at a time. She didn’t much like it either, but they almost always looked away first.
The other players put down their cards. The student scowled at his hand while Micah busily arranged her winnings in stacks ordered by the size and value of the coins.
“Another hand,” said the student, with a funny sort of lift in his voice. Micah decided that she should ask Joshua what it meant when their voices got tight like that, and their eyebrows started wandering up their foreheads like caterpillars. Joshua was better at that sort of thing than Rafe. Rafe was better at talking.
She was trying to decide if it was worth waiting out her next good hand when a crowd of students pushed in through the narrow front door.
“They’re meeting now, the bastards!”
“Who’s meeting, Dickson?”
“The governors! Word is they could even take the vote!”
Micah, putting the last five-minnow in its stack, had been trying to ignore the noisy intruders. But then the student with the wandering eyebrows stood abruptly and smacked his fist on the table, toppling her careful piles. The shouting grew very loud. In a sudden panic, Micah shoved the coins into the inside pocket of her jerkin. Losing the coins would be worse than jumbling them up, and she could put them in good order later. She was still very hungry. She should certainly leave. But when she looked up, all she saw was a smear, noise and high emotion blurring the angry faces before her into a mob.
Take a deep breath. That was what her grandfather had always told her to do when she was little and overwhelmed by the noises of the city on market day. She tried, but someone knocked into her and someone else held her up by her elbow so that she didn’t fall and then the chanting grew louder, like a chisel between her ears. Her eyes watered. She didn’t even have time to wipe them—the crowd swept her up like a saint on a feast day and she was carried away.
“Freedom of the intellect!” was the chant, but they might as well have been speaking the language of the chocolate traders for all Micah understood them. She closed her eyes. An image of Cousin Reuben in his favorite feathered cap appeared behind her lids.
“What have you done now, kid?” said the Cousin Reuben of her conscience.
Micah had been very excited about the cards and money and equations. But stumbling in the midst of a press of marching students, she began to think she would have been much better off keeping to her turnips.
• • •
Rafe’s luck held: he and Kaab got there just as the students were flooding the University streets, tumbling from the pubs and classes and chocolate houses in all directions. They all gathered in front of the Governors’ Hall, where the board had hoped to keep their meeting secret, and at the earliest possible opportunity Rafe climbed the base of the bronze statue of old Rastin and began a modest, stirring oratory he had composed while pushing through the crowd ahead of Kaab, who looked up at him now with amusement.
“If we let this gaggle of barely educated nobles dictate, for political ends, the course of our intellectual pursuits,” called Rafe, aware that his black curls had fallen out of the leather tie, lending him a pleasingly raffish air in the current circumstances, “we might as well return to thinking that the stars have been painted on the cloth of the sky. We might as well tear down the lecture halls and burn the books. Because they will come for those next, if we say something that does not agree with the political aspirations of those lordlings on the Hill.”
This got a satisfying cheer, and another chant. He was just thinking of whether he should follow with a rather fine poem of Joshua’s composition or something more traditional, when he heard his name called in a strangled voice, followed immediately by the somewhat sticky embrace of a young lad with a bowl cut and the family chin.
Rafe slid down the pedestal and only remained upright by the dint of Micah’s surprising strength.
“I didn’t think I’d ever see you again!” said the boy.
“Goodness, no need to get apocalyptic . . . did you fall asleep in a beer keg? You smell like a bad amber wheat five days flat.”
Micah sniffed. “I fell.”
Some smart aleck from the crowd shouted, “Who’s the sweetheart, Rafe?” and at least five others laughed. He glowered, but Kaab distracted him from identifying the culprits.
“Is this Micah?” she asked, peering at them both with that curious intensity of hers.
“Yes,” he said shortly. “Talk amongst yourselves. I want to see the faces of those cowards when they walk out and have to face us.”
The crowd that had gathered to hear him speak was now drifting toward the closed doors of the hall. The rumor was that the governors could even vote today, but after a few panicked moments Rafe had decided to discount it. The Board of Governors was, above all, a conservative body. The vote had been set for next month. Even student unrest was unlikely to make them move it up. Rafe did not want them to pass the bylaw change at all, of course, but provided that they did so safely after he sat his Master’s exams, the outrage would give plenty of opportunity to intelligent men dedicated to the new modes of investigation. Once he had been accepted as a Doctor, he would be able to open a school that would revolutionize the way a generation of scholars would think about natural philosophy. When he died, they might erect a statue of him beside natty old Rastin here in Governors’ Square. Not that he had mentioned that last ambition to anyone, even Joshua.
Despite the general air of expectation in the square, the doors remained stubbornly closed and barred. A few daring students attempted to rush them, but they had been built to withstand the dangers of a more volatile age. The aged oak and thumb-thick iron hasps would take more than a few students drunk on outrage to force open.
The meeting had been going on for hours, according to the latest rumors. They should have finished by now. Was the board actually voting? Rafe felt jittery, his throat full of fire or bile, his skin vibrating with the desire to do something, not just wait here like sheep in a defile. Was there another way out of the hall? Could those cowards be attempting an escape through the delivery entrance? Rafe elbowed his way back toward old Rastin, simultaneously pleased and worried that the crowd had grown so thick so quickly. Some kind of band blocked the most direct path to where he had left Micah and Kaab. The sound of pipe and tambour had never so offended him—what was this, a festival or a protest? If they didn’t take themselves seriously, how could they expect the board to?
He was composing a few choice paragraphs on the subject when he reached the southern edge of the square. Here the crowd had thinned enough to finally let him beat his way back to Rastin’s shitstained shoulders. He shuddered to think of what he would tell Cousin Reuben if he managed to lose the boy. Micah did not do well in crowds. But, Rafe reasoned, he was with Kaab, who—for all that she was a woman and a foreigner new to the city—seemed like the sort who could keep her head at anything short of a chopping block.
A towheaded man, half a hand taller than most of those around him, composed as though by an artist of lean and elegant lines, rested against the retaining wall and looked nervously at the students still pouring in through the side streets and alleyways. Their eyes met and locked. The jittery feeling that had propelled Rafe away from his vigil by the entrance returned. Only now, that vague static seemed to align and gather force and move his feet and tongue as though of their own accord, so that he heard himself saying: “You look lost. Are you?”
The towheaded man looked down at him, and shook his head with a twisted half-smile
