Page 13

At the bottom of the page, under exits and doors and the words provisional housing = cold end / no names, I wrote one more line.

They already know the rules. I have to learn them before the rules notice me.

Then I looked out the window, down past the slope to the treeline, where the woods stood black against the last blue of evening. No lights. No movement. Only the sense, strong enough to raise the hair on my arms, that the school was not the oldest thing watching me.

FOUR

Billie

The orientation lecture taught me two things. First, everyone at Æscholt had known that magic was real since before they could spell it. Second, asking obvious questions was a social crime.

The lecture hall had been built to make a person feel small, with tiered seating and desks climbing the walls in dark wooden rows with stairs on each side and in the middle, effectively dividing the seating into two halves. There was a second door at the back that was hardly noticeable and narrow windows on the opposite wall that let in a pale gray light. In the main part of the room was a podium and desk for the speaker and a slate board stretched from one side of the room to the other, clean and just waiting for the professor to mark it up.

I climbed the stairs to the back row. It was the only way to be close to a door without having to be in the front, which I obviously didn’t want to do. As much as I was loath to admit it, I was anxious and being near a door helped with that, even if I had no idea where that door led.

Other students filled in around me, though none in the same row as me, that would be too much. I could feel their gazes scan over me briefly before writing me off. Some of them called to one another, old friends, or old enemies greeting each other. Sometimes the names felt heavy in the air, as though I should recognize them or like they held some kind of power that I couldn’t understand.

Wyndham. Mallory. Doncaster. Crale. Smithe. Fenwick.

The names all seemed to mean something. I just didn’t know what, at least not yet.

I watched it all like I was the narrator in some kind of nature documentary, except I was supposed to be part of it. Here we see the female of the species…

An older man stepped into the room and a hush immediately began to fall over the other students. He never called for silence, just waited for what he was owed, which told me everything I needed to know about him.

The man, who could only be Professor Sallow, had a narrow, tall frame and a hawkish nose that supported a small pair of glasses. His hair had retreated from his head, but seemed to have just moved rather than disappeared if what was sprouting from his nose and ears was anything to go by. His beard was groomed to within an inch of its life but was longer than I would have expected, reaching down to his chest and resting on top of the long black robe that he wore open over a suit.

Once the room was so quiet I could have heard a pin drop, he said, “Power is what it does.” His voice was thin and reedy, making me cringe inwardly at the tone.

My breath caught in my throat as the words appeared behind him in the air. He didn’t write them either, they just floated into existence. The light of the letters held steady as they moved backward to rest against the clean chalkboard, making the light of them appear even brighter against the dark background.

A girl sitting in the row in front of me sighed like she was already bored and I had to bite my tongue to stop myself from asking her if she couldn’t see the magic that was being done in front of her. There was no projector, no light show, the words were produced from nothing by this man as though it was the easiest thing in the world, and for all I knew it was to him.

“That is the first principle,” he continued. “You may come from families with sentimental vocabularies. Gifts. Blessings. Burdens. Talents. Such language has its place at dinner tables and naming ceremonies. It has no place here. At Æscholt, we concern ourselves with action. A power is known by its effect.”

Powers were known by what they did, not what they were or where they came from. The hole in the lesson was so large I could see daylight through it, and nobody else seemed to notice.

“There are five Orders.” The light letters shifted, and five words arranged themselves across the board.

Force. Element. Ward. Craft. Wild.

“Force moves mass against its present intention. Element works the raw materials of the world. Ward defends, contains, and binds. Craft shapes matter and unmakes it. Wild...” He paused. Not long, but long enough for the room to feel him step around something distasteful. “Wild concerns the body and its less orderly capacities. We acknowledge it, classify it, and discuss it only where necessary.”

A boy two rows down smirked, and the girl beside him dug an elbow into his ribs. I wrote Wild = they don’t like it in my notebook.

Professor Sallow’s gaze swept over his captive audience. “You have all, by now, manifested into an Order or shown clear familial markers. Some of you have been training since childhood. Some of you have been indulged by relatives with more affection than discipline. We will correct that.”

A ripple of polite laughter moved through the room.

“Demonstrations,” he said. “Small. Controlled. No theatrics, Mr. Wyndham.”

Near the front, a student leaned back in his seat and spread both hands as if falsely accused. I could only see the side of his face, the dark hair and the lazy posture and the one sleeve rolled up despite the cold, showing a forearm that was inked nearly to the wrist in dense black marks. He was beautiful in a way that irritated me on principle.

Sallow pointed to the first row. “Miss Smithe.”

A girl stood, turned her palm up, and lifted a bead of water from a glass on the desk. The water rose, spun, flattened into a disc, then froze so suddenly the air around it smoked.

The light letters faded until there was only one word left, Element. My whole body was on alert after seeing her display.