Chapter 16
Apparently Hale had bought me one conversation, not a pardon.
The basin at the end of Juno’s corridor lit as I passed it, silver-white and impatient. I stopped because my body had begun to understand summonses before the rest of me finished resenting them.
Words formed across the water.
Verita.
Headmaster’s office.
Three o’clock.
The water went dark.
So.
Quill had learned to add a time. Not just ‘now.’
How generous of him.
I stood in the corridor with Juno’s closed door behind me and the message still bright behind my eyes.
Three o’clock gave me twenty-two minutes.
Twenty-two minutes to wash my face, decide whether I looked more frightened with my sleeve up or down, and fail to stop thinking about the three lines the basin had dragged out of me in front of Caswell.
I went to Room 114 anyway.
The room had not improved in my absence.
I washed my face. I pushed my sleeve down. Then up. Then down again.
“Ridiculous,” I told my wrist.
The Mark could not be bothered responding.
At two-fifty-four, I left.
The halls were between hours, which meant they weren’t empty, only pretending they had better things to do than watch me.
By the time I reached the third floor of the south wing, I understood the summons was no longer private.
If it had ever been.
The Headmaster’s office was the third door past the south stair. Polished sconces. Dark wood trim. A red wool runner old enough to look old and new enough to mean someone kept paying for it to look that way.
The door had no nameplate.
Apparently if you needed a nameplate for the Headmaster, you had already failed.
It opened before I knocked.
Linden stood on the other side.
He stepped back just far enough to let me enter.
“Verita. Thank you for joining us.”
“I didn’t know a raincheck was an option or I would have taken one.”
His mouth made it clear he disapproved of that.
Small joys.
Linden closed the door behind me.
The room was too warm.
That was the first thing I noticed. Not the desk, not the books, not the tall windows with their heavy curtains drawn against the afternoon.
The heat. The fire had been built high enough to make the air close around my throat, and Quill sat behind the desk as if he had personally decided the room would breathe for both of us.
“Sit,” he said.
So I sat.
The chair was small and wooden, like Juno’s, with a straight back and no arms. No one had meant for a student to relax in it.
Quill glanced at Linden.
“Leave us.”
Linden gave a curt nod and walked out.
When the door closed, Quill let the silence settle until the fire in the hearth became the loudest thing in the room.
“You were summoned earlier,” he said.
“I was.”
“You did not attend.”
“I attended my Oracle first.”
His fingers rested on the center drawer of his desk.
“Instructor Hale has become unexpectedly attentive.”
A note made in the margin.
“You seem awfully interested in who I spend my time with.”
“I care deeply about the welfare of every student and instructor under this roof.”
“That sounds exhausting.”
Quill’s expression remained mild.
“Particularly lately.”
The fire shifted behind me.
I kept my hands folded in my lap and didn’t look at my wrist.
Quill opened the center drawer and took out a small black case.
He set it between us.
The case was narrow, old, and carefully polished. Whatever was inside had been arranged for me before I entered the room.
That was the first thing that set off a warning bell.
The second was the way Quill watched my face as he lifted the lid.
Inside was a silver brooch.
A wren sat at the center, small enough to fit under the pad of my thumb, wings half-lifted as if it had landed and wasn’t sure it wanted to stick around.
I had never seen it before.
I recognized it anyway.
My mother had told me about the brooch once while buttoning my coat in a room so cold I could see her breath. A wren in an apple tree, she’d said. A foolish little bird with its head tilted like it knew better than everyone else.
I had asked her once where it was.
She had smoothed my hair back from my face and said, I left it somewhere I’ll never go back to, baby.
I’d thought she meant with a friend.
I’d thought she meant in a city I had never seen.
The brooch had been here all along.
Quill let me understand that before he spoke.
“Your mother left it behind during her brief time at Zenith Hall,” he said. “The room she occupied was sealed after her withdrawal. Its contents were transferred to Council inventory.”
Council inventory.
My mother’s brooch, kept like a spare key.
“You kept it,” I said.
“The Council preserves everything. Particularly things that might later become… relevant.”
I stared at the wren.
“And it became relevant today?”
“Many things became relevant today.”
Quill rested one finger against the edge of the case.
“The Council has agreed to return it because I recommended patience in your case.”
“For what?”
“For your placement.”
My Mark moved.
The heat in the room seemed to fold closer.
“And what placement is that?”
