25. Chapter 25
Chapter twenty-five
Jessica
I bring the mug.
I carry it up the path in both hands like it's evidence, and when Jon opens the door I hold it out before he's finished saying hello.
He looks at it for a long moment.
"That's a mug."
"That's the correct mug."
"It has a moose on it."
"It has a moose on it, the handle is the right shape, and the rim isn't too thick. I tested four in the dining hall. I made Sophia hold them." I put it in his hands. "You may keep it. You are now at fifteen."
Jon turns it around once, examines the moose, and sets it on the shelf beside the kettle — not in the cupboard with the dusty ones. On the shelf, next to the chipped one.
"I'll be using this," he says, "which you should understand is a concession."
"I'll take it."
The cottage smells like onions again, but this time there's more going on.
There's a board of things chopped in separate piles, because of course they're in separate piles.
There's a pan. There's a page printed off and weighted flat with a stone, and when I lean over it I can see he's written on it in three places.
I pick it up.
Not this long. — 20 min?
Ignore.
This is the only part that matters.
"You annotated the recipe."
"It's a badly written recipe."
"You annotated a recipe, Jon."
"It says season to taste in a dish with four salted components in it." He takes it off me and weights it back down. "And it lies about the timings. If you brown that for the length it claims, you'll be eating a coin."
"How many ingredients?"
"Thirteen."
"I said more than four. I've exceeded the commitment substantially." He hands me a knife, handle first. "Celery. Don't hurt yourself."
I'm extremely bad at it, and he watches me be bad at it for a while, and then does the thing he did the first time: he doesn't take the knife, he just puts two fingers on the back of my hand and moves it half an inch.
"There. Now you're cutting the celery instead of teasing it."
"That's condescending."
"That's teaching. I've been doing it for nineteen years and it looks exactly like this."
We cook. Or he cooks and I hand him things and eat two of the thirteen ingredients before they reach the pan, and he catches me at it twice and says nothing either time.
At the point where the recipe demands that everything sit and do nothing for forty minutes, Jon puts the lid on, steps back, and looks at the clock with genuine hostility.
"Forty minutes."
"You said you'd fill it complaining."
"I intend to." He turns the burner down. "This is the part I object to on principle. Forty minutes in which the only correct action is to not act. It's absurd."
"It's resting."
"Toast was resting," Jon says, "according to Torres, and it was carbon."
Pickles is supervising, very judgmentally. I give him an extra cricket anyway.
We eat at the table with the plates on a stack of journals. The food is genuinely good. I tell him so twice and he goes faintly pink both times and pretends to be interested in the pepper.
Halfway down my plate I put my fork down.
"I thought about your homework."
"I'm sorry."
"You're not."
"No," Jon says.
"I don't have all of it." I turn my glass.
"I know I want the name. It's in the record and it's staying in the record, and I want it on the wall in Faris's hall where the blank space is, and I want the history corrected everywhere we can prove it's wrong.
I want the records — not just access, I want them to stop being somebody else's collection about my family. "
"Those are four things and they're all answerable," Jon says. "What about the rest?"
"I don't know about the land. There are people living on it.
Some of them have been on it for generations and it isn't their fault what somebody did with a blade in a records office.
" I look at him. "And I don't know about a Council seat.
Everybody keeps saying it like it's the prize, and every time I try to imagine sitting in that room for the next forty years, I—"
I stop.
"You don't want it," Jon says.
"I don't know if I want it."
"They are." He puts his own fork down. "For what it's worth, and I want to be clear I'm not answering it for you — the fact that you've separated them at all puts you ahead of where most claimants start. Most of them arrive wanting everything and work out later which parts they actually intended."
"Is that the historian talking?"
“That's the man who sat through nineteen years of faculty reviews watching people ask for things they hadn't thought through.” He picks his fork back up. "Eat. It's better hot and it'll be even better tomorrow."
"Quit teasing me about staying for tomorrow."
Afterward, we end up on the two-seat sofa with the fire down and nothing on the low table, and he's got one arm along the back of it and I'm half across him, and the kissing has stopped being careful.
His hand is under the hem of my sweater flat against my back and his mouth is at the base of my throat, and I have practically crawled into his lap and both hands in his hair, and he says something against my collarbone I don't catch.
"What?"
"I said you've ruined my evening."
