Chapter six
Jessica
I follow the sound of voices down a corridor lit by actual wall sconces, wondering if the "meeting room" is going to be a dungeon.
It isn't, it's a low stone chamber near the great hall, warmed by a fire someone's built up in a hearth big enough to roast an ox, with worn leather chairs and old couches arranged in a loose circle.
It's cozy. The other five file in behind me, Renzo, Sophia, Freya, Declan, Torres, and we sort ourselves into seats, everyone leaving a polite half-cushion of space that Sophia immediately erases by dropping down beside me and tucking her feet up like we've been friends for years.
Jon's already there, leaning against the mantel, looking entirely at home. He waits until we've settled, then doesn't launch into a speech. He just looks around the circle, taking a second on each of our faces, like he's making sure he's got us.
"So," he says. "You've had a long day, and I'm not going to make it longer with a lecture. I mostly want to tell you what this week is and, just as importantly, what it isn't."
"It better not be a sacrifice," Renzo says. "We discussed that in the van."
"Encouraging," Jon says, without missing a beat, and Renzo looks thrilled to have landed a joke on a professor in the first ten seconds.
"No. It isn't a sacrifice. It also isn't an exam.
Nothing this week is graded. Nobody's being ranked, or tested, or quietly sent home.
" He looks around the circle. "Whatever you've each been bracing for on that long drive up — let it go.
This week only works if you stop trying to prove yourselves and start paying attention. "
I feel my shoulders come down half an inch, and I hate a little how much I needed to hear it.
He walks us through the week, and it is — I'll be honest — the best-sounding week of my entire life.
Hiking, proper hiking, deep into the surrounding wilderness.
Navigation, which Freya perks up at like a hunting dog hearing a car door.
Team exercises. A survival day. Sessions on the academy's history.
Evenings left open. And, threaded through all of it, time to ask questions — "especially," Jon says, "the ones you're embarrassed to ask. Those are usually the useful ones."
"Will there be a man with a whistle?" I ask.
Jon considers this with total gravity. "There is a Professor Voss.
He teaches combat and leadership at the academy proper.
He does own a whistle. You'll meet him if you decide to stay and attend Luftis.
" A pause. "I'd suggest not making the whistle joke to his face until you've known him at least a day. "
"Got it," Torres says, and I can feel him filing Voss away somewhere.
"Which brings me to the part you actually want," Jon says, and the room leans in.
This is it — the thing I came down the corridor thinking I'd finally get.
Tonight I finally find out. "You've all been wondering the same thing since the first letter.
Why you. Why a hiking store, a coffee shop, a search-and-rescue team, a ranger station.
You're bright, but you know as well as I do the world is full of bright people who never got a cream envelope. "
Nobody breathes. Even Sophia goes still.
"The honest answer," Jon says, "is that the academy finds people through a program I helped build — a partnership with hospitals and labs across Europe.
Every one of you came up through it. And every one of you has something the academy is genuinely, specifically looking for.
" He chooses his words with that same care I saw across the shop counter, the care of a man deciding exactly how much truth a moment can hold.
"What that something is — that's part of what this week is for.
I could tell you now and it would sound like nonsense, and you'd spend seven days deciding whether I'm a crank.
Or I can show you, a little at a time, in a way that will actually make sense. I'd rather show you."
And there it is. The door, cracked, then gently shut again.
"That's the cult talk," I say, before I can stop myself. "You know that's the cult talk."
Jon's mouth twitches. He remembers. "It is exactly the cult talk," he agrees.
"My defense is the same one I gave you in England, I haven't asked any of you for money, a signature, or your immortal soul.
I've asked you to take some very nice walks and let me answer things in an order that works.
" He looks around. "Anything I can answer plainly tonight, I will. Ask me anything."
"Is the castle haunted?" Sophia asks.
"No," Jon says.
"Would you tell us if it was?"
"No," Jon says, and Sophia points at him like she's cracked the whole thing open.
Renzo raises a hand. "Are we going to be the least impressive people at this school? Be honest. I need to emotionally prepare."
Jon's expression softens then, goes almost fierce under the calm.
"No," he says, and there's real weight in it.
"You'll be told, by all kinds of people, in all kinds of ways, that you don't belong here.
Some of them won't even mean to. So I'm telling you first, before any of them get the chance — you were chosen.
Every one of you earned the envelope. When someone makes you doubt that, and someone will, I want you to remember my words. "
The room is very quiet.
"…Okay, now I might cry," Sophia announces, and everyone laughs, and the moment breaks in the good way, the tension rolling out like a tide.
