Michael Sullivan - The Crown Tower

Across from Angdon, Pickles’s face was also red. He was up on his feet, his hands clenched into fists, and Hadrian wondered if the boy was about to leap the table after the wailing baron’s son.

Scooping up his own pie, Hadrian grabbed Pickles and headed out of the dining hall while the other boys searched for towels and water to aid their friend.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” Hadrian said, rushing Pickles from the room.

“You are so right. I should have beaten him with the leg of a stool.”

“That’s not what I meant. You were supposed to be doing the watching and the warning, remember? Not the hitting and the punching.”

They slowed down when they reached the stairs. “Forget it. We’ll share this pie in the dormitory. I wasn’t hungry anyway.”

“You should have let me fight him.”

“You’d get in trouble for doing that. He’s the son of a baron-a noble.”

“He did not seem very noble.”

“Besides, Angdon is bigger than you are.”

Pickles nodded. “But I am tougher than he is.”

“He has a lot of friends.”

“Maybe,” Pickles said. Stopping on the steps, he added, “But I have one worth more than all of his combined.”

Hadrian couldn’t help but smile. “Yes, you do. And apparently so do I.”

Hadrian spent the night in the vacated bed of Vincent Quinn, who was decidedly shorter than Hadrian, or perhaps he also settled for dangling his feet off the end. The beds were all filled now with a kennel of boys that reminded Hadrian of any number of barracks he’d slept in. Hives of men, living austere lives with no more property than what they could carry-the war hounds of a duke or king. Not a bad life, but without purpose. That’s what ruined it for him. A soldier was meant to be a wheel on a wagon, to roll when ordered. Hadrian always found himself more interested in the choice of direction and annoyed by the sense he was a sword being used to chop wood.

Pickles was in his own borrowed bed, somewhere at the far end. None of the boys spoke to either of them, but they received plenty of stares. Whispers passed between the aisles, and Hadrian caught the words meat pie more than once. The mattress was hard-not as nice as the room in Colnora but better than the cold ground. He undressed, stretched out, closed his eyes, and fell asleep.

It might have been a nightmare that woke him. Hadrian had more than his share, but they dissolved upon waking, leaving little more than a residue of unease. He opened his eyes. It was still dark, with just a hint of gray. He closed them again but that was no use. Instead, he lay there, staring up at the dark ceiling beams, listening to the snoring of a student named Benny and thinking about the hood he’d seen in the window. Maybe that had been the nightmare.

Have you seen his eyes? Cold, I tell you. Dead eyes.

Going back to sleep was a battle he couldn’t win. He decided to retreat from the field. Hadrian put his bare feet to the floor. Cold. He expected to find the morning warmer than those he’d experienced on the road. This was the first time in two days that he had woken up dry, but he’d also woken up naked. Casting aside the blanket, Hadrian shivered. The heat of a dozen boys should have warmed the dorm like horses in a stable, and maybe it did, but this was a big room. He grabbed up his clothes, a bit stiff but dry. Pulling them on, the little bed creaked under his movements.

Hadrian had no sense of time, except that he could see. The utter black of the room had retreated to vague shapes, and the windows, invisible before, were now a source of gray light. Nothing but a soothing chorus of deep breaths and the occasional rustled blanket broke the stillness. The nightmare-whatever it had been-left him with an unease that caused Hadrian to reach for his weapons. He buckled his belt, taking great care with his swords to keep metal from striking metal. When he took a step, a board cried with his weight. One student looked up with squinting eyes before turning over and burrowing back under his covers.

Outside the dorm, Glen Hall was filled with silent corridors of dimly lit wood and stone. Hadrian paused when he reached the main stair and glanced up the steps. He was on the second floor. The window he had seen the hood through had been on the third.

Are you up there?

It took a special kind of madness to believe that a killer had stalked him all the way to the university and even greater levels of lunacy to think he was still there. Yet Hadrian had been wrong on the barge and it had cost the lives of six people.

He climbed the steps, slowing down as he reached the north corridor. The lamps were out and he felt his way along the wall until he came to the end of the hallway. Lifting the latch, Hadrian opened the last door on the common’s side. It swung inward with only a modest creak. Already the early dawn had grown to a bright gray and revealed the interior of the small room. The size of a large closet, the space was used for storage and filled with crates, buckets, even a stack of cut lumber.

Looking to the far side, Hadrian saw the window with the half-moon top he remembered from the previous day. This was it. Third floor-end of the row.

Hadrian walked over and looked out. Below lay the common. Now empty, even tranquil with the dawn, he imagined himself and Pickles standing near the bench where Dancer had been tied.

A storage room.

Students wouldn’t come in there.

He has wolf eyes, doesn’t he?

Hadrian wandered the corridors that morning like a ghost. Glen Hall was larger and more confusing than he expected. He thought of waking Pickles-he probably knew the way better-but decided against it. They would be moving on soon and it was best he got as much sleep as he could.

Eventually Hadrian landed on the main floor and spotted the giant painting. He was near the main entrance and from there he knew the way to the meal hall. He could also hear sounds of plates and banging pots. Other early risers with books in hand waited with him in line for something hot before finding seats at the many vacant tables. Unlike the day before, what conversations there were came in the form of whispers.

“How did you sleep?” Cutting through the quiet with total disregard, came Arcadius’s voice.

The professor sat near the fire where most everyone had gravitated, as the stone still held the night’s chill. On the table before him rested a cup and a small empty plate. The professor looked much as he had the day before with his white hair cascading in all directions like water hitting rocks. He continued to wear his glasses perched on the end of his nose, though he still did not look through them, and remained dressed in his deep blue robe, littered at that moment with crumbs.

“I don’t know, I just sort of put my head down and closed my eyes.”

The old man smiled. “You should be a student here. It usually takes months to break the habit of making unwarranted assumptions. Try the hot cider. It’s soft but if you get it with cinnamon it adds a little zest to your morning.”

Hadrian grabbed one and Arcadius indicated he should sit beside him. Hadrian settled in, feeling the growing warmth of the morning logs against his side. The steam from his mug billowed into his face and he warmed his hands against the cup. The professor reclined in a lush leather chair, one of only four in the room, indicating either he was one of the first to arrive or professorships had privileges.

“When I think about it, that’s my biggest problem,” Arcadius said, rubbing the sides of his own mug.

“What’s that?”

“Getting students to unlearn what they think they know. To erase bad habits.” The old man took a dainty sip even though his drink no longer steamed. “You see, everyone is born with questions.” Arcadius held up his mug. “Empty cups all too eager to be filled with anything that comes by, even if it’s nonsense. For example, what color is this table?”