The Sin System: My Wife is Envy

Chapter 51: Last Day Before Academy

I found her in the library after the session.

Standing in the middle of it looking at the shelves. Not reading anything. Just standing and looking.

"These are not organized," she said.

"The archivist had a system. I have not fully decoded it."

"I can see a system. It is not a good one." She moved to the left wall. "These are organized by acquisition date. Things that belong together are separated by decades."

She pulled a volume and held it out.

"This one is not in the catalogue."

I took it. The first page was dated two hundred and thirty years ago.

"The Keeper had two hands," she said. "One formal, one not. The formal one is in the catalogue. This is the other one."

She was already moving along the shelves.

I stood with the unlisted volume and thought about what else she would find in here that I had missed.

That evening she stood at the study window and watched rain come in over the forest.

She had opened the window.

"It smells different than I expected," she said.

"Rain."

"Through the stone it arrived as a fragment. The cold part. Or the wet part. Not both together."

She stayed at the window until the rain stopped.

I worked through the packing list around her.

Later I was going through the academy letters again when she came and sat in the chair across the desk.

"The students," she said. "At the academy. They know things about the world."

"Most of them."

"More than I know."

"In some areas. In others, considerably less."

She looked at the window. The rain had cleared.

"I have been trying to understand what I do not know," she said. "It is difficult to measure. I know a great deal about what the world was. I know almost nothing about what it has become. The gap is two hundred years wide and I cannot see the bottom of it."

"You will learn it."

"Quickly enough to not embarrass you."

I looked up from the letter.

She was looking at the desk, her expression the same it always was.

"You are not going to embarrass me," I said.

"I said the wrong thing to a servant this afternoon. I asked her why she was carrying the tray on the left side. She did not know how to answer."

"That is not embarrassing. That is a reasonable question."

"I asked it in a way that assumed there was a correct answer and she was wrong about it."

"Ah."

"Yes." She folded her hands. "I have been practicing knocking before opening doors. I knocked on a wall this morning. There is no door on that wall."

I put the letter down.

"You knocked on a wall," I said.

"I was practicing."

I looked at her.

She looked at me with complete seriousness.

"The wall did not answer," she said.

I pressed my hand over my mouth.

"This is funny," she said.

"Slightly."

"I thought it might be." She unfolded her hands and folded them again. "I have not made someone laugh in a very long time."

The room was quiet for a moment.

"You will be fine at the academy," I said.

She looked at the window.

"Tell me more things," she said. "Before we go."

I picked up the letter.

"The dining hall serves three meals a day," I said. "Assigned seating for the first term, open seating after that. You eat at the same time as everyone else."

"Everyone eats together," she said.

"Yes."

"Why."

I thought about it.

"Community," I said. "And because the kitchen only cooks once."

She absorbed this.

"What else," she said.

I kept going.

By the time the lamp burned low she had asked about examination formats, dormitory protocol, the function of the student council, why students wore uniforms when they could simply wear their own clothes, and whether the academy library was organized better than the one in the estate.

That last one I could not answer definitively.

"Probably better," I said. "But I have not seen it yet."

She stood and stretched and went to the door.

She knocked on the door frame before leaving.

I watched this happen.

She looked back.

"Practicing," she said.

Then she went.

Day Three

The trunk was in the corridor.

The uniform was folded on top of the books, which had required rearranging twice because the packing list had a specific order that turned out to matter for the academy storage system.

Anastasia was at the breakfast table when I came down. She had made tea and was drinking it with the look of someone verifying information.

"It is still better than I expected," she said.

"The tea."

"Yes."

I sat down. She had made food as well, and it was different from the first morning, and better. I said so.

"I know," she said.

She had known before she made it.

We ate without talking. The kitchen was quiet. Outside, the servants were already moving through the courtyard, and luggage was being carried out, and the grey morning was doing what grey mornings did.

She watched through the window.

"It is strange," she said.

"What is."

"Knowing I am leaving." She held the cup. "I have not left in two hundred years. Now I am going to a place I have never seen, in a world I do not know, with someone I met three days ago."

"Four," I said. "Counting today."

"Four." She looked at the cup. "That is not a long time."

"No."

"Is it strange to you."

I thought about it honestly.

"I arrived in this world in someone else’s body," I said. "Three months ago. Before that I built rooms for a story I had never read, for characters I had never met, in a game that was never going to be finished."

She looked at me.

"Strange is a relative category," I said.

She was quiet for a moment.

"What is the first thing we do when we arrive," she said.

"Register at the intake office. Then the dormitory assignment. Then orientation."

"In that order."

"In that order."

She nodded once.

"I will knock on doors," she said. "When it is appropriate."

"That is the standard practice."

"And I will not ask why people hurry."

"You can ask. People just may not have a good answer."

She considered this.

"Then I will observe why people hurry," she said. "And form my own conclusion."

"That is probably more reliable anyway."

She stood and carried her cup to the basin.

"We should pack the last things," she said. "I found two more unlisted volumes in the library this morning. They should come with us."

"The Keeper’s hand."

"Yes."

She was already moving toward the corridor.

I looked at the table. The empty plates. The tea things. The grey morning coming through the window at the angle it came through every morning.

Three days.

I stood up and followed her.