But his eyes just passed over Joel, as if not even seeing him. Once in a while, it was good to not be memorable.
“Is that the chalkmaker’s son standing over there?” Professor Haberstock asked, squinting at Joel.
“Who?” Nalizar asked, glancing at Joel again.
“You’ll get used to him, Nalizar,” Haberstock said. “We keep having to throw the child out of our classes. He finds ways to sneak in and listen.”
“Well, that won’t do,” Nalizar said, shaking his head. “It’s sloppy teaching, letting non-Rithmatists distract our trainees.”
“Well, I don’t let him into my class, Nalizar,” Haberstock said. “Some others do.”
“Away with you,” Nalizar said, waving at Joel. “If I find you bothering us again, I shall—”
“Actually, Nalizar,” Fitch cut in, “I asked the boy to come speak with me.”
Nalizar glared at Fitch, but he had little right to contradict instruction given to a student by another professor. He pointedly turned to a conversation about the current state of affairs in Nebrask, of which he was apparently an expert.
Joel stepped up to Fitch. “He shouldn’t speak to you like that, Professor,” Joel said quietly, hunkering down beside the professor.
“Well, maybe so, but maybe he has a right. I did lose to him.”
“It wasn’t a fair battle,” Joel said. “You weren’t ready.”
“I was out of practice,” Fitch said. Then he sighed. “Truth is, lad, I’ve never been good at fighting. I can draw a perfect Line of Warding in front of a classroom, but put me in a duel, and I can barely get out a curve! Yes indeed. You should have seen how I shook today during the challenge.”
“I did see,” Joel said. “I was there.”
“You were?” Fitch said. “Ah yes. You were!”
“I thought your sketch of the Easton Defense was quite masterful.”
“No, no,” Fitch said. “I chose a poor defense for a one-on-one contest. Nalizar is the better warrior. He was a hero at Nebrask. He spent years fighting the Tower.… I, well, to be honest I rarely did any fighting even when I was there. I tended to get too nervous, couldn’t hold my chalk straight.”
Joel fell silent.
“Yes, yes indeed,” Fitch said. “Perhaps this is for the best. I wouldn’t want to leave any students poorly trained. I could never live with myself if one of my students died because I failed to train them right. I … I don’t rightly think I’ve ever considered that.”
What could Joel say to that? He didn’t know how to respond. “Professor,” he said instead, “I brought your books back. You walked off without them.”
Fitch started. “So, you actually did have a reason to speak with me! How amusing. I was simply trying to aggravate Nalizar. Thank you.”
Fitch accepted the books, laying them on the table. Then he started to poke at his food again.
Joel gathered his courage. “Professor,” he said, reaching into his pocket. “There’s something else I wanted to ask you.”
“Hum? What?”
Joel pulled out the sheet and flattened it against the table. He slid it over to Fitch, who regarded it with a confused expression. “A request for summer elective?”
Joel nodded. “I wanted to sit in on your advanced Rithmatic defenses elective!”
“But … you’re not a Rithmatist, son,” Fitch said. “What would be the point?”
“I think it would be fun,” Joel said. “I want to be a scholar, of Rithmatics I mean.”
“A lofty goal for one who cannot himself ever make a line come to life.”
“There are critics of music who can’t play an instrument,” Joel said. “And historians don’t have to be the types who make history. Why must only Rithmatists study Rithmatics?”
Fitch stared at the sheet for a while, then finally smiled. “A valid argument, to an extent. Unfortunately, I no longer have a lecture for you to attend.”
“Yes, but you’ll still be tutoring. I could listen in on that, couldn’t I?”
Fitch shook his head. “That’s not how it works, I’m afraid. Those of us at the bottom don’t get to choose what or who we teach. I have to take the students the principal assigns to me, and he has already chosen. I’m sorry.”
Joel looked down. “Well … do you think, maybe, one of the other professors might take over your advanced defenses class?”
“Lad,” Fitch said, putting a kindly hand on Joel’s shoulder. “I know the life of a Rithmatist seems full of excitement and danger, but even Professor Nalizar’s talk of Nebrask is much more dramatic than the reality. Most Rithmatic study consists of lines, angles, and numbers. The war against the Tower is fought by a bunch of cold, wet men and women scribbling lines on the ground—interspersed with empty weeks sitting in the rain.”
“I know,” Joel said quickly. “Professor, it’s the theory that excites me.”
“They all say that,” Fitch said.
“They?”
“You think you are the first young man who wanted to join the Rithmatic classes?” Fitch asked with a smile. “We get requests like this all the time.”
“You do?” Joel asked, heart sinking.
Fitch nodded. “Half of them are convinced that something mysterious and exciting must be going on in those lecture halls. The other half assume that if they just study hard enough, they can become Rithmatists themselves.”
