They'll see you shortly

===85 Spring 1382==========

In the end, the detective examinations week was one of those strange times that made me feel as though I had never done anything in my whole life but prepare for and take exams, and never would do anything else, while at the same time, concluding itself in a barely memorable blink of an eye. Now it was mid-afternoon on Fourthday and I was sitting dispiritedly outside the citadel testing room because scores had posted today and I was waiting here to find out what it meant when somebody got a score that only said “report to examination board.”

Curry had passed all four sections with the same predictably good scores he always did, and I had passed the three written sections with high marks that were probably a reflection of how hard I had studied trying to improve my lackluster skills for the oral examination interview. He had spent most of the last two days trying to put a positive face on things, which was plenty easy for him when he was good at oral exams and he hadn’t been there to see my embarrassingly flustered, almost tearful, all-round pitiful performance.

My general fatigue on these efforts of his was why he was not here with me now. I was sick unto gagging of him trying to cheer me up over this, so instead of letting him wait here with me I’d appealed to him to go buy a particular strawberry dessert I liked, the primary merit of which was the fact that the bakery it came from was at the far end of the fourth ward, which meant it made no sense for him to come all the way back to the citadel to collect me afterward. I would get to do my shameful trudge home on my own, which really suited me after the frankly astonishing percentage of our waking hours that Curry had devoted to his unrelenting campaign of bright-siding.

I hadn’t secretly cried myself to sleep last night, which was an improvement at least on the previous two nights. That was something. I was curious how bad tonight would be, and whether Curry would be annoyed when I had no appetite for the special food I’d sent him hell and away to get for me, or cloyingly sympathetic.

The door to the examination board administrative office opened then and a clerk I didn’t recognize looked out at me. “Are you Berk?”

“It’s Bersk,” I said.

“That’s what I said,” he said.

“The posted marks for the detective examinations said I was supposed to report here. They said to come at one,” I said, because I didn’t have a ready answer for that and I really didn’t give a fuck anyway what this person called me, and because the two o’clock chime had sounded some time ago and I’d been sitting here since lunchtime.

“Come with me.” The man held the door open, with a vaguely disapproving expression on his pinched-looking face. I got up and followed him through to a tiny room where there was a small table, and two chairs, and a chalkboard. The place was so depressingly claustrophobic that it left me conspicuously mindful that in addition to administrative offices and the courts, the citadel also housed the biggest expanse of dungeons in the whole promised cities federation.

“They’ll be in soon.”

“Who—” I began, but the man was already shutting the door and he clearly didn’t care. He obviously wanted his week over with as much as I did, and answering my questions fit into exactly none of his design for the next two hours. I shut up and sat in one of the chairs, and tried to shake the notion that this was some kind of detention-equivalent.

After what felt like quite a long while I dragged my chair over to the blackboard and began doodling little concentric shapes, which got boring pretty fast so I erased them and began writing in Csoglaran: I must be less remedial at oral examinations if I ever want to be in the **** guards, which was more enjoyable than I expected because this sentence required enough iterations of my favorite Glaric letter erhm. So I continued with it, and when after a long time still nobody had shown up, I switched to cursive, since my Csoglaran script had never been as good as my Tetran. I was half through maybe my tenth line of this when the door opened, startling me enough that I dropped the chalk in the tray and spun to face the person.

The middle-aged orcish woman who came in was one of the examination panelists, which vaguely surprised me, because I’d expected another administrative variation on the irritated clerk who wanted to get on with his weekend and didn’t want to be bothered with me. “Hi,” I said, and then realizing I probably wasn’t supposed to be marking up their boards like a dull child, “sorry!” I turned with burning cheeks and picked up the eraser.

“Oh, don’t bother,” she said. Then looking a bit closer she added, “Your Csoglaran script is very nice. Do you speak it?”

“We speak it at home,” I said, then flushed foolishly when I realized how ridiculous that must sound, when I looked nothing close to Csoglaran. “I learned when I was little, and now I live with a Csoglaran family. My watch partner’s family.”

“Interesting.” She regarded me with something approaching puzzlement for a moment, then asked in Csoglaran, “Your partner’s family—are they from Csoglar proper, or part of the Mivian diaspora?”

“Mivia,” I said, also in Csoglaran. “But his nan doesn’t like to talk about it. I was born in Mivia but didn’t grow up there.”

“No?”

“I got given up to the Rooks,” I said, unsure why I was telling her all this personal stuff.

“Given up to the Rooks—does that mean Blackchapel?” she asked, meaning Rava’s temple district where the orphan home was headquartered.

“Yes,” I said, then didn’t know what to add, so I fell silent.

“How did you ever get all the way here from Mivia?”

“One of them came to fetch me from the village chapel to Arvinter, where my parents left me,” I said, confused by this conversation, and even more confused why we were still talking in Csoglaran, but all the same a bit afraid not to go along with it.

The woman motioned me to sit. I did. Then she did. She sat there looking at me a moment with a peculiar bemusement, then asked, “Did you attend any of the Rook schools?”

“Not the college,” I answered. “Only the primary and secondary forms. Then I went to the Watch Guard academy and that’s all the rest of the schooling I got apart from the detective course we just went through.”

“Is Rava’s Secondary where they taught you such good Glaric script?”

“As the instructors there would tell it, my Glaric script has always been something of an embarrassment,” I replied after a moment. Now I really had no idea what was going on. Maybe I had died of mortification in my sleep last night and this was one of the strange liminal dreams that recently recalled people reported from whatever time they spent with Rava before the Rooks pulled them back.

She smiled. Something in her expression had the peculiar flavor of someone who hadn’t expected to smile at any point in this conversation, and who was glad for this disappointed expectation, which puzzled me even more. “The instructors there are too hard,” the woman said. “Your script is excellent.” Instead of going on about any of this, or asking me another question, she studied me a long moment without saying anything.

I was almost about to cave and beg that she explain what was going on, when the woman said in Tetran this time, “I’ll just have out with it. You were summoned here because when examination candidates have such perfect written scores, as you did, coupled with such abysmal live examination scores, it nearly always means that academic dishonesty is to blame.”