I like his answer. Something valuable. I turn it over like one of my trail rocks — and I still cannot, for the life of me, imagine what a girl who sells headlamps and reads a horoscope app is supposed to be contributing to Europe's oldest anything.
But I decide, in the firelight, that I'm willing to spend a week finding out.
"One more," I say, because I can't help it. "When's your birthday?"
Jon looks at me a long second, like he's unsure whether to be amused or worried. "December twenty-ninth."
"Capricorn," I say, pointing, delighted. "Of course. Disciplined, patient, plays the long game, thinks he can out-wait everyone in the room —"
"That's slander," Jon says mildly.
"— and is usually right, which is the best worst part."
The corner of his mouth goes up. "Go to bed, Jessica." It's not unkind, and I grin at him.
We do not, of course, go to bed.
We make it about forty feet down the corridor before Renzo stops dead, points at a suit of armor standing sentry in an alcove, and announces, "If that thing moves, I'm leaving. I'll walk back to Italy. I'll swim if I have to."
"It's not going to move," Freya says.
"That is exactly what it wants you to think."
And that's how the six of us end up giving ourselves a completely unauthorized tour of Lufgard by phone flashlight, because none of us can find a light switch and half the wing probably doesn't have them.
It's the most fun I've had in years. The castle is made for it — corridors that dead-end at boarded doors, a spiral stair so tight Declan has to turn sideways, rooms of sheeted furniture that Sophia narrates like a true-crime podcast ("and it was here, in the drawing room, that the group was never seen again").
I read every plaque I find out loud, whether anyone wants me to or not.
Torres keeps drifting to the front, checking corners before we round them — I don't think he knows he's doing it — and Declan keeps drifting to the back, so the rest of us end up quietly bracketed between them the whole time.
Then, somewhere on the third floor, we all hear it. A long, low, breathy whooo drifting down the dark corridor ahead.
Sophia grabs my arm hard enough to bruise. "Nope. Nope, nope, that's a ghost, I knew it, I called it in the van —"
"I'll go look," Torres says immediately, already moving, because of course he does.
"You will not," Sophia hisses. "That's how the first one always dies. The brave one goes to look. We never see him again."
Renzo, meanwhile, is delightedly making it worse. "Ask it its birthday," he tells me. "Jessica, quick, establish rapport. Ghosts love astrology."
"That," Freya says calmly, from over by the window, "is a tawny owl. There's a nest in the tower above this wing. You can hear the male calling — they hunt this time of night."
Silence.
"…I liked it better when it was a ghost," Sophia admits.
Declan laughs then — really laughs, a big warm sound that fills the corridor and makes all of us grin just to hear it, because it turns out the gentle giant has been enjoying every second of this.
Sophia gasps and points at him like she's witnessed an eclipse.
"He laughs! Mark the date! Jessica, is this astrologically significant? "
"Deeply," I say solemnly.
Freya reaches over and unlatches the window like she's done it a hundred times, and cold mountain air pours in. One by one we crowd up to look, and the joking trails off into nothing.
Because the Alps are right there.
The moon's up, huge and clear the way it never is over England, laying the whole range out in silver, peak after peak after peak, snow catching the light, the forest falling away below the walls.
The owl calls again, and this time nobody jokes.
Freya names a few constellations for us.
Declan says, softly, that it reminds him of home. Renzo, for once, says nothing at all.
I'm still leaning into the window when someone steps in behind me.
I know it's Torres before he says anything.
He has a delicious smell that I have already memorized. I'm suddenly aware of every inch of space between my back and the solid heat of his body. The window is pouring freezing mountain air straight into my face, and somehow I'm warm.
A shiver runs through me anyway.
Torres leans closer, his mouth near my ear. His breath brushes warm against my skin.
"Cold?"
The word goes straight through me.
An actual little zing shoots down my spine and lands somewhere considerably lower, and for one ridiculous second all I want to do is lean back. Just an inch. Find out what all that heat feels like pressed against me.
I behave myself.
Barely.
"Freezing," I say, which is a spectacular lie.
His quiet laugh brushes my ear too, which does not improve the situation.
There's a low section of wall just outside the window — a walkway, really, wide and safe, part of the old battlements — and I climb out onto it before my body can come up with any more terrible ideas.
Torres laughs behind me. "Of course you are climbing out the window."
I stand there in the cold with the mountains spread in every direction and the wind pulling at my braid.
"You're going to fall," Torres says.
I glance back. He's climbed halfway out after me.
"Probably," I agree. "It's kind of my whole thing." I tip my head back at the sky. "Worth it, though."
He follows my gaze up, and for a second neither of us says anything, and the wind does all the talking.