7th of Darkfall, 412 AH
The border dispatch was late.
I read it again, though the content hadn't changed since the first pass. Garrison strength at the northern stations, supply consumption, two injuries from a routine patrol near the outer markers. Nothing alarming or useful. Three pages to say the Maw was quiet and her soldiers were bored.
I set the dispatch under the next letter, where the real morning's work was. The price of smelting iron had moved again, the second time since Frostfall, and the house that controlled the ore road between us and the capital had decided that a border duchy whose forge never stopped arming its garrison was a house that could be charged extra for the privilege of arming itself. House Conti controlled the only road their iron could take to my forge, and they expected me to pay whatever they named.
I would not.
I was three lines into the reply that would let them keep thinking so while I arranged the alternative supply when two knocks came. Pemberton.
"Come."
He entered and stopped three paces inside the door, leather case under one arm, coat brushed, shoes polished to a shine that no one had asked for. Decades of teaching and he still dressed for an audience he'd never gotten. Pathetic.
"Your Grace. I've completed the first lesson since the young master's recovery."
I finished writing a figure in the margin of the Conti letter. "Sit."
He sat straight-backed, knees together, case balanced on his lap rather than set on my desk. Pemberton always knew whose surfaces belonged to whom, one of the things that made him tolerable.
"How was he?"
Pemberton opened the case and withdrew a single page of notes.
"I had prepared a lighter session. Letters, arithmetic, a brief history passage, geography if time allowed. We covered all of it, and he asked for more."
I leaned back and folded my arms.
"His handwriting is what concerns me." His chin tilted. He was stating this, not floating it. "A boy who cracked his skull on stone and lost half his memories should not write better than he did before the fall. Post-injury recovery typically produces regression. What I got was penmanship that was rough, yes, but seemingly deliberately rough. The young master is moderating his hand to appear worse than he is."
Why would he?
"I have not been wrong about script in twenty years of teaching."
I set the Conti letter aside. This deserved my attention.
"His vocabulary has shifted. His questions are structured. He sat through etiquette instruction and asked questions about marriage protocol, unprompted, when six weeks ago he would not engage with it at all."
He folded his hands over the notes.
"Your Grace, I have taught young men from many houses over the years. Post-injury recovery does not look like this."
"What do you attribute it to?"
"I wouldn't dare." He held his hands up then smoothed one hand over the other in his lap. "I have seen people wake from worse injuries than this. They come back slower, or angrier, with missing memories. I have never seen one wake up sharper. Perhaps the fall shook something into place."
It never is that simple.
I picked up my pen again and turned it between my fingers. Pemberton was watching me with the expression he wore when he wanted a reaction and was too proud to ask for one. Most men wore it eventually, when they'd done good work and wanted a woman to say so.
I gave him nothing. He was good at his work, but that did not make him my equal.
"I've already begun adjusting the curriculum," Pemberton said. The silence had been a fraction too long for his pride to bear. "I'll advance the history and geography to match what he can absorb. The etiquette instruction will continue, expanded. Formula theory groundwork as well. He is..." He stopped. Started again. "He is ready for a pace I haven't attempted in this household."
He was now leaning forward by an inch. I could hear it in the tone, underneath the professional delivery. The curriculum adjustment was appetite.
I knew this man. I'd hired him years ago on the basis of a single interview where he'd corrected my pronunciation of a historical name and then spent forty minutes making me glad he had. Sera had been his student first. The erosion came later, when Klaus joined the roster, a brilliant mind assigned to teach a boy who wouldn't learn, the slow grinding of purpose into routine.
The lessons continued because the contract continued, and Pemberton's pride wouldn't permit stopping, but the man behind it all had been retreating for years. I'd done nothing, you couldn't make the student want to learn. You could only keep paying the teacher.
Now the teacher was sitting in my study with a curriculum plan he'd already started revising, and his hands weren't folded in resignation anymore.
Good.
"Thank you, Pemberton. Continue on the adjusted schedule. I'd like written assessments weekly."
"Of course, Your Grace." He stood and tucked the case under his arm, then paused at the door with the air he reserved for closing statements. "The young master asked me to recommend geography chapters for independent study. I gave him three. He'll finish them before our next session." He nodded.
He left, his footsteps quicker than when he'd arrived.
Something was wrong with him.
The changes Pemberton described were coherent, and coherent didn't make sense coming from a boy falling off a wall.
But something was also right with my son, and I was not the kind of woman who could hold one assessment without holding the other.
If this version held. If the focus persisted, the questions continued, the engagement wasn't a passing response to the novelty of waking up with a blank slate. If this was who Klaus was going to be.
My political calculations had been built around managing Klaus, containing his social damage, compensating for his academic mediocrity, negotiating a marriage that would survive his personality. That was the Klaus I'd been planning around for years.
I stood. I thought better moving, and this was a decision I would not get to make twice. I walked the length of the study and back, turning the plan over until the weak points showed.
I came back to the desk and took out the list for long term plans I kept. I read it, marking where his new behavior now changed things. It changed more than I had expected, the further down I read.
Fairhaven's entrance examination tested practical spellwork. I had been prepared to let Klaus come to it latest of all and scrape through on my name, like most sons did. That didn't seem necessary anymore.
Catrin's last letter had mentioned it as well. He'll need a practitioner before the entrance term. Don't leave it too late. An afterthought when she wrote it; a schedule now.
The timeline moved up.
(Verena Pic)
Spoiler
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