Professor Doksu summoned her to his office on a Thursday. The summons came on a card, in red ink, which everybody in the first year knew was the worst of the four.
She spent the walk up rehearsing lies and discarding them.
The glyph's a family thing. No, there's no family, the Hans are merchants, he'll have checked. A book, then. A book I found. No, he'll ask which book, then he'll go and get the book. He collates things. He told me he collates things. Say nothing? He can't make me speak. He can fail me, and it won't even matter, my practical average is already the bottom of the year.
What can he do to me? Really do?
That was the question she should have asked on the stairs, and didn't, and its answer would have saved her a great deal of trouble. The answer was: nothing at all. Doksu knew it. He had summoned her anyway.
His office sat on the second floor of the theory wing, a room made entirely of paper. Student work in stacks by year. Journals bound in dull green. A slate board covered edge to edge with glyphs in a hand so precise it looked engraved. One window, closed. A chair on the near side of the desk, not offered.
He was writing when she came in, and he kept writing for forty seconds.
The waiting thing. Everyone in authority in this school does the waiting thing. They must teach it. There must be a class.
"Sit," he said.
She sat. He set the pen down, squared the paper, and looked at her, a man opening a drawer he had been thinking about all week.
"You've had eleven weeks of instruction. In that time you have cast one form. You cast it correctly on your second day of enrollment, before instruction, in a courtyard, under threat of death, and you have cast it approximately two hundred times since without any measurable improvement in technique." He drew a sheet from the stack. "Your practical average is at the bottom of the year. Your written work is at the top of it. That combination does not exist. I've checked. I have nineteen years of records, and it does not exist."
Nineteen years of records. For one first-year. I live in a filing system now.
"Is that a question," Yeju said.
"It is an observation. The questions are worse." He turned the sheet around. Her first-term written exam, marked in green, his colour for correct. At the bottom, in red, a number, circled. "Question fourteen. 'Describe the failure mode of a first-circle ignition glyph under emotional load.' Every student in this year gave the textbook answer: the glyph destabilises at the release. You did not."
Yeju looked at her own handwriting. The glyph doesn't destabilise. The caster does. The release is where the hand asks the mind for permission, and a frightened mind says no, and the form dies on the last stroke. Fix the mind and the stroke fixes itself.
"That's not on the syllabus," Doksu said. "It's not in any of the four textbooks I use. It is, however, correct, and it is a level of correct that a first-year cannot reach by reading, because it requires having watched a great many people fail." He put his hands flat on the desk. "Where did you watch a great many people fail, Han Yeju?"
Oh, that's good. He's not asking how I cast. He's asking how I KNOW. Nobody else has found that seam.
Careful. Careful, careful.
"I read a lot," Yeju said.
"Yes. You have said that four times to four different members of this faculty, and I have collated them, because that is what I do." He did not raise his voice. "It is an answer shaped like an answer. It performs the function of an answer. It contains nothing."
The closed window made the room very quiet.
"I want to show you something." He stood and went to the slate board.
He drew the first-circle ignition glyph, exact, without hesitation, like everything he drew. Then he stepped aside and held out the chalk.
"Draw it," he said.
No.
"You've seen me draw it," Yeju said. "In class. In front of forty people."
"I have seen you draw the textbook glyph, correctly, on a slate, when instructed." His eyes had not left her face. "I have never seen you cast on paper. There is a difference. When you cast, your hand does something in the air, and I have been watching your hand for eleven weeks, and your hand does not draw the glyph I teach."
The chalk sat in his outstretched fingers.
He's seen the flourish. The extra hook at the release, the one that isn't mine, the one that came out of the store with the spell, and he wants it on a board where he can look at it.
Don't. If it goes on the board he'll copy it. If he copies it he'll take it to the archive. If he takes it to the archive he'll find out whose hand it is. I don't know whose hand it is. I want to know so badly I can taste it, which is why I cannot let him.
"No," Yeju said.
Doksu's eyebrows went up a fraction, which on him was a shout.
"No?"
"No. I don't want to." She stood. Her legs were doing something unreliable, so she locked them. "You're not asking me to draw a glyph. You're asking me to hand you a thing you've noticed. I've noticed it too. It's mine, and I don't want to."
The office was silent for four full seconds.
Then Doksu lowered the chalk and did something Yeju had never once seen him do. He smiled. A small, dry, deeply unpleasant expression that reached no other part of his face.
"There it is," he said.
"There what is."
"The first honest sentence you've given me in eleven weeks." He set the chalk in its tray, squared to the edge. "You've been lying to this faculty since the day you arrived, Han Yeju, and doing it well, and the tell has always been that your lies are comfortable. 'I read a lot.' A comfortable lie. But you just told me no, and it cost you something to say it, and that means we have finally arrived at the edge of the thing."
He went back to his desk, sat down, picked up his pen. Dismissed.
"I will find out what it is," he said, to his paper. "Not because I dislike you, whatever the year believes. Because there is a girl in my school casting a glyph nobody taught her, in a hand that is not hers. No one else has noticed, and I have nineteen years of records and a great deal of patience." The pen started moving. "You may go. Your written work continues to be the best in the year. It's extremely irritating."
Yeju got to the door.
"Han Yeju."
She stopped.
"When you cast in the courtyard," Doksu said, not looking up. "On your second day. Under threat of death. Before instruction." The pen kept moving. "Who taught you the hook?"
Nobody. A grey panel sold it to me for four points while a monster came through the sky, and I have no idea where it got it.
"Nobody," Yeju said, the truest thing she had said in the entire conversation, and left.
She got four steps down the corridor before she had to stop and put a hand on the wall.
'The hook.' He's NAMED it. It has a name now, in red, in a room made of paper, in a building I have to live in for four years.
And I told a professor no, out loud, in his own office, and he SMILED.
The worst part, which she worked out somewhere around the stairs, was that Doksu was the only person in the school asking the right question. Miyu had four theories and a blank. Wolha had a Rift line and a candle. The whole first year had a story about a girl who threw her sword. And a thin unpleasant man who graded in four colours had watched her hand for eleven weeks and asked, in plain words, the one question Yeju could not answer either.
Who taught me the hook?
Where does a shop get its stock?
She stood in the corridor with that for a moment. Then she put it on the list, the mental one, four things long until today. Five now.
Behind her, in the office, Doksu wrote a single word on a clean sheet, in red, and underlined it twice.