Chapter 31
The dining hall was a terrible place to recover from learning your dead mother had once refused the father of the boy you were supposed to accept as your bond-mate.
That was why I chose it.
In the dining hall, at least, I wasn’t hiding.
Rev pushed the door open with her shoulder.
The room was between meals and mostly empty but not entirely. A few students lingered over plates. Two stewards stood near the west arch. Someone I didn’t know at the north table stopped talking when I came in and didn’t begin again.
Rev went straight to the south side.
Delphine’s old chair was still empty. It hurt more today than it usually did.
I sat beside Rev and left her chair open.
A roll appeared near my left hand.
“Eat,” Rev said.
“I don’t think bread can fix this, Rev.”
“My grandmother used to say bread gives the soul somewhere to sit.”
“What does that even mean?”
Rev shrugged. “Not sure. But I figure it’s worth a shot.”
I tore the roll in half.
The side door opened, and Kieran Marsh came in juggling two apples in his left hand.
He was grinning.
He was also white as a sheet, and the first step he took into the hall was almost a stumble before he made it into something theatrical.
One apple went up. The other slapped neatly into his palm.
Left hand only.
“Oh, good,” Rev said under her breath.
“What?”
“He’s about to pretend he’s perfectly fine at us.”
Kieran crossed to our table. He took me in and frowned.
“Who ruined your day?” he asked, raising a brow.
“I found a file.”
He opened his mouth to say something that never came out because he staggered.
A hiss got through his teeth before he could turn it into a smile.
Rev was on her feet before the second apple hit the table.
“Sit down before you fall over.”
Kieran half-collapsed into the seat across from us, not beside me.
“Very well behaved,” I said.
“Don’t spread it around. I have a reputation.”
His voice managed the joke. His eyes didn’t.
“So what file?” he asked.
Rev winced.
Kieran glanced at her. “That bad?”
“Worse,” she said.
I looked down at the table.
“My mother refused Magnus Ashford.”
The color that was left in Kieran’s face went.
“Well,” he said quietly.
“That’s all?” I asked.
His gaze lifted.
“No. That’s the only part I can say in public without making several things immediately worse.”
The bell rang before I could answer.
Students began to pour in from the corridors, noisy at first, then less so when they saw us. The quiet didn’t happen all at once. It moved group by group, carried by glances, elbows, whispers cut short.
“If you wanted to avoid attention,” he said, “this probably wasn’t the place to go.”
“I didn’t.”
He looked at me then, and I saw him understand.
“Good.”
The word should have sounded like approval. It didn’t. It sounded like worry that had failed to find a better disguise.
Then the main doors opened.
Caspian Ashford entered with Cosima Verraine at his side.
A few people straightened when they saw them together.
They had walked in together before. A hundred times, probably. The school had understood that version of them.
This time, people looked at Cosima and then at me.
The whispers had done their work. Everyone knew whose name the Council meant to put beside Caspian’s at the formal, and suddenly Cosima standing next to him looked like something the room was waiting for her to lose.
Then Caspian saw me.
And then he saw Kieran.
The Mark under my sleeve pulled once, hard enough that my fingers curled against the table.
Kieran felt it.
Caspian felt it too.
Cosima was the only one who looked around at the room as Caspian crossed the hall.
She caught his sleeve.
Only for a breath.
He stopped because she had touched him, not because she had stopped him.
Whatever passed between them was old enough that I felt like I had walked in on it.
Then Caspian gently removed her hand from his sleeve and kept walking.
Kieran pushed back from the table.
“Kieran, whatever you’re thinking, don’t,” Rev said.
He didn’t even glance at her.
Caspian stopped at the end of our table.
“Astra.”
My name in his mouth steadied one part of me and disturbed the rest.
“Hello, Caspian.”
His gaze cut past me. Found Kieran.
“Marsh.”
“Ashford.”
The dining hall forgot to pretend it was eating. Forks paused. Conversation thinned to nothing.
“You went to the lower archive,” Caspian said to me without shifting his gaze from Kieran. He already knew what I knew somehow.
