Page 16

Then, after a long time, I added one more. Why did Wyndham look pleased?

FIVE

Billie

By breakfast, the robe hem had become a public matter. I learned this in the dining hall, where apparently everyone had agreed to pretend they were not looking at the four missing inches of fabric around my shoes.

The pretending was elaborate. A girl glanced down, looked away, whispered to the boy beside her, then both of them looked at a window with the intense fascination of people who had, apparently, never seen glass.

I moved to the bad-lit end of a long table and sat where the three students from supper had abandoned me. Nobody stood up this time because nobody was sitting there. Progress.

The server appeared within moments. Breakfast was porridge and brown sugar and apples sliced so thin they had clearly been cut by a person who had never been hungry enough to resent decorative fruit. I was deciding whether to ask for an extra roll for later when the green-cold perfume arrived behind me.

“So it wasn’t temporary,” Vivienne Mallory said.

I did not turn right away. One of the few advantages of being judged my whole life was that I had learned the power of making people wait for my reaction, so I finished buttering the roll before I looked up.

Vivienne stood with two others arranged a half-step behind her, a girl with glossy black hair and a boy built like a door. Not friends, I thought. Formation. Vivienne Mallory did not travel with friends. She traveled with witnesses.

“Morning,” I said.

Her smile was perfect, small and precise, designed by generations of women who had discovered that murder was frowned upon but manners were not. “You’ve altered your robes.”

“Yes.”

“They’re academy pattern.”

“I assumed so, since they came from the academy.”

Her eyes dropped to the hem, as though she could see it even though I was sitting down and it was under the table. “That pattern has been unchanged for four hundred years.”

“Then it was overdue.”

Someone behind her made a choking sound, but Vivienne did not look away from me even once, which was the first thing I almost respected about her.

“We don’t alter them,” she said.

“They were dragging.” I shrugged.

“Yes.” Her smile sharpened. “I imagine many things here will.”

There it was, clean and quick. Not a blunt insult, because blunt insults were for people without training. This one slipped under the ribs and pierced the soft tissue.

Heat climbed my neck, and I hated that. Not the insult, the heat, the visible evidence that she had landed something.

“Good to know,” I said. “I’ll keep scissors handy.”

The boy behind her laughed before he could stop himself. Vivienne’s head turned slightly, and he went silent.

Then she looked back at me, and for one second the performance thinned. She was not enjoying herself as much as initially thought, and that was the strange part. If she had been cruel for sport, I could have put her in a drawer with a label and shut it. But the way she looked at my hem was not like someone looking at a poor girl making a mistake. It was like someone looking at a crack in a wall she loved.

“You don’t understand what things mean yet,” she said.

“Then I guess it’s lucky everyone here is so eager to explain.”

Her eyes lifted to my hair. “Meaning is not the same thing as explanation.”

Then she walked away, formation following, and I sat there with my roll in my hand and my spine very straight. It bothered me that she was right. Not about the hem, because I would cut the robe again if it tried to trip me, but the rest of it. Meaning wasn’t the same as explanation. I was surrounded by things people would not explain because they thought the meaning should be obvious. Names. Tables. Robes. Orders. Blood.