Chapter 664: The Mystery Moon Detective Squad
Three days later, the results came back.
113 out of 150. Evelyn read the number twice.
By any reasonable measure, this was excellent. By the standard she’d set for herself, it was a victory she needed confirmed before she could fully believe it.
Scroll was away—accompanying His Majesty Roland on the inspection tour of Longsong—so it was Wendy who delivered the grades, with a firm pat on Evelyn’s shoulder. “Well done. Her Highness Tilly would be very pleased. Keep it up.”
“I will!” Evelyn nodded, and then immediately went to find Candle. “How many did you get?”
“91. Still a pass.” Candle read Evelyn’s expression with the accuracy of long acquaintance. “You did well.”
“113.”
Candle’s eyes went wide. “That’s close to Lucia’s score, isn’t it? Should I find out?”
“No—they definitely did better.” She waved the thought away. “I only want to know Maggie’s.”
She wasn’t being ruthless. She understood clearly that her raw ability was poor; that fact was fixed at birth and no amount of effort would change it. What could change was the effort itself. Ordinary people excelled at learning all the time. She had decided that she would not lose to anyone in the things that depended on work.
She had also decided, somewhere along the way, that she wanted to be like Roland—learned and capable and broad. That aspiration required, at minimum, not finishing behind Maggie.
She found Maggie after class. Maggie’s answer was cheerful and immediate.
“Cuckoo—117!”
Evelyn stood very still.
She stood still for a while longer after Maggie had wandered off, unable to reconcile the number with any interpretation of events she could construct. 117 was not a score that emerged from a paper mostly covered in drawings of honey jerky. It was not a score that could be explained by luck on the multiple-choice section alone.
“Scroll must have made an error in the results.” The voice that said this was not hers. She blinked. Mystery Moon stood beside her, wearing an identically bewildered expression.
“Don’t doubt other people’s abilities just because you fared poorly,” Lily said flatly, appearing from somewhere nearby.
“I was sitting right in front of her,” Mystery Moon said. “When I collected the tests, her paper was almost entirely blank except for the easy questions. And there were drawings of roasted meat in the calculation section.”
Lily’s brow drew down. “You’re certain?”
“I swear on my electromagnetic force!”
“That is spectacularly unconvincing.” Lily turned to leave.
Mystery Moon grabbed her arm. “Wait. We should investigate.”
“Check with Scroll when she returns.”
“That would defeat the entire point. Where’s the adventure in that?” Mystery Moon’s face arranged itself into an expression of theatrical mischief. “Evelyn! Let’s get to the bottom of this!”
“Don’t include me in—”
“What’s happening?” Candle drifted over.
Evelyn hesitated, then explained. Candle listened with her chin in her hand, turning the problem over with visible interest.
“If you wanted to investigate,” Candle said slowly, “what would you need?”
“Not access to the office,” Lily said, directing the words specifically at Mystery Moon. “I know exactly what you’re planning, and His Majesty and Nightingale being away doesn’t change the rules.”
“I’m not going to steal the tests. I’m not stupid.” Mystery Moon held up one finger. “I just want to know where Scroll marks them. That’s all.”
“You mean…” Candle’s eyes lit.
“We call Summer.” Mystery Moon smiled. “She can replay it.”
Evelyn understood at once. Summer’s ability could reconstruct past events as illusions—if they knew where Scroll had been sitting when she marked the papers, Summer could show them exactly what had happened. “But Teacher Scroll marks exams in City Hall. Is it appropriate for us to simply walk in?”
“City Hall is open to everyone in Neverwinter. There’s nothing inappropriate about it.”
“The lobby is open,” Lily said. “The Ministry of Education office is on the second floor. Do you think the officials there will just let us through?”
Mystery Moon went quiet.
“Let’s forget it,” Evelyn said. She didn’t want to impose on anyone.
“I have an idea,” Candle said.
The idea was Nana.
It was simple: Summer was already involved, and one more person hardly changed the situation. And Nana Pine, as it turned out, required no explanation or strategy at all—she simply walked into City Hall the following morning and was greeted on all sides by smiling officials who waved her through without question. Whether it was the warm reputation she’d earned as the little healing angel, or the fact that her father was a well-known noble personally commended by His Majesty, or simply the way she moved through a room as if trouble was something that happened to other people—she arrived at the Ministry of Education office without a single impediment.
The office was empty. Few teachers came unless there was a meeting.
“We’re in!” Mystery Moon announced. “Let’s backtrack!”
Summer lingered in the doorway. “Are we supposed to be here? This is for officials.”
“Hummingbird is the vice minister of the Ministry of Construction,” Mystery Moon said, placing one hand on her chest. “We’re practically colleagues. As long as we don’t touch anything, Scroll won’t even know we were here.”
“If I find out you’re lying,” Lily said, “I will personally tell Scroll every detail of this.”
“I thought you weren’t coming.”
“I’m here to supervise. To prevent a catastrophe. Don’t read anything into it.”
Evelyn glanced between them arguing and thought that she may have made a mistake agreeing to this. Then Candle took Summer’s hand and murmured something reassuring, and Summer nodded and closed her eyes.
The illusion bloomed into the room.
