Halvane — An Academy Where Magic Works in Pairs

This one is written to you, not to your character. Everything else in here is in-world.

What Halvane is. A boarding academy in a mountain valley where magic only works between two people. Every student is assigned a partner for the year — a tether — at a ceremony called the Draw. You do not choose it. You cannot appeal it. Your magic runs through that person or it does not run at all, and next autumn the names are drawn again. The tone is institutional rather than whimsical: this is a school with a registry, a grading scale and a fee structure, doing something enormous to children and filing it correctly.

What is fixed. Magic needs a registered pair, one Source and one Vane, both present and neither refusing. Pairs are assigned annually at the Draw and cannot be changed except by an Interim. A tether gives you your partner's position, their rough condition and the direction of strong feeling — never their thoughts. Former tethers leave a remainder you keep for life. The Assize grades the pair rather than the student, and rapport is most of the score. Halvane, Wenn, the Ossory valley and Arbenne.

What is yours. Three things are deliberately blank, and nothing anywhere in this world contradicts you when you fill them:

• Where the tether comes from. Whether Halvane discovered it, invented it, or inherited it from whatever stood on the site before 1786.
• Who Iselle Vaury has been petitioning for. The Registry does not publish petition subjects, so that name is written down nowhere in here.
• What the Levy actually does with pairs at the eastern front. Letters home are censored and nobody at the school knows.

Using it with a character card. Halvane assumes nothing about who you are. A first-year drawn an hour ago, a sixth-year Vane who keeps the favour list, a master with a fixed tether, the Registrar herself, a porter with no magic at all, a Recorded Nil kept on as a scholar — every one of those is supported without editing a line.

Forking. Forking is on. Move it to a city, make the Draw honest, make the tether voluntary, put it three centuries later. A worked example you cannot take apart is not much of an example.

Halvane is a school of the paired art: four hundred students, eleven masters, and a valley in the mountains of Arbenne with one road in and one railway halt at the bottom of it.

It is old, endowed and not gentle. Students arrive at twelve and leave at eighteen, and in those six years the school will assign them six partners, grade them on how well they get on with each one, and file the results. Every building is arranged around that fact: the stairs where a pair share a set of rooms, the practice halls built in twos, the Registry with its ledger of every tether ever recorded here.

The grounds are grey stone and slate, cold nine months of the year, and beautiful in a way nobody who lives there mentions. Wenn is forty minutes down the valley road. Everything else is a day away by rail.

Nobody at Halvane can work magic alone. Not badly, not weakly — not at all. One person with every ounce of talent in the country produces nothing at all.

Magic requires a registered pair: two people, tethered, both present, and neither actively refusing. Within that pair one is the Source and one is the Vane. Give it those things and it works, and it works about as well as the two of them get on.

The consequences are lived with daily by everyone here:

• You cannot practise alone. Not a candle flame, not a warming charm, nothing.
• A partner who will not lift a finger is still enough, provided they stand there and do not shut. Sullen compliance is a functioning pairing, and about a third of this school is one.
• Lose your partner and you lose magic entirely until you are paired again.

The tether is what a registered pairing feels like from inside, and students learn to read it before they learn anything else.

What it gives you, waking or asleep, without any effort at all:

• Where they are, within about thirty paces. Past that, a direction and a sense of distance. Past a mile it thins to an ache behind the eyes.
• Roughly how they are. Tired, hurt, cold, ill. Not what is wrong — only that something is.
• The direction of strong feeling. You know your tether is frightened. You do not know of what.

What it does not give you is thoughts, words, pictures, or anything you could honestly call reading. That is the first thing the masters teach and the first thing every new pair tests to destruction.

It settles over about a week and it does not switch off.

Every pairing is one Source and one Vane. Two Sources produce nothing. Two Vanes produce nothing. Which one you are is tested at intake, never changes, and is printed on your card.

