第10章 The Eve of the Veil

The academy knew the Turning of the Veil was coming. You could feel it in the air, the way you can feel a storm coming, a pressure behind the permanent dusk. The students spoke of it in hushed voices, and the Curators went about their work with faces that had turned inward, and the blue lamps burned a little lower, as if the school itself was holding its breath. Maya did not sleep well that week. The sound was back, the low patient sound in the stone beneath her tower, and it was louder now, and it did not stop. She lay awake at night and felt it in her teeth, and her shadow lay across the floor of her room, trembling, and she could not say whether it was afraid or eager. She did not know anymore whether those were different things. Talia came to her on the third night, slipping through her door with her hair coming out of its braid and a look on her face that Maya had learned to recognize. It was the look Talia got when she had heard something she wished she had not. "The Council has been called," Talia said. "All of them. Every Curator in the school. They're meeting at the Turning of the Veil, and there's a paper going around, and your name is on it." Maya sat down on the edge of her bed. She had known. She had known since the feast, since the kind-eyed man had smiled at her and told her there was no rush, since she had seen her mother's shadow in the mirror. She had known, and she had spent three days pretending she had not. "What does the paper say?" she asked. "It says you're required to appear before them," Talia said. "It says you're to answer for the legacy you carry." She sat down beside Maya and took her hand, and her hand was cold. "Maya. Everyone is talking about your mother. About what she did. About what she was. They're saying you're going to be the one who finishes it." "Finishes what?" "I don't know." Talia's voice was small. "That's the worst part. Nobody knows. They're all just. Waiting. Like the whole school is waiting for something, and you're the one it's waiting on." Cassian came the next evening, when the corridors were dimming toward the night watch. He did not knock. He stood in her doorway with his arms crossed, the way he stood in the practice yard, and he looked at her for a long moment before he spoke. "Voss has been meeting with the Curators at night," he said. "Every night this week. I've been watching. He has something planned for the Turning of the Veil, and it's not what he's telling everyone." He paused. "There are students in this school who watch other students and report back. I know two of them by name. I'm fairly sure I don't know them all." "Why are you telling me this?" He did not answer at once. He looked past her, at the window of her tower room, at the permanent dusk beyond it, and when he spoke his voice was quieter. "Because you're the only person in this school who makes the window at the end of the west corridor light up," he said. "And I've been watching that window for a long time, and I'm not going to watch it go dark." He looked back at her, and his face was unreadable. "Whatever happens at the Veil. Don't do it alone." He left before she could answer, and Maya stood in the middle of her tower room, and she felt the sound in the stone under her feet, patient and vast, and she understood that the night before the Turning of the Veil was the last night of the life she had been living, and that the girl who woke up tomorrow would be someone else. The next day the corridors were worse. Students who had never spoken to Maya looked at her as she passed, and looked away when she met their eyes. At supper she ate with Talia, and the tables around them went quiet whenever she laughed, as if her ordinary voice startled them. She had been the girl whose shadow ate the lamps. Now she was the girl who carried her mother's secret, and the school was holding its breath around her. She did not sleep. She sat at the window of her tower room, and she watched the blue lamps of the school go down one by one, the way a tide goes out, and she thought about the girl she had been, the one who had climbed out of her parents' window with a backpack and a secret, and she tried to remember when the adventure had become this. When the mystery had become a weight. She could not find the moment. It had happened the way the dusk happened, slowly, and then all at once. She thought about her mother, who had gone down into the dark to hold a door shut, and about the letter in the sealed drawer, and about the man with the kind eyes who had offered her everything she wanted in a voice that had counted her answer before she gave it. Her shadow lay across the floor behind her, and it was not still. It moved the way water moves, slowly, and it kept moving toward the door of her room, the way it had moved toward the wall of the deep chamber, the way it had moved toward the thing in the stone. "Not yet," Maya said to it. She did not know why she said it. She said it the way you say a thing to an animal that is waiting. "Not yet." Her shadow settled, and the sound in the stone went quiet, and for a moment there was nothing but the blue dark of the tower room and the press of the dusk against the window. And then, at the edge of dawn, when the permanent dusk of the academy was just beginning to grey toward the first hour of the morning, she heard it. A tap at the door of her tower room. Light. Precise. The sound of something small and sharp, driven into the wood. Maya stood up, and her shadow stood up with her, and the two of them stood together in the blue dark of the room, and the sound in the stone, far below the school, began again. ---