“There … might be a way, right?” Joel asked. “I mean, Dusters like you are just regular people before their inception. So, other normal people can be Rithmatists.”
“It doesn’t work that way, lad,” Fitch said. “The Master chooses his Rithmatists carefully. Once the age of inception has passed, the choices have all been made. In the last two hundred years, not one person has been chosen later than their inception ceremony.”
Joel looked down.
“Don’t feel so sad,” Fitch said. “Thank you for bringing my books back to me. I’m sure I would have searched my entire study three times over for them!”
Joel nodded, turning to go. “He’s wrong, by the way.”
“Who?”
“Yallard, the author of that book,” Joel said, waving toward the second of the two books. “He determines that the Blad Defense should be banned from official duels and tournaments, but he’s shortsighted. Four ellipsoid segments combined may not make a ‘traditional’ defensive Line of Warding, but it’s very effective. If they ban it from duels because it’s too powerful, then nobody will learn it, and they won’t be able to use it in a battle if they need to.”
Fitch raised an eyebrow. “So you were paying attention in my lectures.”
Joel nodded.
“Perhaps it’s in the blood,” Fitch said. “Your father had some interest in these things.” He hesitated, then leaned down to Joel. “What you desire is forbidden by tradition, but there are always those who break with tradition. Newer universities, young and eager, are beginning to teach about Rithmatics to anyone who cares to learn. Go to one of those when you’re older. That won’t make you a Rithmatist, but you will be able to learn what you wish.”
Joel hesitated. That actually sounded good. It was a plan, at least. Joel would never be a Rithmatist—he accepted that—but to go to one of these universities … “I would love that,” Joel said. “But will they let me in if I haven’t studied under a Rithmatic professor already?”
“Perhaps.” Fitch tapped his knife softly against his plate, looking thoughtful. “Perhaps not. If you were to study with me…”
Fitch looked toward the head of the table, toward Nalizar and the others. Then he looked down at his food. “No. No, son, I can’t agree to this. Too unconventional. I have already caused enough trouble. I’m sorry, son.”
It was a dismissal. Joel turned and walked away, shoving his hands in his pockets.
Chapter 6
Joel hated nights.
Night meant bed, and bed meant lying in the dark, feeling exhausted, yet completely unable to sleep.
He and his mother shared a single room in the family dormitory. They had a closet that doubled as a changing room, and shared a communal bathroom at the end of the hallway outside. The room was tiny: brick walls, a single slit of a window, one bed. When his mother had a holiday from work, Joel slept on the floor. Other days, he made the bed and left it for her to sleep in during the daylight hours when she was off shift.
They’d once lived in larger quarters attached to his father’s workshop in the basement of the dormitory. After the accident, Joel’s mother had requested that the principal allow them to move into another room. Joel hadn’t complained. The chalk workshop held too many memories.
Joel stared at the ceiling. Some nights, Joel went out onto the lawn and read books by lanternlight, but that tended to get him into trouble. His mother was half convinced that his poor showing in school had to do with his nocturnal habits.
Above him, sketched onto the ceiling, he could make out lines, illuminated by the faint light of the grounds’ lanterns outside. The Easton Defense, one of the most complicated of the traditional Rithmatic defensive circles. He traced the lines with his eyes, following the inner circle, then the inscribed nonagon with its missing sides, the outer circles.
It was a clumsy sketch, though Joel had been proud of it when he’d drawn it two years back. The nine bind points were off, and a couple of the circles were uneven. If this defense had been used by a Rithmatist in a duel, the circle would have been breached in a matter of heartbeats. Even now, Joel often couldn’t do a nine-point circle without a sketch for reference. If he got even one bind point off, it could destroy the integrity of the entire drawing.
The integrity of the drawing. It had no integrity. It was just chalk on plaster; it had no power. He blinked, gritting his teeth. Sometimes he hated Rithmatics. It was all about fighting and conflict. Why couldn’t it do anything useful?
He turned onto his side. Was Michael right? Was Joel too infatuated with Rithmatics? Everyone, from Fitch to his mother, told him that at one point or another.
And yet … it was the one thing he cared about, the one thing that he seemed to be skilled at. Without it, what was he? He had been shown, pointedly, that a good education wouldn’t elevate him to the status of the other students.
So what did he do now? Follow the course everyone expected of him? Do well enough in school to get a job as a clerk, one step up from a laborer?
Or did he keep chasing a dream? Study Rithmatics at a university. Become a scholar of it, an expert. Fitch had offered him a nibble of something grand, but had snatched away the plate right afterward. Joel felt a flare of anger at that.
He shoved it down. Fitch did want to teach me, he thought. He was so shaken by what happened today that he didn’t dare ask.
Fitch would spend his summer tutoring students assigned to him by Principal York. A plan started brewing in Joel’s mind. A desperate, foolish plan.