Chapter 32
Cosima didn’t take me to the east tower.
Instead, she led me through the east corridor, past the common room where first-years sometimes gathered after supper, and unlocked a narrow classroom I had never seen used.
Chalk dust lay in the tray beneath a board no one had cleaned properly.
The chairs were stacked against one wall, their legs hooked together like they had been waiting a long time to be needed.
A small basin stood on a side table beneath a covered window.
Dark, for now.
Cosima shut the door but didn’t lock it.
“Are we hiding?” I asked.
“No.”
“Good, because I am trying very hard not to hide today.”
She crossed to the desk and set her notebook down.
“We are being temporarily less available.”
“That sounds a lot like hiding.”
Cosima shot me a look and opened her notebook to a page already marked with a folded green ribbon.
“The dining hall came very close to disaster,” she said.
“That seems dramatic.”
“No. Dramatic would be Marsh and Ashford fighting over you in public. Disaster would be their Marks answering yours while they did.”
My wrist still ached from where my Mark had answered them both.
“I didn’t ask them to stand up.”
“That will not matter.”
For the first time since we left the dining hall, exasperation cracked through her control.
“Astra, looking unstable is dangerous. Looking as if you destabilize everyone near you is worse. It is the worst possible story they can write about you, and that cafeteria came within one breath of handing it to them.”
“Does anyone here ever get tired of writing girls into corners?”
“No. That is why you need corners with witnesses.”
She took a slim green volume from beneath her notebook.
The title stamped into the cover read:
Formal Consent and Record.
“You carry that around?”
“Today, yes.”
“Charming.”
“It is a procedural manual.”
She opened to a marked page and turned the book toward me.
Chapter four was titled Refusal and Witness.
The first line read:
A refusal made publicly must be witnessed by parties who cannot benefit from its erasure.
I read it twice.
It still meant nothing to me.
“That sounds important.”
“It is.”
Cosima tapped the line with one finger.
“Caspian cannot be a clean witness.”
“Because he benefits.”
“The Council will argue that he does. If you refuse the question they ask and keep him honorable, he benefits. If you accept him, he benefits. If you refuse him, his family benefits from claiming injury.”
Her mouth tightened on the next words. “Ashford men are very difficult to make irrelevant. On paper or otherwise.”
“And Kieran?”
“Too easy to call partial.”
“Hale?”
“Too easy to call compromised.”
“Rev?”
For the first time, Cosima hesitated.
“Reverie tells the truth very well when she is angry. Unfortunately, everyone knows she is your friend.”
“So being my friend makes her less believable.”
“Often.”
I looked down at the page.
“Then who counts?”
“People with standing who lose something by telling the truth anyway.”
“You.”
Cosima’s eyes met mine across the book.
“Possibly.”
“Aldric.”
“If he’s willing.”
“Juno.”
Cosima looked at the dark basin.
“Do not ask Juno to stand in that room until she chooses the room herself.”
I touched the page with two fingers.
“Why show me this now?”
Cosima’s gaze flicked to the door.
“Because in the dining hall, Caspian looked at you and forgot who was watching.”
My throat tightened.
“Is that my fault?”
Her eyes came back to mine.
“No.”
The word came out ice cold.
She went on, “But if the Council can make him into the reason you behave, they will. If they can make you into the reason he becomes his father, they will do that too. The council wants nothing more than another Magnus Ashford.”
I thought of Caspian removing Cosima’s hand from his sleeve.
Gently.
Awfully.
“You’ll always love him, won’t you?” I asked.
Cosima didn’t flinch.
“I always have.”
“Then why help me?”
Her mouth moved once, almost a smile and nothing like one.
“Because I have already lived through what happens when a girl is handed to a man and told to call the cage safety.”
Korey Dorian’s name was nowhere on that page, but I knew exactly what she meant.
Cosima turned the book back toward herself and closed it.
“And because Caspian is trying to become someone better than the role they made for him. If you are not careful, they will punish him for that and I don’t want to watch that happen.”
“I am tired of being told a man’s future is mine to ruin.”
“Good.”
“I hate it.”
“Then hold on to that.”
The basin on the side table lit.
Cosima tensed.
Silver moved under the water. No bell sounded. No steward knocked. The words simply formed, bright and precise.
Astra Verita. Report to Oracle Juno. Immediately.
The letters dissolved.
“That was Juno,” I said.
“Yes. You should go to her.” Then Cosima slid the green book into my hands. “Take it.”
“Isn’t this yours?”
“No. It belongs to the school.”
“And that makes stealing okay? You’re starting to sound like Rev.”
Cosima’s expression cooled.
“I have very little in common with Reverie LeJoi.”
“Except you’re both helping me.”
“Not for the same reasons.”
I tucked the book under my arm.
At the door, Cosima stopped me.
“Astra.”
I looked back.
“If they offer you something else of your mother’s, be warier than you were with the brooch.”
Her eyes dropped to the silver wren pinned inside my coat.
I covered it with my hand before I could decide not to.
“That’s a horrible thing to say.”
“Perhaps,” Cosima said. “But it still needs to be said. Now go.”
So I went.
I kept my hand over the wren as I walked, and Cosima’s warning circled in my mind. By the time I reached Juno’s chamber, my palm was damp against the silver.
Her door was already open.
She stood beside the basin with one hand on the rim and her attention fixed on the water.
“Cosima showed you the page,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Then she understands.”
Juno didn’t elaborate. When she looked at me, the lines around her mouth had deepened since morning.
“Wrist.”
I set the green book on the nearest chair, rolled up my sleeve, and held out my arm.
The Mark hadn’t settled since the dining hall. The lines were finer now, brighter at the turns, as if some careful hand had sharpened them while I wasn’t looking.
Juno didn’t touch me.
She crossed to the cabinet beside the basin, opened a lower drawer, and removed a small silver mirror, no larger than her palm. Its back was scratched and darkened with age.
She gave it to me.
“Look.”
I gazed into it.
The mirror showed my Mark instead of my face.
Or space around it.
Three faint lines extended from it.
One cold and pale.
One green-gold at the edge.
One dark as wet stone.
They reached only a little way.
I closed my hand around the mirror before my fingers started shaking badly enough for Juno to see.
She saw anyway.
“Those are not completed bonds,” she said.
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“I know they aren’t complete, I don’t know what that means.”
She nodded once.
“They are answers beginning to hold shape,” she said. “The formal is meant to force one before the other two become undeniable.”
“Why does that frighten them so much?”
“They need one answer because one answer can be owned.”
“And three?”
“Three means no one man can claim you.”
My fingers tightened around the mirror.
“That’s the threat?”
“Control,” Juno said. “Not romance. Not scandal. Control.”
I looked down at the faint lines.
“One man makes me safer.”
“One man makes you easier to own.”
“And three?”
“Three makes you harder to own.”
“And if the other two become undeniable?”
“Then the Council loses the round. For now.”
I was thinking about my mother, who had made it out of Zenith Hall, but who the Council had still caught up with, when the basin brightened.
Words formed across the surface.
Astra Verita. Report to Room 114 for formal preparation.
The letters held for three breaths, then dissolved.
Juno stayed very still.
“This is your basin,” I said.
Her hand closed around the rim.
“Yes.”
“Could they always send a summons here?”
Juno looked at the water.
“Not that I was aware of.”
Then she looked at me.
“Go,” she said.
“That sounded like an order.”
“It was.”
My Mark moved again.
This time, it felt different.
It felt like three hands closing around my wrist in the dark.
Juno opened the chamber door herself.