Chapter 5
Despite my sleeplessness, the bell rang at six.
I didn’t get up at the sound. I waited, letting the bell pass without obeying it, because I still had no idea where I was supposed to start the day.
By seven, the hallway was full of students with a plan for their morning. I didn’t have one, but I decided I’d need to find one.
I left my room and made it halfway down the corridor before a man stepped out from the stairwell.
He was older than the students and younger than Juno, with a faculty coat.
“Astra Verita,” he said. “Professor Aldric, Dean of the Combat Department.”
I stared at him.
“The what department?”
“Combat.”
“Of course. Normal school thing.”
His mouth twitched toward a smirk but he said nothing.
“You have Hale now.”
“I have what now?”
“Hale. Orientation. Lower salle.”
About damn time someone gives me some direction.
“I haven’t eaten.”
“The breakfast bell rang at six.”
“And I was supposed to understand that was the breakfast bell by instinct?”
He shrugged. “Now you know for tomorrow.”
“Am I going to get a schedule or something?”
He ignored the question, strode past me, and was on his way without even bothering to tell me how to get to the lower salle.
I shook my head in disbelief.
Breakfast would have to wait.
Not because I wanted it to. My stomach was growling. Because I was apparently expected to be at a place I had no idea how to get to.
Again.
So I went looking.
I found two staircases, one locked door, a corridor full of portraits who all looked disappointed in me, and a classroom occupied by three girls who stopped talking the moment I opened the door.
“Lower salle?” I asked.
One of them pointed down without speaking.
This again.
“Helpful,” I mumbled, and closed the door.
By the time I found the lower door, I was late.
Excellent.
Lost and late, all before breakfast.
I stepped inside and saw racks of practice blades lining one wall. On the other, old shields hung above a row of hooks, all empty.
No one had warned me sharp objects would be involved in my education, but somehow I wasn’t surprised.
Hale, or so I assumed, was already there.
He stood in the center of the room with his sleeves rolled to the wrist and his hands loose at his sides.
Tall, tan-skinned, close-cropped hair, broad through the shoulders without looking heavy.
My first thought was that he looked like he could put me on the floor before I finished deciding whether to be afraid of him.
My second was worse.
I wanted to see if he would.
He didn’t bother to introduce himself, only inclined his head a small degree.
Apparently Hale was economical with more than his words.
“Hale?” I asked.
He nodded. “Astra, I assume. You know why you’re here?”
“Some man named Aldric, who I’ve never met before in my life, said lower salle at nine. He seemed to think that was enough information.”
“It wasn’t.”
“No, directions would have helped. That’s why I’m late.”
His eyes stayed on me for one breath too long. I got the feeling he didn’t appreciate my wit.
“I’m to take you through the places you’re expected to know before someone punishes you for not knowing them,” he said finally.
“That’s generous of the school, considering no one has shown me anything since I got here.”
“Generosity has nothing to do with it. Neither does the school, really.”
I had to stifle the urge to stick my tongue out at the back of his head.
Cryptic bastard, I thought as he turned and walked.
I followed him anyway, partly because I had no idea where else to go and partly because the view wasn’t terrible.
His shirt fit badly in the shoulders.
Or well.
Whichever one made the fabric pull across the muscles of his back when he moved.
I was still wondering whether noticing an instructor’s deltoids was against any academy rules when the sensation came again.
He was three feet ahead of me, walking, and still I tasted it, the same impossible way I had tasted marble in the quad with Caspian and apples in the kitchen with Kieran.
Except this time, it was leather and the faint metal-salt of someone who had been working out before I arrived.
Under that was something else I was too flustered to pin down.
Hale’s step checked, then he kept walking.
So he’d felt it too.
I curled my fingers into my palm and followed as he took me down a stairwell without explaining any further about where we were going.
He showed me the lower passage, the locked archive door, and the stair that led back toward the main floor without stopping long enough for questions.
Then he took me through the main hall.
It was the largest room I had seen in Zenith Hall so far, and the dining hall had been the biggest room I’d seen in my life to that point.
