Chapter 3
By the time the building went quiet, I was hungry enough to remember the east kitchen.
The girl with box braids had said the bread in the east kitchen was better, so that became my destination.
I put on my boots and went looking.
At the next turn, I saw them.
Four students stood near the end of the corridor, where the main hall split toward the classrooms and the service passage. At the center was the boy from the dining hall. The one who looked like he expected me to lick his boots.
He saw me and stared at me with same expression, but now without a table between us, without bread to distract myself with, without a wall at my back.
He didn’t move for the first breath. He moved for the second. By the third he was walking toward me, and his friends were walking with him. They had apparently decided—at some signal I couldn’t read—that I was now on their schedule.
I lifted my chin and refused to look away because I knew angry men.
Men at the shop. Men in apartment hallways. Men who wanted someone smaller nearby when the day had gone badly.
He wasn’t that kind of angry, though. His was cleaner. Better dressed. Trained into a posture of disdain.
He stopped four feet away.
The cold of marble came off him in waves. The taste at the back of my throat was sugar—burnt sugar, like a scented candle when its wick had gone too long.
I swallowed.
The taste did not go away, which seemed unfair, since I hadn’t invited any part of him into my mouth.
“Verita,” he said, like he had read it off a list.
“My name is Astra.” I was really getting tired of correcting that.
“Not to me.”
“Then I guess we’re not talking.”
Unfortunately, he continued speaking.
“You are not what I expected.”
“That seems to be upsetting you very deeply.”
His eyes narrowed.
Good. I had annoyed him.
“My name is Caspian Ashford. I am the Ascendant first-year prefect.”
“Congratulations.”
“I have been assigned to your alignment year.”
“My what?”
“The first-years who will train with you, read with you, and witness what becomes of you.”
“That sounds cozy.”
“It is not meant to be.”
“And what becomes of me?”
“That depends on whether Zenith Hall can correct you.”
“Correct me?”
“If it’s possible.”
“Good luck to everyone involved, then.”
For half a second, something in his face looked less certain.
Then it was gone.
The two boys beside him stayed there, glaring at me, until Caspian Ashford turned and strode down the corridor.
The cold of marble in my mouth went with him, thankfully, and so did the others students.
It took me a minute to start walking again after that.
The corridor Caspian was not the way I was going. Naturally, that made it the only direction my eyes wanted to keep checking. Like some part of me wanted him to come back.
Ridiculous.
He was exactly the kind of boy I was better off avoiding.
I finally dragged my gaze away from the empty space where he had been and followed the narrower passage until the polished academy smell gave way to fried onions.
The east kitchen was behind a curtain of old garlic hung over the doorway.
The girl with box braids was sitting on the counter eating an apple.
She lifted her eyebrows when I came in.
“You said that the bread was better here. So I put in the effort to find it.”
“Heroic.” She grinned.
“I also met a boy named Caspian Ashford in the corridor.”
She rolled her eyes and pulled a face. “Ew. Sorry.”
From the far counter, someone snorted.
The girl took another bite of the apple. “Reverie LeJoi.”
“What?”
“My name. Rev, if you’re going to make a habit of popping in.” Rev looked past me to him. “Ignore Kieran.”
The boy at the far counter lifted his apple in a lazy salute. “Reverie’s introductions leave something to be desired.” The boy—Kieran—tossed the apple in the air and caught it.
He was taller than Caspian, with brown skin and locks braided back.
His eyes were green.
Not hazel. Not brown with light in them. Bright green.
He watched me over the apple like he had been waiting for me to notice him and was pleased I finally had.
Something pulled inside my body. A strange sensation like the one I’d felt around Caspian, but this time it was the sour-sweet taste of green apple. The feeling of sun on warm stone on my skin, and a clean edge of wind, like a window cracked open above a river.
That’s twice today my body has done a thing I don’t have a word for, I thought a moment before my knees went loose.
I caught the edge of the table, hoping neither of them noticed.
“Can I sit?”
“Before you fall down?” Kieran asked. His mouth curved. “That was an attempt at sympathy,” he added when Rev shot him a look.
“It needs practice.”
“Most of my better qualities do.”
Rev pointed to the counter beside her. “Sit there before he reveals another one of his qualities.”
I sat on the worn pale corner of the counter.
Kieran watched me do it.
Not the way Caspian had watched me, like I had offended him by existing near him. This was worse in a different direction. Interested. Amused. Too direct to be polite.
Rev glared at him again.
He ignored her because he was still staring at me.
“Kieran. Be a person.”
“I am being a person.” He bit the apple. “Just not the one she expected.”
“Try being a polite person.”
“Polite isn’t one of my qualities. She’d never trust it.”
He said it like he already knew me.
Annoyingly, he wasn’t wrong.
He bit the apple again, chewed slowly, and swallowed. Then he glanced at Rev. The look between them was quick and old, the sort of exchange people had after years of friendship.
“Welcome to Zenith Hall, Astra. I’m Kieran Marsh,” he said.
It was the first time anyone at Zenith had welcomed me.
“Grab a piece of the good bread,” Rev indicated the tray behind her. “For the road.”
“What road?”
“The one back to your room. They lock the corridor at nine. You don’t want to get caught out after curfew.”
I reached for the bread, and my sleeve slipped back.
Kieran’s apple stopped halfway to his mouth, and Rev choked on the bite of bread she’d just taken.
“What?” I asked.
Rev’s eyes stayed on the lines at my wrist.
“Nothing.”
“Whatever just happened there was not nothing.”
Kieran glanced at her.
“Rev?”
She looked at him once, then back at my wrist.
“It looks like Sadie’s did.”
Kieran nodded.
Neither of them bothered to elaborate so I had to ask:
“Who’s Sadie?”
Rev looked away and Kieran said, “Someone who isn’t here anymore.”
He was looking at me with something close to pity in his eyes.
“Where’d she go?” I asked again, looking at Rev this time.
Rev shook her head and didn’t meet my eyes.
“Not tonight,” Kieran said.
“I wasn’t asking you.”
“I know, but I’m answering you.”
Rev slid off the counter and went to the bread bin. When she came back, she had a piece of bread wrapped in cloth and a small pat of butter folded into waxed paper.
“For the road,” she said.
“What road?”
“The one back to your room.” He set his apple down and pushed off the counter. “Curfew,” Kieran said.
Rev looked at the clock above the stove and nodded.
“He’s right.”
“Tragic for everyone,” Kieran said. “I was just becoming interesting.”
I rolled my eyes. “I doubt that.”
His eyes met mine, and the taste of apples came back so sharply I nearly dropped the bread in my hand.
“Oh, I wouldn’t doubt me just yet,” he said.
“Why’s that?”
His smile tilted.
“I’m even better with second impressions.”
Rev groaned. “Like I said, ignore him.” She took Kieran by the arm. “Come on, let’s go before you make an even bigger ass of yourself than you already have.”
Rev took the narrow pantry door, and Kieran followed her with one last look over his shoulder.
When they’d disappeared, I went the other way, back under the garlic and into the hall, with warm bread in one hand and butter in the other..
The corridor was even colder on the way back than it had been on the way in. But apples stayed in my mouth long after Kieran was gone.
When I reached my room, I went in and sat on the bed with my coat still on. I held the bread Rev had given me in one hand. My wrist had not stopped doing whatever it had been doing since the basin.
I hadn’t looked at it since, but I looked at it now.
The lines on my Mark had moved again. The pattern was nothing I could read, but it was a pattern, and it was responding to something.
Or someone.
Green eyes. Apples.
I pressed my thumb over the Mark.
The lines held their new shape.
I just didn’t know what it meant.