Rosters
From THE PRACTITIONER, Wednesday, Notes and Workings
THE EVERBURNING SPARROW. Mr. Barnaby Croft, who placed second in the kingdom in this spring’s Highers and was appointed to the Royal College on Monday, has bound a common spirit into a plain wand that releases a working of fire at its owner’s wish, again and again. If a working can be carried by the spirit rather than the caster, every licensed mage in the kingdom may soon do work he has never etched, and the Ministry of War has asked for a demonstration. A Founders’ Medal is spoken of. Mr. Croft was assisted by a Mr. Grey, whose papers, this journal is assured, are entirely in order.
Leon’s spirit took a long time to come up, and when it finally crossed the ring, it was not much to look at. It was a small grey wisp, no bigger than a man’s fist, and it drifted over the first two rows so low and so slowly that most of the students never noticed it at all.
Lucian noticed it differently. For the second it took to cross, it rested on his knot with more weight than the wolf had, and the knot, which had carried six hundred spirits since eight o’clock without complaint, took the strain. He kept the gate steady and watched the wisp go down to the third row, where it found Leon’s voice and then Leon’s hands.
Through the cloud, he followed it a little further, into the boy’s Sea of Consciousness. The room was already occupied. Two spirits had been living there for some years, bound in tight and close to the body in the old ways, and Lucian waited for the new one to fight them for the space. It did not. It settled in beside them without any fuss at all, and the three of them went quiet together.
The wolf was heavy because it was many spirits, badly stitched, said one mind. This one is heavy because it is dense.
We broke ours into a trillion pieces for the surface, said another. His is packed tight. Two answers to the same law.
Lucian’s face did not change. It was a professional interest, and he put it away with the rest. High on the observatory tower, at the only open window on that side of the College, a white glove rested on the sill. It had not been there at eight o’clock, and Lucian did not look at it twice.
Down in the third row, a book had appeared in Leon Grey’s hands. Pollard had to stand up to see it, and then wished he had not bothered, because it was the plainest book he had seen all morning, grey-covered and very thin.
“Is that it?” said the senior in front.
“Poor lad,” said his friend.
Two rows down, the stout man in the new collar sat down heavily and said, to nobody in particular, “He got one.” Along the row, Penny said “Oh,” very quietly, and kept her hand on the pocket where she had put her almonds.
Then the man at the gate turned to the clerk, said a word Pollard could not hear, and closed the gate. He did it without any fuss. The grey light folded in from the edges, the cold wind stopped, and the ring was a ring of old stone again with the far side of the field showing through it, while six hundred students looked round at each other with their books in their hands.
“Hargreave takes ten minutes to shut it,” said the senior in front.
“He took ten seconds,” said his friend.
Pollard wrote that down, and so did the man beside him, who turned out to be from the Evening Post and had been pretending all morning not to be. The stands began to empty at once, because it was past noon and they had been talking about lunch for an hour. Pollard was halfway down the steps when he heard somebody say “That is the sparrow man,” and then a great many people said it together.
The stout man in the new collar had been recognised. A crowd of seniors had closed round him on the stairs, and two fathers from the front stand were pushing their way up to shake his hand, while Croft stood in the middle of it all, going red from the collar up and holding his stick wand a little away from his coat.
Pollard got his elbow between two seniors. “Mr. Croft! Pollard, of the Crier. Is it true the Ministry has asked to see the sparrow?”
“The Ministry?” said Croft. “Nobody has asked me anything.”
“They will,” said Pollard. “Can it be taught? Can any mage do it?”
“The spirit carries the working, not the caster. That is the whole point of it.” Croft looked round, plainly hoping for help. “But I must say, in fairness, that Mr. Grey…”
The man from the gate had come up the steps behind them with his gown over his arm. Croft saw him and brightened at once.
“Mr. Grey. Tell him.”
“It is Mr. Croft’s spell,” said Mr. Grey. “I only held his bird for him.”
“But you…”
“Brilliant, Mr. Croft.” Pollard nodded pleasantly and went on down the steps.
The man from the Evening Post wrote down Mr. Gray (assistant) and underlined Croft twice. By the time he looked up again, the man from the gate had gone, and nobody in the crowd had noticed him leave.
On Wednesday the Practitioner came up with the news from the Hall, and by the time Lucian came down, Croft had read it four times.
He was sitting in the dining room with the paper folded open beside his plate and a piece of toast going cold in his hand, while Leon sat across from him eating kidneys and watching him with some concern. Three tables away, two elderly ladies had stopped talking in order to look at him, and the waiter who brought Lucian’s coffee called Croft “Professor” twice before Lucian had even sat down.
“Mr. Grey.” Croft turned the paper round and pushed it across the cloth. “Have you seen this?”
Lucian had seen it at six o’clock in the lobby, before anybody else was up. He read it again anyway, because Croft so plainly wanted him to.
The Everburning Sparrow, said one mind. Somebody has waited all his life to write that.
Whose papers are entirely in order, said another. Somebody has pulled our file, and wants us to know it.
“It is very fair to you,” said Lucian, and gave the paper back.
