Chapter 2
"The relics are in here," Ryder says. He pushes open the door to the Headmaster's office and steps aside, which I'm choosing to interpret as politeness rather than strategy, though with him I genuinely can't tell.
The office is large and old-feeling, the kind of room that collects weight over decades.
Shelves of dark books. A fireplace burning something that smells like cedar and old iron.
Behind a desk that probably cost more than my family's estate sits a man with silver at his temples and the careful, composed expression of someone who has decided in advance how every conversation in this room will go.
He looks at me and straightens slightly in his chair.
"Miss Fairmont," the Headmaster says. "Please, come in."
I walk in. The ember in my chest, the thing I've been carrying since the ritual room three hours ago, shifts when I cross the threshold. I press my hand flat against my sternum without thinking about it.
Ryder notices.
The relics are arranged on a long table to the left of the fireplace, and they are nothing like I expected.
Four objects. A scythe carved from something black and bone-pale.
A scale carved from what looks like raw amber, deep gold and warm.
A chalice, dark glass, with condensation already forming on its surface despite the warmth of the room.
And a small wooden disc, etched with sigils I recognize from my family's texts, the ones I wasn't supposed to read.
Witch sigils.
My stomach does something unpleasant.
"We'll begin," Ryder says. He stations himself to the right of the table, arms crossed, watching me with the same cataloging attention he's used since the estate. "Step forward."
"Are you going to explain what's about to happen?" I ask.
"The relics will react to your affinity. Or they won't. The result determines your house placement."
"And if they don't react?"
"They will."
I look at the Headmaster. He gives me a small, encouraging nod, the kind adults give children right before something unpleasant happens to them.
I step forward.
The scythe moves first. That's the only word for it.
It doesn't fall over. It doesn't glow. It simply orients toward me, the blade tilting a fraction of an inch in my direction, the way a compass needle swings toward north.
The air around it darkens slightly, the same cold register as Ryder's magic, and I feel the ember in my chest respond with a slow, answering pulse.
Then the amber scale flares. Actual light, a brief surge of gold that throws shadows across the shelves and then subsides into a steady, low luminescence. Heat against my left cheek. The ember in my chest pulls toward it, and I take an involuntary step sideways before I catch myself.
The chalice doesn't wait. The condensation on its surface runs in a sudden sheet, ice crystals forming along the rim, and I feel something press against the inside of my skin from the direction of it, cool and deliberate, like a hand laid flat against a wall from the other side.
And then the wooden disc lights up.
Witch sigils, burning gold. Warm and steady and terribly familiar, the exact color the candles were supposed to burn tonight in my family's ritual room. The color that was supposed to mean the bloodline holds true.
I am a null. I have been a null since the first healer confirmed it when I was seven years old.
I have been a null through every Awakening I stood in the center of, through every time my family found me useful for what I could be passed through rather than what I could hold.
I have been a null through every Fairmont gathering where the explanation for me trailed off into careful silence.
The witch relic burns gold for me in the middle of the night in the Headmaster's office, and something cracks open in my chest that has nothing to do with the absorbed ritual energy.
I hear the Headmaster's chair scrape back.
"All four," he says.
"Yes," Ryder says. His voice is very controlled.
"That's not—" The Headmaster stops. "In the academy's entire history—"
"I'm aware."
I keep my eyes on the witch disc. The gold is already fading, but it happened. It happened and I saw it and so did both of them, and there is nothing any of us can do to put that back where it was.
"I'm a null," I say. My voice comes out flat. "I have never cast a single spell. I cannot hold a thread of magic. My family has had three separate healers confirm it."
"Your family's healers measured what you could produce," Ryder says. "Not what you could absorb."
"The witch house relic doesn't care about the distinction?
" I turn to look at him. "The Fairmont name is attached to that house.
My mother's family has placed heirs in Witch House for six generations.
My sister is going to be sorted there in the spring, and everyone already knows it.
And a null daughter of the line is going to walk in there on the first day wearing the same crest."
Neither of them answers that.
