“What—?” he began, his blood loud in his ears.
He’d dropped the glass when he’d stumbled but Komako had somehow crouched and caught it, cleanly, just above the floor, so that only a little water had spilled and the glass hadn’t shattered and no one had awoken or come running.
She looked at him grimly and, without speaking, handed back the glass. She wasn’t wearing her gloves and he saw the skin of her hands looked blotchy and red.
The look on her face was fierce, alert, but also there was in it something else. Fear.
She raised a raw-looking finger to her lips.
“Shh,” she whispered.
And then she turned in her white nightgown and slipped silently away, back up the corridor, like a ghost, her long black braid hanging to her waist as she went, past all the other girls’ rooms, to the room she shared with Ribs. Charlie watched her go. Unbidden, Marlowe’s words came to him again, how they didn’t get to choose their lives, and all that happened was chance or fate, with no way of knowing the difference between.
* * *
It had been a strange encounter, almost like a dream. Whatever the rider and his passenger had been taking out to the dark carriage, Charlie couldn’t guess at. But Komako never spoke of it, and he knew better than to ask. And anyway, in the meantime there was daily life at Cairndale, and the whole strange world of lessons and of learning.
There were maybe fifteen boys at Cairndale. The boys’ bedrooms were all aligned along that same brief corridor with a master’s room—Mr. Smythe’s—at the far end, his door left ajar in the nights while the boys settled. Most of those boys were older, and white-skinned, though there were several Chinese and two silent brothers from the Gold Coast who kept to themselves. All of them snuck curious glances at Marlowe; even the older residents, and the teachers, would whisper and stare whenever Marlowe passed by. They’d all heard the stories; many of them had been there that night when Jacob Marber had broken into Cairndale. They seemed to think Marlowe half-miracle, half-monster, for having survived Marber’s attack. The hell with it: Charlie and Marlowe stayed in the little room they’d been given that first night; and other than Oskar, they had little to do with other boys.
It was Komako and Ribs they spent their days with. Miss Davenshaw had set the five of them up in lessons together, liking, as she said, the different abilities of each. “You will teach each other,” she said, “and learn that every one of us has our own gifts to share.” If she had other, darker reasons, she did not say.
They woke each morning to Mr. Smythe in the hall, ringing a bell, calling them to dress. Then came breakfast in the dining room, bustling, noisy, the scraping of plates and the shouting and the laughter, and then the scattering of the kids to their various lessons. Marlowe and Charlie, Komako and Ribs and Oskar: the five of them began each morning in the book-lined schoolroom of stern Miss Davenshaw, under her unseeing gaze.
It was probably the most normal of all that they’d learn there, though Charlie couldn’t know that at the time. Miss Davenshaw would stand rigidly at the front of the schoolroom and assign readings and tasks to each of them in turn, and they’d line up and take from her hands their assignments and sit back down and begin to learn. Charlie didn’t mind it, liked it even, going through his letters and learning to read more quickly, more smoothly. Then came geography, the acquisitions of the British Empire, the countries of the east, and an endless litany of cities and nations and languages. After that, the history of the British Isles, a list of kings and queens and dates of battles. And last of all they’d go through their arithmetic on the chalkboard in the corner, while Miss Davenshaw, though blind, followed along their work and tsked at each error, and the pale morning light slowly filled the high windows and fell across the bookshelves and crept, gradually, down to the carpeted floor.
And after lunch they filed out through the dead English gardens, over the bloodred clay, to the outbuildings beyond, and there began the subtle study of talent work.
* * *
It was this Charlie had been most eager for, most dreading. The outbuildings were two long gray wooden buildings, like barns, or storage sheds, with roofs that leaked in the rain and floors of dirt. They were not heated and were only just barely—Ribs muttered with a grin—buildings at all.
There were others in the building, adults, some of them very old. Miss Davenshaw separated the kids and they each went off with a different instructor but Charlie she kept herself. “I have some experience with haelans,” she explained. “I will teach you what I can. Ah … you are surprised.”
Charlie, who’d been looking at her black blindfold, tied tightly across her eyes, and frowning at her, felt a heat go into his cheeks.
Miss Davenshaw smiled a sharp smile, just exactly as if she could see. “Oh, not myself, Mr. Ovid. I am obviously not like you. My great-great-grandfather was a haelan. He raised me. That was some time ago. He is … gone, now. But I do know a little of what he could and could not do.”
Charlie, who had been using his talent all his brief life to stay alive, crossed his arms. “I know how it works,” he said. “It just sort of does its own thing. It just sort of—”
“Reacts? Yes. But it can be controlled, too, Mr. Ovid, it is a greater talent than that. Though it will certainly take some effort, on your part. And much patience. If you are willing to learn, that is. Are you willing to learn?”
“Maybe,” he said warily.
They were standing just inside the opened doors and the cold air was muscling over them and Charlie raised his eyes and looked at the loft at the far end. When he lowered them he saw Miss Davenshaw had started walking, through the doors, outside. For a sudden flickering moment he wondered if she knew where she was going.
“You are right to be cautious,” she was saying, just as if he hadn’t been almost left behind. “But you need not fear.”
“I’m not afraid.”
“Hm. Yes. Good.” She led him across the brown grasses to the perimeter of the institute grounds. The sky threatened rain. It was Charlie’s first close approach to the wall and he felt a low buzzing dread in his skull, like he was doing something wrong, like he ought not to be there. He tried to shrug it off but his anxiety only increased.
The stone wall looked ancient, waist-high, covered in black moss, crumbling in parts. It was loosely assembled with weird pancake-shaped stones that might have come from the bottom of the sea. It stretched off in both directions, over the furls and encircling the dark loch and its dark clay cliffs, as far as Charlie’s eye could see.
Miss Davenshaw trailed a long pale hand over the stones as they walked. The red clay was slippery underfoot. Cairndale loomed off across the field, behind the outbuildings, forbidding, strange.
“Do you feel it, Mr. Ovid?” Miss Davenshaw asked quietly, her blind face turned away. “Do you feel the wards? Unpleasant, hm?”
He did; they were the source of his anxiety, his dread. They were like a prickle of electricity all around him, a hum in the air, at a frequency just below sound.
“That, Mr. Ovid, is the glyphic’s doing,” she said. “It keeps us all … safe. Talents such as yourself cannot cross through, from one side to the other, except that the glyphic wills it. It takes a tremendous effort from him to keep the wards strong, I am told. He is never at rest. That is one of the reasons a visit to the island is strictly forbidden. But it would not do to have Jacob Marber, or his litch, walk in here uninvited, would it?”