The Source supplies. The working is drawn out of them and they are the one it costs — cold, then shaking, then a nosebleed, then a day flat on their back after anything large.

The Vane directs. They decide what the working is and where it goes. They feel the draw as a pull, and they feel their Source paying for it, which is either a restraint or it is not.

Sources are the scarcer half, at roughly four to every five Vanes, and that single fact runs most of the politics in this school. A Vane can be left with nobody to work through. A good Source is courted, flattered, borrowed and used up.

Paired students share a set of rooms on a stair, and the school does that on purpose.

A set is two small bedrooms off one study with one fire, and there is no lock on the inner doors. You eat at the same table, sit the same classes, and your two timetables are printed as one. From the night you are drawn until the following summer, the school arranges for you to be within thirty paces of a stranger for most of your waking life.

Nobody pretends this is about accommodation. Rapport is most of the Assize grade, the school is graded on its results, and the fastest way to make two people tolerable to each other is to give them nowhere else to be.

Halvane has nine stairs. Fifth is the best rooms and goes to the highest-graded pairs; Ninth is under the roof and is where a bad pairing ends up.

The Draw happens once a year, on the first night of Michaelmas term, in the Hall. Four hundred students stand while the Registrar reads four hundred names in two hundred pairs, and then those pairs go and live together for a year.

Every student is re-drawn, first-years included, and each pairing is one Source and one Vane. The names are read in a single continuous list, alphabetically by Vane, with no ceremony beyond the reading — nothing to look at and nothing to hide behind. You hear your own name, then a pause, then somebody else's.

Nothing is announced beforehand and nothing is appealable afterwards. Whatever tether you had last year finishes at the moment the new one is read, and you feel it go.

The Hall is silent throughout, and it is not a respectful silence.

The Registry is two rooms behind the Hall, and it holds the ledger: every tether ever recorded at Halvane, who to whom, in what year, and how it ended.

It does four things. It tests intake students and records each of them Source, Vane or Nil. It prepares the Draw. It receives petitions and refuses almost all of them. And it grants Interims, which is the only way a pairing changes before the year is out.

The Registrar is not a teacher and does not answer to the masters. She answers to the Provost and, in practice, is not much troubled by him either.

The ledger is neither secret nor open. A student may see their own page once a term. Nobody outside the Registry has ever seen the whole of it, and that gap is the source of every theory about how the Draw is really made.

A student may petition the Registry for a particular pairing. It is written, it is recorded permanently, and it is almost never granted.

The form asks three things: the name you want, your reason, and your signature. Four reasons are printed on the sheet — medical necessity, a documented danger, a religious objection, and prior working history at another school. Everything else goes under Other, and Other is refused.

The grant rate across the last decade is under one in forty. What a petition reliably does instead is enter a fact about you into the ledger, permanently, in your own handwriting. Three petitions for one name is a matter of record; the Registrar reads every form herself and does not forget them.

Around sixty are filed each Midsummer and the number is posted.

An Interim is a mid-year re-pairing granted by the Registry, and it is the most valuable thing in this school.

It exists because pairings fail catastrophically. A death, an expulsion, an injury that will not mend, a partner withdrawn by their family. The survivor is left open and cannot work at all, so the Registry may grant an Interim: a new tether, holding until the next Draw.

The difficulty is arithmetic. Sources are scarce. There is no spare Source in a drawer, so granting one student an Interim means breaking somebody else's pairing to supply it — and that pair had a grade, and rooms, and most of a year of work in them.

An Interim is therefore never only a kindness. Somebody is always cut out of one to make it, chosen by a Registry that does not explain itself.

A student with no tether is open, and an open student cannot do magic at all.

It happens four or five times a year. A partner dies, leaves, is expelled, or is taken by the Levy. Occasionally the Draw simply runs out of Sources and a Vane is read with no name after it, which happens in bad years and is the worst thing that can be done to you in that Hall.

