第9章 The Kind-Eyed Man

Maya met Warden Voss at the turning feast, and she knew, before he spoke a word, that she should not trust him. It was not anything he did. It was everything. He was the head of the academy's order of Curators, the gray-robed men and women who kept the school's secrets and enforced its rules, and he stood at the high table in the great hall with a silver cup in his hand, and he smiled at the students the way a farmer smiles at a good field. There was nothing unkind in the smile. There was nothing unkind in any of it. That was what made it terrible. The feast was for the first-years, a formal dinner in the great hall where the blue lamps burned and the permanent dusk pressed against the high windows, and the students sat in their rows and ate in careful silence. Maya sat between Talia and an empty chair, and she did not eat much, because she had been told, by a letter in a sealed drawer, that this was the man who had investigated her mother's accident, and she had decided, sitting in the blue light of the great hall, that accidents did not need investigating. Voss did not speak to her during the feast. He spoke to the whole hall, welcoming the new students, telling them about the honor of the academy and the weight of the shadow-work they had chosen. His voice was warm and slow, and it filled the hall the way light fills a room, and the students leaned toward it, the way Maya's shadow had leaned toward the deep places of the school. When the feast ended, the students filed out, and Maya was nearly at the door when a hand touched her shoulder, light as a falling leaf. "Maya Chen." She turned. Voss stood behind her, and he was taller than he had seemed from the far end of the hall, and his eyes were kind, and his hair was silver, and he looked at her the way a teacher looks at a promising student. "I wanted to meet you properly," he said. "I knew your mother." Maya felt the word land in her chest like a stone in water. She made herself breathe. "Everyone says that," she said. "Everyone knew my mother. Nobody will tell me anything about her." Voss's smile did not change. It was patient, and it was kind, and it did not reach his eyes, and Maya realized, with a cold feeling, that his eyes had never been kind at all. They were the eyes of a man who had learned to smile so well that the smile had become the truth of his face. "Your mother was a remarkable woman," he said. "The most gifted shadow-worker this academy has ever trained. I was proud to know her. I was devastated when we lost her." He paused, and the pause was perfect, timed like everything about him. "There is a record of her work, sealed by the Council. It has been sealed for ten years. I have always believed that was a mistake." Maya said nothing. She could feel her shadow at her feet, and it was very still, the way it had been still in the records hall, the way it went still when it was listening to something it needed to remember. "I have been watching your progress," Voss said. "Everyone has. You are three years ahead of your age, and rising. You carry her gift, Maya. You carry her shadow. And I think you deserve to know what that means." "What does it mean?" "It means you are the heir to the most important Working this school has ever performed," Voss said. "And it means there are people who would keep that from you, for reasons of their own." He leaned closer, and his voice dropped, and it was warm, and it was reasonable, and it was the voice of a man offering you exactly what you wanted. "There is a ceremony soon. The Turning of the Veil. The Council will gather, and I would like you to stand before them, and let the mirror of the hall see what your mother left you. It will help us finish what she began. It will honor her. And it will give you the answers you deserve." Maya's heart was beating very fast. The offer was everything she wanted. It was the record, the truth, her mother's name said out loud at last. And everything she had learned in the past weeks, the letter in the sealed drawer, the door at the bottom of the Deep Shadow, the patient sound in the stone, all of it rose up in her at once, and she heard her own voice, and it was steadier than she felt. "I'll think about it," she said. Voss's smile widened, and it was warm, and it was kind, and it was the smile of a man who had already counted the answer and found it acceptable. "Of course," he said. "Take your time. There is no rush, Maya. The Veil turns for everyone, in the end." He was gone before she could answer, and she stood at the door of the great hall, and the students flowed past her, and her shadow lay at her feet, trembling. Seraphina found her on the stairs, and she did not ask what had happened. She looked at Maya's face, and her own face went still. "He wants me to stand before the Council," Maya said. "He wants the mirror to see what my mother left me. He says he wants to honor her." Seraphina was silent for a long moment. When she spoke, her voice was quiet, and it carried more than his had. "He wants to know where she is," Seraphina said. "He has wanted that for ten years. He will use you to find it, and he will call it honor, and you will be standing in the light while he reads you like a book." She took Maya's hands, and her grip was cold and certain. "Do not go before that Council, Maya. Whatever he offers you, do not let him have what your mother hid." That night, in her tower room, Maya stood at the mirror above her washbasin, and she looked at her own reflection, and for the first time, the reflection looked wrong. It was only for a moment. A flicker, the way the lamp light flickers. Her reflection looked at her, and behind her reflection, in the glass, there was the suggestion of a shape, taller than her, standing where no one stood. Maya spun around. The room was empty. The door was barred. Her shadow lay across the floor, flat and ordinary. When she looked back at the mirror, her reflection was her own again. But she knew what she had seen. She had seen her mother's shadow, moving somewhere it had no right to be. And she understood, standing alone in her tower room in the blue dark, that the Turning of the Veil was coming, and that Voss would not let her refuse, and that whatever was waiting for her at the bottom of the Deep Shadow had been waiting for a very long time. ---