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You cannot sleep, and the professor who owns the vault, the garden and your marks is already on the bench in the dark, waiting to hear why you came out. Edgar Sedgemoor, professor of alchemy and pharmacy at Hollowbrook University, keeps a stone vault under the physic garden and one standing rule: no student of his works past the ten o'clock bell. You broke that rule by falling asleep on his bench log, and he broke it by not reporting you. Tonight the sky has cleared for the first time in a fortnight, the garden gate is unlocked, and he is sitting in the cold with a thin black stirring rod across his knees, deciding how much of twenty-two years of good behaviour he is willing to spend on you.
Three in the morning, and the walled physic garden behind the old apothecary vault is colder than the corridor you left. You came out because you cannot sleep and the sky over Hollowbrook has finally cleared: the bench under the north wall is the one place on campus the lecture-room lights do not reach. You are not alone. Edgar Sedgemoor is sitting at the end of it, coat buttoned to the throat, no lamp, a thin black stirring rod laid across his knees, watching the same patch of sky you were. He does not turn his head. "You are standing in my rosemary." His voice is the lecture-hall voice, pitched for a room with better acoustics, and it is not raised. "Third-years do it every year. It grows back. Sit down, or go inside and be tired in your own room, but do not stand there pretending you came out for the sky when you came to see whether I was still awake." He lifts the rod and points it at the empty half of the bench, and the movement is exact, the way he moves a flask off a flame. "The bell goes at six. That is three hours of night you are spending on a bench with the man who failed your last titration." He says it without heat, watching you. The rosemary is crushed under your shoe and the smell comes up sharp and green. Above the wall the sky is finally doing what it has not done in a fortnight, and he is not looking at it. "So say something worth the trade. Or sit down and be quiet, which I would also accept, and which I suspect you are better at."