Everly
Sitting in the Nyxhaven dining hall with a tray of acceptable eggs and the full, burning attention of three rival sororities is, I'm discovering, as good as the morning gets.
It's the prettiest room I've ever been afraid in.
Three stories of vaulted stone, the long windows throwing bruised reds and blues down across the tables, the ceiling lost somewhere up past where the iron chandeliers bother to light.
It smells like coffee and cold rock and the old must of a building that's been standing longer than my whole family's time in this country.
A hundred forks find a hundred plates and the sound climbs up into the dark and doesn't come back down.
Four hundred people eat breakfast in here every morning, and a couple of weeks in I have not learned the name of a single one who'll say mine back.
I have a seat. That was the easy part. The harder part is everything the room is saying without saying it, in a language nobody handed me a textbook for, and pretending I'm not straining to keep up. They didn't cover this at my state school.
The Ossuary Sisters hold the long table by the east windows, Mors girls in silver and white, the kind of pale and poised that acts like having feelings is something that only happens to lesser people, and who've spent the last few days making sure I know exactly what they think of me: cold looks, stares held too long across the quad, the works.
Catalina's loyalists. I already know the story they're telling about me: that the four house presidents were corrupted by something that arrived wearing a grimoire where its magic should be, which—
Okay. To be fair. I'm not not a factor.
The Storm Daughters are more complicated.
They've split, which Felix mentioned last week in the kind of offhand way he delivers important information, and I can see the fracture from here: half of them along the north wall, half near the door, and a current of something taut running between the two clusters that prickles faintly along my forearms. Like a storm front that hasn't committed yet.
The Chance Dealers are closest to me, scattered at the round tables near the hearth, most of them running cards or dice while they eat.
One girl is balancing a coin across her knuckles with one hand and buttering toast with the other, and the toast hasn't fallen, so I assume this is just what Tumult students do with their hands when they can't make them stop.
I eat my eggs. I keep my chin up. I do not make prolonged eye contact with anyone who has already decided what I am.
The problem with being the one thing nobody has a name for is that everyone keeps trying to give you one.
Right on cue, one of them takes the long way to the carafes—an Ossuary Sister, silver pin at her collar, not one hair out of place—and slows just enough as she passes my table.
"They salted the president's houses after the five of you ran in the spring," she says, pleasant as weather, to the air a foot to the left of my face. "Floor to rafters. You can still smell it, if you go in. Like something died in there and they're pretending it didn't."
She's gone before I've decided whether that was a threat or just a fact, which is the whole point of how people talk in this place. I keep my fork moving. Chin up. Welcome to Nyxhaven, I tell myself, where even the cruelty makes you do half the work yourself.
The coffee on my tray is watery and apologetic, the kind you'd refuse at a free event—when a mug appears at my elbow. Placed there without ceremony, set down by a hand with chipped blue nail polish, quick and quiet, so smooth it's barely a move at all.
"End carafe," Enya Halstone says. Not quite to me—to a point between my shoulder and the serving line, the way people here say the real things.
She has a yellow scarf tied into her hair and a book open on her tray, half-finished, the spine bent back like she's been carrying it around for months.
"Nobody uses it. The brew cycle's off by twelve minutes, which puts everyone off.
But the acid's—" She trails off, hums three notes of something I don't recognize.
"Thank you," I say, and it comes out holding more than two words should be able to carry.
For just a second her eyes actually land on mine—tired, kind, focused from somewhere far off, like she's looking up at me from the bottom of a well.
"Don't thank me in here," she says, mild.
"It draws the eye." Then, softer, the corner of her mouth moving: "But you're welcome.
" And she's gone, drifting toward the graduate table at the back, sliding into her seat and opening her book like the whole thing never happened.
I pull the mug toward me. Dark, actual coffee, steam still threading off the surface.
I take a sip and feel, for one honest second, like a person.
I tuck the feeling away fast, because I've learned that's what you do here: pocket the small warmths before the room finds them and uses them for something.
Enya Halstone is a name I'm already carrying.
One of the ones from Wheeler's notebook, numbers declining by the week, her column falling faster than anyone else's.
Whatever he draws from the sessions, he draws it from her first and sharpest. The good coffee she found me goes bitter at the back of my throat.
I don't know what to do with that yet. I mark it and move on.
The graduate table at the back is its own small country, and this morning half of it is sitting in the silence people carry when they've just come from Wheeler's parlor.
I'm starting to know the look well enough to find it across a room.
The boy at the end has his fork in his hand and no clear idea what to do with it, like the wire between fork and eggs got knocked loose somewhere on the walk over.
The girl beside him keeps starting a sentence and not landing it.
Another one sits dead still, careful with it, like he's hunting around for the last hour and could've sworn he had it a minute ago.
Enya slides in among them and opens her book, and not one of them looks up, because looking up costs something they're running short on today.
I told myself, my first week, that it was the work. Hard study, long hours, the price of being chosen. I get a little worse at believing me every morning.
The dining hall sorts itself while I eat.
It's not assigned seats; it never is, in places like this.
It just settles, everyone sliding into the place they already know is theirs, an order nobody has to announce.
I'm the exception—no house colors, no sorority flanking me, gray fabric that means undecided or unplaceable, sitting at a center table because I had three seconds to choose and picked wrong. The room notices. It always notices.
So do I.
The bond threads pull in four directions at once, the way they always do now, that warmth from outside my sternum, arriving from the wrong side of my ribs, four separate weights in four directions.
Atlas is somewhere north of here, running something low and banked, distant thunder that hasn't broken, which means he's managing rather than releasing.
Ren's thread is steadier, deep and warm, already attending to someone.
Felix is—light. Barely there. Which might mean nothing, or might mean he's bent the odds around himself again so even the mark can't quite pin his location, which is the kind of move that gives me a headache if I think about it too long. I leave him to it.
Callum I've been trying to learn to read since Oklahoma.
The thread is there—cool, deliberate, like putting your hand near stone rather than against it—and sometimes I think I can feel something under it, something that isn't cold all the way through.
I might be inventing that. I'm not ready to decide.
Four people I'd trust with my life, every one of them close enough to feel from a breakfast table, and I won't sit across from a single one of them today.
That's the part the terms are best at. The cameras and the marks aren't even the worst of it.
The worst is the quiet work of taking four people who spent a summer learning to sleep in the same cheap motel room and setting them down at four separate tables in four separate buildings and calling it accountability.
If Atlas walked through that door right now I still couldn't cross the room to him. So I don't watch the door. I eat my eggs and feel all four of them not-here at once, four cold spots where four warm ones should be.
I've nearly made it all the way around the room when I see her.
The far table—the least contested corner, half-tucked behind a support column, which I'm fairly confident was deliberate.
A girl, freshman probably, still in the gray-and-black of an unsorted student.
She isn't eating. She has a cup of tea she isn't drinking, both hands curved around it like she's warming them, and she's staring at nothing, or at something the rest of us can't see, her mouth pressed into a flat careful line.
The air around her is wrong.
I don't have a precise word for it. It isn't the way the bond threads pull from my chest in four directions—north, west, west-and-south, somewhere behind me—that warmth I know by heart now, arriving from outside me.
This is different. The air around her table has weight.
It moves differently. Pools, almost—settles around her the way water finds the low spot under a door.
More than a freshman should have. More than anyone should have who didn't know they had it.
She doesn't look like she knows she has it. She looks like someone trying very hard to hold still in a room that won't stop pressing on her, which is—yeah. I could describe that feeling from the inside.