Chapter 24
The next two days were alarmingly uneventful.
I went to class. I ate when Rev put food in front of me. I practiced Hale’s forms in the narrow space between my bed and the wardrobe until my shoulders ached.
No one from Quill’s office sent for me.
No one mentioned Delphine.
Caspian didn’t appear at my door, which was sensible of him and irritating for reasons I refused to examine.
On the first night, I climbed the clock tower and found only wind, stone, and a half-eaten apple on the ledge where Kieran had sat.
That was also sensible of him.
I disliked sense more by the hour.
By the second morning, I had almost convinced myself the school had lost interest in me.
Then Juno came to Room 114 without a summons.
No silver water. No words across the basin.
Just a knock that almost made me jump out of my skin. No one had ever knocked on my door in all my days at Zenith Hall.
I opened the door with my coat half-buttoned and my hair tied in a knot that would have disappointed Hale on principle.
Juno stood in the corridor.
“Show me your wrist,” she said.
“Good morning to you too.”
“Wrist.”
I gave it to her.
She did not step into the room until I moved aside. She did not touch the Mark. She held my hand by the heel of the palm and looked at the air around my wrist instead.
That was when I started to worry.
“You were with Hale recently,” she said.
“Does everybody in this place know my whereabouts just by looking at me?”
She ignored the question. It was rhetorical anyway.
“You were close to him.”
“He was teaching me how not to be beaten senseless by a boy with a staff. The intimacy was mostly educational.”
Juno’s eyes moved to mine.
“Astra, this is serious.”
I pursed my lips and looked down.
I had been too preoccupied to notice that the Mark had changed again since I’d trained with Hale in the salle. A line pulled tighter at the edge. A narrower space between the lines. Nothing I would have trusted myself to name.
But the negative around it was different too.
Not brighter.
Louder, was the only way I could describe it.
“Read it,” Juno said.
“I am.”
“You are looking at it. Read it.”
I breathed once through my nose because irritation at her had become less useful than fear. Then I softened my focus the way she had taught me, looking at the air around the Mark instead of the Mark itself.
The pale outline thinned.
Then opened.
Three spaces showed under the lines.
One cold as marble.
One green as apple skin in sun.
One dark and narrow as the space under a closed door.
Hale.
I knew before Juno said anything.
“They will look for this today,” she said.
“Quill?”
“Quill. Linden. Anyone told to watch.”
“And your plan is what? Gloves?”
“Gloves invite too many questions. We’ll need to obscure it.”
“Of course. Silly me, reaching for a mundane answer when deception was available.”
Juno released my hand and pointed to the chair by the desk.
“Sit.”
“Is this another lesson?”
“It is the kind of lesson you receive when someone has moved the examination before the class.”
“I’m beginning to hate this school’s educational philosophy.”
“Sit.”
I sat this time, and Juno pulled the other chair close enough that my knees nearly touched hers. She held out her hand, palm up.
“Give me your wrist again.”
I did.
“You cannot hide a Mark from a basin,” she said. “You may be able to keep a room from reading everything around it.”
“May be able to?”
“I am not in the habit of lying to improve morale, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“No one around here is it seems.”
“Look at the negative.”
I looked at it. It looked exactly the same as I had a moment ago.
“Now pull it inward.”
“That means nothing to me.”
“Find the outside edge,” Juno said. “Do not look at the line. Look where the air stops being empty. When you feel the edge, breathe in and draw it toward the Mark.”
“You could have led with that.”
The first time, nothing happened.
The second time, the lines on my wrist sharpened and the negative flared so hard Juno’s fingers tightened around my palm.
“Wrong,” she said.
“I gathered.”
“Again.”
“Has anyone ever told you that you and Jonas Hale have a lot in common?”
“Do it again.”
The third time, I found the edge of the negative.
It was not a thing I could have explained. It was the difference between staring at a locked door and finding the seam where the wood met the frame. I took hold of that seam with whatever part of me had learned to look at air, and I pulled.
The negative folded closer to the Mark.
Not gone, but tucked away.
The air around my wrist settled.
The Mark looked less changed than it had a moment before.
It was a lie, but a small one. More like an omission.
Juno let out a breath she had not meant me to hear.
“There.”
It wanted to come undone as soon as I noticed it had worked, which didn’t fill me with confidence.
“Will it hold?”
“For a while.”
“Define a while.”
“I cannot.”
“I walked into that.”
“You did.”
