Chapter 13 — The Shape of a Habit
The envelope I'd left by the door was gone when I woke; in its place the ward office had slipped a small tag with a number: 8. Catalogue entry. The circle-maker was counting and now so were we. I put the tag in the ledger, not because it was useful there, but because I wanted the paper to know we were keeping score.
Outside, the campus wore early light like a clean shirt. The flagstones still held last night's cool. I walked to Ether Harmonics with the old pen tucked into my sleeve where it wouldn't look like a statement. Van had drawn no lines today. He stood with his palms flat on the front table as if steadying the room.
"Noise," he said. "You will learn which part you're capable of ignoring. This is not bravado. This is survival."
He opened the casements. Street carts clattered. The bell tower's gears gossiped. Somewhere, a student practiced scales like a confession. We tuned rods and did not strike. The room filled with other people's insistence. My jaw learned where to put itself when listening hurts.
"Prince," Van said without looking up. "You're still gripping like a cutter."
"I like edges," I said.
"Then learn where not to put them," he said, and moved on.
Under the far casement, near the floor where the wall met the old stone with a seam you'd only see if you were paid to see it, the rod throbbed with a frequency that didn't belong to open windows or to cheering students shoving late into a lecture somewhere else. It sat in the teeth. It was a hum like a lie trying out its voice. I marked the map with a small X, then boxed the X, then closed the ledger because there is such a thing as drawing a target in ink.
When Van dismissed us, he barked a single laugh that meant he'd remembered something he didn't want to have to say. "One more thing. If a thing is wrong, it will still be wrong when you've eaten. Do not starve to make a point."
Ethics and Administration wanted to be a trial today. Hale wrote Demonstration Failure across the board and underlined it hard enough to chip chalk. "Our case," she said. "We suspect substandard materials were used in a public restoration. We have evidence enough to make a fuss and not enough to make a case. Do we allow a minor, controlled failure to expose guilt? Or do we protect the project and risk letting the practice continue?"
Hands went up the way fires go up when oxygen is proud of itself. The front-row crest argued that allowing any failure was a betrayal of mandate. The dwarf apprentice Tarr grunted that nothing educates a bursar like a broken plank that doesn't kill anyone.
Hale's lens found me. I hadn't raised a hand. "Lunaris District," she said.
There are answers that make you popular and answers that make the room quieter. "A controlled failure is still a failure," I said. "But the word controlled matters. If you cannot narrow the harm to inconvenience, you don't do it. If you can, and if the only way to change the habit is to show it weight, you set the failure where it teaches most and breaks least. You brace everything around it twice. And you put your name in the ledger where the blow lands."
"Cowardice dressed as caution," the crest said.
"Courage dressed as other people's blood," I said, not loudly. A few students turned to look. People are fascinated by the taste of their own hypocrisy until it turns to something they have to chew.
Hale tapped the board with her chalk. "Record," she said. "If you do not record what you did and why, you did not do policy. You did theatre."
After Ethics, Field Logistics handed us the Academy map and a list of unwelcome lists: weak points, drains, anchor sockets, cart routes. Elias had beaten me to a seat and was already drawing a skeleton of the south face as if he meant to teach it to walk. He'd scrubbed the ink off his wrist but the skin remembered where the numbers had lived.
"We can move the next four deliveries around the east garden and keep carts off the south entirely," he said when the room began offering plans. "Costs two extra hours and a handful of favors. We'll need three more crews if we want the straps redone before the west wind decides it hates us again."
"What favors?" the lecturer asked.
"Guild access. Lantern oil. A bursar's signature where we won't point at it later," Elias said. He didn't look at me when he said it. He didn't have to.
We broke at second bell. Guilds & Governance Exhibition filled the green behind the Rector's hall: stalls under awnings, banners that looked tired of being proud, small plinths where artisans performed competence for politics. Students called it the Charity Market when they were being unkind and the Vendor Fair when they were pretending they weren't.
