The academy emptied the way water leaves a bath, slowly for a long time and then all at once. Term ended formally at midday on the eleventh, which meant the corridors on the ninth were still ordinary and the corridors on the tenth were full of trunks and the corridors on the eleventh were mostly gone, and Arthur, who had spent ten months learning the shape of a building with eight hundred people in it, found he did not recognise it at all with two hundred. Sound carried differently. The eastern stairwell, which had been a place you shouted to be heard in, produced an echo. He came down it on the last morning with his arm still in the sling and heard his own boots arrive back at him from four floors up, and thought about a cave, and did not enjoy the thought particularly. Results went up on the ninth. Arthur read his own without any real feeling about them: middling across most of the theoretical work, poor in Soul Ability foundations for the third consecutive assessment, and a combat mark that Sutton had annotated in the margin, which almost nobody received. The annotation said, in its entirety, Do not fight left-handed again until the shoulder is properly healed. It was impressive and it was stupid. Arthur read it four times and folded the paper into his coat.
BRR: What did you get?
ART: Nothing interesting.
BRR: You've folded it up.
ART: I fold things.
BRR: You've folded it up and put it in the inside pocket, Arthur, which is where you put your father's letters. I'm not asking to read it. I'm simply making an observation about your storage habits.
Room fourteen came apart over two days. It had accumulated a great deal more than either of them had brought into it: Yseult's diagrams, which had colonised the entire western wall and had to be taken down in a specific order she refused to explain; three separate half-built essence conduits; a quantity of Briar's notation that had migrated across the room without anyone tracking how. Arthur packed one-handed and badly and Yseult repacked most of it behind him without comment, which he noticed on the second occasion and did not mention.
YSE: You've done the boots wrong.
ART: The boots are in the bag.
YSE: The boots are in the bag on top of the shirts, which means you will arrive at your hometown in four days with shirts that have been under boots for four days.
ART: Does that matter?
YSE: Your mother will think we've been living like animals.
ART: We have been living like animals.
YSE: Yes, but she doesn't need it demonstrated on arrival.
The academy told them on the tenth. It was not an assembly, which Arthur thought afterward was deliberate, because an assembly would have made it an event and a notice on eleven doors made it an administrative matter. The notice was pinned in the residential halls and on the eastern gate and in the refectory, and it said that in accordance with the provincial authority's order of the third, civilian passage across the Sea of Serenity was suspended until further notice, and that students whose homes lay in Drennick, Eskandar, and the eastern holdings of Lassiter would be accommodated within the academy for the duration of the summer recess at no charge, and that they should present themselves to the bursar's office before the eleventh to arrange it. Three lines. There was a fourth line about meal provision. Arthur read it in the refectory doorway with Elsie beside him and did not immediately understand what he was reading, because he had spent a week in a village and a year at an academy and had never once had cause to think of the sea as a thing that could be closed. Then he understood it, and then he understood the second sentence, and then he turned round and looked for Yseult and she was not there.
ELS: Drennick.
ART: And Eskandar.
ELS: Mira as well...
He found her in the workshop, which was where she went, and she was not working. She was sitting on the stool with a conduit housing in her hands and she was not doing anything to it, and she had clearly been sitting like that for some time before he came in, and she did not look up when he did.
YSE: I read it on the gate. Coming back from Beckwith.
ART: The civilian traffic notice.
YSE: The routes closing. Yes. Four feet behind you. You read it and you kept walking and I read it and I kept walking, and we went up the hill and talked about food.
ART: I didn't know it meant this.
YSE: Neither did I. Not properly. I knew it was going to mean something and I decided not to find out what, and I've had eight days to find out and I've spent all eight of them not finding out, which is a thing I'm apparently very good at.
Arthur sat down on the second stool, which put him about four feet from her, and said nothing for a moment because he was assembling something and he had learned from Briar and from Rufus Hale that the assembling was worth doing before the saying.
ART: I want to ask you something and I want to say first that I should have asked it a week ago.
YSE: I know what it is.
ART: Finn asked you what you were doing for the summer and you said you'd work something out, and he asked what was in Drennick and you said Drennick, and you said it the way people close doors. And I noticed, and I told myself I'd ask you on the road, and then the road was four hours and I didn't, and then it was eight days and I didn't.
YSE: Why not?
ART: Because you closed the door and I decided that respecting it was the same thing as being kind about it. And I've had eight days to work out that those aren't remotely the same thing and I only actually worked it out about forty minutes ago, standing in the refectory doorway, when I realised I'd have had to ask you eventually anyway and that the only difference was that now you'd already had to read it off a wall by yourself.
Yseult set the housing down on the bench.
YSE: That's a considerably better apology than most people manage.
ART: It's not an apology. I'm asking now. What's waiting for you in Drennick?
She was quiet for long enough that he thought she might not answer.