“Fair to me? It is fair to nobody. It says I bound the spirit.” Croft lowered his voice, although the elderly ladies leaned in to make up for it. “I did not bind anything, Mr. Grey. I must write to them and correct it.”
“I would not.”
“It is a lie.”
“It is a journal,” said Lucian. “They are not the same thing, though I grant they are often found together.”
Croft stared at him, and Leon put down his fork.
“Besides, it was your spell,” said Lucian. “The sparrow was yours and so was the working. I only gave it somewhere to sit.”
“That is not how anybody else will see it.”
“Then let them see it your way. You came second in the kingdom, Mr. Croft, so people expect remarkable work from you. Nobody expects anything of me, and I find that very restful.”
Croft looked as though he wanted to argue and could not find the end of the argument to pull. Before he could find it, the manager came through the dining room and asked whether Professor Croft would prefer the table by the window, which had a better view of the park.
Croft said he was perfectly comfortable where he was, thank you, and went red again. When the manager had gone, he looked down at the paper for a long moment. Then, very carefully, he folded it into quarters and put it in his inside pocket, where he would not have to look at it and could not possibly lose it.
Leon, who had been at the summoning but not at the Hall, looked at Mr. Grey for a while before he went back to his kidneys.
On Thursday the rosters went up in the cloister, and by nine o’clock the cloister was full.
Every student at the College had to select a tutor, because a lecture could only teach the theory. So in the first week of term, each tutor pinned a sheet to the boards with his name at the top, and the students wrote their names underneath, while their families lobbied, their friends compared notes and the tutors struck out whoever they did not want.
The cloister was a long square of grey stone round a lawn, with the boards running the length of the east walk. Lucian had come early, partly to see who stopped at which sheet, and partly because a crowd told a man more about an institution than its charter ever did.
Croft’s sheet was the easiest to find, because the crowd was thickest in front of it. His name had been written at the top in a clerk’s careful hand, and there were already more names under it than the sheet had lines, so a second sheet had been pinned beneath the first. Somebody had drawn a small sparrow beside his name. Croft himself stood at the end of the walk with a pen in his hand, besieged by a mother in a fur collar.
Leon stood at the edge of the crowd with his plain grey book under his arm and his bundle across his chest. He did not go up to the sheet. Lucian watched him read it from ten yards away, take in the length of the list and the second sheet beneath it, and decide not to try.
Croft saw him too. He excused himself from the fur collar, came down the walk with his pen still in his hand, and stopped in front of the boy.
“Have you a tutor yet, lad?”
“No, sir.”
“Good.” Croft turned to the board, found the top of the first sheet, and wrote LEON GREY above all the other names, squeezing it in under his own where there was no line at all. “Then that is settled.”
“Sir, I did not ask…”
“You were on my train,” said Croft. “That is the oldest claim there is.”
He glanced once at Leon’s gloved right hand and said nothing about it, then went back to the fur collar, who had been waiting with the expression of a woman who did not often wait.
He has no idea what he has just written down, said one mind.
Further along, Gerald Croft’s sheet was nearly as long as his cousin’s, and the names on it were the kind that came with crests. Gerald stood in front of it with two friends and had polite conversations with men in coats. Mr. Steelheart’s sheet had a single name on it, written in a square foreign hand, and nobody was standing in front of it at all.
Lucian’s own sheet was at the far end of the walk, between a lecturer in natural philosophy and a gentleman who taught ward-craft to the second years. MR. L. GREY, it said at the top, in the same clerk’s hand.
Underneath, the sheet was blank.
People came past it all morning. A few of them read the name and looked at each other. One boy asked his father who Mr. Grey was, and the father said he had no idea, which settled the matter for both of them. Nobody knew Lucian Grey. He had appeared in the Hall on Monday from nowhere, done a small trick with Mr. Croft’s bird and stood at a gate all Tuesday morning, but none of that was a reason to trust a stranger with your career.
No pupils, no points, and no reason for anybody to look at us, said one mind.
The best cover we have had in years, said another.
Croft found him there a little before noon. He had Leon at his elbow and a letter in his hand, and he had gone the colour of the cloister stone.
“Mr. Grey. The Ministry of War.” He held the letter out at arm’s length. “They want a demonstration. On Saturday, in front of a colonel and two gentlemen from the Board of Ordnance.”
“Then you had better practise.”
“Practise?” Croft lowered his voice, though nobody in the cloister was listening to two men beside an empty sheet. “Mr. Grey, I cannot make another one. You know I cannot. I have tried four times since Monday, and the spirit goes into the wood and comes straight out again, like a cat out of a bath.”
Leon looked from one of them to the other and held his book a little tighter.
“I am free this afternoon,” said Lucian, and glanced at his sheet. “As it happens, I am free most afternoons.”
Croft let out a breath he seemed to have been holding since Tuesday. He opened his mouth to say a great deal, then thought better of it and simply shook Lucian’s hand with both of his own, the way he had on the train.
Penny Holloway came along the east walk on her way to a lecture, stopped in front of Mr. Grey’s sheet, and read all of it, which did not take long. Then she looked at him.
“It suits you,” she said, and went on her way.