A resin stand held samples in glass vials lit from beneath so they glowed like captured honey. The sign said North Resin Cooperative — Superior Mixes For Modern Work. The man at the stall had a face that could read as friendly until you asked it for receipts. Deputy Bursar Ilvine stood nearby in a position that meant he wasn't with them and wasn't not with them.
I stepped up and let the stall keeper smell my money. He smiled for my seal. "Your Highness," he said. "A gift for your restoration crews."
"I prefer to pay for what I use," I said, and lifted a vial. The stopper came out with a small sound. The smell was pine and something that wanted to pass for pine if you didn't have a good nose. I tilted the vial and watched the surface sheet along the glass. Clean mixes spend half a second remembering themselves. This one forgot immediately.
"New formula?" I asked.
"Improved," he said. He smiled wider. Ilvine knew not to look at me and did it anyway.
"What did you replace?" I asked.
"Impurities," he said smoothly.
"Which ones?" I asked, and held his eyes.
He missed the step you're supposed to take then—specifics, a number you can argue with later, the name of a binder. Ilvine cleared his throat in a way that people clear their throats when they want to remind a partner to use bigger words. The stall keeper obliged with "proprietary," which is the same as admitting ignorance, but with a ribbon on it.
I turned to Ilvine as if bored by commerce. "The Restoration Office must be relieved," I said.
"It is," he said. He was careful. Careful gets you partway. "The schedule will hold."
"Schedules are habits," I said. "Habits keep people alive."
"Indeed," he said, as if we were discussing café hours.
Elias arrived then with a scholar's smile that did not reach his eyes. He was holding a coin pouch like a man on his last coin. "Samples by weight?" he asked the stall keeper. "We're testing mixes for a classroom demonstration. Magister Van swears he can smell quality. I prefer numbers."
"Of course," the stall keeper said. He bagged two small vials, heavier than you'd need for a demonstration. Elias overpaid by a hair, because people who cheat small are more comfortable cheating when they think you won't notice. He thanked the man like he had just returned a library book and walked away without acknowledging me. Good. We were not supposed to know each other here.
At the next stall a dwarven woman hammered pins into a wooden joint and then pulled the joint apart with her bare hands to show how the wood failed before the pin did. "Superior temper," she declared. "Superior patience." Tarr stood off to the side, admiring misery. He nodded once at me without changing his face. We speak a language here made of stares and unembarrassed competence.
By afternoon, Physical Forms had decided we'd grown sloppy with our feet. The instructor set us to moving through the room without touching anyone else, a cruel exercise in humility. Noble shoulders forgot how wide they weren't. Scholarship kids forgot how to claim space.
"Again," the instructor said whenever we began to believe we had learned. The wolf-eared student moved like he was listening for the floor's permission. I set my pace to his and he found a rhythm that didn't apologize. On break he shared a strip of dried meat without looking at me. I took it and didn't say thank you. There are kindnesses that tarnish if you polish them with words.
Word slipped onto the board by evening: Restoration Drill — South Face. Volunteers report. The crew boss with rope-burn jewelry had written it. Good. She preferred directness to pretty failure.
We met at the base of the scaffolding under a sky thinking about rain. Elias had a coil of line slung over one shoulder and a flat satchel under his arm—slates, receipts, the day's purchases from North Resin. Tarr carried a tool the size and mood of a small hammer.
"Two anchors inward, two cross-lashes, and we pull the third pin to see if your vendor likes theatre," the boss said. "If she does, she'll fail where I want her to."
"I don't like theatre," I said. "But I like audiences who learn."
We set lines. We pulled the third pin. It slid out too easily, the socket deformed in a way that made Tarr swear in a civilized voice. "Soft," he said, the word a verdict. The scaffold shifted a hair and then remembered the ropes we'd tied to tell it a different story. Students on the ground took two quick steps back because their bodies didn't trust their minds.
The crew boss barked, "Hold," and we held. The lash sang. The wind tried to be a villain and failed. The anchor settled into honesty with a sigh.
