They trained in the boathouse every morning for four days, at five o'clock, before the castle woke up.It was nothing like the basement gym on Central Park West. There were no mats, no heavy bags, no mirrors. There was a cold wooden floor and the long shapes of the racing shells hanging from the rafters and a single lantern, and outside the window, the gray lake and the dark island and the gradual coming of the light over the peaks.Vance didn't care."You fight where you are," he said, on the first morning, circling Alexander in the lantern light with his huge hands loose at his sides. "Not where you want to be. On that island, you're going to be in a tuxedo, in a crowd, in the dark, in a building full of stone stairs and narrow corridors and drunk rich kids. You won't have room to move. You won't have time to think. So we train for that."He pushed a rowing boat across the floor until it blocked half the room, and stacked oars against the walls, and hung a coat over the lantern so t

"Teaching," Alexander repeated.It was one o'clock in the morning, and they were in the back corner of the library where nobody ever sat, the same table where they'd found the Meridian fraud in September and the Polish spectrum in November. Lena sat across from him with her coat still on and snow melting in her hair. She'd come straight up the mountain from the church. Her eyes were red and swollen, but her voice was even and very cold."Twenty-three years," she said. "That's what she said. The Steward has been teaching at Aldermoor for twenty-three years.""There are thirty-one professors at this school.""And how many of them have been here for twenty-three years?"Alexander thought about it. Then he pulled Felix's laptop toward him, opened the school directory, and started scrolling. Felix himself was asleep with his head on a stack of books at the end of the table, his bow tie askew."Eight," he said after a few minutes. "Eight professors have been here more than twenty years. Fou