"The Fairmonts will hear about this," the Headmaster says, to Ryder rather than to me, as if I've stopped being someone the conversation needs to include. "The sorting can't be kept quiet indefinitely."
"It doesn't need to be kept quiet indefinitely," Ryder says. "It needs to be kept quiet until she's settled."
"She was sorted into four houses, Ashford. There is no precedent for managing—"
"Then we'll establish one."
I stop listening to the part of the conversation that's about me and start paying attention to the part that's about the room.
The Headmaster's hands on the desk, fingers spread, the particular stillness of someone working very hard not to show how unsettled they are.
The way Ryder's jaw is set. The relics on the table, all four of them still faintly active, faintly oriented toward me, the way the room's furniture all angles toward a fire.
"What does it mean," I ask, cutting across whatever the Headmaster was saying, "to be sorted into all four?"
Silence.
"Not what it means politically," I say. "Not what it means for my family's reputation, or for the academy's precedent, or for whatever problem you two are currently not explaining to me. What does it mean for me?"
The Headmaster looks at Ryder. Ryder looks at me.
"It means you'll have access to all four houses," Ryder says. "Dormitory, common rooms, coursework. You'll be required to attend foundational sessions in each."
"That's logistics. I asked what it means."
"We don't know yet."
Honest. I didn't expect honest.
I look at the relics one more time. The scythe, still tilted toward me. The amber scale with its dying warmth. The chalice, its frost already melting. The witch disc, dark now, giving nothing back.
"Fine," I say. "Where do I sleep?"
Ryder leads me out of the office without another word to the Headmaster. The corridor outside is stone and cold and lit by sconces that burn too blue to be regular fire. My footsteps make sound. His don't. I notice that and decide not to think about it.
The academy is quiet in a way that feels inhabited rather than empty. Sound pressing against the other side of walls. The sense of something large and awake folded around us while we walk through its bones.
"How many students know I'm here?" I ask.
"None. We came in through the east entrance."
"And tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow is tomorrow."
I match his pace, which is faster than it looks. "That's a very specific non-answer."
"Yes."
We turn down a narrower corridor, then down a flight of stairs, then along a passage that smells faintly of old paper and something herbal I can't identify.
The ember in my chest has quieted since we left the office.
It's still there, still sitting low behind my ribs, but the relics aren't pulling at it anymore and I can almost pretend it's a normal sensation. Almost.
"The girl you're rooming with is named Sage Winters," Ryder says. "Witch track. Second year. She was informed this afternoon that she'd be receiving a new roommate."
"Was she informed about the four-house sorting?"
"No."
"Was she informed I'm a null?"
A pause that lasts exactly one stride. "No."
"Great," I say. "I love being someone else's surprise."
He stops in front of a door. It's plain wood, nothing remarkable, a small brass number affixed at eye level.
He doesn't knock. He looks at me instead, and the blue-lit corridor does nothing flattering to either of us, and I think about the ritual room and the car and the office and the relics and how none of tonight has had the shape of anything I would have predicted this morning when I was standing in the circle waiting for my sister's Awakening to start.
"The sorting doesn't leave this building," he says. His voice is low. "You don't tell your roommate. You don't tell anyone you encounter tomorrow. You answer questions with as little information as possible until I've spoken with the Headmaster about how to proceed."
"And if someone asks which house I'm in?"
"Tell them it's pending review."
"That's going to go over beautifully with a room full of students who sorted at birth."
"I didn't ask you how it would go over." He reaches past me and knocks twice, short and sharp.
A moment. Then shuffling. Then the door opens.
The girl on the other side is shorter than me, dark-skinned, with her hair wrapped in a silk scarf that's slightly crooked from sleep.
She has a textbook tucked under one arm and a jar of something luminescent green in her other hand, and she's looking at me with curiosity and wariness in equal measure.
"Sage Winters," Ryder says. "Your roommate. Get her settled." He looks at me one more time, the same brief cataloging sweep. "Don't absorb anything."
He walks back down the corridor before I can respond to that.
I watch him go. Then I look back at the girl in the doorway.
