Henry had almost pressed his forehead against the glass when the stationer caught his shoulder.
"Away from the window."
He stepped back. She reached past him, pulled the inner shutters together, and dropped the wooden bar into its brackets. The market vanished behind two panels of dark wood.
"Is it a creature?"
"I don't know. Come behind the counter."
Her voice made him obey. He tucked the book into his coat and followed her past the envelopes, into the narrow space between the desk and the shelves. A thin line of daylight showed through the shutters. Outside, footsteps scraped over the paving, and someone called a question Henry could not make out.
He kept one hand over the pocket holding his book.
The watchman beside the trough had a clear view between the stalls.
An old man was walking through the cloth market.
He was exceptionally tall, even with his shoulders bent and his head inclined toward the ground. Loose grey-white hair reached the collar of a long brown coat. Its skirts brushed his boots as he walked, opening occasionally over trousers powdered with road dust. He carried a large clay pot against his side, one long hand supporting its rounded base. A square of faded cloth covered the mouth, tied beneath the lip with cord.
People drew back before him. A woman who had been examining a length of yellow cloth let it slide through her hands. Behind her, a merchant stood with a measuring stick held against his chest. The old man paused to let a little boy get around the end of a table, then continued along the space they had made.
He seemed pleased by the weather. At the edge of an awning, he lifted his face into the sunlight.
The watchman swallowed.
He had taken his hand off his sword because he could not imagine a circumstance in which drawing it would help. His fingers still felt stiff. He pressed them against the seam of his trousers and tried to remember whether he was expected to salute a visiting scholar.
The old man stopped beside the trough.
"Good morning. Could you direct me to the General Orphanage?"
The watchman opened his mouth, then looked past him at the market.
"The orphanage, sir?"
"Yes. I was told it was among the workshops, but there seem to be rather a lot of workshops." His gaze moved along the fronts of the buildings. "I have passed three streets full of them already."
"I can take you."
"That would be kind."
The watchman stepped forward, remembered the trough, and went around it. By then, a second watchman had reached them from the far side of the market. The two men exchanged a look.
"Will you tell them where I've gone?" the first asked.
"Who?"
Before he could answer, a cloth seller spoke from beneath an awning.
"Matthias Sorel."
The second watchman's eyes widened. He looked at the old man again, taking in the height, the white hair, the face turned patiently toward his colleague.
Sorel gave the seller a small, friendly inclination of his head.
Then he followed his guide across the road.
The stationer's shutters remained closed as they passed. Beyond the shop, the road curved between a dyer's yard and a building whose upper windows had been taken out for repairs. Sorel and the watchman turned with it, and the people at the market entrance lost sight of them.
For several moments, nobody resumed selling anything.
---
Matthias Sorel was two hundred and forty-five years old.
He was born in Montferrand's capital, far within the fortress's central region, and was the fifth son of a former High Chief of the Slayer Administration. By the time he settled on the remote outskirts of Marécourt, his own name had been familiar in cities he had never visited.
He was one of the foremost scholars Montferrand had ever produced. His genius had shaped the training of people far beyond the pupils who had sat in a room with him.
Many of the fortress's leading slayers had once been his students. Men and women whose arrival could change the course of a dangerous operation had stood before Sorel, waiting for him to explain what they had done wrong. They had brought him questions, argued with his answers, and returned years later with questions they had only then learned enough to ask.
His influence reached further through the methods he developed. Sorel had pioneered ways of training that became part of ordinary instruction at Montferrand's finest academies. He had helped determine how lessons were arranged, how instructors judged a student's progress, and how teaching could be adapted when two people learned in very different ways.
Much of that work had acquired the familiarity of a well-used tool. Instructors changed an exercise to suit a class without thinking about the person who had first designed it. Students complained about a sequence of lessons without knowing whose work lay beneath the sequence. The models Sorel had developed passed through the hands of teachers, their pupils, and eventually the teachers those pupils became.
Among people who devoted their lives to such things, his name carried an almost uncomfortable weight. There were disagreements over his methods, as there were over any work studied so closely, but even the disagreements tended to begin with a careful reading of what he had actually said.
Outside the academies, knowledge of him was less precise. Someone might know that he had taught a celebrated slayer, or that a son hoping to enter an academy had spent months studying from a book bearing his name. Others knew only that Matthias Sorel was a great scholar, a man of immense power, and someone to whom very important people listened.
