Shattered Innocence: Transmigrated Into a Novel as an Extra

Chapter 1231: A Convenient Calendar

Elias answered the release question first, because it was the one line he had chosen not to soften.

"The Council releases," he said. "At present. The wording is standard. I did not write it, and I expect you would like it changed."

"That seems likely."

"Then that is what the space is for." He tilted the sheet a quarter inch toward the blank at the bottom and left it there, an open field in an otherwise ruled page.

"Someone else’s wording," Lucavion said. "And you’re only carrying it."

"I am presenting it."

"That’s a nicer word."

Lucavion still had not looked at the space. Head canted, two fingers resting on the edge of his own file, he looked at Elias the way one looks at a door before trying the handle. "Why now, President?"

It was asked lightly, like a remark about the weather, and it was the one question Elias had not put a page behind. Why him had been answered in full, with a file to prove it. Why now had no file. Lucavion had stepped past merit, where the desk was strong, and gone straight to timing, where it was weak. It was the kind of aim Elias admired in other people when it was pointed elsewhere.

He had an answer regardless, which was the purpose of having prepared one. "Clubs Day closes the recruiting period. Societies file their expedition schedules next week, and the Council must settle coverage before those are approved, not after. Your diagnostic record was finalized this week. Before that, there was nothing to offer against."

Every clause was true. He had checked each against the desk before Sera opened the door.

"Funny thing about an accurate calendar," Lucavion said. "It can still arrive on the wrong day."

Elias let the silence stand. It was a compliment of a sort, the kind paid to well-made furniture: admiring the joinery while declining to sit on it. A rebuttal would only have been a second answer, and he had already spent his one true one.

"I was on the slope this afternoon," Lucavion went on. "Good view of the yard." His fingers turned a page of nothing in the air. "Lucien had a very well-attended afternoon."

Elias had not known where he was standing.

That went in first, before anything about Lucien. A first-year had watched the whole field from the high ground, and none of the reports on Elias’s desk had said so. He tracked who stood beside whom with great care. Who stood apart and simply watched, he tended to learn late.

He had watched that afternoon himself, from the best seat the field offered, and spent it on the wrong thing. Now the man across from him was reciting the afternoon back, kindly, as though returning something Elias had dropped.

"I’m not complaining," Lucavion added. "Hurried men write generous terms."

There was no mockery in it, and Elias understood that this was the craft. Mockery he could have logged and collected against, a debt the other man ran up. Lucavion had declined to press, and had let the declining be seen, and that went onto the ledger the wrong way round. A courtesy, handed across the desk. Owed.

He noticed, too, with the small cold precision he kept for his own errors, that the word had been generous and not weak. A man who meant to wound would have reached for the other one. This man wanted terms.

"Both things can be true," Elias said. His face stayed where it was. Only his thumb moved on the pen cap, once.

"They usually are." Lucavion took the concession the way a clerk takes a receipt, without looking at it, and squared his file to nothing in particular. "Council access could be useful. I’d like a door or two that opens for a seal instead of a name. Seals are only names that got promoted. So. If someone is in real danger, I’ll go. If the Council and I are pointed the same way, I’ll walk beside it. Defined jobs, fine. And afterward I’ll tell you whatever needs telling."

Elias had begun to tally it as agreement when the third clause stopped him.

"’Real danger’ is a wide term."

"Is it? I would have thought it was fairly obvious when it turned up. Fire is a wide term, too. People still manage to notice it."

There was nothing in that to contest, which was the difficulty. Then the pattern showed itself. Real danger, by whose measure. The same way, by whose compass. Whatever needs telling, decided by whom. Each yes had come across the desk with its judge attached, and the judge was not sitting behind it.

It was the question Lucavion had put to the release line, except that this time he had not asked it. He had answered in advance, in a shape that already contained the question, and left Elias to find it.

He filed it, for the moment, under posture. A man named what he would not sell before he named a price; it was the ordinary preface to a haggle. Elias had a column for that.

He had meant to spend the meeting drawing Lucavion into detail, to make him familiar by degrees, one clause at a time. Instead he was being drawn into definitions, and it was Lucavion holding the pen, though the pen was in Elias’s hand.

"What I won’t do," Lucavion said, "is work for you. Or sit on a roster for any hour of the day. Or stand a shift because it’s Tuesday. Or ask permission before I move." He said it lazily, the way a man lists what he does not eat. "I’ll answer a danger. I won’t answer a schedule."

It was a fair division, and Elias disliked how little there was in it to object to. Every refusal sat beside something he had already said aloud that evening, so that none could be argued down without arguing against himself. The last sentence was worse. It was the kind that got quoted back to a man later.

Four yeses against four refusals. It looked even until he weighed them, and then it did not look even at all. The yeses were the heavier.

The haggle, then. Workload, or compensation, or the price of the release line. He had prepared for all three, and a man who had prepared did not wait to be asked.

Elias uncapped his pen and set it to the blank himself.

"Then the Council offers this in return." He wrote as he spoke, the words arriving in the order he had drilled them, and did not look up to see whether the pace suited his guest. "Standing use of the Western Library’s restricted stacks, after curfew, on your name alone. A line in your file that any instructor will read before they read your rank. And—"

"I have conditions," Lucavion said.

Elias stopped. The nib rested where it was, a small dark point above nothing yet written.

It was an old habit, and it had nothing to do with the file on the desk. A commoner was drawn into detail and handed terms to accept; a lord was left room to propose his own. Elias had done this to a dozen men before Lucavion sat down across from him, and had never once had cause to notice himself doing it. He noticed now, because the pen had stopped a line short of where he meant to leave it.

Conditions were what the space was for. He had said so himself. He set the pen down, this time on purpose. "Name them."

Lucavion looked at the pen, then at him. He did not smile. The pleasantry had simply run out of him, and what remained was plain, level, and in no hurry at all.

"The first is simple," he said. "I want a Wayfarer writ."