The ceiling disappeared into shadow above the beams, dotted with more celestial patterns that probably meant something to someone who could read the constellations, and the far wall held a set of doors that gave me the chills for no reason I could understand.
Dark wood banded in black iron, set beneath an arch carved with Marks I didn’t know how to read. No handle on the outside. No keyhole I could see.
At hip height, on the right side of the frame, people had cut symbols into the wood.
One of them caught my eye.
A curved line met a straight line, and at the junction of the two lines someone had cut a small circle. The cut was deeper at the curve than at the line. The circle had been done last; the wood was lighter inside it than outside it.
It wasn’t my Mark.
Not exactly.
But it was close, and my body knew it.
The lines under my sleeve gave one small pull, as if something in the wood had called them by the wrong name.
I thought of Rev in the kitchen.
It looks like Sadie’s did.
The hall felt colder after that.
I looked at the cut mark without intending to look at it for as long as I did.
Hale stopped two paces ahead of me.
Then he turned.
He saw where my attention had gone and waited.
“What door is this?” I asked.
“The west door.”
“That sounds official.”
“It is.”
“Where does it go?”
His eyes moved once to the symbol cut into the frame.
“Not somewhere you want to be sent.”
“Was Sadie sent there?”
Hale’s attention snapped back to me.
For one second, he looked less like an instructor and more like a man who had just heard someone yell fire in a crowded room.
“How do you know that name?”
“Reverie said it.”
That did not make him look less alarmed.
He looked down the hall behind us.
“Not here,” he said, and his voice had dropped to a whisper.
“Why not?”
“People do not need to stand in a hallway to hear what happens in one.”
That shut me up. For the moment, at least.
Hale turned and kept walking.
I followed again. Mostly because I wasn’t sure I’d be able to find my way back on my own.
We came up two flights and out into a corridor I had walked last night.
“Where are we going now?” I asked.
“The archives.”
“Are we allowed in those?”
“Today.”
We reached a heavy wooden door with three locks. He undid two. He showed me he didn’t have a key for the third by not attempting to open it.
“Student files. Pre-founding records. The pre-founding ones are behind the third lock. The third lock is for archive staff.”
“And students,” I said, “do not have access to the pre-founding ones?”
“Students do not have access. Neither do instructors. Anyone who wants to read those records must get access through the faculty. The faculty signs for them at the desk.”
“Have you ever read in the pre-founding stacks?”
“I have.”
“Who signed for you?”
“You ask a lot of questions.”
“I’ve noticed no one around here gives me any answers unless I do.”
Hale frowned. “Careful with that.”
“With asking questions?”
“With assuming you want to know the answers.”
Then he opened the door and said, softer, “Aldric.”
Hale walked me past the second-year files, the third-year files, the fourth-year files, and the records of students no longer in residence.
Those stood in cabinets at the back.
Last year. The year before. The year before that.
Sadie would be in one of them.
I slowed at last year’s cabinet.
Hale stopped without turning fully around.
“What did I say about questions?”
“I haven’t asked one.”
“You were about to.”
Annoyingly, he was right.
Hale led me back out the way we’d come, locked the archive behind us, and took me back up through the warmer corridors without speaking.
At the door to the south wing, he stopped.
“That’s the tour.”
“That’s the whole tour?”
“For today. You have first attunement at noon. East practice hall. You’ll find it on your own.”
“I’ve noticed that’s the preferred method here.”
He looked at me then.
Not my face.
My wrist.
Then the direction of the archives.
“Don’t go digging in last year’s cabinet,” he said. “You won’t find anything you want to see there.”
I opened my mouth to protest, even though he was right, but he held up a hand.
“I notice everything, Astra,” he added. “It’s a curse.”
Then he turned and walked away.
I watched him go back the way we had come, still admiring the way he moved despite myself. He had reached the stairwell before I let myself look away.
The leather-warm trace of him stayed at the back of my throat.
By the time I reached Room 114, my Mark had moved again.