By Jennie Wren Foster. A free reader bonus.

Orientation

A Coven General bonus scene. Mr. Grieve’s POV.

Free reader bonus (~1,600 words). The first day, from behind the laminated badge. Jennie Wren Foster.

I arrived at 7:40 on the Monday, which was twenty minutes early, which was deliberate and which I will defend.

A man who arrives on the hour has been waiting somewhere out of sight in order to arrive on the hour, and people can tell. A man who arrives twenty minutes early has simply arrived, and can be found in the corridor being unremarkable, and by nine o’clock four separate people will have decided independently that he was already there.

I had my badge. I would like to say something about the badge.

It is laminated. It is worse than laminated: it is laminated badly, with a bubble in the corner over my second initial, and it hangs from a lanyard printed with the name of a pharmaceutical company that no longer exists. Human institutions issue these to one another constantly and no one has ever once looked at mine.

I have carried the seal of a court that predates the alphabet you are reading this in. I have been announced into halls where the announcing took four minutes. And in four hundred years of this work, nothing has opened a door for me like a plastic rectangle with a bubble in it.

Before I say anything else I want the record to show that the vending machine was genuinely broken.

I have been accused of theater about the vending machine. The accusation is not unfair and I am not going to pretend otherwise, because I am aware of what it did and I chose to do it first rather than fourth. But it was broken, and it had been broken since 2019, and there was a laminated sign on it that said TAKES YOUR MONEY AND KEEPS IT, and beneath that, in a different hand, GOD’S MACHINE.

Somebody had drawn an arrow to the coin slot and written DO NOT.

Four work orders had been submitted. Two had been closed as resolved by a maintenance contractor who, I established in about eleven minutes, has not had a person assigned to this building since a restructuring in 2021. Nobody in the building knew this. Everybody in the building had simply absorbed it, the way you absorb weather.

I want to be plain, because a great deal turns on it and I have thought about it since.

I did not fix the vending machine in order to be liked. I fixed it because there was a machine in a hospital that had been stealing from exhausted people for seven years and four requests to stop it had gone into a void, and I had the afternoon.

That both of those things are true is the entire difficulty of me, and I am aware of it, and being aware of it has never once made me behave differently.

The staff meeting was at nine.

I learned their names on the Friday. All of them, from the rota, the incident log, the shift-swap board, and a birthday card that had been circulating in the break room since October and which forty-one people had signed.

This is not a trick. There is no glamour on it, no working, nothing that could be called an art. It is four hours of reading and it is available to any administrator alive, and the fact that not one of them does it is the reason my court has never once had difficulty placing anyone anywhere.

Dr. Chen prefers Dr. Chen. She has been correcting people about this for six years with the patient exhaustion of a woman who expects to die correcting it. It took me one line in a meeting to stop.

Rosa Alcaraz has worked in that building for nineteen years and has a face she keeps for administrators. It is a very good face. I watched her put it on when I walked in.

And there was a complaint in the file from February, unanswered, from a night nurse, which said that a rotation which puts the same four people on the same three impossible shifts because those four people have never once said no is not a schedule but a bet, and that one day the bet would come in.

I read it four times on the Friday.

I have taken instruments from kings. I have sat across from a woman in Odesa in 1911 and listened to her explain, with great composure, why she was signing. In four hundred years of this work I have never read a sentence that told me more completely who a person was than that one, written at four in the morning by somebody who thought no one would ever read it.

She had diagnosed herself, perfectly, in one line, about a hospital.

She had not once applied it to herself.

That was Friday. By Friday evening I knew exactly how this would go, and I want to set down that I did not enjoy knowing it.

Here is the thing my court does not say out loud, and I am going to say it, because this is a private document and because I am tired.

We do not take. That is our whole position. Nine thousand years of it: mortals are to be left alone, because every time the other side has reached into a line it has ended badly for the line, and because a gift creates an obligation whether or not anybody meant it to. We are correct. We have been correct for longer than there have been cities on this lake.

And a court that has been correct for nine thousand years stops noticing the difference between being correct and being kind.

I could tell you it is the same. I have told a great many people it is the same. I could tell you that offering a woman a protection she badly wants, and asking nothing but that she remain available to be asked, is the most scrupulous thing anyone has ever done to her, and it is, and there is no clause in that instrument I would not put my name to in a hall in front of my queen.

And I read her February complaint on a Friday and I knew, before I ever set foot in that building, that she would never once use clause nine.

I did not conceal that. I want that understood. I told her, in an office with two chairs at an angle, that asking is not nothing, and that over a long enough time asking is everything. I said the true thing out loud on the first day and I did not soften it.

But I said it to a woman I had already read, and I said it knowing she could not hear it, and there is a word for offering somebody a door you have measured and know they cannot walk through.

I have not found the word yet. I have been looking for six weeks.

At 9:14 on the Monday a nurse came into the staff meeting eight minutes late holding a bag of pretzels as though it were a relic and said, out loud, in front of everybody, “It gave me change.”

Nora Kemble. Auburn ponytail, bad knee, no magic of any kind, and the only person in that building I have never once been able to predict.

The room came apart. Somebody applauded, actually applauded, for a machine that dispensed forty cents.

And I stood at the front of a room of forty exhausted people who had just discovered that a thing that had been quietly stealing from them for seven years had stopped, and I watched them look at me, and I have been in a great many halls in a great many centuries and I would like to tell you the truth about that morning.

It was the best I have been at my work in two hundred years.

It was also the moment I understood that I was going to be very good at this and that being very good at this was not going to be the same as being good.

The first day ended at 6:40 in the evening.

I sat in the old dictation office, which is a windowless box with a desk in it, and I did not put anything on the walls, because a man who hangs a diploma is telling you what he wants you to think of him and I would rather you had no idea.

I had two chairs brought in. The same height. At an angle rather than across the desk.

She noticed. She noticed on the Monday, four days before she sat in either of them, from the doorway, in about a second and a half.

I put it in my notes that evening: She sees the furniture.

Then I sat there for a while in a hospital that had gone quiet, sixty feet from a woman who could not say no, with a laminated badge on a lanyard from a pharmaceutical company that does not exist, and I thought about a sentence written at four in the morning by somebody who thought no one would ever read it.

One day the bet would come in.

I did not know when. I want that on the record too, for whatever a record is worth in a document nobody will ever put before a court.

I did not permit myself to look.