always like this?”

“Always,” Rohan said.

“Never speak ill of the dying,” Adam complained.

“You’re not dying.” Henry did a final sweep of the armory to make sure everything had been put back into place. “Come on, to see Sir Frederick.”

Sir Frederick kept his office in the thatch-castle thing, on the first-floor corridor. By the time Henry wearily raised his fist to knock on Sir Frederick’s door, Adam’s dramatics had tripled.

“Is this an angel I see?” Adam marveled, staring at Frankie. “I must not be long for this world.”

“Only because I’m going to finish what I started,” Frankie muttered.

Sir Frederick opened his door a crack, surveyed the scene, and then burst out laughing.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but you’d better come inside. I’d hate to have it on my conscience if Mr. Beckerman perished in the corridor.”

Sir Frederick’s office was rather larger than Henry had expected, and it was wonderfully strange.

Brass-knobbed objects cluttered the shelves—well, the shelves that weren’t already filled with preserved specimens in cases, laboratory beakers stained with brightly colored residue, thick medical books, or daguerreotype photographs of old men in white coats.

With a severe look at the four of them, Sir Frederick opened a drawer in his paper-piled desk and took out some antiseptic and bandages.

“Give me your arm, Mr. Beckerman,” Sir Frederick said.

Meekly, Adam obliged.

“Was there rust on the sword?” questioned Sir Frederick.

“How did you know we were fencing?” Adam asked in surprise.

Sir Frederick merely raised an eyebrow. Frankie was still in her fencing gear. And carrying a large basket filled with knitting. No wonder Sir Frederick had laughed, Henry thought.

“No rust,” she said, looking at the floor. “It was an accident.”

“Well, of course it was an accident,” Sir Frederick said. “Do you think I entertained the possibility, even for a moment, that you purposefully impaled Mr. Beckerman with a sword and then came to me to confess your crime?”

Sir Frederick finished fixing up Adam’s arm and dusted off his hands.

“You’re not going to tell my father, are you?” Frankie asked.

“Nor Lord Havelock,” Henry, Adam, and Rohan put in.

“That depends on one thing,” Sir Frederick said.

Henry forced himself to exhale. “What’s that, sir?”

“Whether or not you’ll stay for tea and biscuits.” Sir Frederick smiled.

“Well, I am dying of hunger,” Adam said.

“You’re not dying of anything,” Rohan said crossly.

“We’d be delighted,” said Frankie, with a stern look at the boys.

Sir Frederick rang a bell on a thick cord behind his desk and, when an out-of-breath maid appeared, asked for a pot of tea. With a calm smile, he took a tin of biscuits out of his desk.

“Which one of you bandaged Mr. Beckerman’s arm with that ribbon?” he asked, prying the lid off the tin.

Henry felt his cheeks flush. “I did, sir.”

“Not bad at all,” Sir Frederick said, proffering the biscuits.

“What kind are they?” Rohan asked, peering into the tin.

“Longbread biscuits, imported specially from the Nordlands,” Sir Frederick said. “Try one.”

Henry warily bit into his, as he wasn’t certain what a biscuit with “bread” in the name would taste like. A rich, buttery flavor filled his mouth, with just a hint of cinnamon.

“This is brilliant,” Henry enthused.

Encouraged by this, Adam, Rohan, and Frankie nibbled at their own biscuits.

When the tea came, Sir Frederick began to talk. He told them of his work as a young man in a hospital in the Nordlands, and of the strange foods the Nordlandic people ate: animal jellies and purple soups and raw fish. He asked the boys how their classes were going, and even inquired of Frankie how her lessons were getting on with Professor Stratford.

“I am on the edge of triumph,” she said, her mouth twisting into a wry smile. “I feel certain I’m about to master the art of not dribbling paint onto my smock when I watercolor fruit.”

Everyone, even Sir Frederick, laughed.

When a second-year student in his green and white tie knocked on Sir Frederick’s door and reported that he definitely smelled pipe smoke coming from someone called Jasper Hallworth’s room, the four friends were sorry to leave. Sir Frederick had treated them as though they were worth something—as though they were adults and not first-year students whom the other boys would not befriend, or a girl who wasn’t very good at being one.

“Come and visit me anytime,” Sir Frederick said with a little wave, and then followed the second-year boy down the hallway in the opposite direction, muttering about wooden beams and stray sparks.

“That was lucky,” Adam said as they returned to the main building, passing a group of first years