A torrential thunderstorm battered the windowpanes of the Director's office, blocking his view of this spring's handsome crop of daffodils. Not that he was in any mood to enjoy the view, as he was writing a letter to the parents of his favourite student, informing them that their daughter was on the verge of being expelled from his school.
The crisp slap-bang of his typewriter, normally clear as tap-dancing gunshots, could barely be heard above bludgeoning gusts of rain and the soggy despair that hammered the old man's heart.
The Director yanked the finished letter from his typewriter and handed it to his secretary to be mailed with the souvenirs. (Ms. Tawdsbee was punctual and organised, but painstakingly decorated all outgoing envelopes with yellow flowery stickers, a fact that she mistakenly believed the Director appreciated. The only outgoing envelopes the Director had ever seen were those kept by his granddaughter, and as the style of stickers was that normally applied by his granddaughter, he thought it only mildly peculiar.)
The Director leaned back in his chair and watched the rain on the windowpanes, breathing in the woodsy scent of untouched tea, lost in thought. The things he really wanted to say couldn't be placed on paper, for there was always a chance the letter would be secretly opened and read on the way to Mr. and Mrs. Bickerstath. He couldn't warn them that their daughter, their tall and outstandingly strong daughter who looked more like a two-meter overgrown flat-chested ten-year old than a blushing maiden at the cusp of womanhood, their intelligent but inscrutable daughter with odd habits such as oiling her muscles and running behind carriages and pushing them when the horses were tired, had recently applied to work after classes at the Ministry of Forbidden Memories, a job usually chosen only by old poets who become tired of poetry, then taken up mathematics, and then become tired of both mathematics and of living itself. It was an agency whose existence was virtually unknown outside the gossip of decrepit old intellectuals, and for good reason. Their last public offices were closed after the debacle of the Wars of Eternal Midnight that led to the excommunication of the Clockwork Empress herself. Every one of his old friends that worked there had quickly gone mad, senile, and then died, not necessarily in that order. He suspected the meddling of Dr. Midgard, but why would Ariadne apply after killing him? Was this one thread of a greater ploy on the part of Imbroigled College to expel one of his students and then scout them as one of their own? They'd pulled off more outrageous plots in the past to steal students with half the fame of Ariadne.
Ms. Tawdsbee cheerfully popped her head into his office. “Director Buttercup? Your meeting with -- good lord, what are you looking at?”
He was staring at the rain, his mouth twisted into a look of horror as if he had heard a bloody black hand screeching rotten fingernails across the windowpane. But the kindly old administrator saw nothing but a month-old memory: the teachers loading parcels as the students chatted merrily about the upcoming charms of Porto-Vecchio. At the time, the mood was sunshine and daisies, and nobody could have guessed that the Imbroigled College would be sending their own expedition to Porto-Vecchio. Ariadne, normally glib and garrulous, had strayed back from the other students, and he had caught the briefest expression of contempt and anticipation flicker across her innocent face, like coldfire on the brain of a basilisk. The look of a huntress, of an executioner.
She knew.
