3. Chapter 3
Chapter three
J essica
The gates and guard house come up out of the trees exactly the way they did last September, and I realize I missed this place.
I'm not going to say that out loud. Sophia would want to know whether I missed the academy or missed specific people at the academy, and she would never let it go.
Last year I got out of a van here and thought: I do not belong here.
This year I get out and think: there's my school.
"Okay," Sophia says, hauling a bag out of the back that is roughly the size of Declan. "I need everyone to prepare themselves emotionally, because I have not seen a bathroom with water pressure since June."
"You lived above a café," Renzo says.
"I lived above a café with terrible water pressure. Do not diminish my suffering."
Declan takes the bag off her without being asked. Freya's already got hers on one shoulder and is scanning the courtyard.
And Torres is unloading four bags and a box, because Torres came back to Luftis with everything he owns.
He wasn't supposed to come back at all. Last year was an exchange, one year, Frosthaven to Luftis and home again, and he flew out in June and packed his room into boxes and said goodbye to people.
Then he spent weeks on the phone being relentlessly charming to institutions.
Matthias wrote letters. Frosthaven said no, and then maybe, and then fine.
Luftis said the same three things and took longer about it.
Apparently Frosthaven isn't getting rid of him entirely. His friends have threatened to visit.
He straightens up with the box under one arm, and his free hand finds the small of my back, and stays there.
That's the other thing about the summer.
We talked every day. Every single day, across an ocean, at hours that made no sense for one of us. I knew what he ate, what he packed, which of his friends cried and which one pretended not to. I knew when the paperwork went through, because he called me at four in the morning to tell me about it.
None of that is this. This is his hand on my back and my shoulder against his arm and the fact that I have not stopped touching him since the airport.
"You two are being disgusting," Sophia says pleasantly.
"We're walking."
"You're walking like a three-legged animal."
Freya doesn't say anything. She just looks at the two of us for slightly longer than she needs to, and then goes back to the courtyard.
We get about forty feet.
A group of first-years is clustered by the fountain with that stunned new-student look, and one of them turns, and sees me, and grabs the arm of the girl next to her.
I hear it perfectly.
"—that's her—"
And then, quieter, the word.
Direwolf.
Sophia's head whips around.
"Don't," I say.
"I wasn't going to do anything."
"You were absolutely going to do something."
"I was going to smile at them."
"You don't smile like that at people you like."
Sophia turns back to me. "Jessica. You have fans."
"I have a label."
"You have lore."
I keep walking, because the alternative is standing in a courtyard being looked at, and I've had four months of being questioned.
That's what the summer was. Not a summer.
A very long, very polite interrogation with intervals of laundry.
Somebody from the academy on the phone about birth certificates.
Somebody else about my grandmother's maiden name, and then my great-grandmother's, and then a parish register in a town I'd never heard of.
A Council archivist who asked me, in complete seriousness, whether anyone in my childhood had ever mentioned a fourth Great House.
Nobody had. I said so roughly ninety times, and then I'd hang up and text the group chat about the weather, because I wasn't allowed to tell them why the phone kept ringing.
They found nothing. Officially, I'm still just Jessica Miller, second-year student.
And I haven't shifted since April. Not once. Not for lack of trying, and we are absolutely not discussing how much trying, because it turns out you can want something with your entire body and still just stand there in a field being a person.
"They're not all being rude about it," Freya says from my other side.
"Sorry?"
"You've assumed they're being rude."
We pass a knot of third-years by the archway. One of the guys catches my eye and gives me a solemn little nod.
I nod back.
He immediately goes red and turns to his friends.
"See?" Freya says.
"See what?"
"Not rude."
"That was weird."
"Still not rude."
"Huh."
"People are curious. Curious isn't the same as hostile." She adjusts the bag on her shoulder. "You'll want to learn the difference this year."
"That's ominous."
"It's practical."
We're most of the way across the courtyard, aimed for the second-year blocks, when a woman in academy grey comes out of the admin door with a folder and says, "Miss Miller?"
Everybody stops.
"That's never good," Renzo says.
"Your accommodation's been changed. If you'll follow me."
"Changed how?"
She checks the folder like the folder is going to save her. "You've been assigned a suite in the Great House residence. Chancellor Falken approved it in July."
There's a pause of about two seconds.