The Pull came in twice. Cold marble and burnt sugar at my left where he stood. Green apple and sun on stone at my right where Kieran hadn’t moved yet. Two signatures bracketing one body. The chord they made was off — half a step from harmony, half a step from a fight.
“Careful,” Kieran said. “Say that any louder and they’ll call you involved.”
Caspian didn’t look at me. His eyes stayed on Kieran.
“I am involved.”
The words landed wrong. Two rows down, a girl I didn’t know whispered ‘this is good’ too loud.
Kieran stood.
He did it too quickly. Pain flashed under his collar — green-gold, a thin shiver of his Mark misfiring — and he covered it by setting one hand on the table. The hand stayed there too long to be doing anything but supporting him.
“Convenient,” he said.
Caspian went still. He was choosing his next sentence carefully. I could see it happen behind his eyes, the slow arrangement of one word against another.
“What is?”
“How involved you get to be.”
“Kieran,” I said.
He heard me, but he didn’t stop.
“The Council writes your name beside hers and calls it official,” Kieran said. “The rest of us have to make sure breathing near her doesn’t damn us all.”
Caspian’s hand closed into a fist.
“You think I don’t know that’s how it is?”
“I think Ashford men have always known exactly what they were taking and never cared if it was given willingly.”
The sentence hit the table like a dropped blade.
Somewhere behind me a chair scraped.
Caspian’s voice, when it came, was very quiet.
“Then say my father’s name, Marsh. While we’re here. While they’re listening. Tell them all I’m just like him.”
Kieran’s jaw worked but he didn’t say it.
Caspian stepped forward. Kieran did too. Half a stride each. Close enough that I could see the muscle work under the line of Kieran’s locs, close enough that the cold off Caspian had a temperature I could feel along my forearm.
My Mark answered both of them at once.
Pain snapped under my sleeve, a clean cut of it, bright, deep enough to steal my breath. I made a sound before I could swallow it.
Both men stopped.
Neither one looked at the other. They looked at my wrist. My Mark. The place where the line of it burned in.
That was when Cosima reached us.
She didn’t hurry. The room moved out of her way anyway, the way rooms had always moved out of her way. Quiet, instinctive, embarrassed by their own deference.
“Sit down,” she said.
Kieran’s mouth opened.
“Both of you.” She didn’t raise her voice. “Now.”
Caspian broke off his gaze with Kieran and turned to her.
The pain in her face was gone before anyone else in the room could have noticed it.
I noticed it.
So did Rev.
Kieran sat first, though it was closer to a collapse.
Caspian remained standing for one breath longer, then lowered himself into the chair at the end of the table.
Cosima leaned on the table between them.
Her Mark glinted at her collarbone, bright enough that I wondered if anger looked different on her than fear.
“This is what they want,” she said quietly.
Neither of them answered.
“Two men standing over Astra Verita in the dining hall while her Mark reacts erratically enough to draw the attention of witnesses.”
The word witnesses changed the air around us.
Kieran looked away first.
Caspian stared at my wrist.
My hand was still curled against the table, the Mark blazing and shifting under my skin.
I made myself uncurl it.
Cosima turned to me.
“Come with me.”
“Where?”
“Anywhere but here.” Her eyes tracked to the basin on the far wall. Glowing gently silver. I hadn’t noticed it.
Rev stood at once.
“I’m coming too.”
“No,” Cosima said.
Rev opened her mouth to argue but Cosima beat her to it.
“Stay,” she said. “Make sure they leave separately.”
Rev glanced at Kieran.
Then at Caspian.
“Wonderful. Babysitting the boys. My favorite.”
But she sat back down.
I rose.
Kieran’s eyes came to mine.
Caspian’s did too.
They might not have realized it, but they both wore the same desperation on their faces.
Cosima saw me see both of them.
“Astra, come along,” she said.
Her voice had lost its edge.
I followed her out of the dining hall.
Behind me, forks touched plates again.
The show was over.