She rose and the room felt colder with her no longer in front of me.
“If Hale taught you a fifth form, use it only if you must.”
“How do you know he taught me a fifth form?”
“Because if he cares about you enough to alter the Mark, he cares enough to cheat.”
“He didn’t touch my Mark.”
“No,” Juno said. “But it changed anyway. And that should worry you.”
She went to the door.
“Juno?”
She stopped with her hand on the latch.
“Is the assessment about combat?”
“For the other first-years, yes.”
“And for me?”
“For you, it is about what the room learns when someone is permitted to strike you.”
My blood went cold.
Annoying, since the room had been cold already.
Then she opened the door and left.
I shut it behind her and stood with my hand still on the latch.
Very useful, standing there doing nothing.
I did it for a while anyway.
Eventually, I moved away from the door and stood at the basin, because apparently I had become the kind of girl who waited for water to decide what came next.
The water stayed ordinary for a while, but eventually the basin lit.
Astra Verita. Training ring. Noon.
No mention of combat.
No mention of assessments.
But I knew what was coming.
I put on the training clothes I’d found in the bottom drawer, right where Hale had said they’d be, and tied my hair back with a new string. The knot was ugly and tight, but deeply committed to staying where I put it.
Hale would approve of that, at least, no matter how badly I screwed up the rest.
At eleven-fifty, I left Room 114.
The training ring was not the salle.
No one had told me that.
Naturally.
I found it by following the students who were trying not to look as if they were going anywhere interesting.
They led me past the salle, past two lower practice rooms I had not seen, and toward a noise I recognized before I had a name for it: wood striking wood, bodies shifting, people gathered to watch someone else be tested.
The training ring sat behind a wide door that opened onto a sunken square of sand and packed earth.
A railing ran around the upper edge. Students stood behind it in rows: first-years in linen like me, second and third-years in darker training coats, upper-classmen leaning on the rail as if they had seen this go badly before and had no qualms about watching it again.
Faculty lined the far wall.
Aldric stood at the center of the ring with a staff in one hand.
Hale stood behind the rail near the faculty line, arms folded, face unreadable.
Of course he was there.
Of course that made my grip worse before it made it better.
The first-year pairings had been written on a slate beside the door. I found my name on the third line.
Astra Verita.
Marcus Venn.
It took me a moment to place him.
The boy with the Mark on the back of his hand.
He stood on the other side of the ring, a head taller than me, with his shoulders squared and his Mark uncovered on the back of his hand.
Dark. Settled. The opposite of mine.
He saw me notice it and lowered his hand to his side.
He looked at me once, then down at his stave.
If he felt sorry for me, he had the decency to keep it off his face.
Mostly.
Aldric called the first two pairings.
Not us. Yet.
The first ended quickly. A block. A pivot. A pin. Polite applause from no one, because apparently even approval had rules here.
The second took longer. The girl slipped in the sand. Her opponent stopped short of striking her ribs, and Aldric said, “Mercy is not a form.”
The girl was a shade paler when she rose.
Then Aldric called:
“Verita. Venn.”
I stepped down into the ring.
Marcus came from the other side.
At the railing near the door, Caspian Ashford stood in his prefect coat.
He had not been there a moment ago.
Or he had, and I hadn’t noticed because I’d been busy panicking.
His hands gripped the wood too tightly for indifference.
And his eyes were on me.
The Pull answered at the back of my throat. Cold. So cold.
The negative at my wrist stirred.
I pulled it inward the way Juno had taught me.
Caspian’s gaze flicked to my sleeve.
He had seen something.
Or felt something.
No one else had, I hoped.
Aldric looked between Marcus and me.
“The assessment is response,” he said. “The strike is not announced. The block must be correct. The recovery must be controlled. The pin must hold. Begin.”
“That’s all?” I said.
Aldric glanced at me.
“Begin, Verita.”
Marcus lifted his stave.
I lifted mine.
The stance Hale had taught me came back to me: right foot back, quarter turn, two inches in. Hands not carrying the stave. Holding it. Ready to stop something.
Marcus saw a first-year who had not been in combat class.
Aldric saw my back foot.
His eyes stayed there for half a second.
Then Marcus struck.
Right shoulder.
Of course.
The added strike.
The one Hale had taught me until my hands hurt.
The one Juno had warned me to use only if I had to.
I had to.
The block came up clumsy but in time.
Wood cracked against wood.
The force ran down my arms and into my teeth.