killed me.”
And she started crying in earnest. Quentin went to put his arms around her, and said, “Shush, shush…”
Victor stood up. “I move we put memory restoration at the top of the agenda. We all add to our running- away caches, and we all steal money when we can, except you, Quentin. I don’t think we need to flee just yet; they don’t know we’re on to them, and I also want a crack at that safe Amelia saw. As for the memory thing, let’s try the thing in Amelia’s dream. Let’s do that right now.”
“But we need the table,” I said. “The great green table in the Great Hall.”
Victor smiled. “There is also a table made of a similar green marble in the waiting room in front of Boggin’s office. Is it the same? Let’s go upstairs and find out.”
12
1.
Victor and Colin stayed behind in the kitchen to loot it systematically. Victor wanted a certain amount of imperishable foods, lightweight canned goods, and other things like knives, all packed away and hidden before the escape attempt. The outside weather was cold, so even perishable food would keep for a while, hidden in the woods or the Barrows.
When Vanity and I were finally released from doting duty, she had to cut me out of my apron strings with a paring knife. I looked in wonder at the knot Colin had made. It seemed to have no beginning and no end, and have no place for slack to form: a topological impossibility. Perhaps he had done magic to it, “put energy into it,” as he would say. I stuck it in my skirt pocket for later study.
Buttons done up and skirts pulled down, Vanity and I, along with Quentin, made our way up to the Headmaster’s office without incident.
There was the antechamber. Mr. Sprat was not at his desk; no one was around. Beyond the door was the waiting room. As quietly as mice, we crept in. A low table of green marble squatted on heavy crooked legs of wood before the red plush length of the couch. Tall wing-back chairs, red as Catholic cardinals, looming solemnly, crowded close. The two clocks, ticking half a step out of time with each other, stood like sentries to either side of the far door. Two strips of light from the archer-slit windows, one to either side of a book cabinet with dusty glass doors, threw angular lines across the rectilinear shadows.
“This place is a tomb,” Quentin announced. “Someone is buried here.”
Vanity stole over to the other door, which was coated with soundproof leather and a pattern of studs, and put her hand on it. She pushed it open a crack. She sniffed sadly, turned, and came back.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Boggin is not there.”
“That makes you sad?”
“But Odysseus is in there!” she said. “The guy I rescued from the sea. What kind of people would do this to me? Make me read my own story about my own life as an assignment for Greek tutorial? I had to write those damn papers on the
She said to me, “Please tell me this will work on me, too.”
I said, “The dream did not say.”
Quentin said, “I found Apsu, pardon me, I found my walking stick where you had left it in the snow on the windowsill. I must say, I was mightily confused, before I heard your story at breakfast, as to why I had left it there. When I picked it up, it was heavier than normal. That usually only happens when a True Dream, a dream from the Gate of Horn, had flown by on owl-wing. Do you remember your dream with particular clarity? If it came at dawn, it may be a
I repeated the words the egg had spoken to me in my dream. “ ‘
Vanity said, “Why are we assuming he meant me to stand on a table?”
I said, “The Stone Table, the Boundary Stone Table, is what Boggin and his pals called the big green table in the Great Hall. Also, the Hundred-Hand Man said the table allowed his powers to work outside of his native land.”
Quentin asked me about the first stanza of the dream, and I repeated the words of greeting.
Quentin said, “And he said your name was Phaethusa?”
I said, “Either that, or I was supposed to pass a message along to her. Do either of you recognize that name from myth or books?”
Quentin said, “We’ve all read the same books, Amelia.”
“But we don’t all get the same grades,” I said, trying to preserve a look of dignity.
Vanity said, “Melly here would crib off me in Greek and Latin. And she did my math for me.”
Quentin looked shocked. “You didn’t do your lessons?” The idea seemed to astonish him. “I thought only, you know, kids on TV sitcoms acted that way. And Colin. But I thought he was a freak of nature, or something.”
I said, “We’re all freaks of nature.”
Vanity said tartly, “No, only
Quentin said, “Amelia, turn your back.”
I blinked. “What? Why?”
Quentin said, “Or don’t, as you like.”
Vanity was beginning to look both suspicious and flustered.
Quentin stepped up to her, took both her hands in his hands, stared into her eyes for a long moment.
He said, “Vanity, no matter what we discover, now or ever, what I feel for you shall be unchanged and unchanging.”
“Quentin, I…”
“Hush. I am going to kiss you.”
Vanity blushed and looked at her feet. “You’ve drunk too much champagne…”
“I said, ‘Hush.’ ”
And he took her chin in his fingers, tilted her head up.
Vanity closed her eyes and pursed her lips. I have never seen a face look more sweet, before or since, than she looked at that moment. Or more trusting.
He kissed her.
I know I was really not supposed to stand there gawking, but wild horses could not have dragged me away at that moment. I had known, for months now, how Vanity felt about Quentin.
He stepped back, his eyes filled with emotion, but his face calm. The same way, earlier, I had seen an expression that made me think he was a five-year-old, now I saw what he would look like when he was twenty-five, when he was forty-five.
Quentin laughed for mere joy, and said, “Colin told me never to ‘ask’ a girl for a kiss, merely to inform her so she knows you’re doing it deliberately. I have no idea why he thinks he knows anything about women, since he’s never met any I haven’t met. But maybe he knows the right thing about women.”
Vanity’s face, all freckled and round and flushed, lit up like the sun coming out, and her smile peeped up,
