Novice Tissadelle Shepherd (Human)

The office was the Survey Corps' and the form was not.

Tissadelle had known what the woman at the back table was for nine nights before the woman said so, because a Ranger in a common room was a Ranger in a common room, uniform or not, and this one had sat where the sound was worst and written very little, which was not how anybody listened to a band. Marlow had talked to her. Marlow talked to everyone. He had come back and said she was a Principal of something with music in its name, on loan to the Survey people upstairs, and that she had asked about the hum, and Tissadelle had said nothing, and had sung the set, and had not changed anything in it, which had taken some doing on the ninth night and none at all after.

Now it was the morning, the ring's morning, which came up along the deck lights at the same hour whatever the dock was doing, and she was in the delegation office in her own clothes with the form on the desk between them.

The Principal, Varga, gave her rank and her branch and her corps in that order, as if the order mattered, which Tissadelle supposed it did, and then stated the position the way a person states a thing she expects to be answered. The Music Corps took its novices provisionally. A Novice of the Xenomusicology branch carried a study and held a placement, and the placement was an ensemble, for the time the study needed, and the ensemble would be the one she was in. The college would confirm Cadet standing when it was satisfied. It had never been known to say when that would be.

"Nothing changes in the room," Varga said. "That is the first thing and I will say it once. In the room you are the band's. You sing in your own clothes, you take the band's break, you do not tell the room, and if the band tells the room that is the band's. The file is ours. The hours for the file are here, and you wear the uniform for them, because that is what the hours are."

"And what goes in the file?"

"What you can show." Varga turned the form round. "What a room does. What it does when the band does a thing, and what it does when the band does not. Later, what a people does, when the Corps has a people in front of it that nobody has asked that of. That is later. The room first."

The form was two pages and the first was hers to fill. It asked what every form asks, and then it had a line for prior training, and she looked at it for a while.

She could have left it. Her arrivals line held it already; the Principal had read the line, she could tell, because the Principal had not asked where she was from. But a line left empty on a form she had signed was a thing she had been taught about at the Garda college, in a room with the Mannán light coming in flat across the benches, by a sergeant who had said that the empty line was the one the court would ask about. She had passed the boards on that and on a great deal else, and had left two weeks short of the oath. So she wrote it. Garda college, Tír na nÓg. Coursework complete. Boards passed. Oath not taken. In her own hand, which was slower than the record's and said the same.

Varga read it the right way up.

"Why not the oath?"

Tissadelle had been asked this by her mother, once, on the hill, and had given the only answer she had. It had not got better in a year.

"It was more like being pulled than pushed," she said. "I had nothing against the Gardaí. I still have nothing against them. There was nothing on the ground pushing. It was more like the sky." She stopped, because past that it became an explanation, and she had none.

"And why the Corps?"

That one she had expected, and had thought about on the walk up from the ring, and had found that the things she could say were all things she would later be asked to stand over, and that she could stand over none of them. There was a hillside, and a band, and a song half-written that she did not point to, and a woman at a back table, and none of those was a reason.

"I don't have a reason I could write down," she said. "If I give you one I'll be defending it in a year. I would rather not have to."

Varga wrote. Tissadelle could read upside down, a Garda college habit, and what Varga wrote was no reason given; candidate declines to supply one, and then, after it, noted as answered. She did not know what that meant either, and did not ask.

The tab came from the quartermaster's record an hour later: a small hard-edged thing with one bar on it, seated on the chest of a shell that had been cut to the record and not to her, which the quartermaster said was the ordinary way round and would be corrected. One bar. A Novice wore one. She had read the ladder on the walk up, the whole of it, Novice to the Triumvirate, because it was there, and had noted that it was a long way, and that the first rung said provisional and under evaluation in so many words, and she found she did not mind that. It was, at least, exact.

She wore it for the study's two hours, at a desk the delegation lent, with a page in front of her on which she wrote what the room had done the night before and nothing it had not. Then she took the shell off and put her own clothes on, and the tab went back into the record's drawer, and she went down to the ring to find Perrin and Marlow before the set, because a thing like this was told the day it happened or it was a thing you had kept.

Her mother would have called them na Maoir Réalta, with the small turn of the mouth the Boirinn holdings kept for anyone who came up the hill with a form. Tissadelle had the form now. She found she still did not know what she would call them.