6. Briar’s Job Is Arms
Briar wakes up the next morning and promptly falls out of the platform bed, rolling down two steps and managing to throw out an arm to prevent further descent. They feel almost hungover, blurry around the edges, but it’s just sheer exhaustion.
Coffee will help.
They grab a T-shirt and the charcoal cargos their mum picked out as a practical job-warming present, pull on a soft brown overshirt, and don’t bother stopping in the bathrooms to wash up.
Dry-fingering their contact lenses will have to do.
The whole building is alive with morning hubbub, the thudding of feet, the running of water - Briar is out of there as quickly as possible, head down, their ankle stiff but not painful as they march towards the refectory.
There aren’t any ambulances or police cars parked in view. That’s probably a good sign.
It’s hell at breakfast. Worse than any zoo. Comparable only to a battlefield, if all the troops were cosseted lordlings who liked talking with their mouths full. Briar chances a few sidelong looks, searching for grey hair or anyone with a visible face rash, and comes up empty.
A hatch has opened in one of the walls to allow scholars to line up and receive hot breakfasts from the kitchen, but there’s also a continental situation on the buffet table, so Briar pours an enormous, watery coffee and grabs a yoghurt pot and then makes a run for it.
At home, Sean makes pitch-black coffee in a very worn Bialetti, and Briar’s mum cooks protein porridge for everybody.
Thick and creamy, with fresh fruit from her window boxes, mixed seeds, drizzled peanut butter and a scoop of chocolate protein powder, which she added after Briar started lifting weights with singular purpose every evening.
‘There’s just this thing about porridge,’ she once said to Briar.
‘It makes me feel like I’m connecting with generations of people going back hundreds of years, you know?
Medieval people sitting by their fires. Little Victorian children.
People all over the world. Frumenty! Gruel!
Congee! Parritch! Try stirring it with the wooden spoon, see if it awakens something in you. ’
Briar had declined, and their mum had chased them around the kitchen wielding the wooden spoon, exclaiming different names for porridge in various languages until she ran out.
Now Briar finds a ledge in the gatehouse at the back of the school building, drinks the somehow tasteless coffee, throws back the yoghurt like a shot of vodka because they forgot to grab a spoon.
They long for good espresso and stupid historical spiritual awakening porridge.
The safety of a familiar kitchen. The knowledge that nobody at home is actively trying to maim or kill each other.
How embarrassing to already be homesick.
The gatehouse is grand on a small scale, a tiny castle, slit windows and worn stone with a wooden ceiling above. In good weather it would be idyllic, but the sky is subdued today; that wet, heavy summer grey that keeps the heat stagnant while it warns of rain.
It’s humiliating having to ask a thirteen-year-old in a waistcoat where Briar might find Eugenia, but the boy gives surprisingly good directions when he gets over his shock at being directly addressed by someone wearing a T-shirt purchased from a supermarket, and Briar finds the administrative office nestled among a clutch of other staff rooms behind the kitchens.
The building is red brick and Victorian, braced with ivy, but inside it’s unfussy and practical.
Glass windows in each doorframe afford a view of staff hunched over their messy back-to-back desks.
Eugenia has her own small office. It’s mostly filing cabinets framing a large central desk, but there’s an orchid by the window and an abstract, modernist rug on the floor, the only hints of personality.
Her hair is up in a ponytail today, and she’s wearing a cream blazer over her tank top and jeans.
Her perfume smells clean, fresh laundry and white freesias, and it wafts in Briar’s direction as the door closes.
‘Come sit,’ Eugenia says, not looking up from where she’s shuffling through documents, the gold cap of a fountain pen pressed to her lower lip. She tuts, crosses something out with a flourish, then gives Briar her full attention. ‘You passed the test.’
‘What test?’ Briar says, thinking immediately of trapdoors and allergic reactions.
‘You found my office. You are here early. You are wearing sensible shoes. This is a very good day for me.’
She delivers all this completely devoid of emotion, which only endears her to Briar. She’s fascinating. Briar desperately wants to impress her. They try to imagine Eugenia laughing, and their brain can’t quite render it in three dimensions. Not enough source material.
‘Here,’ she says. She reaches into a drawer, pulls out a generic staff ID card on a black lanyard and an iron keyring with half ordinary and half comically oversized ancient keys on it, and slides them with a clatter over the desk.
