Chapter 1

"You must be terribly proud of yourself," Miss van Cleef said. "Being so pretty."

Justin didn't answer. If you didn't answer a teacher's question at St. James's School for Young Men, you could get in trouble. Answering a statement that sounded like a question could get you in trouble too, though. He sat looking straight ahead. There wasn't anything for him to say, either.

He'd been called both proud and pretty before. Both were frequently epithets. He could deny neither. When he looked in a mirror, he saw only the boy he'd always been. But, he knew people were drawn to him. Too many of the school's older boys had tried to coerce, cajole, or even force him to touch them and needed to be beaten bloody before they saw the error of their ways.

The charge of pride confused him even more than accusations of beauty. People who threw his pride in his face invariably seemed to be saying he should be ashamed of something, but he never understood what he was supposed to be ashamed of.

"The other boys call you the Raven." Miss van Cleef stepped into view, "Why do you think they do that?"

Justin lowered his head. He knew why they did even better than they knew. At Saint Crellifer's, his last school, another boy had written a truly dreadful and explicitly homoerotic poem called "The Magnificent Raven." He hadn't actually named Justin, but everyone had known who he meant. Justin had been glad to transfer out of Saint Crellifer's after a year, but the nickname had followed him.

At least the "Magnificent" hadn't followed him here. Neither had specific taunts about "blue-blood tresses," "delicate lashes," or "glittering eyes."

"Boys make up cruel names," he said quietly. If the comment hit home, Miss van Cleef showed no sign. She had to know that boys called her "the Yardstick" for the device she seemed to never be without. Mostly, she used it to gesture, but it had come down on enough knuckles and shoulders that no one dared to be inattentive in her class.

He wondered if she knew that some boys also called her "the Sausage" for the way she wore her long, blond hair in a bun so tight that it seemed to pull at the skin of her face.

"I call you an insolent, indolent, unruly boy," she said. "What do you think of that, Mr. Dark?"

"I prefer it to 'the Raven, ' Miss van Cleef."

For a moment, it seemed like she wanted to laugh. Instead, she tapped the desk in front of him with her ruler, "That is exactly the sort of insolence I'm talking about, Mr. Dark. One week in the stables."

"Yes, Miss van Cleef," he said, resigned to his fate.

Justin hadn't protested. He liked stable duty well enough and it was mild enough as punishment duty went. Miss van Cleef was capable of far worse. The idea that he might draw her attention and not receive punishment no longer occurred to him. He didn't know why, but the woman seemed to have some special grudge against him.

"You back again?" Gus handed Justin a pitchfork.

"Another week for being insolent to Miss van Cleef." Justin followed Gus into the barn. He liked the broad-shouldered young man well enough, which was odd because Gus had tried to touch him more than anyone else at St. James's. But he was otherwise good-natured, even immediately following a beating. He never got mad at Justin, seemed to accept the bruises as his due. He never came back with friends looking for revenge, either. Of course, Justin might be Gus's only friend. He had a peculiar way of looking at the world that the other boys would have tormented him for if he weren't built like a brick wall. Besides, he always smelled like horse shit.

But Justin knew where he stood with Gus. The big man still had the shadow of a black eye from the last beating he'd gotten. There would be no trouble tonight.

Together, the two of them worked shoulder to shoulder mucking out the stalls and feeding the horses. Neither spoke during the hard work. It wasn't until they'd saddled up a pair of the horses and ridden them out for exercise that Gus said, "Do you ever wonder about this school?"

"Probably more than I should," said Justin. He squinted out at the purpling horizon, "It would probably go better for me if I kept my head down and didn't wonder about anything."

Gus went on as if he hadn't heard, "What I'm wondering about is why, in the middle of Wyoming in the twenty-first century, this place feels like it's right out of England in the eighteenth."

Justin's own wondering about the school had been less well-formed, a sort of existential malaise about what an awful school it was. He scoffed, "There's a difference?"

"Sure." Gus seemed to be warming to the subject, "Haven't you ever wondered why we can't get a cell-phone signal out here or a reliable Internet connection?"

"It's ... rural." Justin felt uncertain, but ploughed on, "And we're supposed to be minimizing distractions so we can focus on our studies. If we all had TVs and X-Boxes..."

"I'm not talking about X-Boxes," Gus waved the objection away. "Haven't you seen how, when you go home for the holidays, everything has a web site now? Everybody has e-mail and..." He sighed, " ... and all sorts of things that we don't use. My cousin says she can't imagine writing a term paper without the Internet and she'd two years younger than me."

"I don't know." Justin shook his head, "The Internet never seemed that great to me. E-mail's just a way for people to..."

" ... exert control over you at a distance," Gus finished the sentence. "I was at the same assembly. It's the same speech Doctor Wurtz has given twice a year for the last four years. Listen, forget the Internet for a minute. What about St. James's curriculum? This year, I'm taking riding, fencing, chess, estate planning, Latin, philosophy and falconry." He laughed, "Do you think there's another high school in America that teaches falconry?"

