Chapter 23: Public Consequences

The cold climbed to my elbow, and for one breath the old fog came down over everything.

Then I felt the shape of the thing.

Giver, bound, let the given be taken.

It was a smaller knot than the Stone's, and a newer one, and I had undone worse before breakfast.

I turned my wrist toward the light and let it go.

The ring cracked clean across the stone and dropped from my finger onto the flags.

It rang once, and lay still.

"That's all of it," I said.

Caspar stared at his empty hand.

He lifted it and said the word for flame, as I knew he would.

A few thin grey threads of smoke wandered up between his fingers.

Two hundred scholars watched him do it.

So did thousands of graduates, a king's herald, and every great house in Verrane.

"That's all of you," I said.

The older examiner crossed the dais.

He took the gold seal from Caspar's sleeve, the fire-trial seal that had never been his, and he handed it to the herald.

"Mr Lorimer is struck from the roll," the herald said, "and held for the Crown's inquiry."

"I was a boy," Caspar said hoarsely. "Mother did it. You all saw her."

"You were twenty-one," Calista said.

She had come up the steps in Hedda's borrowed coat.

"You told me to wear it. You told me it would be an honour."

He turned to her with his whole face begging.

She looked at him for a moment, as at someone she had known at a great distance.

Then she turned her back.

At the foot of the dais, Grey Thorn rose in one grey wave.

Two hundred scholars turned their backs on him together, row by row, and the sound of their boots was the loudest thing in the hall.

The examiners led him out between them without a word.

He walked with his head down.

Nobody looked at him, so there was nothing for him to do with his face.

Calista stayed where she was.

"Struck from the roll, Miss Frewen," the examiner said, quite gently.

"Your evidence stands, and the Crown thanks you. But the reports are in your hand."

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