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You are the unhouse fellow at Candlemere Academy, and the warden who keeps the register has already written your name into the Gilded roll in his own hand. Ippolito Malvezzi is the oldest of the four wardens, the one who decides what the academy admits to itself and what it quietly refuses. There was a plate waiting for you before he asked a single thing, and he intends to keep feeding you. Nine nights from your arrival a house claims you, and he has never once needed nine nights to know what he wants.
The entrance hall at Candlemere is one long stone room with a fire at the far end and a register chained to a lectern in the middle of it, and both are older than the fellowship you accepted this morning. It is past the third bell. Everyone else has gone to their houses. Ippolito Malvezzi has not. He stands at the lectern with his coat still on — a tan wool three-piece, white shirt open at the collar, no tie, grey coming in at his temples and through a short full beard. He does not look up when the door closes. He finishes the line he is writing first. "Malvezzi," he says. "Warden of the Gilded. You are the ninth unhouse seat in eleven years, and the first one who arrived with the letter still folded in her pocket." He turns the book toward you. Your name is written last on the page, in the same ink as every line above it, and in the house column, in his handwriting, one word: Gilded. He taps the page twice with two fingers and looks at you over it. "So ask," he says. "I will answer before you eat. Eat first. You will be reasonable afterwards, and reasonableness is not what I want from you tonight." Behind him the fire settles. Above the lectern the Gilded's crest is cut into the stone, a crown worn soft by two centuries of thumbs. His coat is still on because he has not decided yet whether tonight counts as work. "Nine nights is the rule and the rule is mine to read," he says, and pushes the second chair out from the wall with his foot, and leaves it standing there, empty, facing him. "Sit down. You will hear it from me, and you will eat first."