Текст книги "The Ask and the Answer"

Автор книги: Patrick Ness

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***

(Viola)

Mistress Coyle leads him in . Her face is sterner than ever, her forehead creased, her jaw set. Even having only met her once I can tell she's not happy.

He stands behind her. Tall, thin but broad shouldered, all in white with a hat he hasn't taken off.

I've never properly seen him. I was bleeding, dying when he approached us in the town square.

But it's him.

It can only be him.

"Good evening, Viola," he says. "I've been wanting to meet you for a very long time."

Mistress Coyle sees me struggling with the sheet, sees Maddy reaching for me. "Is there a problem, Madeleine?"

"Nightmare," Maddy says, catching my eye. "I think she pulled a stitch."

"We'll deal with that later," Mistress Coyle says and the calm and serious way she says it gets Maddy's full attention. "Get her 400 units of Jeffers root in the meantime."

"400?" Maddy says, sounding surprised, but seeing the look on Mistress Coyle's face, all she says is, "Yes, Mistress." She gives my hand a last squeeze and leaves the room.

They both watch me for a long moment, then the Mayor says, "That'll be all, Mistress."

Mistress Coyle gives me a silent look as she leaves, maybe to reassure me, maybe to ask me something or tell me something, but I'm too frightened to figure it out before she backs out of the room, closing the door behind her.

And then I'm alone with him.

He lets the silence build until it's clear I'm meant to say something. I'm gripping the sheet to my chest with a fist, still feeling the lightning pain fire up my side if I move.

"You're Mayor Prentiss," I say. My voice shakes when I say it but I say it.

"President Prentiss," he says, "but you would know me as Mayor, of course."

"Where's Todd?" I look into his eyes. I do not blink. "What have you done with him?"

He smiles again. "Smart in your first sentence, courageous in your second. We may be friends yet."

"Is he hurt?" I swallow away the burn rising in my chest. "Is he alive?"

For a second, it looks like he's not going to tell me, not even going to acknowledge that I asked, but then he says,

"Todd is well. Todd is alive and well and asking about you every chance he gets."

I realize I've held my breath for his answer. "Is that true?"

"Of course it's true."

"I want to see him."

"And he wants to see you," says Mayor Prentiss. "But all things in their proper order."

He keeps his smile. It's almost friendly.

Here is the man we spent all those weeks running from, here he is, standing in my very own room, where I can barely move from the pain.

And he's smiling.

And it's almost friendly.

If he's hurt Todd, if he's laid a finger on him-

"Mayor Prentiss-"

"President Prentiss," he says again, then his voice brightens. "But you may call me David."

I don't say anything, just press down harder onto my bandage against the pain.

There's something about him. Something I can't quite place-

"That is," he says, "if I may call you Viola."

There's a knock on the door. Maddy opens it, a phial in her hand. "Jeffers," she says, keeping her eyes firmly on the floor. "For her pain."

"Yes, of course," the Mayor says, moving away from my bed, hands behind his back. "Proceed."

Maddy pours me a glass of water and watches me swallow four yellow gel caps, two more than I've taken before. She takes the glass from me and, with her back to the Mayor, gives me a firm look, a solid one, no smile but all kinds of bravery, and it makes me feel a little bit good, a little bit stronger.

"She'll grow tired very quickly," Maddy says to the Mayor, still not looking at him.

"I understand," the Mayor says. Maddy leaves, closing the door behind her. My stomach immediately starts to grow warm but it'll take a minute just yet to make the pain start to go or take away the quivering running all through me.

"So," the Mayor says. "May I?"

"May you what?"

"Call you Viola?"

"I can't stop you," I say. "If you want."

"Good," he says, not sitting, not moving, the smile still fixed. "When you are feeling better, Viola, I would very much like to have a talk with you."

"About what?"

"Why, your ships, of course," he says. "Coming closer by the moment."

I swallow. "What ships?"

"Oh, no, no, no." He shakes his head but still smiles. "You started out with intelligence and with courage. You are frightened but that has not stopped you from addressing me with calmness and clarity. All most admirable." He bends his head down. "But to that we must add honesty. We must start out honestly with each other, Viola, or how may we proceed at all?"

Proceed to where? I think.

"I have told you that Todd is alive and well," he says, "and what I tell you is true." He places a hand on the rail at the end of the bed. "And he will stay safe." He pauses. "And you will give me your honesty." And I understand without having to be told that one depends on the other.