Then Sophia says, "Excuse me," in a voice that could take paint off a wall.
"It's a security arrangement," the woman says, to me, ignoring her with what I have to admit is real professionalism. "The residence has controlled access, staff at the entrance, and considerably fewer students."
"What about them?"
She glances at the five of them. "Their assignments are unchanged."
"No," I say.
"Miss Miller—"
"No, I'm not doing that." My bag is cutting into my good shoulder and I set it down. "I came here with them. I spent a year in a building with them. You do not get to move me into some—what is it, a tower? Is there a tower?"
"There isn't a tower."
"You do not get to move me somewhere quiet and separate because I got big once."
"It isn't a punishment."
"It's isolation, and everyone keeps promising me it isn't, but they're wrong."
Beside me, Torres doesn't move, but I can feel him tense.
The woman closes the folder.
"Miss Miller. Your name has been in front of the Council four times since April.
" She says it without any drama. "Your old corridor has a door onto the lawn that doesn't lock.
This one has staff at the entrance. That's the kind of difference we're talking about.
It isn't about whether you need to be separated. "
Okay. That is annoyingly reasonable.
"Can they visit?"
"Of course."
"Whenever I want?"
"Within normal residence rules."
"Define normal."
She looks at me for a moment with something that I think is actually amusement.
"Guests at the Great House are allowed until eleven on weeknights. Signed in at the desk."
"And if they're still there at eleven?"
"Then somebody at the desk would have to notice."
"Right," I say. "Great. Wonderful. Love it here."
"Oh," says a voice behind us, "they gave her the Great House ."
I know that voice.
Natasha is standing about ten feet away with two girls I don't recognize and an expression she has clearly been saving all summer. Four months has done nothing for her personality.
Oh , I think. This bitch again.
"Hi, Natasha."
"It's for her safety," she tells the girls, not me. "That's what they call it. Safety."
She looks me up and down, then at Torres's hand on my back, then at the woman in grey waiting to take me to my new accommodation.
"It's amazing, really. Last year nobody knew who you were. Now you get a Great House suite because you managed one impressive shift."
"Everything is peachy, Natasha. Thank you so much for asking. How was your summer?"
Her smile gets bigger.
"Better than yours, apparently. Did they ever figure out what you are? Or where you came from?"
That lands.
She knows it does.
"Still nothing?" she says. "God, that must be awful. Everyone staring at you like you're something special and you can't even tell them why."
Torres's hand presses harder against my back.
I don't look at him.
Natasha tilts her head. "I suppose the suite helps."
There she is.
God, I hate her.
"Actually, I was just thinking about you," I say.
Her smile falters.
"I was wondering what you did all summer that was so boring you came back this interested in my housing."
"I wasn't thinking about you. You and your nobody squad are in my way, genius."
"Well, thank you for this fun talk. Tell your mom hi." I pick up my bag. "Oh, and I asked them to put me in second-year housing. They said no. If you want to write a letter about the gross injustice of it all, I'll sign it."
I walk past her.
"That was very restrained," Sophia says under her breath.
"I'm a new woman."
"You're a new woman with a suite . But just so you know, I could kill her for you.”
"No."
"Freya can kill her."
"No."
"Torres looks like he could do it very quietly."
Behind us, Torres says, "I could."
That gets half a laugh out of me.
The Great House residence is on the far side of the chapel. It's older than the rest of the campus. Fewer windows, deeper stone, a courtyard with actual grass instead of the churned mud we had.
There's a desk inside the door with an actual person behind it. There is a staircase with a carpet on it. On the second floor the corridor goes quiet in that thick way that means money spent on making things quiet.
And my key opens a door about halfway down it.
"You have got to be kidding me," I say.
There's a sitting room.
I have a sitting room. There's a fireplace in it, laid and ready, and two windows that go from about knee height to the ceiling, and a desk that is not a plywood shelf bolted to a wall.
Through one door there's a bedroom with a bed in it that is, conservatively, twice the size of the one I had last year.
Through another there's a bathroom that is mine. Only mine. Nobody else's.
There's a second bedroom. A small one, off the sitting room, with a bed and a wardrobe and nothing in it.
I stand in the middle of all this holding one canvas bag.
"Oh," Sophia says behind me, in a voice of pure religious awe. "Oh, Jessica."
"Don't."