Shattered Innocence: Transmigrated Into a Novel as an Extra

Chapter 1245: The President’s Request

The evening before everything else on the Martial Arts Practical Session began, Kaleran was still signing for the cohort.

Five folders sat stacked at his elbow, each with its schedules, its evaluator rosters, and an extract waiting on a signature nobody else in the Academy was allowed to give. His tea gone cold two documents ago, he drank it anyway, out of respect for the cup.

The lamps had burned down to the dull gold they reached around the sixth bell, and the parchment looked warmer than it had any right to. That morning he had promised himself forty minutes.

’Five commoners. Every problem lands on me twice.’

He set the quill down to flex his hand, and someone knocked.

A single knock, from someone whose habits Kaleran knew.

"Come in."

Elias Selcourt came in alone.

There was no clerk behind him now. And Sera apparently did not follow him either, which she would have done most of the time Elias visited Kaleran.

He shut the door himself and stood a moment with his back to it. The collar sat at the height regulation allowed and no higher. A slim folder rode level against his chest, one forearm squared beneath it.

Kaleran had watched a good many students come through that door. The ones who wanted something came in fast, and the ones who feared something came in slow. Elias came in at the pace of a man who had already walked the route in his head.

His face gave nothing away, except the shadows under his eyes.

Crossing the office, Elias inclined his head without breaking stride and said, "Vice-Headmaster." Kaleran answered with his name.

He took the visitor’s chair without being told, nudged it a few degrees toward the desk, and sat.

Kaleran noticed what was missing before he looked at the paper. Elias had come without a clerk, and that was deliberate.

A provisional writ sent through the office would be known to the whole building by morning. Every clerk who logged it, every runner who carried it, every registrar who copied its heading into a ledger would learn of it. Elias knew that. He had brought it down himself so that it would stay between the two of them.

And seeing him in that chair, under that light, Kaleran heard his own voice from the last time.

"A Wayfarer is a student we have stopped pretending to watch. Try not to make me regret which ones."

He had said it across this desk. Elias had nodded once and written nothing down.

"You came yourself."

Squaring the folder against the desk’s edge until the two lines agreed, Elias slid it across. "The writ and the appointment. Both need your name."

Kaleran opened it.

Wayfarer standing was a second-year privilege, vouched for by a Magister or a house head, and most students would graduate without learning it existed. The provisional writ was its smaller cousin: issued early against a sponsor’s name instead of a student’s record, and worth nothing until a second signature agreed with the first. Provisional, on most Academy forms, meant permanent with a probationary smile.

In all his years at the Academy, Kaleran had held one provisional writ before this, and that one had been rejected. One writ was not experience, and he knew it.

He read it the way he read everything, signatures first, measuring it against the only other one he had ever held, the rejected one. Elias’s hand was clean. The movement clauses were tight, departures and returns logged, and where a destination should have been there was a ruled blank, left on purpose. Nothing in it was forgotten, and nothing was padded.

He read it a second time, hunting for the flaw that would let him refuse.

He wanted one thing from the paper: a reason. It had none to give. The writ was sound, and the appointment behind it was sound, and Elias had clipped them together on purpose: Kaleran couldn’t sign one and put off the other.

To the Head Council, a first-year with a Wayfarer writ would read as a first-year with a patron. Kaleran could hear the sentence being said. But refusing a sound writ just because it would look bad to the Council was something he had stopped doing years ago.

They went through the appointment in the short questions Kaleran favored. Who called him out, who kept the log, what an emergency was permitted to override and what it was not. Elias answered each once and did not decorate any of them. Nothing in it widened the boy’s authority by an inch, which was the first thing Kaleran checked and the last thing he trusted anyone to have thought of.

"There’s a rider."

"One assignment, before the semester closes." Elias’s voice stayed level. "He can’t refuse it. Purpose and known risks, however, would come to him beforehand."

Kaleran found the page. It was shorter than the writ and harder, the kind of clause a man wrote after he had seen what happened without it. Nobody handed a student president a term like that out of kindness. It was the price of the writ, taken in a form Elias could defend aloud, and Kaleran respected the trade a little more than he would have respected a gift.

Just then, as he reached for the quill, Elias said, "There’s a part I can’t account for."

The quill stayed where it was.

"He asked for the provisional form," Elias said. "By that name. Not a pass, not an exemption. The provisional Wayfarer writ."

"By name."

"Yes."

"Who told him it exists?"

"I don’t know." Elias’s hands lay flat on his knees. "I’ve been through it more than once. I can’t explain how he knew."

Somewhere down the corridor a bell marked the quarter hour, and a door shut on it.

Kaleran gave it the length of a breath, then another, waiting for the guess that usually followed a sentence like that: someone must have, or I think it was. Even a wrong guess would have been something to hold. Elias set the gap on the desk beside the paper and left it there.

The lamp ticked. Kaleran’s thumb found the edge of the rider and stayed on it.

"I’ve heard it."

Elias stood. At the door he paused the way people do when they have decided on one more sentence and then decided against it, and said only, "Tomorrow, then."

Kaleran nodded, and the door closed. The wards went back to their hum.

Kaleran read the rider a third time. He had no new question for it, and he read it anyway, down to its last line, and then he sat with the page in his hand while the cohort’s other folders waited their turn.

Elias had left one thing off the desk, though Kaleran would not have thought to look for it: a promise made to Lucavion, written on no form and countersigned by no one.

What Kaleran had was a writ, a rider, and a gap, and only two of them could be signed.

Elias knew the form because he was sponsoring it, and he knew the standing because Kaleran had told him. Neither explained the boy.

Whoever had told the boy, it was not Elias. A man who had dug that hole did not carry it into Kaleran’s office and set it on the desk.

’Then someone with standing to know.’

He didn’t reach for the name. It was there anyway. Magisters vouched for Wayfarers. And the boy’s cross-Block courses ran under one Magister’s sponsorship, which Kaleran knew because it was his business to know.

Selenne.

He had built a working life on not suspecting the people he sat beside, and he had been rather proud of how well it held. He looked for the reason it couldn’t be her. He found several, and every one of them was a reason he wanted.

It was too much to weigh at the end of a day like this. Tomorrow, with a clear head, before the first bell.

He squared the writ with its rider, set them at the far corner of the desk beside the cohort’s folders, unsigned, and capped the ink. The lamps held their gold.

Selenne.