Summer worked backward quickly through the recent days, searching for the moment after the exam when Scroll had sat at this desk to score papers. She found it, and held it.
Everyone crowded behind the translucent figure of Scroll. Evelyn watched as the familiar, precise hands moved through the stack, marking each sheet in turn. Then Maggie’s paper came to the surface.
“There,” Mystery Moon said. “I told you.”
The paper was indeed nearly blank. Drawings of meat occupied the spaces where calculations should have been. Even the illusion-Scroll paused at it, shaking her head faintly before inscribing a number at the top.
Not 117.
“So the problem is with Maggie,” Nana said thoughtfully, tilting her head.
Mystery Moon looked devastated. “This means it wasn’t Scroll who gave her a high score in exchange for grilled meat—”
Lily’s palm landed on the back of her head. “Be quiet.”
“Should we leave?” Summer asked. “Before someone finds us here?”
“Wait just a moment,” Candle said. “Something might have gone wrong when the scores were copied.”
“The figures in the new notation system are clear,” Evelyn said. “Confusion between 17 and 117 is almost impossible.” The universal education system used simple, distinct strokes for each digit. A copying error of that magnitude was effectively ruled out.
They watched as Scroll checked all the papers and transferred the totals to a summary form. Maggie’s column read 17.
“The error wasn’t Scroll’s,” Candle said, satisfied.
Then an apprentice appeared in the doorway.
The illusion rendered the conversation in silence. Lip-reading produced something like: Lord Scroll… Director Barov is asking for you. The illusion-Scroll nodded and rose, following the apprentice out. The door swung shut behind them.
A moment later—perhaps from the suction of the closing door, perhaps from the shift in air pressure—the window, which had not been latched properly, swung open a crack.
The autumn air moved through it.
Papers lifted from the desk and scattered across the floor in a loose cascade.
“The window,” Lily said quietly.
They watched the window swing wider, pushed by the outdoor wind. It banged against the frame with what must have been a loud crack, though Summer’s illusion rendered it in silence. The glass trembled in the panes.
Then the wind moved through the room again, and the pen-holder tipped. A quill that had been resting inside the ink bottle caught the air current and wheeled upward, tracing an arc across the office—
—and came down with its tip on Maggie’s exam sheet.
The nib dragged a single wet stroke across the paper, beginning before the 1 and landing just after the 7, turning the number into something that looked, to any eye that hadn’t watched it happen, exactly like 117.
Another apprentice appeared in the doorway some time later, alerted by whatever noise the window had made. She entered, looked around, shut the window firmly, gathered the scattered papers from the floor, stacked them neatly on the desk, and departed.
Evelyn and Candle looked at each other.
Neither Scroll’s error nor Maggie’s intention. A wind. A quill. A door opened and closed at precisely the wrong moment.
“The culprit,” Mystery Moon announced, raising her head toward the ceiling, “was Teacher Scroll. For not closing the window.”
“It was the wind.”
“But if she had shut the window properly, none of this could have happened. Ergo—”
“That is not how causation works!”
“Actually,” Nana said, in the tone of someone working through a genuine logical puzzle, “if we follow it back far enough, it was His Majesty Roland’s fault. He built City Hall here, and expanded it to two stories. Without the extra story, Scroll wouldn’t be marking papers in this room at all.”
A long pause.
“So the culprit is… His Majesty Roland?”
“Enough.”
Summer had begun to make small, desperate sounds. Evelyn put a hand on her shoulder. “That’s enough. Thank you—really. Let’s go.”
“Wait!” Mystery Moon stepped in front of the door. “What if the next exam paper is in here? We could—”
Lily moved. Mystery Moon scrambled backward. The argument that followed was brief and definitive.
The investigation dissolved into farce, and afterward Evelyn walked back to the Witch Building alone.
The truth had been established. She should have felt satisfied, or at least settled. Instead, the image of the flying quill kept returning—the way it had wheeled up from the ink bottle, traced its arc, and descended at exactly the right angle to land on exactly the right square of paper, converting a score of 17 into 117 through nothing more than the cooperation of a poorly-latched window, a draft from a closing door, and the particular position of a pen-holder on a desk.
Every element had been random. Not one of them had intended anything.
And yet together they had produced a result as precise as if it had been engineered.
She thought about cocktails—the way a good one emerged not from knowing what each ingredient would do in isolation, but from understanding how they would collide and combine. How a rare combination, discovered entirely by chance, could produce a taste that no amount of deliberate calculation had anticipated.
Roland had told her once about the microscopic balls—molecules, he’d called them—that moved in constant, disorderly disturbance through any liquid. Each motion was meaningless. The aggregate of all of them was flavor, temperature, life.
The world is full of chaos. But the results are hidden inside it.
She opened her eyes. Reached for the cup of water on the table beside her.
Color spread through it—red-orange, warm as autumn—and a fragrance she couldn’t name drifted up to meet her. She hesitated, then touched her tongue to the liquid.
The sweetness that answered was complex: something bitter underneath, something deeply mellow beneath that, a layering she had no existing category for. Not juice. Not milk. Not tea. Not honey. Some territory that lay between all of those and was also none of them.
One thing was certain.
This was not wine.