"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?"