The warmth is starting to spread up from my stomach, making everything seem slower, softer. The lightning in my side is fading, but it's taking wakefulness along with it. Why two doses when that would put me to sleep so fast? So fast I won't even be able to talk to-

Oh.

"I need to see him to believe you," I say.

"Soon," he says. "There is much to be done in New Prentisstown first. Much to be undone."

"Whether anyone wants it or not." My eyelids are getting heavy. I force them up. Only then do I realize I said it out loud.

He smiles again. "I find myself saying this with great frequency, Viola. The war is over. I am not your enemy."

I lift my groggy eyes to him in surprise.

I'm afraid of him. I am.

But-

"You were the enemy of the women of Prentisstown," I say. "You were the enemy of everyone in Farbranch."

He stiffens a little, though he tries not to let me see it. "A body was found in the river this morning," he says. "A body with a knife in its throat."

I try to keep my eyes from widening, even under the Jeffers. He's looking at me close now. "Perhaps the man's death was justified," he says. "Perhaps the man had enemies."

I see myself doing it-

I see myself plunging the knife-

I close my eyes.

"As for me," the Mayor says, "the war is over. My days of soldiering are at an end. Now come the days of leadership, of bringing people together."

By separating them, I think, but my breathing is slowing. The whiteness of the room is growing brighter but only in a soft way that makes me want to fall down into it and sleep and sleep and sleep. I press farther into the pillow.

"I'll leave you now," he says. "We will meet again."

I begin to breathe through my mouth. Sleep is becoming impossible to avoid.

He sees me starting to drift off.

And he does the most surprising thing.

He steps forward and pulls the sheet straight across me, almost like he's tucking me in.

"Before I go," he says. "I have one request."

"What?" I say, fighting to keep awake.

"I'd like you to call me David."

"What?" I say, my voice heavy.

"I'd like you to say, Good night, David."

The Jeffers has so disconnected me that the words come out before I know I'm even saying them. "Good night, David."

Through the haze of the drug, I see him look a little surprised, even a little disappointed.

But he recovers quickly. "And to you, Viola." He nods at me and steps toward the door to leave.

And I realize what it is, what's so different about him.

"I can't hear you," I whisper from my bed.

He stops and turns. "I said, And to-"

"No," I say, my tongue barely able to move. "I mean I can't hear you. I can't hear you think." He raises his eyebrows. "I should hope not." And I think I'm asleep before he can even leave.

I don't wake for a long, long time, finally blinking again into the sunshine, wondering what was real and what was a dream.

(... my father, holding out his hand to help me up the ladder into the hatch, smiling, saying, "Welcome aboard, skipper...")

"You snore," says a voice.

Corinne is seated in the chair, her fingers flying a threaded needle through a piece of fabric so fast it's like it's not her doing it, like someone else's angry hands are using her lap.

"I do not," I say.

"Like a cow in estrus."

I push back the covers. My bandages have been changed and the lightning pain is gone so the stitch must be repaired. "How long have I been asleep?"

"More than a day." She sounds disapproving. "The President's already sent men by twice to check on your condition."

I put a hand on my side, tentatively pushing on the wound. The pain is almost nonexistent.

"Nothing to say to that then, my girl?" Corinne says, needle thrashing ferociously.

I furrow my forehead. "What's there to say? I'd never met him before."

"He was sure keen to know you though, wasn't he? Ow!" She breathes in a sharp hiss and sticks a fingertip in her mouth. "All the while he's got us trapped," she says around her finger. "All the while we can't even leave this building."

"I don't see how that's my fault."

"It isn't your fault, my girl," Mistress Coyle says, coming into the room. She looks sternly at Corinne. "And no one here thinks it is."

Corinne stands, bows slightly to Mistress Coyle, and leaves without another word.

"How are you feeling?" Mistress Coyle asks.

"Groggy." I sit up more, finding it much easier to do so this time. I also notice my bladder is uncomfortably full. I tell Mistress Coyle.

"Well, then," she says, "let's see if you can stand on your own to help with that."

I take in a breath and turn to put my feet on the floor. My legs don't want to bend very fast but eventually they get there and eventually I can stand up and even walk to the door.

"Maddy said you were the best healer in town," I marvel.

"Maddy tells no lies."