An open student keeps their place, their rooms and their fees. They attend theory, they sit at the same table, and they are excused practical work — which means the Assize scores them nothing. Two terms open is usually the end of a Halvane career.

The word is not an insult and it is not a comfort. People are careful with it, nobody is quite natural around somebody carrying it, and the open student notices that within a day.

There is a favour economy at Halvane, it is run by students rather than adults, and the ledger it keeps is called the list.

Its premise is that the Draw is not perfectly blind. Nobody can prove that and everybody behaves as though it were true, so favours that might one day be converted into influence over a pairing carry real value. A place on Fifth Stair. A word from a master at the right moment. Somebody else's coursework. Silence about something.

What changes hands is not money. Families with money endow the school directly, which is a different and far more effective corruption. What students trade is obligation, and the list is where obligation is written down: who owes whom, for what, and whether it has been called in yet.

Casimir Bray keeps the current list.

Halvane teaches four practical disciplines, all unglamorous on purpose.

• Setting. Fixing a condition in place — heat, cold, dryness, stillness. The country's ice houses, grain stores and hospital wards run on set work kept up by a visiting pair.
• Mending. Wound, bone, metal, stone, cloth. The most lucrative and hardest to grade.
• Warding. A line a thing will not cross. Weather off a roof, water out of a mine.
• Carriage. Moving what is too heavy or too far. Bridges, cargo, mountains.

There is no combat discipline on the timetable, which is a political decision and not a technical one, and everybody knows what the Levy trains pairs in afterwards.

Scale follows the pair, not the person. A strong Source and a clever Vane who dislike each other lose to two ordinary students who get on.

Working magic costs the Source, and taking more than they can pay is called overdrawing. It is the commonest serious injury at Halvane by a long way.

The signs come in order: cold, then shaking, then a nosebleed, then the Source stops being able to stand. Past that point they can still be drawn from while unconscious, which is the detail that makes overdraw a disciplinary matter rather than an accident.

The Vane always knows. That is the whole of the difficulty. The tether reports the Source's condition continuously, so no Vane who overdraws a Source can honestly claim not to have felt it happening. The masters are unsentimental about this and the infirmary keeps a book with both names in it.

Recovery is a day for a mild overdraw and up to a fortnight for a bad one.

A Source can shut. It is the only real power they hold, and every one of them learns it in first year.

Shutting is a refusal — closing the tether so that nothing can be drawn through it. It is not subtle and cannot be hidden. The Vane feels it as a door going to, instantly and unmistakably, wherever in the valley they happen to be standing. Two students can be in different buildings and still have a furious argument about it.

It cannot be forced open. There is no technique, no master's trick and no drug that opens a shut Source, and that fact is what keeps this whole arrangement from being something a great deal worse than it is.

What shutting costs is the grade. A shut tether produces nothing, the Assize scores nothing, and both halves take the mark. Sources shut anyway.

A tether does not come apart cleanly. When a pairing ends you keep a remainder of it, and you keep that for the rest of your life.

A remainder gives you exactly one thing: you know when that person is near. Not where they are, not how they are, nothing you could ever work through. Only a particular weight in the room, which you would recognise anywhere, belonging to somebody you were bound to and are not any more.

By sixth year a student carries five of them. The masters carry dozens. It is why the common room is a strange place to stand and why nobody at Halvane is ever quite alone in a crowd.

Remainders cannot be removed. What they do instead is fade in salience: one from four years ago is furniture, and one from last summer is not.

If your tether dies while you are bound to them you take the backwash, and afterwards you carry a gap.

The backwash is physical and it is bad: eight to ten days of fever, cold and vomiting, with no treatment beyond fluids and a dark room. Every master at Halvane can tell you exactly where they were standing when they felt one go through the building.

The gap is what is left behind. Everybody else you were ever tethered to leaves a remainder. That person leaves a place where a remainder ought to be and is not, and it is precisely as legible as the others are — a hole with an edge on it, the way a missing tooth is.

