The accumulated quality of people doing honest work in a specific place over time.
The school's own coal.
He had been thinking about this since Lyr described the approach visible from where he was standing.
The school had been running for two and a half years.
The first class had been eleven students in a half-finished building.
The eleventh class was running now with twenty-four students and six faculty and the participatory curriculum and the correction curriculum and the deep-layer sessions and Adva coming from the eastern territories to describe the formation-hardening failure mode from the inside.
The school was not what it had been.
But the quality of the first morning was in it.
What you have is not wrong.
Still present.
Present not because Calla still said it — she still did when a student needed it — but because the school had been built on it for long enough that it was in the fabric.
The coal in the school.
