Magisterium

“There’s only the one bed. I can sleep outside.”

“No!” she said quickly. No matter what she felt about Kevin she couldn’t imagine being left alone in that strange place. “One of us can take the floor. It’ll be fine.”

Kevin stepped inside and closed the door behind him. “Well …

you should take the bed.”

“No, you can — ”

“Hey, who’s the jerk who let you pilot that boat all night? Take the bed, Morgan. Seriously.”

Glenn settled onto the mattress as Kevin crossed the room and sat down in the narrow space between the bed and the wall. He pulled his boots off, then collapsed against the plaster wall with an exhausted sigh.

His face was ashen and deeply lined. He yawned and brushed the stubble on his head back and forth under his palm.

“Guess I cut it a little uneven, huh?”

Kevin shrugged. “I keep expecting it to be there, I guess.”

“How’s your side?” Glenn asked.

“Better. Opal gave me some different stuff. Wouldn’t have made it this far if she didn’t.”

“Good,” Glenn said. “Maybe without you constantly whining

about your gunshot wound we’ll actually be able to make some time.”

Kevin looked up at her, surprise quickly growing into a wide smile and a small laugh that Glenn was happy to echo. His face lit up, so distinctly Kevin. In that moment there didn’t seem to be a trace of Cort in him.

Maybe it was never even there, Glenn thought. Maybe it was all in my head.

Below them, the violinist finished the song with a flourish, and the patrons of the inn shouted their appreciation. Heavy treads moved from the tables to the bar and back again. The front door opened and closed and the bar grew more silent in stages.

“Look,” Glenn said. “Downstairs and all — the fighting — it’s stupid. We’re just … we’ll be fine. Right?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Of course.”

Kevin pulled a spare blanket off the end of the bed and lay down on the floor. Glenn drew the covers aside and laid down too. The mattress was thin, but the blankets were heavy and warm.

It struck her how close they were, him lying just inches from her.

Glenn leaned over the side. Kevin was flat on his back, cramped in the tiny space, his eyes shut. She saw him as he was only days ago after she had stayed after school to help him study and they’d tramped through Berringford Homes together, and then as he was sitting at a train platform, a haze of snow blowing between them.

It struck Glenn how their whole life had been made up of such little things. Homework. Teachers. Tests. Names of bands. The sound of each other’s voices bouncing back and forth between them like a game. How when he looked at her, his body close, his brown eyes black in the dark, there was a swell in her chest that she had to force down, terrified it would rise up and overtake her.

Were they really little things? she wondered. Or am I just seeing them from far away?

“You don’t have to sleep on the floor.”

It was Glenn’s own voice, but she barely recognized it. Her arm snaked out and drew the covers back. Kevin lay motionless in the dark.

“It’s too cold,” she said. “And we need to rest. Come on.”

There was a rustle. The blankets rose and fell and then, after a long pause, there was Kevin’s warmth filling the bed next to her. She was on her back and he was on his. A narrow corridor of air was all that separated her body from his. Glenn thought of a line of surface tension resting on top of a lake, a thin membrane riding between air and sky on one side and the dark shifting depths below. She remembered placing her hand on the flat of Opal’s wall that night and seeing that illusion for what it was for the first time.

Nothing is separate, she thought. Everything is one thing.

Glenn wondered what it would be like to push against the tension, to feel it as it flexed and bent and broke. How warm it would feel to be on the other side. To feel arms around her, Kevin’s chest underneath her head.

The noise from below subsided. All that was left were scattered voices and the clatter of tin as plates and tankards were gathered from tables and returned to the bar. Footsteps creaked up the stairs and down the hallway as people moved into their rooms for the night. Quiet settled throughout the inn.

Drawn by an island of warmth, Glenn’s hand moved beneath the covers to Kevin’s chest. She was only inches from him when he shifted and there was a faint metallic clatter beneath his shirt. His hand fell on whatever it was and stilled it.

“What did she make you promise?”

“Nothing,” Kevin said. “Just … that I’d be safe. That’s all.”

Glenn waited for more, but moments later his breathing became slow and regular. She turned and stared up at the ceiling, wondering why, for the first time in his life, Kevin Kapoor had just lied to her.

Late that night Kevin pulled the blankets aside and slipped out of bed. Glenn watched out of half-closed eyes as he dressed quietly in the dark and then disappeared into the hallway. His footsteps whispered along the hall and down the stairs.

The inn was quiet except for a low murmur that rose up through the floorboards beneath her. Soon Glenn could make out at least three separate voices — two that were deeper and older, and another …

Glenn lowered her head and focused. The third voice was higher and talked fast in a short, clipped cadence. Kevin.

The wood floor creaked as she put her weight on it. She froze, but there was no change in the voices below. Glenn eased out of bed and crept to the door.

There was a shaft of light coming up the stairway down the hall.

Glenn dropped to a crouch at the edge of the staircase. She kept her body hidden in the darkness, leaning forward just enough so she could look down into the inn.

Kevin sat with his back to her at a table by the fire. Across from him sat the bartender and the violin player.

“Is he here or not?” Kevin asked.

“We’re still not sure who we’re talking to,” the bartender said.

His clawlike hands were on the table, half curled into fists.

“A friend,” Kevin said.

“Prove it.”

Kevin’s hand dropped below the lip of the table and beneath his coat, where he had hidden whatever it was Opal had given him. He pulled it out and placed it flat on the table, but Glenn still couldn’t see what it was.

The bartender turned to the violin player, but the older man remained still, staring across the table at Kevin.

“Can’t imagine where you got that,” the violin player said.

“It was given to me.”

The bartender scoffed. “Might have killed the old bag for it.”

“What do you want?” the violin player asked.

“To talk to Merrin Farrick.”

“About what?”

Kevin said nothing. The bartender shifted in his chair, but the violin player didn’t move. He was an older man with slate gray hair and a heavily lined face covered in short steely whiskers. His eyes, narrow and sharp, were hard on Kevin. Glenn was sure Kevin would crumble under that glare, but he sat deadly still, staring back at them until, as if by some strange magic, the two older men grew smaller and Kevin

larger.

The violin player glanced at the bartender and then out toward the front of the bar. The red-headed man pushed his chair back and quickly walked away from the table. The front door opened and shut, leaving Kevin alone with the musician.