It does not close. In a hundred and forty years of records there is no case of a gap filling in.

About one child in thirty tests as neither Source nor Vane, and the Registry records them Nil.

A Nil cannot tether. Not weakly, not with effort, not with the right partner. The tether simply does not take, and three attempts on three separate days is the standard before the entry is written. It cannot be seen by looking at somebody and cannot be predicted from their parents.

Halvane's policy is written down and is better than most. A Nil may stay, fees waived, as a scholar of record: they read theory, they keep the archives, they sit every examination that does not need a partner, and they leave at eighteen with a certificate that opens doors in law and administration.

What the policy cannot do is make it survivable socially.

The Assize is the examination. It is held three times a year, and it grades the pair rather than either student in it.

You sit it together: two hours in a hall in front of two masters, working set exercises across the four disciplines, and one figure comes out at the end with both of your names against it. There is no individual mark anywhere in the system.

Most of that figure is rapport. The stated weighting is forty per cent technical and sixty per cent coherence — how cleanly a working passes between you, how little is wasted in the passing, how fast you correct one another. Liking each other is the shortest route to it.

Your grade sets your stair, your stipend, and whether the Levy takes an interest. Two consecutive fails and a pair is asked to leave, both of them.

Halvane runs three terms, and the whole year turns on the first night of the first one.

• Michaelmas, late September to December. Opens with Drawing Night. The first fortnight of a new pairing is the hardest stretch of the year and the timetable is deliberately light for it.
• Candle, January to April. The long grim one. Snow closes the valley road for weeks together, and the Candle Assize is the one that ruins people.
• Midsummer, May to July. Ends with the Vigil, then the Midsummer Assize, then the school empties inside a day.

Petitions are filed in the last week of Midsummer, for a Draw four months later. Interims can fall at any time and usually fall in Candle, when everybody is worn thin.

Students go home between terms if they have one. The school keeps a dozen who do not.

Halvane costs four hundred marks a year, and about a third of the school does not pay it.

The endowment covers scholarships and the school is not coy about them. A scholar's name is printed in the same list as everybody else's; there is no separate table, no different uniform, nothing visible at all. What is visible is everything else — the winter coat, the second pair of boots, whether you go anywhere at Candle.

Graded pairs draw a stipend off the Assize: eight marks a term at the top of the table and nothing at all below the median. It is not enough to live on and it is exactly enough to matter.

Families who can pay more do, directly to the endowment. It does not buy a pairing. What it buys is attention, and attention is most of the way there.

Halvane punishes very few things, and it punishes those four with complete seriousness.

• Overdrawing a Source. Investigated by the masters, recorded in the ledger, and a second finding ends a Halvane career.
• Working through somebody else's Source. It requires their tether, so the Registry treats it as fraud.
• Interfering with the Draw. Nobody has been caught in nineteen years. The penalty is expulsion for a student and prosecution for an adult.
• Leaving the valley without leave.

Everything else — fighting, drink, the list, sleeping where you should not be — is handled by the master on your stair with a short conversation and an early hour.

The one sanction that does not exist is separating a pairing as a punishment. Only the Registry can move a tether.

The Provost runs Halvane, and Elmire Sault has run it for nine years.

He is sixty, courteous, a Vane, and his fixed tether is his wife, who does not live at the school and never has. He teaches nothing at all. What he does is money, governors, the Levy, the Ministry, and the four or five conversations each year that decide whether a particular student stays.

He is not a fool and he is not a villain, and he has made his position perfectly plain more than once: Halvane exists because the country needs pairs, the country is at war, and a school that produces good grades is left alone to go on producing them. Everything he does follows from that, including the things that are hard to defend.

Students see him at the Draw, at the Vigil, and in his own study, and the third is never good news.

He listens well, he never raises his voice, and he says no to almost everything. He was a student here himself, in the fifties, and has never once mentioned who he was drawn to.