She accompanies me down a long white hallway to a toilet. When I've finished and washed and opened the door again, Mistress Coyle is holding a heavier white gown for me to wear, longer and much nicer than the backwards robe I have on. I slip it over my head and we walk back up the hallway, a little wobbly, but walking all the same.

"The President has been asking after your health," she says, steadying me with her hand.

"Corinne told me." I look up at her out of the corner of my eye. "It's only because of the settler ships. I don't know him. I'm not on his side."

"Ah," Mistress Coyle says, getting me back through the door to my room and onto my bed. "You do recognize there are sides then?"

I lie back, my tongue pressed against the back of my teeth. "Did you give me two doses of Jeffers so I wouldn't have to speak to him for very long?" I say. "Or so I wouldn't be able to tell him very much?"

She gives a nod as if to say how clever I am. "Would it be the worst thing in the world if it was a little of both?"

"You could have asked."

"Wasn't time," she says, sitting down in the chair next to the bed. "We only know him by his history, my girl, and his history is bad, bad, bad. Whatever he might say about a new society, there is good reason to want to be better prepared if he starts a conversation."

"I don't know him," I say again. "I don't know anything."

"But, done rightly," she says, with a little smile, "you might learn things from a man who takes an interest."

I try to read her, read what she's trying to tell me, but of course women here don't have Noise either, do they?

"What are you saying?" I ask.

"I'm saying it's time for you to get something solid into your stomach." She stands, brushing invisible threads off her white coat. "I'll have Madeleine bring in some breakfast for you."

She walks to the door, taking hold of the handle but not turning it yet. "But know this," she says, without turning around. "If there are sides and our President is on one...." She glances back at me over her shoulder. "Then I am most definitely on the other."

7 MISTRESS COYLE

***

[VIOLA]

"THERE ARE SIX SHIPS," I say from my bed, for the third time in as many days, days where Todd is still out there somewhere, days where I don't know what's happening to him or to anyone else outside.

From the windows of my room, I see soldiers marching by all the time, but all they do is march. Everyone here at the house of healing half expected them to come bursting through the doors at any moment, ready to do terrible things, ready to assert their victory.

But they haven't. They just march by. Other men bring us deliveries of food to the back doors, and the healers are left to their work.

We still can't leave, but the world outside doesn't seem to be ending. Which isn't what anyone expected, not least, it seems, Mistress Coyle, who's convinced it only means something worse is waiting to happen.

I can't help but think that she's probably right. She frowns into her notes. "Just six?"

"Eight hundred sleeping settlers and three caretaker families in each," I say. I'm getting hungry, but I know by now there's no eating until she says the consultation is finished. "Mistress Coyle-"

"And you're sure there are eighty – one members total of the caretaker families?"

"I should know," I say. "I was in school with their children."

She looks up. "I know this is tedious, Viola, but information is power. The information we give him. The information we learn from him."

I sigh impatiently. "I don't know anything about spying."

"It's not spying," she says, returning to her notes. "It's just finding things out." She writes something more in her pad. "Four thousand, eight hundred and eighty – one people," she says, almost to herself.

I know what she means. More people than the entire population of this planet. Enough to change everything.

But change it how?

"When he speaks with you again," she says, "you can't tell him about the ships. Keep him guessing. Keep him off the right number."

"While I'm also supposed to be finding out what I can," I say.

She closes her pad, consultation over. "Information is power," she repeats.

I sit up in the bed, pretty much sick to death of being a patient. "Can I ask you something?"

She stands and reaches for her cloak. "Certainly."

"Why do you trust me?"

"Your face when he walked into your room," she says without hesitating. "You looked as if you'd just met your worst enemy."

She snaps the buttons of the cloak under her chin. I watch her carefully. "If I could just find Todd or get to that communications tower..."

"And be taken by the army?" She's not frowning but her eyes are bright. "Lose us our one advantage?" She opens the door. "No, my girl, the President will come a – calling and when he does, what you find out from him will help us."

I call out after her as she goes, "Who do you mean by us?"

But she's gone.

"... and the last thing I really remember is him picking me up and carrying me down a long, long hill, and telling me that I wasn't going to die, that he'd save me."

"Wow," breathes Maddy softly, wisps of hair sneaking out from under her cap as we walk slowly up one hallway and down another to build my strength. "And he did save you."

