Chapter 11
All the seniors are rushing and scraping around the first week back, just to keep up with the too many assignments dished out too soon, which is supposed to make way for all the practice print exams.
But come Saturday, the first weekend of the semester, the rush and the chaos and the frazzled study has shifted to a buzzing relief.
The mess hall is packed fuller than it should be this early on a Saturday—and the atmosphere is humming. Literally, I walk into the residue of a fading spell, zapping and glittering up the tall walls that arch into a beam-slashed ceiling.
I lean my head back to watch the sparks fizzle, a glittering drape of golds and silvers, and through the ache of my neck arched too far, I wonder what charm I missed as I slip between groups of students moving by me in the doorway.
I pass tables packed with early risers, and almost every senior can be accounted for in the animated faces that alight like stars.
On my way to the buffet, I spot Piper, dressed in her snowgear, up early to hit the slopes, but Teddy wears his snow rugby uniform, and so he’s not one of the seniors who gave up sports to focus on the upcoming print exams.
Oliver and Dray did.
But that’s the thing about witches like them. For all I know, they didn’t actually give up all sports. They might sneak off to spar, or play hockey in the basement ring, and only pretend to have given it up because it looks better.
Appearances and all that.
Appearances don’t matter as much to the gentry—or is it that they just don’t calculate the same way?
Eric does.
As I join the buffet queue, I glance up at him, sitting at the faculty table—but I swerve my gaze away the moment he looks at me.
I stroll the length of the buffet, eyeing up the morning’s fresh spread, but I can see his reflection in the glass casing.
Still, he watches me.
That alone irritates me.
He’s probably chewing over responses he wished he said in the moment.
I won’t be giving him another chance to say those things.
As far as I’m concerned, I won that quarrel.
And I let that victory lift my chin a touch higher as I spoon out a perfectly round and plump poached egg, then delicately lower its wobble to the slice of buttered sourdough.
I sprinkle a load of chilli powder all over it. The red rainfall is somewhat meditative, hypnotising—
Until the clatter of a tray drops, loud and sudden, right next to mine, and I flinch.
“Morning,” Landon says, then starts plating up a bunch of boiled eggs and some bacon strips. “Have you ever done keto before?”
That glitter still hums above, and the reflection dances on his cheekbone.
I make a face at him. “No.”
I don’t even know what keto is, but I don’t ask, because to ask would be to open up a conversation to him.
And I don’t want that.
Doesn’t stop him, though.
“Where have you been?” he asks, blue chewing gum rolling around his mouth. “Every time I go to find you, it’s like you vanished right out of the academy.”
I blink at him, speechless for a moment, torn between the reality that I need to stick to our deal—but also a bit surprised that he has been actively looking for me.
“In my dorm,” I say, a mumble, “usually.”
He bobs his head to the side, a fair enough gesture, and pushes the edge of his tray into mine.
He moves me along the buffet.
“How are we to be friends if you’re always hiding out?” Landon plops spoonfuls of marinated feta onto his tray. “You’re going to have to meet me halfway. What about the slopes today, you up for it?”
Before I can answer, another tray sets down.
I lean a glance around Landon’s back—and find Serena eyeing the options with a pursed mouth.
“How fresh are these?” she asks, her suspicious gaze running over the tray of Belgian waffles.
Landon gives a shrug.
The waffles do look a tad soggy, all that sweat gathered from under the heat lamps.
But I don’t give the answer.
I just slide my tray along the metal grate to my favourite breakfast foods.
There, I find my beloved porridge, the soft kind, oats pulverised into a powder, then soaked overnight with rich milks.
I fill a bowl, then sprinkle it with granola and berries.
I’m first to finish, and without a word, I steal my tray from the grate, then turn my back on them.
I stalk for the table at the far end of the mess hall, where the draught is stronger and colder with each squeaky step of my plimsoles on the hardwood floors.
I only make it halfway before Landon has caught up to me with his long legs, striding to my side—and he throws an arm over my shoulders.
The moment he does, curious gazes latch onto us from all over. Some surprised, students double-take, Piper holds a spoon near her parted mouth like she’s frozen in place.
It itches me, the urge to shrug out of his hold, to get as far away from Landon as I can.
And that look searing at us from the Snake table only strengthens my urge to squirm away.
Mildred’s stare is matched with an ugly purple complexion of her rising blood pressure.
I keep my cheek to her and slip out from under Landon’s arm with a side-step.