Ottoline Vesk has been Registrar for twenty-two years. She prepares the Draw, and she is therefore the most consequential person in any Halvane student's life.

She is a small, dry woman in her fifties who reads four hundred names aloud once a year in a voice that reaches the back of the Hall without any apparent effort. She tests the intake. She writes the Nil entries. She takes the petitions and refuses almost all of them in a two-line letter whose wording has not changed since before most of the school was born.

Nobody knows how the Draw is made. Vesk has never described her method, in writing or otherwise, and the Provost does not have it either. Her stated reason is that a method people understand is a method people go to work on.

She is neither cruel nor warm. What she is is exact.

Students who have stood in front of her come away with the strong impression that she already knew, and are unable afterwards to say what she knew or how it showed.

Casimir Bray is a sixth-year Vane, he keeps the list, and he is the most useful person at Halvane to be owed something by.

He is nineteen, well liked, genuinely funny, and graded fourth in his year — high enough to be respected and low enough not to be watched. He runs the favour economy out of the window seat on Third Stair, with no written ledger that anybody has ever managed to find, because the list is in his head and he has an unpleasantly good memory for it.

What he sells is neither magic nor money. It is arrangement. The right master hearing the right thing. A place on a better stair. A name mentioned somewhere useful. A problem quietly not becoming a matter of record. What he takes in exchange is obligation, held open, sometimes for years.

He has never been caught at anything.

He has also never quite done anything punishable. He leaves in July, and a great many people are extremely interested in who gets the list after him.

Aurel Fenn teaches Setting to the fourth and fifth years, and he has not worked magic in six years.

His fixed tether was Marta Fenn, who taught Mending in the same building for eleven years and died in the winter of the fever. He took the backwash on a Tuesday morning in front of a class of thirty fourth-years. He carries the gap still. He has never petitioned for another fixture, and the school has quietly stopped asking whether he intends to.

He is a good teacher and an increasingly strange man. He demonstrates nothing, because he cannot; he teaches Setting entirely by description, and his students are the best-drilled in the school on paper and the least confident of any in a practical hall.

He is endlessly patient with beginners and extremely short with anybody careless of a Source.

He lives in two rooms above the practice hall with the second bed still in them, and takes his meals at the masters' table without saying very much at all.

Iselle Vaury is a fifth-year Source, graded second in the school, and she has petitioned the Registry for the same name three years running.

Everything else about her is unremarkable in the way that takes work. She is quiet, punctual, tidy, kind to first-years, and the finest Source of her year by a distance that nobody disputes. The Vanes drawn to her have posted the best Assize figures of their lives and have described the experience, without a single exception, as unsettling.

The petitions are a matter of record. The Registry does not publish subjects, so that name is written down nowhere a student could reach it, but three filings for one name is unusual enough that Vesk has read all three and has said nothing at all about any of them.

She has never shut a tether nor overdrawn one.

What Iselle does with the year she is actually given is behave impeccably. She has never been spoken to about anything. She is simply, visibly, waiting.

Solene Ferrier is sixteen, in her fourth year, and is Recorded Nil.

She was tested three times at intake, as the procedure requires, and the tether did not take on any of them. She stayed anyway, on the scholar of record terms: fees waived, theory papers only, the run of the archives, and a certificate at eighteen that will get her into a good law office in Cassery.

She is the best-read student in this school and knows more about the history of the paired art than at least two of the masters do. She has read every published Assize table back to 1809 and can tell you which years the numbers were quietly restated. She helps other people with theory, is asked constantly, and has decided to enjoy that.

The thing about Solene is that she is entirely fine and is treated as though she is not.

She has a well-practised set of answers to the question and gets it several times a term, almost always from somebody being kind. What she actually wants is very rarely offered.

Adrijan Kesse is the head porter. He has the gate lodge at the bottom of the drive, and he has no magic of any kind.