"But he can't kill," I say, "not even to save himself. That's the thing about him, why they wanted him so bad. He isn't like them. He killed a Spackle once and you should have seen how he suffered for it. And now they've got him-"

I have to stop and blink a lot and look at the floor.

"I need to get out of here," I say, clenching my teeth. "I'm no spy. I need to find him and I need to get to that tower and warn them. Maybe they can send help. They have more scout ships that could reach here. They've got weapons ..." Maddy's face looks tense, like it always does when I talk this way. "We're not even allowed outside yet."

"You can't just accept what people tell you, Maddy. You can't just do that if they're wrong."

"And you can't fight an army on your own." She turns me gently back down the hallway, giving me a smile. "Not even the great and brave Viola Eade."

"I did it before," I say. "I did with him."

She lowers her voice. "Vi-"

"I lost my parents," I say and my voice is husky. "And there's no way I can get them back. And now I've lost him. And if there's a chance, if there's even a chance-"

"Mistress Coyle won't allow it," she says, but there's something in her voice that makes me look up.

"But?" I say.

Maddy says no more, just walks us over to the hall window that looks out onto the road. A troop of soldiers passes by in the bright sunlight, a cart full of dusty purple grain passing by the other way, the Noise we can hear from the town coming down the road like an army all on its own.

At first it was like no Noise I'd ever heard, this weird buzzing sound of metal grinding against metal. Then it got even louder than that, like a thousand men shouting at once, which I guess is pretty much what it is, too loud and messy to be able to pick out any individual person.

Too loud to pick out one boy.

"Maybe it's not as bad as we all think." Maddy's voice is slow, weighing every word as if she's testing them out for herself. "I mean, the town looks peaceful. Loud, but the men who deliver the food say the stores are about to reopen. I'll bet your Todd is out there working away at a job, safe and alive and waiting to see you."

I can't tell if she's saying this because she believes it or because she's trying to get me to believe it. I wipe my nose with my sleeve. "That could be true."

She looks at me for a long time, obviously thinking something but not saying it. Then she turns back to the glass.

"Just listen to them roar," she says.

There are three other healers here besides Mistress Coyle. Mistress Waggoner, a short round puff of a woman with wrinkles and a mustache, Mistress Nadari, who treats cancers and who I've only seen once closing a door behind her, and Mistress Lawson, who treats children in another house of healing but who was trapped here while having a consultation with Mistress Coyle when the surrender happened and who's been fretting ever since about the ill children she left behind.

There are more apprentices, too, a dozen besides Maddy and Corinne, who – because they work with Mistress Coyle – seem to be the top two apprentices out of the whole house, maybe even all of Haven. I rarely see the others except when they're trailing behind one of the healers, stethoscopes bouncing, white coats flapping behind them, off to find something to do.

Because the truth of it is, as the days go by and the town gets on with whatever it's doing beyond our doors, most of us patients are getting better and new ones aren't arriving. All the male patients were taken out of here the first night, Maddy told me, whether they could travel or not, and no new women have been brought here even though invasion and surrender aren't bars to getting sick.

Mistress Coyle worries about this.

"Well, if she can't heal, then who is she?" Corinne says, snapping the elastic band around my arm a little too tight. "She used to run all of the houses of healing, not just this one. Everyone knew her, everyone respected her. For a while, she was even Chair of the Town Council."

I blink. "She used to be in charge?"

"Years ago. Quit moving around." She jabs the needle into my arm harder than she needs to. "She's always saying that being a leader is making the people you love hate you a little more each day." She catches my eye. "Which is something I believe, too."

"So what happened?" I ask. "Why isn't she still in charge?"

"She made a mistake," Corinne says primly. "People who didn't like her took advantage of it."

"What kind of mistake?"

Her permanent frown gets bigger. "She saved a life," she says and snaps loose the elastic band so hard it leaves a mark.

Another day passes, and another, and nothing changes. We're still not allowed out, our food still comes, and the Mayor still hasn't asked for me. His men check on my condition but the promised talk never happens. He's just leaving me here, so far.

Who knows why? He's all anyone ever talks about, though.

"And do you know what he's done?" Mistress Coyle says over dinner, my first one where I'm allowed out of bed and in the canteen. "The cathedral isn't just his base of operations. He's made it into his home."

There's a general clucking of disgust from the women around her. Mistress Waggoner even pushes her plate away. "He fancies himself God now," she says.

