Math didn’t lie. It shouldn’t be necessary to fudge the answers to basic problems of navigation with fixes based upon direct experience, as ship captains and navigators routinely did. That was cheating. People cheated all the time, but not numbers. That was one reason why, on the whole, she preferred numbers to people. With numbers, she knew exactly where she stood.
Or always had, until now.
And there it was again, that fizzy feeling she’d felt in Volney’s lecture, with its peculiarly pleasant mix of discomfort and anticipation, like an itch that begged for scratching.
An itch she couldn’t reach.
But she had to reach it. If she failed, she would disappoint Rafe, who had been so nice to her. Who believed in her. And all her time here in the City would be for nothing. She would go home a failure, and her family would smile and hug her but on the inside would think about the work she’d missed, the help she hadn’t been there to give them just when they’d needed it most.
At least, she thought, she could do something about that.
On her way out, Micah paused to push the slumbering student aside—he snorted but did not wake—and retrieved the sack of turnips. Sooner or later, Rafe would show up at the Inkpot; he always did. And when he did, she would make sure that he took the turnips to Tremontaine House as he’d promised. They were not yet too old to make a favorable impression on any cook who knew a thing or two about root vegetables.
Juggling the sack and papers in her arms, Micah made her way down the stairs and out the front door. The sun shone brightly; it was a hot day, the first day that really felt like summer, even though it was technically still late spring. She stood back against the door, blinking and getting her bearings as crowds of people streamed by. It was as if the party inside had reached that tipping point she’d postulated and spilled out onto the sidewalk. And in fact the return of chocolate did seem to have put the whole City in a festive mood. Lately, everyone she saw on the streets was bursting with energy and enthusiasm; people talked loudly and gesticulated as they walked, smiling and laughing together; her aunt would have said they had a spring in their step, but to Micah it seemed much more than that, as if they were awaiting only some prearranged signal that would send them spinning about each other like the dancers at the Tremontaine ball.
She took a steadying breath and plunged into the stream.
As she walked, half swept along in the flow, shifting the sack of turnips in her arms so as to keep the jumble of papers from blocking her view, she thought again of music, and of math, which was merely another kind of music, just as music was another name for math. The notion came to her that perhaps the unheard music that orchestrated the movements all around her could be translated into math.
For an instant, she pictured herself as one of the guests at the Tremontaine ball, sweeping across the tiled ballroom floor in swift and elegant steps that traced hyperbolic patterns, which themselves could be rendered in the curves of trigonometric functions, orbiting the room like one of the planets in Rafe’s heliocentric theory, the floor no longer flat beneath her feet but swollen, rounded. She felt it then, the fizzy sensation that had been announcing something all day, felt it rising up higher than it had before, but still not high enough for her to grasp with her conscious mind, though she reached for it, groping, felt it slip back through the fingers of her flimsy understanding and fall away, saw in her mind’s eye its glittering effervescent after-trail bending against a dark background like the tail of a comet. Desolation scraped her insides, as if she’d lost the thing she loved most in all the world. A soft moan escaped her lips, and her feet fell out of rhythm.
“Hey, watch where you’re going!”
A shoulder jostled her along with the voice, and she felt herself spun in a direction she hadn’t intended to go. Before she could gather herself, someone else stumbled into her, or she into someone else; at any rate, the collision altered her trajectory again, and what was even worse, loosened her grip on the papers in her arms. They began to slide, and as she frantically tried to clutch them closer to her chest, like a shield, a third collision, the most forceful yet, knocked her off her feet. As she fell, papers and charts and tables and numbers real and artificial scattering like leaves around her, the sack of turnips flew up, and its contents, as if eager to be free, shot from the open top. For an instant, a flock of bulbous shapes in graceless tumbling flight was silhouetted in transit across the sun’s blazing face.
Time froze. Or she did. The backlit shapes, smoothed in shadow, hung suspended like fruit, perfect orbs ripe for plucking. She felt as if she had grown unbelievably large, bigger than the whole world, and was gazing down upon creation as the gods themselves might see it, from an incalculable height, watching the stately, ordained dance of the planets about their central star. A fizzing kind of music filled her ears.
