Chapter 38

There was still a long stretch of time before noon.

Roy left the lower quarter and hurried back to the House of Cardell. He crouched outside the classroom and watched for a moment. The students were all raptly listening to Cardell’s history lesson. Ffion sat alone in the back row.

The timing was perfect. Everyone at the school, except him and the cook who stayed in the kitchen, was in class. Roy slipped upstairs to the principal’s office, found the door locked, then crept to the far left of the corridor and leaned half his body over the railing to peer through a second-floor window.

The window was wide open and not too high from the walkway. Roy took a breath, crouched on the rail as if measuring a jump, then sprang. His legs shot out like coiled springs and he sailed up, hands catching the sill. With one smooth, practiced twist he hauled himself through the opening like a cat, dropping into the room. For someone whose physical condition now matched an adult’s, the move was not difficult.

The office looked exactly as it had the day he’d first come. Roy went straight to the desk behind the bookshelf and yanked open drawers and cabinets. Every one of them was locked. He could have left then, but he did not want to give up. He searched the room: shelves, the sofa, the pen holder.

Half an hour later, Roy found a small copper key tucked into a corner of the bookshelf, hidden inside a poetry collection titled A Handful of Dusk. His heart sped. He slid the key into the lock of the rectangular cabinet under the desk and turned it. The lock clicked, and the cabinet swung open to reveal neat stacks of papers.

Among them were the student registration forms he’d filled out on his first day. Cardell had said that every new pupil had to complete one: date of enrollment, name, sex, age, home address, relatives, and a short physical description—hair and eye color, any birthmarks or scars.