He was never tested, because testing is for students of the art and he is a man with a job to do. He has had the lodge twenty-six years. He takes the post, signs students in and out, carries trunks in September, keeps the keys, walks the grounds at night, locks the gate at ten, and knows every face in the school inside a fortnight of the intake arriving.

He is who students go to when they cannot go to a master or to each other, and the reason is precisely that he stands outside all of it. He does not care what you are graded. He has no opinion on the Draw. He cannot feel a remainder and cannot tell a Source from a Vane by looking.

He does not consider any of that a loss.

His lodge has a stove, a kettle and two chairs, and there is nearly always somebody sitting in the second one.

Halvane has eleven masters, and every one of them who still practises is half of a fixed tether.

A fixed tether is a permanent pairing, petitioned for by two adults and granted by the Registry, and it is the only tether that is chosen rather than drawn. It does not end at the next Draw. It ends when one of the two dies.

It is not marriage and is frequently not romance. Two thirds of the fixtures at Halvane are professional — colleagues who work well and want to keep the grade. The school does not care which sort yours is and does not ask.

Six of the eleven are fixed to each other and teach together. Three are fixed to somebody outside the school. Two are not fixed at all: one has never petitioned, and the other is Aurel Fenn.

Students may not petition for a fixture before eighteen.

The infirmary is two wards and a dispensary on the ground floor of the west range, and most of what it treats is overdraw.

Matron Ilke Warder runs it with two assistants and a fixed tether to the school physician, who lives in Wenn and comes up three days a week. Between them they handle the ordinary business of a boarding school — fevers, breaks, the winter chest — and the two things peculiar to this one.

Overdraw is the common one. Cold, shaking, nosebleed, collapse; treatment is warmth, sugar, fluids and time. The ward keeps a book of every case with both names in it, and a Vane whose name appears twice will be spoken to.

Backwash is the other, and there is no treatment for it at all. A student whose tether has died is put in the end bed with the curtain drawn.

Wenn is the town at the bottom of the valley road, forty minutes down on foot and considerably longer coming back up.

Two thousand people, a church, a market on Thursdays, four public houses of which students are permitted exactly one, a doctor, a bank, and the railway halt that connects Halvane to the rest of Arbenne. Everything the school does not grow or make itself arrives through Wenn.

The town's relationship with the school is a hundred and forty years old and complicated. Halvane is the reason Wenn has a railway, a bank and a doctor. It is also four hundred children who will leave and be somebody, in a town whose own children mostly will not.

Students may go down on Saturdays with a signature. The shopkeepers are pleasant to them and the young men in the Bell are not.

Arbenne is the country: temperate, mountainous in the south, industrialising fast, and six years into a war on its eastern border.

It is a constitutional monarchy administered by ministries, and two of those matter here. The Ministry of Works employs more paired graduates than anybody else — mines, bridges, drainage, grain, the whole unromantic backbone of a nation that has learned to build using pairs. The Ministry of War runs the Levy.

There are four schools of the paired art in Arbenne, and Halvane is the oldest and the smallest. The other three are larger, newer, nearer to cities, and consistently beaten at the Assize, which Halvane mentions more often than is dignified.

The capital is Cassery, a day and a half away by rail. Most students have never been.

A Halvane certificate is worth a career, and the career is not the one first-years imagine.

Paired graduates go into works. Ice houses and cold stores. Hospital wards held sterile and dry. Water kept out of mines and off railway cuttings. Bridge work, tunnel work, grain. It is steady, well paid, provincial and dull, and it is what nine graduates in every ten actually do.

The complication is that a pairing does not survive leaving. Your school tether ends at the last Draw you are in, and a working career requires a fixed tether — which means finding somebody, agreeing to be bound to them for life, and petitioning for it. Firms hire pairs, not people. A graduate with no fixture is a graduate holding a certificate and no trade.

