Shattered Innocence: Transmigrated Into a Novel as an Extra

Chapter 1247: A Vice-Head and An Old Friend

Kaleran broke the packet’s gray seal.

He believed her. That was the trouble. Her answer had taken the only explanation he could build and left him a packet of results he had requested out of habit.

Most of it was grades, in the registry’s plain columns. On top, clipped there by someone who had not been asked to, lay a single page in Arcten’s hand.

Arcten Valebran wrote the way he had once given orders, verb first and nothing after it that the verb didn’t need. Kaleran read it the way he read most records, from the bottom, where an instructor said what he had decided. Then he climbed back up to see whether the page earned it.

‘Reilan Dorne.’

He knew the name, and not from a drill record.

Reilan Dorne and Elowyn Caerlin had run into trouble with their papers, some matter of records that did not sit right, and it had ended in a review request.

That was the part Kaleran remembered. A review request did not appear on its own. Someone had to put it in, someone else had to accept it, and by the time it was settled a good many people in the registry would have read both names. Nobody’s papers were examined that closely in this building unless the students behind them had already drawn a great deal of attention.

It had been the registry’s matter, not his, and he had left it there. He had not forgotten the names.

And now looking at the documents, it appeared that Reilan had left his assigned line. Kaleran himself was not aware of the current exact details of the practical sessions for the Martial Arts Block, but it was not hard for him to envision how the session worked from the explanations written here.

Student Reilan’s final strike had gone past the force the exercise required. Lucavion had stopped it. Against Lucavion’s result stood one more line: commendation.

The page earned it. Above those lines Arcten noted that Reilan had relieved his right-hand fighter earlier in the drill, and set it down plainly, with no opinion attached. Above that came a line Arcten had no duty to write at all: the drill had been preceded by a remark about a fellow student.

He gave no wording and no weight. He had put it in so that no one could say, later, that the instructor hadn’t known. The case did not turn on it, and Kaleran did not let it turn on it for him.

Valeria Olarion was listed as observer, in the margin where Arcten kept the names of people who had seen what he had seen.

The name was one he knew, and the line suited her. Watching was the work the Disciplinary Committee had taken her on to do, and she was doing it where it could be seen, though this was yet to be an official moment on her work most likely.

It did something for the page, too. Arcten’s account alone could have been called one instructor’s opinion. With an Olarion standing beside it, it read as a record two people could stand behind.

Reading the page a second time, Kaleran saw that it said two things at once. The first was exactly the judgment the field-response appointment had been written to find: someone who saw it early, stepped in at the right size, and stopped a bad morning from becoming a worse record. The second was that he had done it in front of the whole yard.

Of all the places on the grounds in which to be right, the boy had picked the best attended.

Neither reading was a reason to sign, and neither was a reason to refuse. He let both stand.

He signed the appointment, then the writ.

The reasons went by in a short line, and they were sound. Elias’s name stood first on both, and Elias’s name carried the Council. Whatever the boy did with the freedom, the penalties would fall on the boy and not on the man who had vouched for him, a term Kaleran would have insisted on himself. And the appointment was worth having. He had just read what it was worth.

How the boy had known to ask for the provisional form was still unanswered. He signed with it unanswered.

The destination line sat ruled and empty, as the writ had been built to leave it, and Kaleran’s mind filled it without asking him.

The forge.

He had known Harlan for fifteen years, long enough that their insults had turned into habit. He had stood in that forge and watched the smith and the boy not quite talk to each other, and he had seen that whatever lay between them had begun long before any admission list.

Lately Harlan had been troubled by something Kaleran couldn’t see. A grunt when asked, a hammer left down mid-stroke. Kaleran put it down to the Empire’s arrangement, as he put most things down, and knew that was opinion rather than knowledge.

Still, a boy who insulted the old man on arrival might do him more good than anyone Kaleran could send him. Kaleran had no standing to arrange that.

He set the thought down before it could grow into a reason.

The clerk who came for the paperwork was one of the registry’s regulars, middle-aged, with ink on one cuff. He checked both signatures and the seal line. Kaleran let him take his time.

“Both signed, Vice-Headmaster?”

Kaleran nodded.

“I’ll have the writ entered and sealed by the next bell. Departure logs go to the Block office as a rule, so I’ll route them—”

“Send them here.”

The clerk looked up. “Here, sir?”

“To this office. It’s a new instrument. I’d like to see how it’s used before it— before it settles into anyone’s routine.”

The clerk had no reason to weigh it. “Of course. I’ll mark the file.”

He wrote it on the cover in his small registry hand, and Kaleran could read the note upside down: returns to V-H office.

Just then, as the clerk reached the door with the folder under his arm, a pair of students crossed the corridor outside, arguing about nothing, and their voices went with them.

The door closed. The writ was active now, or would be when a seal came down on it somewhere on the registry’s second floor.

Kaleran stayed where he was. Down in the yard, someone was raking the practice ground smooth, and the sound came up faint and regular through the glass. He had a few minutes and nothing he wanted to do with them.

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

He had said it to Elias, across this office. It read differently with his own signature underneath.

The logs would come to him. He would read every one himself.

He had signed away the pretending. The watching he had kept.

Sorry for not posting yesterday and being late. I will make it up tomorrow with 4 chapters.