That was enough to make the cloth seller leave his stall.
It was enough to send the second watchman hurrying toward his post, and another man from that post up the streets toward the town hall. The news travelled unevenly through Rocheforte. At one corner people were already arguing over whether the visitor had really been Sorel; two streets farther on, a woman shook out a rug without any idea that he was passing beneath her window.
No reception had been arranged. No official stood ready to meet him. By the time the first hurried message reached the offices above the city, Matthias Sorel was waiting outside a worn green door.
Mrs. Vautrin was counting pillowcases when the front passage grew quiet.
She noticed because Bram had been explaining, at considerable length, why a stone found in another boy's shoe might still belong to him. His argument stopped halfway through a sentence.
"Bram?"
There was no answer. Then someone knocked.
She put the pillowcases on the dining table and went into the passage. Bram stood beside the wall, looking toward the door. Tessa had come down three steps of the staircase and stopped there.
Mrs. Vautrin felt the change before she reached the handle. Her next breath seemed too shallow. She slowed, one hand against her apron, and looked through the narrow gap beside the doorframe.
A watchman's shoulder filled part of it.
She opened the door.
"Mrs. Vautrin," he said. "You have a visitor."
The man behind him was so tall that, for an instant, she looked at his coat instead of his face. Then she raised her eyes.
Deep lines lay beside his mouth and across his forehead. His hair was mostly white, with darker strands still gathered near the nape of his neck. The clay pot tucked beneath his arm was broad enough that he would have to turn to carry it through the doorway.
He smiled.
"Mrs. Vautrin? Matthias Sorel. I believe you have a boy here named Henry Wells."
She knew the name. She had known it long before she had copied it onto a scrap of paper for Henry.
She had even considered what she would say if a representative of his household arrived. There were questions to ask, possessions to account for, arrangements to make. She had expected time to prepare Henry and perhaps an afternoon in which to see that his clothes were clean.
Now Matthias Sorel himself stood on the step, and she could not remember whether she had greeted him.
"Yes," she said. "Yes, of course. Please come in."
He turned the pot carefully and bent beneath the lintel.
The watchman stayed outside.
"Shall I wait, sir?"
"You have already been very helpful. Thank you."
The man hesitated, glanced at Mrs. Vautrin, and withdrew to the edge of the yard. He did not leave immediately.
Sorel looked along the passage. Bram stared up at him. Tessa remained on the stairs with one hand around the rail.
"Good morning," Sorel told them.
Tessa answered. Bram opened his mouth a moment later, after the greeting had already passed.
Mrs. Vautrin moved toward her office.
"Henry is out at present. I can send for him. We weren't expecting—there was no word that you would be coming today."
"No, I hadn't sent any. I'm sorry to arrive on your doorstep like this." He shifted his grip beneath the pot. "There is no need to hurry him."
"He ought to be at Mr. Besson's shortly. I can have a message taken there."
"Thank you."
She opened the office door and saw the room with sudden, unwelcome clarity: the stack of folded blankets on one chair, the washbasin under the desk, a child's boot waiting beside a pile of receipts. Her best cup was in the kitchen. There was a crack in the plaster behind the place where he would sit.
She lifted the blankets.
"Please."
Sorel glanced at the chair, then at the floor beside it.
"Would this be in your way?"
For a moment she did not understand that he meant the pot.
"No. Not at all."
He took a folded cloth from his coat pocket, laid it on the boards, and lowered the pot onto it. The movement exposed large, weathered hands and wrists almost bare of flesh. He settled into the chair with his knees extending well beyond its seat.
"There," he said, with evident satisfaction. "Much better."
Mrs. Vautrin put the blankets on the shelf behind her desk. She had to move a box first. Normally she would have left them in the passage, but she could not bear to set something down where he had just walked.
"Would you like tea?"
"Very much."
She turned to the door. Tessa had reached the bottom of the stairs.
"Would you bring the tray from the kitchen? Then I need you to take a message to Mr. Besson. Wait while I write it."
Her handwriting was as legible as ever, which reassured her. She asked Besson to send Henry back to the orphanage and excuse him from any work that remained that day. She folded the note and gave it to Tessa when the girl returned with the tray.
"Straight there. You can come back with him."
Tessa glanced once into the office, then went.
Mrs. Vautrin poured the tea. The familiar task helped. She knew how much the cup held, where to put the strainer, which side of the teapot's handle had worn smooth.
