Chapter 6
Imanaged to find the attunement room on my own, as was expected of me.
The room had a high ceiling and no windows. The air was too warm and too still. A circle of pale stone had been inlaid into the floor, three paces across. Someone had scrubbed the center of it recently; the wet mineral smell still clung to the room.
Students stood around the circle with their hands at their sides, eyes down or fixed on the blank stone above us.
I had been ignored more warmly by inanimate objects.
The man at the center of the circle looked up from the stone.
He wore the gray coat of faculty, buttoned all the way to the throat.
Narrow, clean-shaven, dark hair combed flat.
He held his hands in front of him with the fingertips lightly touching, as if he had been interrupted in the middle of judging something.
His Mark sat at the inside of his wrist, pale and exact as a signature.
“Professor Caswell,” he said. “You must be Verita.”
He didn’t extend a hand, and his eyes went to my wrist before they came to my face.
“Astra.” I was getting tired of correcting that mistake.
He nodded, but I had a feeling it wouldn’t stick.
“Stand at the rim. Your hands at your sides. Eyes at the floor until I say otherwise. You will not be asked to do anything today. You will be asked to be still while the room does what the room does. This is standard procedure for new first-years.”
I went to the rim of the circle. There were two empty places. I took the one nearest the door because I didn’t yet know whether I would want to run for that door later.
The student to my left was a girl I didn’t recognize. Small, pale-skinned, with a Mark the same gold I had seen on a woman at the gate. She avoided my eyes. The student to my right was a boy with a Mark on the back of his hand. He didn’t look at me either.
Across the circle, opposite me, was Caspian Ashford.
He hadn’t moved when I came in. He just stood at the rim, his palms at his sides, his eyes on the floor.
To his left, also at the rim, was the girl I had seen with him in the dining hall my first day—the one who had put her hand on his sleeve. Her hair was swept back in a severe knot I would later learn belonged to her family.
Her Mark was at her collarbone, and the collar of her dress didn’t hide it. The lines were gold and fine, almost delicate, but the skin around them looked faintly pulled. As if the Mark sat a fraction too tightly.
I didn’t know enough yet to know why that bothered me.
But she made it immediately clear that my very existence bothered her with the look she gave me.
Caswell cleared his throat and drew my attention back to where he stood in the center of the circle. His feet were inside the inlaid stone. His palms were turned up.
“I am the instrument,” he said. “You are the field. I will speak the call. The room will do the rest. None of you will be asked to act. Some of you will feel acted upon. This is normal at first attunement. None of what is about to happen will harm you.”
He raised his palms to chest height and spoke a word… or something like one. It had no syllable I could repeat. It was a thing his throat had done, and once the sound reached the stone, the room changed.
The air thickened.
It felt like a room where water had been boiling for hours and no one had opened a door.
The Marks in the room were responding.
The girl to my left’s Mark brightened. The boy to my right’s began to throw light. Across the circle, Caspian Ashford’s Mark showed through the fabric of his sleeve.
I hadn’t known I could see Marks through cloth until that moment.
I hadn’t known many things until this week.
The Mark on my own wrist heated.
I’d been told I would be asked to do nothing, so I did nothing.
My Mark, apparently, missed that messaged.
The lines stretched toward Caspian Ashford.
They stayed on my skin, but they pulled toward his chest like a compass needle given one job.
My body followed. Wrist first. Then elbow. Then the soft, stupid place behind my ribcage.
Across the circle, Caspian remained motionless.
His head didn’t lift and his Mark didn’t visibly answer.
Then Caswell spoke again. Another strange non-syllable.
The stone under my feet answered.
The pull became a command.
Cold marble crossed my tongue. Burnt sugar followed. The taste of him was so sudden, so intimate, that my breath caught before I could make myself hate it.
Caspian’s eyebrows rose.
Small.
Almost nothing.
But enough to tell me he had felt it too.
One second, I was standing at the rim of the circle.
The next, every line of my Mark went sharp with recognition.
Caspian’s Mark recognized mine back.
I was on my knees on the stone before I had decided to fall.
Caswell’s voice came from very far away.
“That is enough for today.”
More voices around me.
Hands pulling me upright.
The girl to my left hadn’t pulled me up. Neither had the boy to my right. Whoever had done it had hands warmer than the stone floor and let go as soon as I had my balance.
I didn’t know whose hands they had been.
When I was upright, the circle had broken. Students were leaving. Caswell had walked out of the inlaid stone and was at the door, speaking in a low voice to someone.
Linden, I realized. The man who’d brought me here.
Across the circle, Caspian Ashford was already gone.
The girl who’d stood beside him remained, three paces from me.
She lifted one hand between us, palm up: a courtesy without contact, careful enough to be insulting.
She was tiny, with a narrow face and eyes so pale blue, they looked almost clear.
She said, very quietly—quietly enough that the room wouldn’t have heard if the room had been listening to anyone but us:
“You should not have done that.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“You did it.”
“I was told I would be asked to do nothing.”
“Doing nothing was the lesson, and you did the opposite in front of your year’s prefect, a room full of witnesses, a professor, and the Council monitor at the door.”
Her eyes moved over my face, sharp as cut glass.
“Whatever was done to you before they brought you here—whatever your mother told you you were—you should not have brought it into this room until you understood the room.”
My mother had sung me lullabies and combed my hair. That was all I remembered about my mother. The sound of her voice, the feeling of her fingers.
She had died before she could tell me what I was.
The girl in front of me would not have cared.
So I kept my mouth shut.