Then it was over. Micah was her normal size again, flat on her back, head ringing from an impact she hadn’t felt, partially blinded by the sun. Blurry people shapes gathered around her making solicitous sounds she barely heard and didn’t trouble to understand. Things were happening to her body; distantly, she was aware of being helped to her feet, of loose papers and turnips being thrust into her arms, which somehow accepted them.
“I’m fine,” she said, or tried to say, or imagined herself saying. “I’m fine. Leave me alone, please.” Meanwhile, she shoved and pushed and wriggled her way free of the crowd, propelled by pure instinct.
None of this was important. None of it mattered.
What mattered was so beautiful, so simple, so clear. A sphere. The world was a sphere, orbiting the sun in harmony with other spheres. It could never be an ellipsoid; she knew that with an utter certainty, as she knew that water was wet. The math was something to be worked out. But Rafe was right. She knew that now, utterly. Felt the rightness of it, like the sprouting of a seed, the turning of a season. She understood why her calculations kept coming out wrong, even after she’d corrected the tables.
Laughing now, her mind on fire, Micah set her papers and turnips down on the sidewalk. She stood, though she barely realized it, in front of a shop of some kind, the glass of the windowpanes reflecting her own image and that of the murmurous crowd gathering behind her. She paid no heed to either. Instead, she stooped and shuffled through the papers until she found a certain page from her table of artificial numbers. Standing, she studied it intently.
Micah gasped. A terrible new knowledge broke upon her.
If the earth was a sphere, then Kaab was wrong. The Kinwiinik were wrong. Their navigation was based on a false understanding of absolutely everything! Only pure luck had enabled them to repeatedly cross the sea without disaster. That luck couldn’t hold. No ship that left port was safe, she realized. Not those of the City. Not those of the Kinwiinik. All of them, and all aboard them, were as good as sailing to their deaths.
But was she right? She had to do the math. Prove it to herself, prove it all worked with her new realization. She tucked the page under one arm, digging meanwhile in her pocket for the inkpot . . . Oh god, had it broken? No, there it was, whole and sound! She wrenched off the top and heedlessly let it fall; then, with the open inkpot cradled in the palm of one hand, she patted herself down with the other, looking for a quill. But it seemed she had neglected to bring any, damn it all. No matter!
Dipping her finger into the inkpot, Micah stepped up to the glass window and began feverishly to write.
As Rafe shouldered his way down the choked, narrow streets of the Hill in the afternoon light, the memory of the afternoon’s embraces so recently shared—of the last, lingering kiss he’d snatched before parting, the sweet hint of chocolate he’d licked from Will’s lips—caused his breath to catch, his legs to tremble. He scarcely saw his surroundings, paid no heed to the passersby he jostled, like some drunkard reeling home from a tavern.
Ah god, the duke had such a confounded effect on him! It was as if Will had put him under a spell . . . or, rather, Rafe thought, a curse. He ha
d but to catch a glimpse of Will, or not even that, just to smell him, for his body to respond with a fervor he couldn’t resist, had no desire to resist—on the contrary, he yearned more than anything to surrender to it. And surrender he did, repeatedly, holding nothing back, giving of himself to the very dregs. It was bliss. It was torture.
His feet had led him by habit to the booksellers’ quarter, one of his favorite haunts in days gone by. Stalls filled with books, journals, and pamphlets of all kinds lined the street, and he felt a pang of nostalgia for the hours he’d spent browsing here, his only concern whether or not he would be able to convince a bookseller to give him credit. Now, thanks to the duke, he had the money . . . but his desire for books had been overwhelmed by other desires, as a small flame is blown out by a larger blaze.
“Ah, young Master Fenton!” a nearby seller called. “I’ve been holding some journals for you—full of numbers and lines and arrows and whatnot, just the sort of thing you like best.”