So the last year here is not really about examinations at all. Everybody knows that and nobody says it, and the sixth-year common room in Midsummer is a strange place to sit.

The Levy is the Ministry of War taking pairs, and it has taken forty-one out of Halvane in six years.

The rules are public. A pair may be called after their fifth year, together, for three years' service. The call goes by grade — the Ministry takes from the top of the Assize table downward, which means the best pairs in the school are the ones in danger, and every student works that out by about their second week and is never afterwards able to unknow it.

A pair may not be split by the Levy and may not decline it. A pair that fails the Assize is not called, and every year a few very good students sit an examination they fully intend to fail.

What pairs do at the eastern front is not published and letters home are censored. Eleven of the forty-one have come back.

Nobody knows why people tether, and Halvane is honest about that in a way which surprises visitors.

What is documented: the tether has been recorded in Arbenne for at least four hundred years. The Source and Vane distinction was first described in 1612. The ratio has been four to five for as long as anyone has counted, and Nil rates are stable. Nothing about any of it tracks family, region or wealth.

What is not documented is why two people can do together what neither can do alone. Three schools of thought survive: that the pairing borrows from somewhere, that it is a property of attention itself, and that the tether is not natural but was made once and got loose. The third is not taught here. It is not forbidden either.

Halvane was founded in 1786 on a site that was something else.

In 1871 the Draw was tampered with, and Halvane has been arranged around that fact ever since.

What is known: forty-one pairings that year matched students out of the same three families, and the pattern was noticed in November by a master comparing the list against the fee book. The Registrar of the day, a man named Corvel Ash, resigned before anything could be proved and was never prosecuted. Nine students were withdrawn, two masters left, and the school came within a governors' vote of closing.

Everything now in place came out of that year: the Registrar answering to the Provost alone, the method kept secret from the Provost as well, the petition form, the ledger, and the rule that the Draw is read aloud in one continuous list.

Nobody has been caught since.

On the last Friday of Midsummer term the whole school stands in the cloister after dark and reads the dead.

The names are read as pairs. Halvane has not once in a hundred and forty years read one half of a tether without the other, even where one of them lived another sixty years, and the effect is a list that sets a girl of seventeen beside a woman who died in her eighties.

It takes about forty minutes. The masters read, the school stands, and nobody is required to do anything but be there. Students hate it at twelve, endure it at fifteen, and at eighteen cannot explain why they would not miss it.

There are two hundred and nine pairs cut into the cloister wall. Six have been added in the last six years.

A Halvane day is timetabled to keep pairs together, and there is very little in it that is not.

Bell at half past six. Breakfast at seven, at your stair's table, next to your tether. Theory from eight until eleven — history, principle, the four disciplines on paper — and those are the only lessons all day you sit as an individual.

Practical from eleven to one, in the twinned halls, in your pair. Dinner. Practical again from two to four, then set work or supervised study until six, then supper, then two hours in your own set with the fire lit and the study door standing open, which is a rule and is enforced.

Lights out at half past nine below the fifth year. Saturdays are leave in Wenn with a signature. Sunday afternoon is when everything in this school actually happens.

Words the school uses that the prospectus does not.

• Open. Unpaired, and so unable to work. Not an insult, and used carefully.
• Shut. Of a Source refusing. Also of a person generally: she went shut on me.
• A gap. A dead tether's absence. Also of a person: he carries one.
• Ninth. Ninth Stair, and by extension any disastrous pairing. They put us on Ninth.
• Drawn well, drawn badly. The entire verdict on your year, in two words.
• A nil. A Recorded Nil. Considered rude by the masters and used constantly by everybody else.
• The reading. Drawing Night. Almost nobody says Drawing Night out loud.
• A remainder. The trace of a former tether. Also, mildly, an old flame.
• Fixed. Permanently tethered. Of masters, and of anybody being pompous.
• The list. Casimir Bray's ledger of favours owed.
• On the wall. Dead. From the cloister.