He lets me go, and I march for the usual table.
Still, I’m certain Mildred’s glare is burning at me from across the hall as I slip into my seat.
Then Landon drops into the one beside me. “It’s Baltic over here.”
Serena glides into the chair beside him.
And I just stare at them, a stupid flutter of my lashes.
Before I can sputter out the question, the tangled string of words in my mind, ‘what the hell are you doing?’, Landon snatches a napkin from my tray and drapes it over his lap.
“How can you stand it?” Serena throws a withering look at the open doors, the doors that spill out into the atrium, then to the main doors of the academy—where the draught gets in from.
I make a face at her. “So don’t sit here.”
Her steel gaze slides to me.
I pluck the cup of coffee from my tray, my stare unwavering from hers. “Your nice, warm table is over there.”
She answers with a forced smile, slick and smarmy. It isn’t a kind look, and she turns it over to the doors as two seniors saunter in.
Dray and Oliver.
My brother startles as he throws a look my way—then realises who is sitting here with me. His fiancé at the bad table, with me, and Landon.
Oliver’s brow lifts before he pauses to plant a drive by kiss on Serena’s sharp cheekbone on his way to the buffet.
Dray rinses us over once with a cold look, calculating, always calculating, and before it can settle on me, I drop my own to the berries sprinkled over the porridge.
I keep my gaze down as they move through my peripherals, headed for the buffet, and it’s only then that I loosen a tense breath.
I swap out my mug for a spoon.
Landon starts mashing up the eggs with his fork. “Where are your spotty little friends this morning?”
The urge to look at him, to look at him with the knowing gnawing at me, is strong.
I fight it.
“Courtney was still asleep when I got up,” I say.
I don’t know about James.
He might still be in bed or maybe he’s finally wormed his way into the infirmary.
And that’s really who Landon is asking after.
“Doubt you’ll see them out of study hall this weekend,” I add, because I do have a deal with Landon, and I do need to pull my weight just a little more than I have been. “They aren’t immune to the exam stress.”
Landon hums, curt, almost like he’s utterly disinterested in the extra information I threw in there. He plays it off, cool, and starts on his breakfast.
Beside him, Serena drizzles honey over her waffles, and her voice is silk. “Asta cried herself to sleep last night.”
I double-take on her.
But the overshare doesn’t surprise Landon.
“She’s just not very good at transformation,” he says with a shrug. “It doesn’t help that you’re excelling—and she might just get stuck with a gentry for a husband.”
My mouth tilts.
I didn’t think about that connection before.
Asta’s print isn’t powerful enough to be beneficial in the aristos world, like Serena’s is.
Serena can change herself, head to toe, wear another’s identity.
Asta can change a cup to a glass.
And if she marries gentry, like Eric, then her status will get a bit wobblier over time.
Her family are already inching towards gentry, stocks falling across the board, mansions in disrepair. Suppose her arrangement to Dray meant a lot more to her family than it did to her.
Yet there’s no pity in me for her or Eric.
And I’m stolen back to my own woes when two trays set down with a faint clink opposite me.
I look across the table just as Dray and my brother sink into the chairs.
My face crumples.
Dray arches a brow in answer.
But Oliver only has eyes for Serena… particularly the diamond earrings glittering on her lobes. “You changed your mind?”
Serena slides a dark look to him.
“I didn’t get the impression you particularly liked them,” he adds, and reaches out for the diamond earring closest to him, his fingertips grazing the air around it, delicate.
“Perhaps it was you I wasn’t particularly fond of that day,” she says, and though her tone is light, like bells and glitter, that’s all just fog around a sword.
Oliver’s smirk is hard as stone.
He turns his cheek to her, and the moment he does, the smirk disappears.
Whatever happened ‘that day’—which I’m guessing was New Year—lingers with them now, a week into at the academy.
My curiosity is prickled.
But then, maybe Oliver already told me. It could be about the internship.
Serena turns her pointed look on me. “What was your favourite gift this year?”
I blank.
I fluster.
I fucking panic.
My cheeks are hot, immediately, and I swallow down an answer of nothing.
Abigail delivered the stacks of wrapped gifts to my bedchamber the morning after New Year.
I ripped through those gifts in a rage, in a storm.
I didn’t take care to read the cards.
By the time I realised my mistake, all the cards and ribbons and wrappings were strewn around my bedchamber, a mess that was too impossible to make any sense of.
My answer should be, “Oh, I do love my leather bag from my Nonna.”