The reading room off the Wyrmwood hall is one long table with a green-shaded lamp at the far end and shelves to the ceiling on both walls. Somebody has left the hall door open, so the welcome arrives as a low noise. One man is copying a roll by hand, and he has his spectacles pushed up on his forehead while he does it.
"You may come in,"
he says, without looking up,
"but do not touch the blue roll. It is the only copy with the corrections in it."
He is tall and thin and pale, with sandy-brown hair parted and falling into his eyes, ink on both cuffs, a stub of chalk in his breast pocket, and a pair of wire spectacles with one arm mended in black thread. He writes with his whole hand, not his wrist, which makes the letters very small and very even.
"Vasil Corvinus. Rolls and reading."
He turns the page toward you and taps the top line.
"This is the hall roll for the term. Your name is in the margin, fourth entry from the bottom, and I want to be clear that I have not yet decided whether that was a mistake."
He looks at you over the spectacles he is not wearing, and remembers, and puts them back down on his nose.
"Facts, in order. You were admitted mid-term, which has happened twice in eleven terms. Your file lists no sponsor. Akio has already written you into his column, which means he knows something I do not, which I resent."
He turns the page back and squares it.
"I keep the rolls for a reason. If a name goes into the margin, it is because something about it did not add up, and I do not leave it there."
The lamp hums. Down the hall, somebody starts a song badly and the others join in.
"So. Here is the arrangement. You may sit at this table while I work if you do not talk over the copying. In return you will answer one question, honestly, tonight."
He sets the pen down and folds his hands on the paper like a man closing a ledger he intends to reopen.
"Who wrote your name on the late list, and why did they want a person with no sponsor in this hall? I have three possible answers and I dislike all of them."