"He hasn't burned the town down, though," I say, wondering aloud from the other end of the table. Maddy and Corinne both look up from their plates with wide eyes. I carry on anyway. "We all thought he would, but he hasn't."

Mistresses Waggoner and Lawson give Mistress Coyle a meaningful look.

"You show your youth, Viola," Mistress Coyle says. "And you shouldn't challenge your superiors."

I blink, surprised. "That's not what I meant," I say. "I'm only saying it's not what we expected."

Mistress Coyle takes another bite while eyeing me. "He killed every woman in his town because he couldn't hear them, because he couldn't know them in the way that men could be known before the cure."

The other mistresses nod. I open my mouth to speak but she overrides me.

"What's also true, my girl," she says, "is that everything we've been through since landing on this planet – the surprise of the Noise, the chaos that followed – all of that remains unknown to your friends up there." She's watching me closely now. "Everything that happened to us is waiting to happen to them." I don't reply, I just watch her.

"And who do you want in charge of that process?" she asks. "Him?"

She's done talking to me and returns to quieter conference with the mistresses. Corinne starts eating again, a smug grin on her face. Maddy's still staring at me wide – eyed, but all I can think of is the word left hanging in the air.

When she said Him?, did she also mean, Or her?

On our ninth day locked indoors, I'm no longer a patient. Mistress Coyle summons me to her office.

"Your clothes," she says, handing me a package over her desk. "You can put them on now, if you like. Make you feel like a real person again."

"Thank you," I say genuinely, heading behind the screen she's pointed out. I lift off the patient's robe and look for a second at my wound, almost healed both front and back.

"You really are the most amazing healer," I say.

"I do try," she says from her desk.

I unwrap the package and find all of my own clothes, freshly laundered, smelling so clean and crisp I feel a strange pull on my face and discover I'm smiling.

"You know, you're a brave girl, Viola," Mistress Coyle is saying, as I start to dress. "Despite not knowing when to keep quiet."

"Thank you," I say, a little annoyed.

"The crashing of your ship, the deaths of your parents, the amazing journey here. All faced with intelligence and resourcefulness."

"I had help," I say, sitting down to put on clean socks.

I notice Mistress Coyle's pad on a little side table, the one so full of notes from our little consultations. I look up but she's still on the other side of the screen. I reach over and flip open the cover.

"I sense big things in you, my girl," she says. "Leadership potential."

The notebook is upside down and I don't want to make a noise by moving it so I try to twist round to see what it says. "I see a lot of myself in you."

On the first page, before her notes start, there's only a single letter, written in blue. A.

Nothing else.

"We are the choices we make, Viola," Mistress Coyle is still talking. "And you can be so valuable to us. If you choose."

I lift up my head from the pad. "Us who?"

The door bursts open so loud and sudden I jump up and look around the screen. It's Maddy. "There was a messenger," she says, breathless. "Women can start leaving their houses."

"It's so loud out here," I say, wincing into the ROAR of all the New Prentisstown Noise twining together.

"You get used to it," Maddy says. We're sitting on a bench outside a store while Corinne and another apprentice named Thea buy supplies for the house of healing, stocking up for the expected flood of new patients. I look around the streets. Stores are open, people pass by, mostly on foot but on fissionbikes and horses, too. If you don't look too closely, you'd almost think nothing was even wrong.

But then you see that the men who move down the road never talk to each other. And women are allowed out only in groups of four and only in daylight and only for an hour at a time. And the groups of four never interact. Even the men of Haven don't approach us.

And there are soldiers on every corner, rifles in hand.

A bell chimes as the door of the store opens. Corinne storms out, arms full of bags, face full of thunder, Thea struggling behind her. "The storekeeper says no one's heard from the Spackle since they were taken," Corinne says, practically dropping a bag in my lap.

"Corinne and her spacks," Thea says, rolling her eyes and handing me another bag.

"Don't call them that," Corinne says. "If we could never treat them right, what do you think he's going to be doing to them?"

"I'm sorry, Corinne," Maddy says before I can ask what Corinne means, "but don't you think it makes more sense to worry about us right now?" Her eyes are watching some soldiers who've noticed Corinne's raised voice. They aren't moving, haven't even shifted from the veranda of a feed store.

But they're looking.

"It was inhuman, what we did to them," Corinne says. "Yes, but they aren't human," Thea says, under her breath, looking at the soldiers, too.

