sabotaging us since he could, you know, hurt us?”

“Don’t you want your necklace back?” Henry asked.

“Too right, I do.” Adam said. “Lead on.”

Henry led on.

It was nearing the end of second lesson, according to Rohan’s pocket watch. They should make it to Sir Frederick’s office just as that day’s hour free began.

Sure enough, as Henry and Adam crossed the quadrangle and pushed open the door of the thatch cottage that held Sir Frederick’s office, boys spilled out into the corridors, filling the main building with noisy chatter that filtered through the half-open windows.

Henry ached to join the other students. To spend his hour free in the first-year common room and bet silly trinkets on the outcome of a checkers game. To stand on the sidelines before a cricket match and hope to be chosen toward the beginning. To have a laugh with his roommates and sneak down to the kitchens for extra tarts and try not to snicker at the boys who fell asleep in chapel. To put on his fencing mask and wield a practice sword at lessons. To have his favorite pudding at supper, and earn a perfect mark on an essay. To be normal.

But that door had long closed and left him standing on the outside of those happier school days, carrying around an unwanted and unasked for burden.

Henry stopped outside Sir Frederick’s office, wishing he just had a simple question about that day’s lesson.

“Go on,” Adam urged.

With a deep breath, Henry raised his fist and knocked.

“Come in,” Sir Frederick called.

Henry pushed open the door and Sir Frederick paled as though he’d seen a ghost—two ghosts.

“How—,” Sir Frederick began, and then composed himself and said, “have you run out of paper again?”

“Not quite,” Henry said, “although you might ask how we let ourselves out of a locked room.”

“Ah,” Sir Frederick said. “How clumsy of me. Had Lord Havelock not locked the door?”

“Neither this time, nor the last,” Henry said with a small smile.

“What is it you’ve come to see me about?” Sir Frederick asked, his eyes glittering, daring Henry to say the words out loud, to give them power, to make it real.

Adam coughed and looked away. Henry bit his lip.

“I was, er, reading page twenty-four of the rules of the school,” he began. “And it occurred to me—to both of us—that you would become the next headmaster if Headmaster Winter lost his job.”

“That’s true,” Sir Frederick said with a wary frown.

“It also occurred to us that, well, the person who has been doing all of these things, sabotaging us …” Henry stopped. There was no use being polite. Not now. It was too late, and he was in this too far to turn back. “That it was you,” Henry finished.

Sir Frederick didn’t deny it.

“And why would I do that?” Sir Frederick asked mildly, but his gaze betrayed his indifference, and for the first time, the medicine master looked sinister.

“I don’t know, sir,” Henry said.

“A clever boy like you,” Sir Frederick said, as though scolding a small child, “and you can’t even venture a guess?”

“I wouldn’t know where to begin, sir,” Henry said. “I was hoping you’d tell us the reason for the letters and my being locked inside the library overnight and the nuts in the muffin and the unblunted sword and stealing Adam’s necklace—which, by the way, he’d like back. Because we trusted you. I confided in you. And I can’t imagine why you’d betray us like this.”

Henry stopped to catch his breath, his chest heaving with anger. He stared down at his boots, and when he looked up again at Sir Frederick, he forced his mouth into a thin, determined line and willed his eyes not to show uncertainty—or fear.

“You boys are so selfish,” Sir Frederick crooned. “It’s always about you, isn’t it? All your little problems and disasters, and you never think that maybe this is part of something bigger.”

“Like what?” Adam asked with a derisive snort. “The Nordlands?”

Sir Frederick’s eyes narrowed.

“Perhaps,” Sir Frederick allowed, but Henry could see that Adam’s offhand comment had landed perilously close to the target. “What you boys need to do is consider the greater good, to think of what it would accomplish if you were expelled.”

“Let me think for a moment,” Henry said, his voice dripping with disdain. “I’d be out on the streets, Adam would disgrace his family, but oh, you’d be head- master.”

“Precisely,” Sir Frederick said with a dangerous smile that forcibly reminded Henry of Lord Havelock. “Because once I am appointed headmaster, I will