YSE: A house with my stepmother in it. A room that was mine and hasn't been for two years and I'd rather not know what it's got in it now. A man who is my stepbrother whose face I have told you I will not describe and I'm not going to describe it today either.
ART: Yseult-
YSE: I want you to understand something, because you've asked properly and you deserve the properly-answered version. When I read that notice at the gate, the very first thing I felt, before anything else, before I'd even finished the sentence, was relief.
She said it flatly, looking at the bench.
YSE: I have a home I cannot get to and my first feeling was relief, and I have spent eight days being unable to look directly at that, and it is considerably worse than the not-being-able-to-go. I could tell you a great deal about how frightening it is that the crossings have closed. I've thought about it. There are three hundred people in this academy who cannot get home and some of them are going to be in a very bad way about it by August. And I am one of them, and I read the notice, and I was relieved, and what does that make me?
ART: Somebody with a bad house.
YSE: That's very simple.
ART: Yes. I've noticed that when things are genuinely awful people want them to be complicated, because complicated is more dignified. It's not complicated. You've got somewhere you're afraid of and something has stopped you from having to go there and you're ashamed of being glad about it. That's the whole of it. It doesn't make you anything.
Yseult put both hands over her face and held them there for a moment, and Arthur did not say anything else and did not move, and eventually she took them down again.
YSE: Two months.
ART: In an empty academy.
YSE: With Mira, who will be genuinely unhappy about it, because Mira wants to go home. And Dane Whitlock, apparently, who I have not spoken to since he was face-down on the ground and who has three hundred people's worth of mail arriving from a province nobody can reach.
ART: That's not a summer.
YSE: No.
Arthur looked at the workshop, the diagrams, the housings, the four months of accumulated work.
ART: Come with me.
YSE: What?
ART: Come with me and Elsie. It's four days' walk and it's a village with one mill and a barn everyone calls a mill and there is genuinely nothing to do there. My mother will put you in the back room and feed you until you're frightened. My father will ask you three questions about Alchemy that he won't understand the answers to and will remember every word of anyway.
YSE: Arthur, I can't-
ART: You can. There's no order about the western provinces. The roads are open. The only thing stopping you is that nobody's asked, and I'm asking, and I'm asking badly and in a workshop with a week's notice, which is the whole of my apology for not doing it eight days ago.
Yseult did not answer for a considerable time.
YSE: I'd have to write to Mira's-
ART: Ask Mira as well.
YSE: You cannot simply invite the entire eastern continent to your mother's house.
ART: I've invited two people. My mother has been writing to me since September asking when she gets to meet anyone.
Yseult laughed, which came out wrong and slightly wet, and then put a hand over her mouth for a second and got herself back.
YSE: I'm going to say yes and then I'm going to worry about it for four days.
ART: That's fine.
YSE: I'm going to worry about it extensively and out loud and you're going to have to listen to all of it.
ART: I've walked four days with Finn. I have a very high tolerance.
Arthur was called to the headmistress's study on the last morning, which he had not been expecting and which no one else in his year received. He went up with his bag already packed and waiting in the hall below and his arm in the sling, and Seraphine Wysteria did not sit behind her desk but on the edge of it, which somehow made the whole thing worse.
WYS: Your shoulder.
ART: Six weeks, Julian says.
WYS: And you will do exactly what he tells you.
ART: Yes, Headmistress.
WYS: You will not. But I am obliged to say it.
She was quiet for a moment, and Arthur had the distinct sense of a woman deciding how much of something to hand over.
WYS: You are aware that I watched the semifinal.
ART: I've been told.
WYS: I have been the head of this academy for a long time. I have watched, at a conservative estimate, four thousand students fight in that arena, and I want to say to you that I do not know what I saw and that this is a genuinely unusual sentence for me to say out loud to a first year.
ART: I don't know either.
WYS: No. I'm aware. That is very nearly the whole of what makes it interesting.
She stood off the desk and went to the window.
WYS: I am not going to tell you a story about it. You would carry it round for two months and it would grow, and whatever it grew into would almost certainly be wrong, and I would rather you spent the summer being fifteen. So I will say only this, and then you will go and catch your road.
She turned round.
WYS: There was a person, once, a considerable time ago, who could not be stopped by any means available to the people who tried. Not because she was strong. She was not particularly. Because stopping her was the wrong shape of problem and nobody worked that out until it was far too late to be useful to them.
ART: What happened to her?
WYS: She died. As everybody does.
She said it without any weight at all, which Arthur found more unsettling than weight would have been.
WYS: Go home, Mister Lyerm. Eat a great deal. Let your mother look at you. Do not touch a sword for six weeks, which you will ignore, and come back in September.
He got to the door before she spoke again.
WYS: Arthur.
ART: Headmistress.
WYS: If anything happens over the summer that you cannot explain, I would like you to write to me about it rather than to anyone else. Not because you are in any difficulty. Because I would like to be the person who hears it first.