"Thea Reese!" A vein bulges out of Corinne's forehead. "How can you call yourself a healer and say-"

"Yes, yes, all right," Maddy says, trying to calm her down. "It was awful. I agree. You know we all agree, but what could we have done about it?"

"What are you talking about?" I say. "Did what to them?"

"The cure," Corinne says, saying it like a curse.

Maddy turns to me with a frustrated sigh. "They found out that the cure worked on the Spackle."

"By testing it on them," Corinne says.

"But it does more than that," Maddy says. "The Spackle don't speak, you see. They can click their mouths a little but it's hardly more than like when we snap our fingers."

"The Noise was the only way they communicated," Thea says.

"And it turned out we didn't really need them to talk to us to tell them what to do," Corinne says, her voice rising even more. "So who cares if they needed to talk to each other?"

I'm beginning to see. "And the cure ..."

Thea nods. "It makes them docile."

"Better slaves," Corinne says bitterly.

My mouth drops open. "They were slaves?"

"Shhhh," Maddy shushes harshly, jerking her head toward the soldiers watching us, their lack of Noise among all the ROAR of the other men making them seem ominously blank.

"It's like we cut out their tongues," Corinne says, lowering her voice but still burning.

But Maddy is already getting us on our way, looking back over her shoulder at the soldiers.

Who watch us go.

***

We walk the short distance back to the house of healing in silence, entering the front door under the blue outstretched hand painted over the door frame. After Corinne and Thea go inside, Maddy takes my arm lightly to hold me back.

She looks at the ground for a minute, a dimple forming in the middle of her eyebrows. "The way those soldiers looked at us," she says.

"Yeah?"

She crosses her arms and shivers. "I don't know if I like this version of peace very much."

"I know," I say softly.

She waits a moment, then she looks at me square. "Could your people help us? Could they stop this?"

"I don't know," I say, "but finding out would be better than just sitting here, waiting for the worst to happen."

She looks around to see if we're being overheard. "Mistress Coyle is brilliant," she says, "but sometimes she can only hear her own opinion."

She waits, biting her upper lip.

"Maddy?"

"We'll watch out," she says. "For what?"

" If the right moment arrives, and only if," she looks around again, "we'll see what we can do about contacting your ships."

8 THE NEWEST APPRENTICE

***

[ Viola]

"BUT SLAVERY IS WRONG," I say, rolling up another bandage.

"The healers were always opposed to it." Mistress Coyle ticks off another box on her inventory. "Even after the Spackle War, we thought it inhuman."

"Then why didn't you stop it?"

"If you ever see a war," she says, not looking up from her clipboard, "you'll learn that war only destroys. No one escapes from a war. No one. Not even the survivors. You accept things that would appall you at any other time because life has temporarily lost all meaning."

"War makes monsters of men," I say, quoting Ben from that night in the weird place where New World buried its dead.

"And women," Mistress Coyle says. She taps her fingers on boxes of syringes to count them.

"But the Spackle War was over a long time ago, wasn't it?"

"Thirteen years now."

"Thirteen years where you could have righted a wrong."

She finally looks at me. "Life is only that simple when you're young, my girl."

"But you were in charge," I say. "You could have done something."

"And who told you I was in charge?"

"Corinne said-"

"Ah, Corinne," she says, turning back to her clipboard, "doing her best to love me no matter what the facts."

I open up another bag of supplies. "But if you were head of this Council thing," I press on, "surely you could have done something about the Spackle."

"Sometimes, my girl," she says, giving me a displeased look, "you can lead people where they don't want to go, but most of the time you can't. The Spackle weren't going to be freed, not after we'd just beaten them in an awful and vicious war, not when we needed so much labor to rebuild. But they could be treated better, couldn't they? They could be fed properly and set to work humane hours and allowed to live together with their families. All victories I won for them, Viola."

Her writing on the clipboard is a lot more forceful than it was. I watch her for a second. "Corinne says you were thrown off the Council for saving a life."

She doesn't answer me, just sets down her clipboard and looks on one of the higher shelves. She reaches up and takes down an apprentice hat and a folded apprentice cloak. She turns and tosses them to me.

"Who are these for?" I say, catching them.

"You want to find out about being a leader?" she says. "Then let's put you on the path." I look at her face.

I look down at the cloak and the cap.

From then on, I barely have time to eat.