Sorel accepted the cup with both hands.
"Thank you. Please, sit down. I've occupied your office quite thoroughly enough."
She took her chair.
For a moment they listened to Bram in the passage being told to move away from the door by another child.
Sorel's mouth twitched above his cup.
"I appear to have interrupted something."
"Pillowcases," Mrs. Vautrin said.
"Ah. I hope they can wait."
She looked at him and, despite herself, nearly smiled.
"They generally do."
Henry's papers were on the middle shelf.
Mrs. Vautrin knew exactly where to find them. She had checked the date often enough in recent weeks, wondering when someone would write with the details of his journey. Now she laid the folder on the desk and opened it to the placement document.
Sorel put down his tea.
"Before we go through those, would you tell me how he is?"
"Henry?"
"Yes."
"He's well. He's been quite well." She rested a hand on the papers. "He works regularly, and he has made good progress with his reading. There have been no serious difficulties."
Sorel waited.
She became conscious of how much she sounded like a report being read aloud.
"He is a good boy," she added.
"I'm glad." He leaned forward a little, his attention on her face. "What does he do when he comes home?"
That was easier to answer.
"It depends on the day. He reads, if he has enough light and nobody needs the book. He writes a good deal now. At first it was mostly words he wanted to remember. Lately there have been letters."
"To someone here?"
"A friend who left to take an apprenticeship. They still see one another, but he likes having something to give him. He has another friend here, Ivo. They've helped each other with their reading."
Sorel nodded, as though she had given him something worth knowing.
"And the others?"
"He gets on with them. More easily than he did when he came. He isn't one of the boys who can walk into a room and find a conversation waiting for him. He tends to listen first." She considered. "Sometimes he listens for so long that you have to ask what he thinks. He usually has an opinion."
"Does he tell you?"
"If I ask. Sometimes before I ask."
This time she did smile. Sorel smiled with her.
The tightness beneath her ribs had eased. She could sit back without feeling that she was withdrawing from something. His height still made the room seem awkwardly proportioned, and every time she looked at the clay pot she remembered how unusual this visit was, but she could think about Henry.
"He can be stubborn," she said. "Particularly about finishing something he's decided he ought to finish. If he thinks somebody is going to take a task away from him, he holds on to it all the harder. You may need to tell him very plainly when he has done enough."
"Does he enjoy the work?"
"Some of it. He's been doing deliveries for Mr. Besson, and he likes those. He knows the streets. He likes being trusted with a message and bringing the right answer back."
She paused, then continued more slowly.
"But I wouldn't assume he's happy with something simply because he does it without complaining. He worked when he first came here, too. He was frightened of losing his streets. His parents had just died, and he was worried about who would sweep them if he didn't go back."
Sorel's expression quieted.
Mrs. Vautrin looked down at the folder. The boy recorded on the first page seemed younger than the boy who now came through her door with folded delivery slips in his pocket.
"It took time," she said. "For a while he needed to know what would happen next, even about small things. When he would eat. Where his belongings would be kept. Whether someone had told his employer. He didn't always ask in a way that made that clear."
"And now?"
"Now he sometimes forgets to come in from the yard until I call him twice."
Sorel received that with a warmth that made her throat tighten unexpectedly.
"That's good to hear."
She reached for her tea.
Outside the office, a pair of footsteps approached, slowed, and went away. Sorel followed the sound with his eyes, looking amused again.
"Do they usually find your door this interesting?"
"Only when they think I'm keeping something from them."
"Then I have made you very unpopular."
"They'll survive it."
His laugh was soft and unguarded. It did something peculiar to her understanding of him. She had been prepared for a solemn man, or an impatient one. The pleasure he took in the conversation required her to keep reconsidering how to speak.
"Henry will have questions," she said. "Possibly more after he's had time to think than when you first meet."
"He can ask them then."
"He may think he has missed his chance."
Sorel considered that for a moment.
"Then I'll have to ask again." He moved the cup a little farther from the edge of the desk. "I would rather hear a question the next morning than have him spend a week trying to discover the answer without admitting he needs it. Have you found that he asks when he doesn't understand his reading?"
"More often now. He used to try to work out everything himself."
"There's pleasure in doing that. I wouldn't want to take it from him. But he ought to know that asking won't end the lesson."
