it. No pause after. The proctor’s voice doesn’t change registers for my father’s name any more than it changed for the four names ahead of it, and that is worse than a pause would have been, because a pause would mean somebody in that voice understood what the sentence cost. This one didn’t. This one is a woman reading a list.
I keep counting the granite. Six joints. The number where I left it, my father’s death filed into the same sentence shape as everyone else’s business, done, moving on to the next letter of the alphabet before the sound of it has finished landing on me.