Richard’s pen stopped under the last line.
Fast growth is frail growth.
He used [Rationality] to mull over this phrase.
Millet, a field, the keeper of the field... He thought of Demeter’s sheaf of wheat drooping from atop her head, the scythe held horizontally below.
One at Minor Mastery, on the verge of Grand Mastery, who claimed to "tend to matters of the field."
The "field" she guarded was certainly no ordinary field.
After noting down the intelligence, he leaned back in his chair and organized his thoughts on the most important matter of the evening.
Phase two: the Divine Mask.
The mask is a conduit, drawing a wisp of the cognition that has settled around that name over a millennium and channeling it into the wearer.
Borrowing power to aid advancement.
The alarm in Richard’s heart weighed far more than his greed.
There’s no such thing as free power in this world.
A conduit—you borrow its water, and it, in turn, comes to know you.
Hecate herself had said that more than half her power came from the mask.
In other words, more than half of her power was also clutched in the grasp of that mask, and in the set of rules used to create it.
Putting on a mask she made was like connecting to a pre-laid track on your own path of advancement.
The track is easy to travel, but where it leads is decided by someone else.
Not to mention the title of "Hermes."
Messenger, patron of commerce, orators, and Scholars, Exile of souls, and also the god of words and trickery.
A title always has two sides.
’If I borrow the wisp of speech and Scholarship, will the wisp of "trickery" and "soul Extradition" come connected to it as well?’
Richard flipped his notebook to the three sections: "Shareable," "Intermediate," and "Top Secret."
Under the "Top Secret" section, he added a line.
"Divine Mask acceptance: pending. Before accepting, must investigate what kind of trace the mask leaves on the other side of the Curtain."
When he finished writing, he put down his pen.
There was one more thing.
The way Hecate looked at him tonight was different from before.
Previously, at the table, he had been a newcomer with some skill and perhaps some connections.
Tonight, after stealing the show, his importance in Hecate’s eyes had clearly grown.
Being important was a good thing, but it was also a problem.
Richard recalled Mr. Hutton’s warning.
Those who lean against a towering tree first learn to look up; when the tree falls, they fall with it.
’But Hecate isn’t a tree.’
’She’s a gardener, and by gathering this group, she’s cultivating seedlings.’
’The ones that grow straight and strong, she nurtures; the ones that wither and rot...’
He recalled the look Hecate gave Aries’s broken shoulder earlier at the table.
’Aries... He’s probably done for.’
...
On the first day after the Easter holiday, Richard arrived at school as usual, just as the morning bell was fading.
After morning prayers let out, he followed the stream of people into a familiar hallway.
Spring came late to Greenwood. Outside the window, the row of old elm trees had only just finished sprouting new buds, a tender green.
Weighed down by last night’s rain, which hadn’t fully dried, their color had deepened a shade.
Richard pushed open the classroom door and was somewhat surprised.
At the beginning of the school year, the classroom for their grade had been filled to the brim.
Some forty-odd heads were squeezed together, and they’d even had to add temporary stools in the back row.
Now, scanning the room from the doorway, he counted fewer than twenty.
The empty desks hadn’t been cleared away and remained in their original places.
The chairs were all inverted on the desktops, placed there uniformly by the janitors before the holiday.
There were more inverted chairs than chairs with people in them.
Richard walked to his seat by the window.
To his left was Hugh’s desk.
The desk was empty. Hugh’s sketchbook was gone; even the stub of a charcoal pen he’d gnawed bald had been taken with him.
All that was left was a shallow carving in the bottom right corner of the desktop.
It was a chicken Hugh had carved with a small knife last year out of sheer boredom, its comb crooked and one of its claws missing.
In the row behind him and to his right had been Warren.
After Easter, he had followed the path his family had long laid out for him, joining the chamber of commerce to learn double-entry bookkeeping and the going rates for coal.
Mason had gone to be an apprentice at a machine factory in South City. His father was a foreman and had found him a good position.
As for Grey, she was due to leave for a girls’ school in the Imperial Capital in May and was probably at home packing her things right now.
The whole group of them, scattered to the winds.
Only Richard was left, still sitting in his original seat.
"Williams."
Someone called out from diagonally opposite him.
Richard turned his head.
The one who’d called him was a tall, skinny boy named Percy, who was merely a nodding acquaintance.
The kid often sat in the back of the classroom dozing off, his notebooks containing more inkblots than words.
Now, he had three Latin grammar books spread out before him, dark circles under his eyes and a few stray whiskers on his chin that he’d missed while shaving.
"How much... did you review over the holiday?" Percy’s pen hovered over his workbook.
Richard glanced at the page he had open.
Percy had filled two whole pages copying the noun endings for the third declension.
Halfway through, he’d mixed up the lines, jumbling the genitive forms of *corpus* and *tempus* and making three or four mistakes.
"I reviewed some," Richard answered vaguely.
"Take a look at this for me, is it right?" Percy turned his notebook toward him.
Richard glanced at it.
"The genitive of *corpus* is *corporis*. You wrote it like *corpus* here; you forgot the ’r’."
Percy stared at what he had written for a long moment, then crossed out the mistake, his hand trembling.
"...Thanks." He buried his head in his work again. "There are two months left. My family said if I can’t pass the preparatory school exam, they’ll send me to my uncle’s firm to copy documents."
Richard didn’t respond.
The dozen or so people who remained were all planning to take the preparatory school exam.
The remaining two months were the final sprint.
The classroom was very quiet. You could hear the scratching of pen nibs on paper and the crisp tear of a page corner ripped by someone turning it too quickly.
Richard sat down in his seat and placed his schoolbag on his lap.
He pulled a copy of Tacitus’s *Chronicles* from his bag.
As soon as he opened the book, Percy, diagonally opposite him, looked up again.
He glanced at the book’s cover, his throat bobbed, and he lowered his head even further.
Richard shifted the book toward himself, moving it to the right half of his desk.
He flipped through the pages.
Tacitus wrote of Rome, of how families, magnificent in their time, took the stage and how they made their exit.
He wrote of the reign of Tiberius, of the endless denunciations and witherings in the Senate.
Richard turned the page, not letting himself linger on that section for too long.
The bell rang again. The first class of the morning was history.
Mr. Hutton walked into the classroom, clutching a set of lecture notes with curled edges. He swept his gaze over the sea of inverted chairs but said nothing.
"Today, we’ll be discussing ’population flow’ in the early Imperial era."
"You might think this topic is far removed from your own lives."
"It’s not."
His gaze swept from the front of the classroom to the back, skimming over the rows of empty desks.
"The people in a city are always in motion.
Some leave, some stay. Some climb up, some fall down."
"History books always record those who stay, the names of those who climb."
"Those who leave, those who fall, don’t even get a single line."
Mr. Hutton turned a page of his notes.
"But there are far more people whom history does not record than people it does."

Comments

Loading...