Ilvine arrived late, as men do when they want to be present for praise but absent for work. He clucked at the ropes. "This wasn't in the plan," he said.
"The plan was written with the wrong pen," the boss said. "We're changing the ink."
Ilvine turned the color of someone deciding whether to scold a dog or pet it. His eyes brushed Elias and he dismissed him as a boy with a rope. His eyes brushed me and he remembered how to smile. "Your Highness," he said. "We appreciate your…interest."
"Interest is free," I said. "Competence is not."
He left with a pace that said he didn't want to be asked for numbers and feared he might be. The crew finished the drill, then finished the shift. The south face stood straighter not because it had learned integrity but because we'd bribed it with rope and attention.
At dusk, the ward office smelled like wet wool and problem-solving. The warden with the jaw scar labeled the resin samples Elias laid on the table: Vendor A (old), Vendor B (new). He dripped both onto two identical slates and tilted them to watch the runs. "Same thickness," he said.
"Different memory," I said. "Watch the edge."
He did. Vendor A beaded and hesitated; Vendor B smeared with the confidence of a liar who'd never been caught. Tarr tapped both beads with the small hammer. Vendor A cracked. Vendor B tore.
The warden made a small, unhappy sound. "Catalogue," he said, and filed the slates. "Still not evidence. Not until somebody signs the wrong thing in the right place."
"They will," Elias said. "Because they think the right place doesn't exist."
"We'll make one," I said.
The warden gave us the look of a man who knows where hope fits in procedure and dislikes both. "Do not get righteous," he said. "Righteous people forget to duck."
"Ducking is a habit," I said. "We're building those."
Night came on fast, a curtain dropped between one kind of work and the next. The harmonic walk gathered thinner than the night before. People believe in danger more at midnight when it's fashionable; they forget at the second midnight when their feet hurt. Elias walked on my left, the chalk plumb ticking my knuckles when the line swung wrong.
At the second bend under the east arch, the chalk went still as a held breath. The wall there had learned a new song. Not louder. Just more insistent. Elias leaned in, nose almost to the stone. "Resin," he said. "New."
"Where?" I asked.
"Joint below eye level," he said, trusting my height to be useful. I crouched and felt for the tack with my fingertips. It clung where no seal should cling—on a seam that should only ever have been mortar and old promise. I tasted pine and cheap.
The warden's lantern caught a shadow moving where the shadow shouldn't. A figure at the far end of the arch, too careful, too clean, a tool roll hugged to the chest as if it were valuable or guilty. We did not chase this time. The warden lifted his lantern higher and let light be its own kind of net.
"Evening," he said. "Ward Office Three."
The figure stopped. I saw dye around the wrist where gloves had failed. The circle-maker lifted a hand as if to wave, then set it down again. "Catalogue," a voice said from the hood. Not a child. Not old. Neutral the way a clerk becomes neutral to keep secrets safe in their throat.
"You can bring them to the office," the warden said.
"Better if you find them," the hood said. "You learn more."
"And if one breaks a neck?" Elias asked, not hiding the bite.
A pause. The kind of pause that makes you realize a person has a rule and is checking it for cracks. "That isn't the intent," the hood said.
"Intent isn't a brace," I said.
"No," the hood agreed. "Habit is."
He vanished sideways in a way that wasn't magic, just practice—the route maintenance takes when it doesn't want to be admired. We stood there with our lantern and our chalk and the wall that had decided to confess in resin.
"Catalogue," the warden said again, because his mouth had learned to say it whenever his hands wanted to do more. He scraped the joint. Elias held the paper envelope like a reliquary. I marked the map, added 9 to the corner, boxed it, closed the ledger.
We were quiet walking back. Quiet born of attention, not defeat. On the ward steps, Elias blew out a breath that fogged the cold a moment. "They're not trying to break us," he said, as if saying it made it less absurd. "They're trying to teach us to look."
"They're trying to see who looks," I said. "Both can be true."
"Bring it to the Rector?" Elias asked, torn between pride in the shape we'd found and the desire to throw it on someone else's desk.