She didn’t wait for me to answer, anyway.
She just turned on her heel and stalked away.
The room was nearly empty by the time I lifted my palm off the stone of the circle. Caswell and Linden were at the door, no longer speaking. Caswell said nothing to me.
Linden, however, did say something.
“That will be reported,” he said. “The school’s protocols require it. You should not be alarmed.”
I was alarmed, because I had no idea what ‘reporting’ meant, or even what I’d done, but I kept that to myself.
He gave me one brief nod and left the room.
I left before anyone decided to ask me any more questions.
I went to the dining hall because I still hadn’t eaten since missing the breakfast bell, and apparently public magical humiliation made me hungry.
A girl sat alone at one of the tables, tearing bread into small, nervous pieces.
Alone looked like the closest thing to an invitation I was going to get in this room.
So I sat across from her.
She was mousy and thin enough that a strong wind could have carried her off. Her cuticles were bitten raw. A small pale Mark sat on the inside of her forearm.
“Is this seat taken?” I asked.
Her fingers stopped tearing the bread and she looked up at me blinked.
“Good. I’m sitting before someone tells me I shouldn’t.”
Color rose in her cheeks.
“I was told not to talk to you.”
“By who?”
She looked toward the far tables without moving her head.
“Not directly.”
“Of course not.”
“That’s how Caspian Ashford does things.”
So that’s how it was. Caspian Ashford hadn’t needed to tell anyone I didn’t belong here. He had only needed to look as if he believed it, and the room had taken instruction.
I had no idea what he thought I had done to him, except that when my Mark had moved in attunement, his had answered.
Maybe that was enough.
Maybe at Zenith Hall, a girl’s body could offend a man before she ever opened her mouth.
I looked away from the table where Caspian sat with his friends and back to the girl across from me.
“Well, we’re already talking now. Seems wasteful to stop.”
She swallowed, then whispered, “I’m Delphine Moreau.”
“Astra Verita.”
“I know.”
“Everyone does, apparently.”
“They told us you were coming.”
I tilted my head. “Me, specifically?”
She nodded.
“And to be welcoming?”
The joke died in the air.
“And to be careful,” Delphine said.
“Of me?”
Delphine pressed her thumbnail into the edge of the bread and pursed her lips.
“Careful how?” I asked.
She looked down at her plate.
“I’m already in trouble. I shouldn’t talk about this.”
That made me look at her.
“What kind of trouble?”
“My Mark.”
She turned her arm over.
“It’s been getting worse,” she said. “I was going to tell my brother tonight. I’m not sure how much trouble it means, and I don’t want him asking questions until I know.”
I studied her Mark.
It was pale. Paler than the skin around it. It was paler than any Mark I had seen in the attunement room.
“How long has it been getting lighter?”
“Three weeks. Caswell told me it was probably normal.”
“Do you think it’s normal?”
“I think Caswell tells students what they need to hear at the time he thinks they need to hear it.”
I didn’t tell her that sounded familiar. I wasn’t ready to explain why.
She ate a piece of bread and offered me another. I took it.
“I’m glad you sat down,” she said after she swallowed a bite. “People don’t usually sit with me unless they have no choice.”
Then she pointed at my wrist.
“Yours moved during attunement.”
“What did it do?”
“Reached.”
I thought of the circle. The heat in my wrist. The line moving under my skin.
Caspian Ashford across from me.
The pull toward him I hadn’t chosen and couldn’t stop.
“What does that mean?”
Delphine glanced down at my wrist, then looked away.
“It means your Mark moved toward someone else’s.”
“The professor didn’t use that word.”
“He wouldn’t. He’s not allowed to. Yet.”
The yet made me nervous but I didn’t want her to clam up again, so I left it.
“But you’re allowed to use it?”
“No. I’m just already in trouble.”
Delphine looked past me, toward the far tables.
Toward Caspian Ashford.
“Cosima saw it,” she said. “That matters more than the rest.”
“Cosima?”
“The girl with Caspian.”
It clicked then. The same girl who’d come up to me after class.
“And Cosima matters because?”
“She writes for the Council.”
That made the bread go dry in my mouth.
“She’s a student, isn’t she?”
“She’s a Verraine,” Delphine said. “That means her reports arrive places yours or mine never would.”
“What does she write?”
“The kinds of things that look harmless until they wind up in your file.”
I looked toward the far tables again.
Cosima sat beside Caspian, cutting her bread into pieces too small to satisfy hunger.
“You know more about this than I do,” I said.
“I’ve been here longer.”
“And?”
“And I have a Mark that’s going wrong. And you have a Mark that’s reaching for the most untouchable man in school.”
We didn’t speak for a long moment. I wasn’t about to tell her I didn’t think he was the only one it was reaching for.
When the dining hall began to empty, Delphine gathered the pieces of bread she hadn’t eaten.
“My name is Delphine Moreau,” she said.
“I know. You already told me.”
“I want to make sure you remember it.”
The bread suddenly soured in my stomach.
“Why?”
“In case I’m not here next week.”
She stood before I could ask her what she meant by that.
I watched her leave without looking back.
When she was gone, I was still holding the last piece of bread she had torn.
I stood before I could sit there long enough to let her fear feel contagious.
On the way out, I looked toward the far tables.
Caspian was still there.
So was Cosima.
They looked at each other, not at me.
I went back to Room 114 with my wrist tucked deeper in my sleeve.
The lines had moved during attunement.
They had moved, and I had gone to my knees.
Now they wouldn’t settle.