“How are you, Master Brooks?” Rafe inquired politely. The man was nearly as old as the books he sold, but sharp as a knife. Rafe wondered what he wanted.
“Still breathing,” Brooks said, showing three yellowed teeth in a smile. “I hear congratulations are in order. You are a Master of the University now.”
“It’s true,” Rafe said, satisfied.
Brooks gave him a sly look. “Then perhaps you can pay your debt.”
“Ah, yes. Of course. How much was that again?”
A figure was named, and Rafe took some small pleasure in conveying the amount coin by coin into Brooks’s wizened hand.
The old man’s eyes widened at the weight in his palm. He wasted no time tucking the money into his purse. “Let me get you those journals,” he said.
Rafe waved a negligent hand. “Another time.”
The prospect of reading the scientific work of others filled him with something close to despair. He’d always put the pleasures of the mind above those of the body, enjoying the latter all the more for the respite they provided from the intense, exhausting demands of the former. For years he’d flitted like a bee from flower to flower in the lush hothouse of the City while his mind, unconcerned, went about its lofty and imperious business. But now there was no separation: the Duke Tremontaine had taken possession of him, body and mind.
“Shall I hold them for you?” asked Brooks.
Rafe shrugged. “As you like,” he said, and resumed his downward path.
He had given everything to the duke, and what had he received in return? He was secretary to his lover . . . and to his lover’s virago of a wife. He was a Master of the University, the goal toward which he’d worked for so long . . . yet could he truly claim to have won that prize on his own merits and not thanks to the duke’s influence? And as for the school he planned to build, would that, too, be less his own accomplishment than the duke’s fond indulgence?
This was not the life he had wanted for himself. This was not the person he had imagined himself becoming.
It wasn’t Will’s fault. The man had done everything in his power to make it plain how much Rafe meant to him, how much his ideas were valued, his dreams shared. But there was a fundamental imbalance between them, one that Rafe couldn’t ignore even if Will seemed content to do so.
That imbalance, like so many other things, was easy for Will to ignore. He was, after all, the head of a noble house of great antiquity. Wealth and position were his birthright; they were the very air he breathed. Rafe was a merchant’s son.
What, then? Must he spend his life in thrall to a passion that demanded he play a role he had no stomach for, a role that rebuked him daily for taking the easy route, for sacrificing ambition on the altar of lust and expediency? As altars went, he supposed it wasn’t too shabby, but if he were to turn a corner now and find himself face to face with the Rafe of a year ago, wouldn’t that Rafe regard him with a sneer, the hard glint of contempt in his eye? And wouldn’t he deserve to be so regarded?
No, he told himself for the thousandth time, he must resign his post. He must make his own way in the world. If the duke loved him as he loved the duke (and oh, he thought, has it really come to love? He blushed as if that sneering Rafe of a year ago were witness to this moment and judged it as well), then wouldn’t the duke understand, and wouldn’t he still come to Rafe in a manner that preserved Rafe’s dignity as well as his own? Was that too much to ask?
But what if he did not come! Rafe’s heart thumped hollowly, and his legs grew weak in quite another way than they had a moment ago. Never to see Will again, never to touch him . . . Tears stung his eyes. He mentally kicked the smug Rafe of a year ago bloody and senseless to the curb, then trod back and forth over him with hobnail boots a dozen times for good measure.
Ah gods, such an overwhelming effect the man had!
Rafe had descended the Hill and crossed the river to the University without even noticing it. He needed a drink. Hell, he needed a few drinks. He’d intended to go home, to change into fresh clothes, check on Micah’s progress, and see whom he could coax out to the Inkpot. But now Rafe decided to make straight for that refuge.
Around the next corner he came upon not the battered Rafe of a year ago seeking revenge, but a noisy crowd gathered in front of a butcher shop. The shop’s window—what he could see of it through the milling crowd—was covered in numbers and geometrical drawings, like some rogue slate board run off from a University lecture hall for an exciting life in the streets . . . only the ink used to draw upon the window had run, so that the glass almost appeared to be bleeding. The crowd laughed and hooted. A smudged paper on the sidewalk caught Rafe’s eye; he snatched it up; there could be no mistaking that handwriting. Gods, what had happened? Alarmed, he hastened forward and began to push his way to the front of the crowd even as he heard a voice ring out—a voice as unmistakable as the handwriting.