"My last school did," Justin pointed out. "I'm pretty sure they taught all those things."

Gus drew his horse up short, "It did? What school was this?"

Justin wheeled around, "St. Crellifer's in Colorado. It's just like this place ... really traditional."

"Were they anywhere near a town?" Gus asked.

"Like an hour from Coleman, but Coleman wasn't much of a town."

"Kind of like here and Dry Gulch?"

"See?" said Justin. "I told you this place wasn't as strange as you thought."

Gus shrugged, "I guess not."

The next day in the dining hall Justin sat across from Colin McCloud. Colin looked up, immediately suspicious. He and Justin weren't friends. That was fine with Justin. He found Colin rude and abrasive. Still, they weren't enemies either

"What do you want?" Colin asked.

The assumption that he must want something irked Justin. But, he did want something. So, he couldn't really complain.

"I've got a question about your old school."

"Saint George's? What of it?"

Justin took a deep breath, "Did they teach falconry there?"

"Damn straight they did," said Colin. "And Miss Paperbrock was a hell of a better handler than Miss Grey."

"Right," said Justin, not wanting to argue the point. "Where is Saint George's again?"

"In Utah."

Justin nodded, "Near where?"

"Near fuck-all," said Colin. "We always said, 'If you see anything on a map near Saint George's, your map is stained.'"

"Thanks, Colin," said Justin, rising. "I owe you one."

"Whatever," said Colin dismissively. "I don't know why the fuck you'd care."

After his conversation with Colin, Justin looked at his school with new eyes. The general consensus among the boys at Saint James's was that the school sucked and was more like a prison than a learning institution. But, that was true of all high schools. Wasn't it? Everything he knew about other schools suggested it was so. If you went to a public school, you would be replacing stern teachers and the threat of buggery for metal detectors, security guards, and a constant fear of being caught in a drive-by shooting.

The school had no high-speed Internet access. But, it was possible to unplug a lounge phone and get a dial-up connection. That night, Justin did. The connection dropped every few minutes, but Justin was stubborn and dialed back in each time it did, working through the night until the sun came up.

The next day, Justin was tired and distracted—so much so that Miss Koenig called him out in Latin class and Miss Berlin did the same in history. He'd only gotten five minutes into etiquette before he knew it would be a disaster. He asked to be excused and was sent to the school doctor. The doctor shrugged at his description of non-specific symptoms and gave him permission to go lie down for the rest of the day.

Too tired to sleep, right away Justin stripped out of his uniform and lay on his bed, staring at the ceiling. He'd pieced together a picture last night of unusual things about St. James's—the curriculum, the isolation, the fact that all the teachers seemed to be cut from the same mold. Every one of his teachers was an unmarried woman in her thirties or forties, stern and mostly humorless. Although it wasn't official, they seemed to wear a uniform of sorts to teach—starched, white or gray blouses buttoned to the throat, calf-length black or gray wool skirts, and black leather boots. Most strange of all was the discipline. He'd somehow assumed that teachers everywhere applied canings, pencil-kneeling, and all-nighters on their students. But the only sites that even mentioned "punishment duty" seemed to be pornographic ones with dire warnings not to enter if you were under the age of eighteen.

What really stuck in his mind was a creeping awareness of how ubiquitous information about everything in the world had become ... except for his school. When he'd run a Google search on a small, private school not far from the farm he'd grown up on, he'd gotten back thousands of links including an official site put out by the school itself. Searching on "Saint James School for Boys" and "Wyoming" had gotten him three links—all to maps that showed the school, the ghost town of Dry Gulch, and a vast expanse of nothing at all.

He fell asleep looking forward to sharing what he'd learned with Gus and hearing what the older boy thought. Gus always had interesting ideas.

"Wake up, lazy boy!"

Justin opened his eyes, disoriented. He blinked and stared at the western-facing window where the sun sat low on the horizon. Why was he waking up in the early evening? Had he overslept? And why was Miss van Cleef in his room?

"Lazy, insolent boy." She clapped her hands twice sharply, "I told you to get up. I won't tell you again."

Justin wanted to grumble that she'd told him to wake up, which he'd done. But, he knew better. He rose slowly. If she wanted him to rush, she would have to say so.

"You weren't in my class today, lazy boy."

Justin sat on the edge of his bed and looked up at her, "I was on sick leave today, Miss van Cleef."

She crouched in front of him and stared in his eyes. Justin felt a shiver of butterflies shoot down his spine and flutter into his stomach. She reached out one gloved hand and stroked his hair. Justin's breath caught in his chest. He had to close his eyes to keep himself still. No one would argue that his teacher wasn't beautiful, but it had always seemed to Justin an austere, inaccessible beauty.