Thief of Time

and color. The class had built a full-size white horse out of cardboard boxes, during which time they’d learned a lot about horses and Susan learned about Jason’s remarkably accurate powers of observation. She’d had to take the cardboard tube away from him and explain that this was a polite horse.
    It had been a long day. She raised the lid of her desk and took out Grim Fairy Tales . This dislodged some paperwork, which in turn revealed a small cardboard box decorated in black and gold.
    It had been a little present from Vincent’s parents.
    She stared at the box.
    Every day she had to go through this. It was ridiculous. It wasn’t even as if Higgs & Meakins did good chocolates. They were just butter and sugar and—
    She scrabbled among the sad little scraps of brown paper inside the box and pulled out a chocolate. No one could be expected not to have just one chocolate, after all.
    She put it in her mouth.
    Damn damn damn damn! It was nougat inside! Her one chocolate today and it was damn artificial damn pink-and-white damn sickly damn stupid nougat !
    Well, no one could be expected to believe that counted. * She was entitled to another—
    The teacher part of her, which had eyes in the back of its head, caught the blur of movement. She spun around.
    “No running with scythes!”
    The Death of Rats stopped jogging along the Nature Table and gave her a guilty look.
    S QUEAK?
    “And no going into the Stationery Cupboard, either,” said Susan automatically. She slammed the desk lid shut.
    S QUEAK!
    “Yes, you were. I could hear you thinking about it.” It was possible to deal with the Death of Rats provided you thought of him as a very small Jason.
    The Stationery Cupboard! That was one of the great battlegrounds of classroom history, that and the playhouse. But the ownership of the playhouse usually sorted itself out without Susan’s intervention, so that all she had to do was be ready with ointment, a nose blow, and mild sympathy for the losers, whereas the Stationery Cupboard was a war of attrition. It contained pots of powder paint, and reams of paper, and boxes of crayons, and more idiosyncratic items like a spare pair of pants for Billy, who did his best. It also contained The Scissors, which under classroom rules were treated as some kind of Doomsday Machine, and, of course, the boxes of stars. The only people allowed in the cupboard were Susan and, usually, Vincent. Despite everything Susan had tried, short of actual deception, he was always the official “best at everything” and won the coveted honor every day, which was to go into the Stationery Cupboard and fetch the pencils and hand them out. For the rest of the class, and especially Jason, the Stationery Cupboard was some mystic magic realm to be entered whenever possible.
    Honestly, thought Susan, once you learned the arts of defending the Stationery Cupboard, outwitting Jason, and keeping the class pet alive until the end of term, you’ve mastered at least half of teaching.
    She signed the register, watered the sad plants on the windowsill, went and fetched some fresh privet from the hedge for the stick insects that were the successors to Henry the Hamster (chosen on the basis that it was quite hard to tell when they were dead), tidied a few errant crayons away, and looked around the classroom at all those little chairs. It sometimes worried her that nearly everyone she knew well was three feet high.
    She was never certain that she trusted her grandfather at times like this. It was all to do with The Rules. He couldn’t interfere, but he knew her weaknesses and he could wind her up and send her out into the world…
    Someone like me . Yes, he’d known how to engage her interest.
    Someone like me. Suddenly there’s some dangerous clock somewhere in the world, and suddenly I’m told that there’s someone like me .
    Someone like me . Except not like me. At least I knew my parents. And she’d listened to Death’s account of the tall dark woman wandering from room to room in the endless castle of glass, weeping for the child she’d given birth to and could see every day but could never touch…
    Where do I even begin?
    Tick
    Lobsang learned a lot. He learned that every room had at least four corners. He learned that the sweepers started work when the sky was light enough to see the dust, and continued until sunset.
    As a master, Lu-Tze was kind enough. He would always point out those bits that Lobsang had not done properly.
    After