“I’m telling you, we have to close the port! Don’t you see? We can’t let them sail! Not a single ship! We have to shut it down right now!”
Laughter crested on all sides. Then Rafe burst through.
Micah stood in front of the shop window, his hair disheveled, his eyes wild, his gesturing hands covered with black ink, as was his face, which was otherwise pale as Duchess Tremontaine’s pristine ball invitations. Rafe had never seen him so worked up. He was facing two men, his attention fixed on them to the exclusion of all else.
One of these men, by his dress, was a member of the City Watch. This gentleman had pushed back his cap and was scratching his gleaming bald head in perplexity. The other man, beardless as Micah, wore a bloodstained butcher’s apron and carried a cleaver in one hand and a length of sausage in the other. The former hung seemingly forgotten at his side as he shook the latter like an admonitory finger as he spoke, much to the crowd’s delight.
“What do I know of ships?” he demanded. “This is a butcher shop, not a customs office! This boy is crazy—do your duty and arrest him for defacing private property!”
“Wellll . . .” drawled the watchman, squinting his right eye as if by doing so he might suddenly bring what he was seeing into a sensible focus.
“I’m not crazy!” Micah pointed toward the window. “It’s all there! Are you blind or just stupid? The numbers don’t lie! We have to shut down the port!”
“Wellll . . .” repeated the watchman, squinting his left eye now.
“What seems to be the problem?” Rafe said, stepping forward.
“Rafe!” Micah turned to him, an expression of relief flooding his features. “Where have you been?” he added sharply, as though Rafe were late for an appointment.
Rafe was pretty sure that wasn’t the case.
“At Tremontaine House,” he said, inserting himself smoothly between Micah and the two men.
“And who might you be?” the watchman asked.
“Rafe Fenton,” he answered, “Master of the University and Private Secretary to His Grace the Duke Tremontaine.”
At this informatio
n, delivered in a single breath, a hush fell over the crowd. The watchman drew himself up, while the butcher let his sausage droop and his jaw hang open.
“This lad,” Rafe continued smoothly, “is a University student, a protégé of the duke’s. He’s a mathematical genius. Arrest him? Why, we should be giving him a medal! These calculations alone—” And here he glanced theatrically toward the window, where the ink had continued to run, rendering Micah’s scribbles all but meaningless.
“You see, Rafe?” Micah said urgently. “You see, don’t you?”
“What is it, sir?” asked the guardsman.
“Never mind,” said Rafe, collecting himself. “Very sorry to have troubled you. Apologies for the window,” he added, addressing the butcher.
The man managed to close his mouth, but anything more seemed beyond him.
Rafe turned to Micah. “Gather your things and let’s get out of here,” he said in a low, urgent tone.
“But Rafe—”
“We’ll talk in private,” he said. “Please hurry.”
“Yes, we must hurry!” Micah echoed, and bent to retrieve his scattered papers. The nearest members of the crowd helped; one woman handed Micah a dirt-smudged, bulging sack that he accepted with a glad cry and pressed to his chest as if it were the most precious thing in the world.
“Here now,” said the watchman. “What’s all this about shutting down the port?”
Micah stood, the beginnings of a reply on his face, but Rafe cut him off with a laugh. “Just a misunderstanding.”
“But Rafe—” Micah began.
“Now, Micah,” Rafe said, shooting him a look whose meaning he hoped would be plain, though, knowing Micah, he suspected otherwise, “it’s all right. You’ve passed.”
“Passed what?” asked the watchman blankly.
Rafe leaned forward and spoke with a confidential air. “Micah’s been put up for membership in an exclusive University club that sets its proposed members certain, er, amusing but harmless public tasks to prove their interest.”
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