The lanyard is patterned with the school crest, and it’s printed large on the ID too - Briar has seen it before, but able to study it up close, the details are clearer.
A black shield with elaborate silver mantling, and a human skull where there might usually be a knight’s helm or crown; the shield itself is dominated by a heron with one leg lifted, clutching a scroll, and dotted around it are stars, one of which has a human eye at the centre.
The motto, lettered on a scroll at the bottom, reads NUNQUAM DEFICERE.
Eugenia taps the table to regain Briar’s attention.
Her watch looks Swiss and expensive, and Briar wonders if it was a gift from someone at the school.
‘Staff keys. Most of them have labels. The old ones just have symbols. The doors match, if you know to look for them. Do not let any of the scholars come with you to the attic. They are naturally incurious about menial labour, but still. Accidents happen, and the faculty have been throwing anything they don’t want to deal with yet up there for many years.
Take these.’ She gestures to a box of cleaning supplies.
‘Drink water. Use your common sense. If you see a rat with one eye up there, you come and get me. We have unfinished business.’
‘Okay,’ Briar says, reeling from this onslaught of instructions. ‘Do you have a carabiner?’
‘No,’ Eugenia says. She looks Briar over. ‘You look like you might have a carabiner.’
Briar’s eyebrows shoot up, and there’s a brief pause while they recover from this. ‘And you just want me to make piles? Of stuff?’
‘Yes,’ says Eugenia. ‘For now. Then you will graduate from piles to storage solutions. We offer many opportunities for advancement here.’
Briar stands up and attempts a tiny smile, predictably gets nothing back. Oh well. It’s day one. Plenty of time to work out what’ll make her crack. They head for the door, and then pause.
‘The students,’ they attempt, falteringly. ‘The scholars, I mean. Last night, I heard . . . the initiations, I feel like . . .’
Eugenia clears her throat and puts down her pen. ‘It is best if you do not hear things. Or feel things. Be smart, Briar Jones. Ignore the scholars and do your job.’ She returns to her papers.
Right. Good to know. Briar is dismissed.
Box of cleaning things in hand, Briar retraces the journey to the attic.
The scholars drifting about before lessons genuinely don’t seem to see them.
It’s not like they’re actually invisible - a few of the younger kids step out of the way to avoid collisions - but eyes slide right off their edges, like they’re just too boring to fill in the outline.
Briar decides this suits them just fine.
In the inner courtyard, as they’re fumbling to find the key that should lead to the dark ascending stairwell, Tate Adams appears, uniformed in a way that somehow hugs the lines of his body better than something fitted on Savile Row.
He leans against the wall and watches Briar frown down at the spidery tangle of keys, trying to balance the box while searching.
He’s got a little gold daisy stud in his ear today, and he smells vaguely of artificial cherries.
‘Hi.’ He’s got one of those faces that always seems on the verge of a smile. Easy to like. ‘Give me your box, martyr.’
Briar hesitates, but he seems genuine, so they hand over the cleaning gear, inspect the keys, then the door.
Eugenia said something about symbols, and after a scan of the door itself and its stone frame, Briar locates something circular that looks almost like a rune, carved at head height.
Sure enough, there’s a key that matches.
Once Briar has the door open, Tate breezes inside and practically skips up the stairs; Briar remembers a second later that this is one of the only things Eugenia has forbidden, and scrambles to get the door locked again and catch up.
‘Tate, stop - I’m not supposed to let scholars in.’
Tate has taken this instruction literally; on the next turn, Briar bumps right into him, barely visible in the dark.
‘I’m helping,’ Tate says, flashing Briar a grin and jiggling the box. ‘Look at me. So helpful.’
‘Eugenia said—’
‘Don’t worry, I’m just looking for somewhere to hide during Ancient Languages. I won’t get you into any trouble. I mean it.’
Maybe it’s just that smile, but Briar believes him.
Up in the attic, it smells like old wood and long-cultivated damp along with something more pungent, and just shutting the door sends up a cloud of dust motes so thick it seems to swarm.
Tate whistles, long and low. ‘I don’t envy you. They must have been shoving all their crap in here for centuries. And what’s that smell? Is this where they stash the bodies?’