Chapter 29 SECRETS THE HEADMASTER KEPT
I told Ivana I was going for a walk.
She looked at me with those eyes that missed nothing and I looked back at her and we had approximately three seconds of silent conversation that covered everything. She knew I wasn’t going for a walk, I knew she knew and she knew that I knew she knew and then she said “be back by ten” and went back to her book and that was that.
I loved her for it.
The message had said come alone so I came alone, which went against every instinct I had developed over the past weeks but which I honored anyway because Headmaster Voss reaching out in secret at night on an unknown number was not something I was going to ignore regardless of how it felt to walk through the academy corridors by myself with no one knowing exactly where I was going.
He had included a location in a follow up message.
Not his office, the top floor of the east wing had an old observatory that hadn’t been used as an actual observatory in decades and existed now as one of those academy spaces that had a specific historical purpose and no current one, which meant it sat empty most of the time and appeared on no one’s schedule of monitored locations. I had walked past it twice and never thought about it. Which was probably the point.
The stairs up to it were narrow and the door at the top was unlocked so I pushed it through.
Headmaster Voss was standing at the far end of the circular room with his hands behind his back looking out through the curved glass of the observatory dome at the night sky. He heard me come in and turned and looked at me with those still composed eyes and for a moment neither of us said anything, just two people in a dark circular room assessing each other honestly.
He looked tired. Not the tired of someone who hadn’t slept but rather the tired of someone who had been carrying something for a very long time and was running low on the particular energy that sustained that kind of carrying.
“Thank you for coming,” he said.
“You didn’t give me much context,” I said. “Hard to decide whether to come when you don’t know what you’re coming to.”
Something moved in his expression. Not quite a smile, the ghost of one.
“No,” he said. “I suppose I didn’t.” He gestured toward two chairs positioned near the dome’s center. Old, wooden, clearly moved here deliberately for this specific conversation. “Sit down please.”
I sat.
He sat across from me and looked at me for a moment with those tired composed eyes and said “How much do you know about why I’ve been headmaster of Ironfang for nineteen years?”
The question was so far from what I had been expecting that I just looked at him for a second.
“I don’t know anything about that,” I said honestly.
“No reason you would.” He folded his hands in his lap. “I was appointed to this position by the Alpha council nineteen years ago. Standard process, the council oversees all senior academy appointments, the headmaster of Ironfang included. I was young for it as I was thirty four. People said so at the time. What people didn’t know was that my appointment was not entirely the result of standard process.”
I held his gaze. “What was it the result of?”
“Marcus Von,” he said simply.
The room was very still.
“My father,” I said.
“Your father.” He said it without the weight that most people attached to it, without the careful management of someone handling something sensitive. Just plainly. “He was on the junior appointment committee that year. He had no formal authority over the final decision but he had influence and he used it on my behalf. I had been a candidate for the position twice before and been passed over both times. Your father looked at my file and looked at the other candidates and made the case to the committee that I was the right person. He did it because he believed it and not because of anything I offered him or any connection between our packs. He simply thought I was the right person and said so.”
I looked at this man across from me. The nineteen years of headmaster. The still composed quality of him. The tiredness underneath it.
“You’ve been here ever since,” I said.
“I have.” He held my gaze. “And I have been aware for eleven of those nineteen years that what the official council record says about Marcus Von is not what actually happened to Marcus Von. I became aware of it through channels I won’t detail but which you can probably infer from the network of people you’ve been building relationships with since you arrived.”
Professor Maren’s network. Six people, and apparently a seventh who had never been formally counted.
“You’re part of it,” I said.
“Adjacent to it,” he said carefully. “I have been aware, and selectively useful, without being formally embedded in it. The distinction matters because my position here requires a particular kind of neutrality that formal embeddedness would compromise. I have looked the other way at certain things, facilitated certain access. Ensured that specific rooms remained available and specific schedules remained unmonitored.” He held my gaze. “The practice room, for instance. The archive rotation on Tuesday and Thursday evenings.”
I stared at him.
He had been making space for all of it quietly from the beginning.
“Why are you telling me this now?” I said.
“Because Caden Von filed a formal misconduct complaint against Professor Maren at four o’clock this afternoon,” he said. “And as headmaster I am required to convene the review board within forty eight hours and suspend her from all faculty activities pending the outcome. I cannot stop the process from happening. The procedural requirements are clear and I have no grounds to override them without exposing my own position and everything that position has been quietly protecting, but I can tell you something that Caden doesn’t know I know.”
I leaned forward slightly.
