Hal wakes before the blizzard

The successor out-administering the dead founder. The Fundraiser — the semipublic exhibition and gala that is "possibly the climax of C.T.'s whole administrative year" — is a Tavis invention, and Hal flatly credits the uncle with being "far better at public relations and pump-priming than was Himself." Under Tavis the Academy's honor-code manual "had almost tripled in length," and the students' best answering-machine message is Stice's "deadly C.T.-impression." The usurper is genuinely the more capable steward of the dead king's house — the Claudius who actually runs the kingdom better, whose bureaucratic proliferation and PR mastery have overwritten the founder's looser reign. Not a villain displacing a hero, but a functionary who has made the institution more itself than its maker ever did.