She could hear, in the way he spoke, the patience of someone who had waited for a great many people to understand something. He did not hurry to supply a conclusion about Henry. When she corrected a detail or thought of another example, he listened to that too.
She had been sitting with him for some time before she realized that he had yet to ask what Henry could lift.
The thought brought her back to the papers.
"You have seen the information about his talent?"
"Yes."
"I only wanted to be certain. There may have been reports sent that I haven't received, but he hasn't told me of any change."
"I understand."
She studied his face, looking for disappointment, and found none.
"He has had enough people expecting him to be useful," she said.
The words came out more firmly than she intended. She sat very still after saying them.
Sorel lowered his hands to his knees.
"Then I'm glad you've told me."
There was room in his answer for her to continue. For the first time since opening the front door, she felt able to decide what needed saying without first imagining how it would sound to him.
A watchman returned while Mrs. Vautrin was describing Henry's belongings.
She heard his boots in the passage and went to the door. He removed his cap as soon as Sorel looked up.
"Forgive the interruption, sir. Word has reached the town hall. The Third District Deputy asks whether he may receive you there, or come here at your convenience."
Mrs. Vautrin kept her hand on the doorframe.
She had seen the Deputy twice at close quarters. Both times there had been other people arranging where he would go and who would be allowed to speak to him. Now a man stood in her passage asking where he might be permitted to meet her visitor.
Sorel glanced toward the open folder on the desk.
"Please give him my regards. I'm waiting to meet Henry Wells. I'll send word when I've finished my business here."
"Of course, sir. Shall we keep the yard clear?"
"Clear enough for the children to use it, I hope."
The watchman looked through the front doorway. Several people had stopped beyond the low wall. One was leaning sideways to see past him.
"Yes, sir."
He put his cap on outside.
Mrs. Vautrin returned to her chair. Through the window, she could hear him asking people to keep the entrance free.
"I didn't realize there were so many out there," she said.
"I'm sorry. I seem to have brought you extra work."
She almost told him it was no trouble, then thought of the children who would spend the afternoon at every available window.
"They'll be impossible to settle after lunch."
Sorel looked genuinely apologetic, though a smile lingered at one corner of his mouth.
"I won't keep you from it. You were telling me about a box."
"His parents' things. We've kept them here. There are clothes, some household belongings. He keeps a few pieces upstairs, but most of it is in the storeroom."
"Does he want to take it?"
"I haven't asked him yet. Until today, I couldn't tell him when he would be leaving."
"Then let him decide when we speak."
She nodded, but did not turn the page.
There was another question. It had been forming since she had first watched him bend through the doorway. She had asked similar questions about Nadir's apprenticeship without much hesitation. With Sorel, each ordinary concern seemed to have acquired the possibility of giving offence.
He waited while she arranged the edge of the folder against the desk.
"I told Henry he would be living at your farm," she began. "And that you meant to teach him. That is as much as I could tell him with any confidence."
"Yes."
"Will he have a room of his own?"
"He will."
"And someone there when you are away?"
Sorel's expression became more attentive.
"I won't leave him there alone. If there is a reason for me to go away without him, we will make arrangements first."
She let out a breath.
"It's very far out, from what I've been told."
"It is."
"He has always lived among people. Even when he kept to himself, there were neighbours, people in the streets. Here he knows who to find if he needs something."
"Then I'll need to give him time to become familiar with the place."
"And he should be able to write."
"Of course."
"To his friends. To us."
"Yes, Mrs. Vautrin. I'll help him get the letters sent."
She stopped with her hand still resting on the folder.
Sorel looked at her for a moment, then spoke at greater length.
"You've cared for him for more than a year. You know what he is like when he's tired, what he worries about, and which things he'll tell you only if you ask twice. I've read a few pages about him. Please ask me whatever you need to ask. I may not have an answer ready for every detail, but I'd much rather hear it here than discover later that Henry has been worried about something you could have warned me of."
Mrs. Vautrin looked toward the passage.
She had not expected to be thanked for knowing him.
"He can make a place for himself," she said. "He's done it here. I wouldn't want you to think he needs someone beside him all day. He is quite capable. But there are things he's only recently begun to enjoy, and I'd like him to have the chance to keep enjoying them."
"Tell me."
So she told him about the kite. About the letters, and the visits to Nadir's workshop. About the way Henry had begun choosing to stay at the table after supper when the conversation interested him, even if his own work was finished.
