Shattered Innocence: Transmigrated Into a Novel as an Extra

Chapter 1246: A Magister Suspected

Selenne.

Her name was still there in the morning, which was more than could be said for his clear head.

That lasted until the second bell. Kaleran spent the first two hours of the day proving to himself that he had no need to ask her anything. He combed the boy’s record for any mention of the standing, a note, a question, a stray requisition, and found none. The registry of provisional instruments held a single entry, three lines long, stamped rejected. One precedent is an anecdote with a seal on it.

Nothing he found explained the boy.

Before he could argue himself out of the rest, he signed a routine request for the cohort’s recent practical results and wrote a second note, two lines, to Magister Selenne, asking for a word before her afternoon class. The runner at his door took both and went.

He was a little ashamed of the note. If there was a back channel, his signature made him a party to it, and the favoritism her enemies had been waiting to prove would have his name under it. Selenne had never given him a reason to think so. The only reason he had was a hole in a file.

He turned the scrying mirror by the window to face the wall, and felt faintly ridiculous doing it. Then he carried the writ and a pen to the small table beside the east window, where he held the meetings he preferred to call conversations, and waited. By the time the noon bell rang, the light had reached the floor in two long panels, and he had moved the chairs twice.

Selenne knocked once.

"Come in, Magister."

She stopped half a step inside the door. "Magister," she said, mildly. "So it’s that kind of..."

"Yes. You have a class after noon, so I’ll be brief."

Her cloak falling into order around the chair, she sat.

He began where they had begun once before, with the commoners’ schedules ahead of the Oral, when he had come to her with a pattern and no proof and she had heard him out. This was the same, he told her, and he asked her to hear it that way. Having been heard out once on a pattern with no proof, he knew what that was worth, and he meant to give her the same.

"Ask."

He had rehearsed the question on the stairs, and it had sounded better there.

"Do you know that a provisional Wayfarer writ exists?"

"No."

One word. He gave it the length of a breath and watched her: hands, eyes, the line of her shoulders. Nothing moved that shouldn’t. Selenne was always that still.

He told her the rest in the order it had reached him. Elias had brought one yesterday, for Lucavion, over his own name. The boy had asked for that form itself, and Elias could not say how he had known there was one to ask for. She did not ask how, or who. Her eyes went to the window and came back.

"I assumed the source was you. I would rather say it to your face than go on thinking it."

She held out her hand, and he gave her the writ.

She read it to the last line, the way she read everything, and Kaleran found himself hoping for something to cross her face. Irritation, anger, anything but caution.

"I did not tell him." She set the page on the table between them. Her voice stayed level, which was how he knew it was anger. "And I want it on the record that I was asked."

He nodded. She did not raise her voice. Putting it on the record was, for Selenne, as close to shouting as she came. Her thumb had come to rest on the sponsor’s line without her seeming to know it was there.

He offered her the one remedy he had. "Standing wants a Magister’s vouching. If your name were on it—"

She cut across him. "That is the favoritism charge, Vice-Headmaster. I will not write it out for Professor Marcus."

His sentence cut off, Kaleran found he could not fault the answer. A Magister with something to hide would have taken the offer gladly, since it tidied the writ’s origins under her own name. Selenne had refused the tidying, and that told him more than her denial had.

He said it had been meant as a courtesy, and she said she knew. He had meant the offer, and he took the refusal without argument. Then he asked the small thing last: whether, in a lesson or a corridor, she might have let something slip. People said things.

"I have never discussed Wayfarer standing with Lucavion." She set the words down one at a time. "Not in a lesson, not in the corridor, and not when alone."

He looked at her a moment longer than the question needed. Then he looked at the writ. She had answered each question in exactly the shape he asked it, no wider. Kaleran could read that two ways, a careful liar’s or an honest woman’s, and the second fit her better.

"Then I have nothing," he said. "Selenne."

Her eyes came up at the name. "Have you asked him?" She said.

"I haven’t."

"Why not?"

"Because he’ll answer. He’ll give me a good answer, and I won’t be able to tell if it’s true."

She did not argue. She took a breath over it, longer than the answer needed. A point of violet light showed at her fingertips and was gone before he could be sure of it. Kaleran, who was watching again, saw her take the rest of her temper back in.

"I have a class," Selenne said.

She rose, the cloak following, and at the door said, "Good afternoon, Vice-Headmaster," in the same even voice she had come in with. Her boots crossed the corridor and passed out of hearing.

Kaleran sat with the writ a while. The light had moved off the floor.

He drew the writ across the table and reached for the pen. Just then, as his fingers found it, someone knocked.

"The cohort’s practical results, Vice-Headmaster," the runner said, holding out a packet sealed in plain gray. "You asked for them this morning."

Kaleran took it, and set it down beside the unsigned writ.