“The review board has three members,” he said. “Two are appointed by the faculty administration, those appointments have already been made and both members have connections to Caden that I find professionally troubling. The third member is appointed by the headmaster.” He held my gaze steadily. “I appointed her this afternoon.”
“Who?” I said.
“Someone who knew Marcus Von,” he said. “Someone who has been waiting a long time for the opportunity to be useful in the right direction. The review board cannot exonerate Professor Maren on its own, that requires a separate process. But a divided board finding means the suspension cannot be made permanent. It stays provisional, which means Professor Maren remains technically suspended but cannot be formally removed from the academy.” He held my gaze. “She loses her sessions with you and her official faculty access. She does not lose her presence here or her ability to communicate through unofficial channels.”
I sat with that.
It wasn’t everything but it was not nothing.
“Caden won’t get what he wants,” I said slowly.
“He’ll get a version of what he wants,” Voss said. “Enough to think he’s won that particular move. Not enough to actually win it. That distinction is what I can offer. It’s not much but it’s what’s available to me within the constraints of my position.”
I looked at him. At this man who had been quietly holding a door open for nineteen years because my father had believed he was the right person for something and had said so.
“Why not more?” I asked. Not accusatory, genuinely wanting to understand. “You’ve been here nineteen years and you have authority, why not use it more directly?”
“Because direct use of my authority against Caden Von in an official capacity requires official grounds,” he said. “And official grounds require exactly the kind of evidence that has only just become available, which is why I’m here tonight and not five years ago.” Something moved in his eyes. Old and complex and carrying the particular weight of someone who had made a calculation and lived inside it for a long time and was not entirely at peace with every aspect of that calculation. “I have not always been comfortable with the pace of it, but comfort and strategy are not always the same thing.”
I thought about Professor Lind saying something similar in the archive tjough with different words but same truth.
“When the formal review is called,” I said carefully. “By Councilwoman Crane. Will you support it?”
He looked at me for a long moment.
“I will be the first person to publicly confirm its legitimacy,” he said quietly. “The moment it is called I will issue a formal statement of support from the academy, which carries weight. The headmaster of Ironfang publicly backing a council review is not something Caden’s allies can easily dismiss or minimize. That is what I have saved my direct authority for, that specific moment.”
The observatory was very quiet around us.
Outside the dome the night sky was clear, properly clear for the first time in days, the cloud cover gone and the stars present and the forest below the academy a dark mass that extended to the horizon and beyond it.
I thought about five days.
About a review board with a divided finding that kept Professor Maren in the building.
“Does she know?” I asked. “Professor Maren, does she know you’re adjacent to the network?”
“She has suspected for years,” he said. “We have never discussed it directly. She is appropriately cautious about trust.”
“She is,” I agreed.
He almost smiled again, further this time.
“You’re like him,” he said quietly. “The way you sit in a room. The way you ask questions. Direct, no performance around them, just the question. He used to do that in committee meetings. Ask the thing everyone else was dancing around as if it was the most natural thing in the world to simply say it plainly.”
My chest did something I didn’t try to name.
“I never knew him,” I said. “Not really, I was five.”
“I know.” His voice was gentle in a way his composed professional manner hadn’t suggested it could be. “You’ll know him soon.” He said “in five days”.
I stood up.
“Thank you,” I said.
He stood too, looked at me across the old wooden chairs in the circular room under the dome with the stars showing through the glass above us.
“Your father made one decision on my behalf nineteen years ago because he thought it was right,” he said. “I have spent nineteen years trying to be worth that decision. I think I’m nearly there.”
I held his gaze for a moment, then I turned and went back down the narrow stairs and through the quiet corridors of the east wing and up to room 307 where Ivana was in bed pretending to be asleep in the particular unconvincing way of someone who had definitely been awake and waiting.
I sat on my bed.
“Well?” she said immediately.
“I thought you were asleep,” I said.
“I was resting my eyes.” She sat up. “Well?”
I looked at the ceiling.
“Voss is on our side,” I said.
Ivana stared at me.
“Headmaster Voss,” she said slowly.
“Yes.”
“Has been on our side.”
“Apparently for nineteen years.”
She opened her mouth, closed it and opened it again.
“Ariana,” she said.
“I know,” I said.
“Headmaster Voss.”
“Ivana.”
“Nineteen years.”
“I know.” I looked at her. “Go to sleep.”
She lay back down and was quiet for approximately eight seconds.
“Nineteen years,” she said again, to the ceiling.
I closed my eyes and almost smiled and five days sat on the clock and somewhere out there my father was moving and Headmaster Voss had been holding a door open since before I was born and the warmth in my chest sat steady and present and I thought, we might actually do this.