"I'm Angelic," I say.
"I know," Sage says. "He told me your name this afternoon. He didn't tell me you'd be arriving at—" she glances past me toward a clock somewhere inside the room, "—two forty in the morning."
"I didn't know the schedule either."
"Fair enough." She steps back to let me in.
The room is small and organized in the specific way of someone who has established a system.
Her side is dense with it: textbooks stacked by size, jars of ingredients arranged by color along the windowsill, notes pinned to a corkboard above her desk with a precision that suggests they've been moved and repositioned several times until they were right.
The other side has a bed with plain linens, a desk, and a wardrobe standing open and empty.
I cross to the empty side and sit on the edge of the bed.
The mattress is firmer than I expected. The pillow smells like cedar, the same note that was in the Headmaster's office, and I wonder if everything in this building is infused with the same base scent or if I've just absorbed enough magic tonight that my nose has stopped working correctly.
Sage sets the green jar on her desk and sits on her own bed cross-legged, pulling her knees up. She looks at me with frank curiosity.
"You're not a student who transferred," she says. It's not a question.
"No."
"Ashford brought you in himself, which means something happened that required a hunter response rather than an admissions form."
"You're very awake for almost three in the morning."
"I was studying," she says, not apologetically. "Something happened at your Awakening?"
I look at her. She looks back, steady and patient, the jar of green luminescence casting a soft light across her face. She doesn't push. She just waits.
"Something happened at my sister's Awakening," I say carefully. "I was there."
"And they sent a reaper hunter to collect you."
"Yes."
She nods slowly. "Okay."
Just okay. No follow-up questions, no visible calculation about what I might be or what it means for her to share a room with me.
Just the easy acceptance of someone who has decided that whatever I am, I'm standing in her room at two forty in the morning and that's enough information to work with for tonight.
Something in my chest loosens, just slightly, in a way that has nothing to do with the ember.
"Is there a bathroom?" I ask.
"Through that door." She points. "The hot water takes about thirty seconds to come through. There are extra towels in the cabinet on the left." She pauses. "Do you have anything with you? Ashford said you might not."
"I don't."
She uncurls from the bed and opens the wardrobe on her side, pulling out a folded shirt and a pair of sleep pants. She crosses the room and sets them on my desk without making a production of it.
"They'll be big," she says. "But they're clean."
I look at the folded clothes. My family's ritual room, the scorch mark on Mara's dress, my father's grip on my arm and the words don't make this harder than it needs to be, all of that is very far away right now and also somehow located directly behind my sternum alongside the ember, and I am not going to do anything about that tonight.
"Thank you," I say.
"Get some sleep," Sage says. She settles back onto her bed and opens her textbook with the ease of someone resuming a task rather than performing the end of a conversation. "It's a lot to handle when you're not tired. It's worse when you are."
I pick up the clothes and go to the bathroom. The hot water takes exactly thirty seconds, and I stand under it longer than necessary, and the ember in my chest pulses slow and steady like a second heartbeat I didn't ask for.
When I come back out, Sage has turned off the overhead light. The green jar glows softly on her desk, enough to see by without being enough to keep anyone awake. She's reading by it, or pretending to.
I lie down on the narrow bed and look at the ceiling. Somewhere in the building, something settles, an old sound, the kind old stone makes when the temperature shifts.
Four houses. A null sorted into four houses, including the one that belongs to the family that built their entire identity around a bloodline I was born outside of.
The witch disc burning gold in the dark of the Headmaster's office, warm and steady, exactly the color of the inheritance I was never supposed to have.
I turn onto my side, away from the window.
In the morning there will be whatever comes next. The Headmaster's careful management. Ryder's controlled information. An academy full of students who sorted at birth and will have opinions about a null who arrived in the middle of the night with a reaper hunter and no luggage.
But Sage Winters said okay and handed me clean clothes without asking me to explain myself, and the bed is firm and the room is quiet, and the ember in my chest settles to something almost bearable as I close my eyes and let the darkness take what's left of tonight.