No Record of Such a Person

There was still a long time until noon.

Roy left the Lower City and hurried back to House of Cadell. He hid outside the classroom and peeked inside. The students were listening intently as Cadell taught history at the front of the room.

Faywen sat alone in the last row.

The timing was perfect. Everyone in the school was in the classroom except Roy and the plump cook, who was still in the kitchen.

Roy quietly slipped upstairs to the headmaster's office. The door was locked, so he went to the far end of the corridor and leaned halfway over the railing to study the second-floor windows on the side of the building.

One window was wide open. It wasn't far from the corridor, and it wasn't very high off the ground. Roy took a deep breath, crouched on the railing, and gauged the distance with a few practice dips. Then his legs sprang loose like tightly wound springs. He launched himself like a great bird, spread his arms, and caught the windowsill.

With a quick twist of his waist, he flipped into the room as nimbly as a cat. For someone whose physical abilities already rivaled an adult's, the move wasn't difficult.

The room was just as it had been on Roy's first day. He went straight to the desk behind the bookshelf and tried several drawers and cabinets.

Unfortunately, they were all locked. But he couldn't bring himself to leave empty-handed, so he searched the room from top to bottom: the bookshelf, the sofa, the pen holder...

Half an hour later, Roy found a copper key tucked into a corner of the bookshelf, hidden inside a book of poems titled The Age of the Moon. He inserted it into the lock of a cabinet near the corner of the desk.

With a crisp click, the rectangular cabinet beneath the desk opened, revealing several neat stacks of paper.

Among them was Roy's own student registration form, the one he had filled out on his first day at the school. Cadell had said that every new student had to complete the same form upon enrollment. It recorded the exact date of admission, name, gender, age, home address, family relationships, and a brief physical description, such as hair and eye color, birthmarks, or scars.

By Roy's reasoning, if Faywen's brother really existed and had attended House of Cadell, there had to be a record of him.

Everyone who passed through left a trace.

Even if no one could remember "him," written words wouldn't lie.

Cadell had sorted the registration forms by year of admission, putting each year's forms in its own stack. Roy counted them roughly and found thirteen thin piles, which meant House of Cadell had been around for at least that many years.

The records began in 1248. There were only two or three forms for the first year, but the number grew year by year. In the most recent three or four years, it had leveled off at around thirty new students annually.

Most students enrolled, or graduated and left, around Beltane each year. Few, like Roy, joined halfway through.

He felt a pang of emotion. These unremarkable stacks of paper were the history of House of Cadell. They recorded how a school devoted to serving poor children, sustained by nothing but conviction, had grown to its present size in an age of chaos, in a place rife with gangsters and the Revolutionary Army.

The flimsy sheets of paper carried a weight that was hard to put into words.

Roy carefully leafed through them one by one. He didn't read every word—that would take too long, and there were terms he didn't recognize. He checked only the year of admission, names, and family relationships, and limited his search to the past six or seven years, since House of Cadell allowed students to stay for no more than five.

"Hill... no, that's not right."

"Frick... the family details don't match."

"Carlz... the home address is wrong."

He finished skimming more than two hundred forms in fifteen minutes. A few stacks included blank forms, perhaps for Cadell's own reassurance. Then he checked everything a second time, and a third.

After the third pass, Roy let out a long sigh. His expression troubled, he neatly stacked the forms and locked them back in the cabinet.

Roy hadn't found the slightest information about Faywen's brother. The conclusion made him feel that most of the investigation was already over. The way things were turning out was exactly what he'd expected, but it still weighed on him.

Was Faywen really suffering from some kind of psychological disorder?

Among these dozen or so stacks of records, Roy also spotted some names he recognized: children who were still at the school.

Two forms in particular stood out to him. One belonged to a boy who had appeared in Faywen's diary—the boy who had fought "him," Mifen.

The other belonged to a boy with a scar beneath his eye: Harlheim, the outstanding graduate Cadell had drawn a portrait of.

Roy glanced at the clock. It was still an hour until twelve. After lunch, he planned to ask Mifen about it and gather one last piece of evidence.

Before leaving the room, Roy hesitated. Curiosity got the better of him, and he used the copper key to open the other drawers.

"Hmm, books, quills, ink..."

"Cosmetics? You wouldn't think Teacher Cadell, with her stern, serious face, was a woman who cared about her looks."

"Hmm, what's this?" To his surprise, Roy found a crumpled notice in the drawer tucked furthest into the corner.

"Vernon Roche, the great revolutionary leader of Edessberg, worked tirelessly for the people, only to be cruelly seized and imprisoned for three months by Baron Tavik. The righteous citizens who marched in protest were violently suppressed by the baron! But the revolution will never yield. A new force is gathering..."

A flash of light cut through the fog in Roy's mind.

At last, Roy remembered who that outstanding graduate, Harlheim, really was. Wasn't the scarred boy the same cloaked figure he'd bumped into when leaving the dwarven estate—the one handing out revolutionary notices, a member of the Revolutionary Army?

Cadell had a notice like this hidden in her drawer, yet she had insisted that she sent her outstanding graduates away to work elsewhere.

Clearly, the respected headmistress had deep ties to the Revolutionary Army. If he took the idea further, Roy could even imagine Cadell holding a position of great importance within it, with the entire school founded to train the revolution's next generation of leaders.

Right... Roy remembered the history lesson Cadell had given on his first day at the school, the one he'd overheard by chance.

He'd had a strange feeling then that the headmistress leaned toward the Revolutionary Army's point of view, criticizing Edersberg and even the upper classes of the Kingdom of Aedirn.

Now it all made sense. The Revolutionary Army was the power behind House of Cadell! Given how he'd been performing, if he stayed for a few more years, Cadell might even reveal everything to him.

Roy took a deep breath, his feelings complicated. He had only meant to look into the information about Faywen's brother, but by sheer chance he'd uncovered Cadell's true affiliations.

Then was Faywen's own brother connected to Cadell? Had she secretly brought him into the revolutionary ranks, like Harlheim?

Roy quickly rejected the idea. No matter how influential Cadell was within the Revolutionary Army, she was still just one person. It was unlikely she could make Faywen, her family, and her neighbors all lose their memories. Even Harlheim had left behind a portrait and a registration form, but "he" had left neither.

Old Bob's testimony, along with the missing registration form, was already enough to prove that the "him" in the diary didn't exist. If Mifen denied it too, then...