"Your evening was a complicated recipe."
"Fair." He lifts his head. His hair is a catastrophe. "But, I would like you to know, I had a carefully constructed plan for how this evening—"
"I know."
"No, you don't," Jon says, and kisses me again, and I laugh into it, and that's when my phone goes off on the arm of the sofa.
I look at it. Falken. At twenty past nine.
Jon sits up.
Falken sounds like a man who has been on his feet since seven in the morning and expected to be reading in bed an hour ago.
"Miss Miller. I apologize for the hour. There's a woman at the west gate who's asked to speak with you."
"Asked for me by name?"
"By name, and she's been extremely specific about it.
She arrived alone with one bag." A pause; I can hear him choosing.
"She told security she's here regarding House Luftemilen.
She also told them she isn't a journalist, which is the first thing anyone says when they are, so they held her in the gatehouse and called the duty administrator, and the duty administrator called me, and I've spent twenty minutes with her in my office. "
"And?"
"And she isn't a journalist." He exhales. "She's brought documents."
Something goes cold across my shoulders.
"What kind of documents?"
"I don't know. I haven't examined them and she hasn't offered. She's asked that nobody examine them before she's spoken to you."
"That's an odd thing to ask."
"It's an extremely odd thing to ask, and she asked it politely and she hasn't moved on it once." The radiator knocks somewhere in his end of the call. "I'm entirely prepared to put her in a guest room and tell her nine in the morning. You've had a week. Say the word and I'll do it."
I look at Jon. He's already standing, already reaching for his coat off the back of the chair.
"Did she give a name?" I ask.
"She did. Rask." Falken says it like a man reading it off a form. "Kari Rask."
Jon stops with one arm in his coat.
Just stops.
"Hold on," I tell Falken, and lower the phone. "What?"
"Say it again."
"Rask."
Jon puts the other arm in his coat very slowly.
"Jon."
"It's on the passage list," he says.
"What passage list?"
"The registry. The one that quotes the clause.
" He's not looking at me; he's looking at the middle of the room.
"The order was to secure passage for the household by the western road.
The registry lists who the passage was for.
A list of names and three roles." He finally looks at me. "One of the names is Rask."
"You're sure?"
"Yes."
"From seeing it once?"
"I spent hours with that registry." His jaw moves. "But it proves nothing. It's a surname from two hundred and seventy-five years ago."
"But."
"But it's a hell of a coincidence," Jon says. "I haven't seen that name anywhere else."
I put the phone back to my ear.
"Chancellor. Twenty minutes."
"Miss Miller—"
"Twenty minutes," I say. "Put her somewhere warm and give her something to eat, please."
I text the four of them on the path.
Someone's come to the academy asking for me about the House. She's brought documents. I'm going up to admin with Jon. I'm completely fine.
Luke, before we reach the greenhouse: Do you want me there?
Jessica: Not yet.
Luke: Say the word and I'm in the building in minutes.
Torres: Who is she?
Jessica: I don't know.
Torres: That's a terrible answer.
Jessica: It's the one I've got.
Torres: Text me when you do. I'll be awake. I'm not pacing.
Then, seconds later: Ok, I'm pacing.
Soren sends one line. If there is a legal question tonight, don't answer it. Say you'll answer it in writing.
Ander doesn't text anything. The bond just goes tight and stays there the whole walk, the way a hand closes around something.
The meeting room on the second floor is the small one, with the oval table. The window behind it has gone black and holds the reflection of the room.
Falken stands when we come in and looks at Jon for a quarter of a second longer than he needs to, which is Falken noticing that a professor has arrived at nine forty at night in a coat over a sweater and not his usual hair style.
The woman is on the far side of the table, and she gets up too.
She's about my age. That rearranges something I hadn't known I'd assumed.
Her coat is creased from a long day of sitting down in it. There's a canvas bag on the chair beside her, and a plate with a sandwich on it that she's eaten half of, and a cup of tea she's holding in both hands.
She watches me come in. Only me. Jon walks in behind me and Falken is standing at the head of the table and her eyes don't move off my face once, steady the whole way across the carpet, like somebody checking a photograph against the original.
She doesn't bow. She doesn't do the little dip of the head people have started doing at me.
"I'm Jessica," I say. "You wanted to see me."
"Yes."
Her voice is low and tired.