Sorel listened with his hands folded loosely between his knees. Once, when she mentioned Henry arguing over how long somebody else had held the kite string, his eyes creased with amusement.
"And you aren't taking him away immediately?" she asked at last.
"There is no need for him to leave in a hurry. I have come to meet him. We can make the arrangements after that."
"He'll want to see his friends."
"Then he should."
She sat back. Beyond the window, the watchman's voice had moved farther from the house. A child ran across the floor overhead, followed by another, slower set of steps.
Mrs. Vautrin drew a clean sheet from beneath the folder and began making a list of the things they would need to discuss with Henry. Sorel finished his tea while she wrote. When she looked up, he was examining the three unmatched shoes on her shelf with considerable interest.
"Are you waiting for the other halves?"
"For the owners. They're all outgrowing them faster than I can remember who brought them in."
He nodded gravely, then smiled down at his own boots.
"I stopped doing that some time ago. Very convenient."
Mrs. Vautrin laughed before she could consider whether she ought to.
By the time Tessa found Henry, he had heard Sorel's name four times.
The first had been through the stationer's closed door. The woman had made him wait while she lifted one corner of the shutter and spoke to someone outside. When she finally let him out, the road was full of people trying to find out where the visitor had gone.
Henry had looked toward the workshop streets, but all he could see were the backs of people moving in the same direction. He had returned to Besson's as he had been told to do.
Now Tessa stood in the shop doorway with a folded note.
"Mrs. Vautrin wants you back."
Besson read the message. His eyes moved to Henry, then to Tessa.
"Is he there?"
She nodded.
"In her office."
Henry looked between them.
"Who?"
"Mr. Sorel," Tessa said. "He asked for you."
Henry's hand went to the pocket with his new book in it.
He had remembered the name as soon as he heard it through the stationer's door. He had thought of the scrap of paper Mrs. Vautrin had given him, and of Ivo saying he might be made to feed chickens. But the people in the market had spoken as though someone out of a story had walked past their stalls. One man had abandoned his cart to follow.
"What does he look like?" Henry asked.
"Old. Very tall." Tessa drew herself up a little, then seemed to decide that this was not a useful demonstration. "He's got a big pot. Mrs. Vautrin gave him tea."
Besson folded the note again.
"Go on. I'll find someone for the afternoon."
Henry looked at the remaining slips on the bench.
"I haven't taken those."
"I can see that." Besson put a hand over them. "They'll get there."
Henry checked that his purse was fastened and followed Tessa to the door.
At the door, he stopped.
"Mr. Besson. Is he really that important?"
The man looked at him for a moment.
"There are slayers people would travel days to see who used to sit in his lessons. That's about as much as I can tell you." He glanced at Tessa. "Don't keep him waiting on my account."
They left together.
Tessa talked as they walked. There had been a watchman at the door, and then another message, and Mrs. Vautrin had used the cup she kept at the back of the kitchen shelf. Bram had been told to leave the passage twice.
Henry listened without answering much. The streets looked ordinary wherever people had not yet heard the news. A woman was scrubbing her step. Two men carried a door between them, stopping at a corner to let a cart go past. He had walked this way so often that he could have named what stood beyond each turning, but he could not picture what would be waiting inside the orphanage.
There were people outside the low wall when they reached it. The watchman moved aside for Tessa and Henry, then raised an arm to prevent anyone following them into the yard.
Henry crossed beneath the washing lines. A sheet lifted in the breeze and brushed his shoulder.
At the green door, he hesitated long enough for Tessa to look back.
"Come on."
He followed her inside.
Mrs. Vautrin heard them and appeared in the office doorway. She looked first at Tessa, then at Henry. Her face softened with an expression he could not quite read.
"Here you are. Come in, Henry."
He reached the doorway and saw the clay pot on the floor.
Beside it sat a very tall old man, with white-grey hair loose about his shoulders and an empty cup held between his hands. His knees almost reached the desk. Mrs. Vautrin's office seemed too small to contain him.
Henry felt his breath catch. His hand closed around the edge of his coat, over the hard corner of the book.
The old man set down the cup. He rose slowly, bending his head beneath the low ceiling, and looked at Henry with a smile that deepened the lines around his eyes.
"Henry," Mrs. Vautrin said, "this is Mr. Matthias Sorel."
Sorel inclined his head in greeting.
Henry stepped into the office, and Mrs. Vautrin closed the door behind him.