Page 52 of The Black Table
I do.
It’s too big a room for an office, almost the size of an auditorium,vaulted ceilings, shadows cutting in from three-story windows, a platform that could hold a throne instead of a desk, low bookshelves, a few armchairs for casual meetings with deans, professors, visiting scholars, antiquities dealers, whoever’s coming by, and the requisite array of brown liquor in decanters.
And in the midst of it all, my father. Luther Pendragon.
Behind me, the door shuts with a mechanical finality. I straighten my posture, keep my weight in both feet, my head lifted, my eyes trained forward, almost as if I’m ready to step en garde, but not.
My father is sitting, his reading glasses perched on his face, a few papers in his hands. The lenses glint in the light, obscuring his good eye from view and making it impossible to tell where he’s looking, except for the feeling he’s burning into me.
“I want out of Dr. Emrys’s class,” I say, quick, to the point, before I lose my nerve. “I’m done.”
My father says nothing, shuffles the papers, places them face down so I can’t read what’s written, and removes the glasses.
“I beg your pardon,” he says.
“Out of the class,” I say again. “It’s…” I pause, hesitate, just a half second, a half second too long, even though I know what I’m going to say, have been reciting it in my head the whole walk across campus. “It’s a distraction. It’s too taxing. It’s, I think, why I?—”
“No.” His response is just as swift, a parry that clatters my words to the ground. “It’s out of the question.”
He purses his lips, slowly stands from behind the desk.
“Frankly, I’m astonished you even thought you could propose such a thing, Kingston.”
Luther Pendragon is formidable. Though I’m taller than him now, it doesn’t feel like it, and his six-foot-three form commands the entire room. In the tailored suit, the polished cufflinks, theItalian silk tie, he looks the part. He lives the part. Heisit, embodies it.
The silken patch that covers his right eye only seems to intensify his stare, as if the left has doubled in strength in the absence of its partner.
“Truly unbelievable,” he says, coming slowly around from the back of the desk. “All of you. First Kai at the cap this weekend?—”
“That was?—”
“Don’t interrupt me,” he says.
I lower my head a fraction of an inch. Obey.
“I’ve already informed Kai of my disappointment. Extensively.”
It wasn’t Kai’s fault. Not exactly. I know that, and I could speak to that, but he won’t let me speak.
He wants it to be Kai’s fault. He wants me not to contradict that.
And I’m helpless to disobey.
“That kind of upset cannot happen on the Caliburn campus,” my father goes on. “Is that clear?”
No, I think. He doesn’t want it to be Kai’s fault. Kai is only the whipping boy.
It’s my fault. Ultimately, and always.
“Disorder. Drunkenness. Damage,” he goes on. “It brings scrutiny we do not need.”
I know this. He knows I do.
Yet he continues.
“And you,” he goes on. “Your focus waning. Your faith wavering. And you blame it on your schoolwork?”
I say nothing.