“At the alignment formal, you will be presented to Caspian Ashford.”
Presented.
Like a dish with a lid.
“Is he aware he’s being served?”
“Mr. Ashford has been prepared for his role for many years.”
“That wasn’t what I asked.”
“It is the answer I am giving you.”
My mother’s brooch sat between us, silver and small and trapped in its black case.
“You understand what a privilege this is,” Quill said.
“Is it?”
“Caspian Ashford is first in his year, first in his line, and one of the cleanest readings Zenith has produced in eleven generations. There are families who would spend fortunes to put a daughter within reach of that bond.”
“Lucky me.”
“Yes,” Quill said. “That is precisely how you should see it.”
The Mark twitched again.
Caspian Ashford.
It had done that in the south attunement room. Reached across a basin for Caspian without asking me first. Pulled me toward a boy who had spent the last week trying to ignore me and failing at the worst possible times.
Quill saw the movement.
“Your Mark understands the offer.”
“My Mark has terrible judgment when it comes to men.”
He ignored that.
“Consent will still be requested.”
“Requested?”
“At the formal. Before the school. In the accepted language.”
I looked at the brooch instead of my wrist.
“And if I say no?”
Quill closed the brooch case with one finger.
“Then the Council will be… disappointed.”
“Heavens forbid.”
“Disappointment changes the range of options available to patient men forced to deal with a girl like you.”
There was the knife.
Placed where I could see the handle.
“What options?”
Quill’s hand remained on the case.
“You are very young, Astra.”
“You say that like it’s something I should apologize for.”
“No,” he said. “It is the thing most likely to be used against you.”
The room had been too warm from the moment I entered.
Suddenly it was worse.
Sweat gathered at my hairline and under the collar of my shirt.
I looked at the black case.
“So this is what? A bribe?”
“An inheritance.”
“No. An inheritance comes from the dead. This came from the people who killed her.”
Quill let the accusation sit between us.
He did not deny it.
“Careful.”
“With what?”
“Accusations matter only when they can survive being written down.”
“Would you like me to write it down?”
“I would like you to understand the difference between knowing a thing and proving it.”
My Mark moved a third time.
Inward.
The lines drew tight on my wrist, four bright refusals going nowhere together.
Quill’s gaze dropped to it.
“Don’t,” I said.
His eyes returned to my face.
For one second, the mildness slipped.
Then he smiled.
He pushed the case toward me.
“Take it, Astra.”
I didn’t want anything from his hand. I didn’t want to take a thing he had turned into leverage. I didn’t want him to learn that there was still a place in me soft enough for this to work.
But my mother was dead, and the brooch was hers, and I couldn’t help wanting it.
My palm was damp when I reached for the case.
It was smooth and cold. Someone had brought it here for this meeting. Someone had carried my mother’s brooch through the building and placed it in Quill’s drawer so he could set it between us like a bone.
I took the case.
“At the formal,” Quill said, “the Council expects a stable bond.”
Stable.
One line.
One answer.
One approved bond.
My wrist pulsed under my sleeve.
“I understand,” I said, because I did, no matter how much I didn’t like it. And because those were the words that would get me out of this room.
“You may go.”
Permission, after all that.
How benevolent.
I stood, tucked the black case against my side, and walked to the door before my hands could start shaking where he could see them.
Linden opened it from the corridor before I touched it.
When I stepped outside, Caswell stood two doors down with a file in his hands.
Aldric waited at the corner.
Caswell kept his eyes on the file.
Aldric looked at the black case in my hand.
Then at my face.
His expression hardened.
Angry, not surprised.
Then it was gone.
“Walk,” he murmured.
So I walked.
Down the corridor with the expensive runner. Down the stairs that smelled of old water. Past two students who averted their eyes as soon as they found mine.
By the time I reached Room 114, my hand hurt from holding the case so tightly.
I went in and shut the door.
The stolen blanket waited at the foot of the bed.
I wrapped it around my shoulders and opened the case.
The wren’s head tilted as if listening for a sound no one else could hear.
For a minute, my throat closed and tears pricked the inside of my eyes.
Then I took a deep breath and pulled the brooch out.
It was lighter than grief should have been.
I set hit in the drawer with Kieran’s apple and closed the drawer before the sight of them together could become another thing I had to make sense of today.
They had given me my mother’s keepsake.
Then they had put a boy’s name beside it and called it choice.