"Not yet," I said. "He's a smart man. He'll ask us the right questions—proof, source, chain of custody. We need those to be harder than the denial."
Elias rubbed his eyes with a knuckle the way tired men do when they can't afford to be. "You're going to make me patient," he said.
"I don't make people things," I said. "I ask them to endure themselves."
He snorted, and the sound had more gratitude in it than he would have liked.
In my room the window was already working at being a mirror. The pen lay where I'd left it, half inside the ledger's spine like a blade being honest about what it is. I wrote three lists.
Noises to ignore: pride in other people's mouths; the market's compliments; the comfortable hum of plans that don't include the cost.
Noises to hear: drains; braces; the way a bursar's voice tightens when the world asks it to name its cousin.
Noises to make deliberately: a rope creak at the right moment; the sound of a pin sliding free without killing anyone; the argument that happens on paper where it can stand up later without your help.
I left space under each list for a later me to argue with this me. He will. He always does.
At the bottom of the page, where I put the thoughts that won't stop tapping the glass, I wrote: A mask isn't a lie. It's a tool. Decide what you want the tool to do before the tool decides for you.
No names. Not yet. But when the campus stopped pretending the sabotage wasn't sabotage, it would be useful to have a face the city didn't know how to praise. Useful to have an identity that could stand under a leaning wall and not bring the Lunaris crest with it. Useful to have a habit. Habits become names.
I sealed the ledger and set the pen across it north-south. Tomorrow would be paperwork. A formal petition to inspect the other faces. A quiet word to the crew boss about keeping kids away from the south when the west wind blew. A visit to the vendor fair with Tarr wearing his most impolite hammer. A question to Van about masking frequencies and whether a counter-hum could make a seam tell on itself.
And three weeks until the assessment, which would measure listening and will and whatever else the Academy thought it could quantify in a room full of people who wanted to be measured until numbers made them invulnerable. I would stand where they told me and let them make their marks. I would hear the tone the room made when everyone held their breath at once.
I slept badly, the way people sleep when they're waiting for someone else to blink. In the near-morning hour when dreams turn into lists, I saw the circle again—the notched gear, the centered dot, the compass tics. This time the dot was not slashed. It was a small hole cut into paper, and through it I could see a city lit by lanterns, each light a person who knew their work and did it without applause.
When the bell rang, I felt almost rested. I put the tag labeled 8 back in the envelope and took the envelope to the ward office before breakfast. On the way out I passed the bursar with a stack of ledgers too small to be confidence and too large to be comfort. He nodded at me as if we were in a play where we had to pretend to like each other.
"Your Highness," he said. "A pleasure."
"Your ledgers look heavy," I said.
"They are," he said, trying for pity. "Responsibility."
"Mm," I said, and walked on. Responsibility is a word that breaks easily when you lean on it wrong.
By midday, the resin stall had a new placard: Now With Improved Binder. Ilvine pretended not to see me see it. Tarr tapped the new bead. It cracked in a less elegant way. Elias wrote the batch number down his wrist and smiled with no teeth. The stall keeper sweated like a seam.
The wind turned west. We walked past the Old Library without being obvious about it. The south face stood inside its ropes and believed us for now. The drain mouths looked clean and had never known a circle in their lives, at least to a casual glance. We are not casual glancers anymore.
The city, when it sings to you, wants you to pick a part and carry it. I wasn't ready to be a tenor or a bell. I was content to be a tuning fork pressed against wood, humming with someone else's potential. For now. There is a line between patience and neglect. The trick is not to mistake one for the other because you like how it feels.
That night, no note slid under my door. The circle-maker had nothing new to say. Good. Silence is information. I slept with the pen under the pillow again. I had not earned ritual yet, but repetition is a kind of prayer.
If you listen, you can hear a habit taking shape in the next room. It sounds like paper being turned carefully. It sounds like rope settling right. It sounds like a boy deciding where to stand when the wall decides to lie.