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“Wonderful,” I groan. “You two.”
Cavendish and Caldwell twitch their heads in unison. They appeared when my mother vanished, and I can’t seem to get rid of them.
“And where have you been?” Cavendish croaks. His voice is a creepy imitation of my own—it’s how ravens learn to speak, mimicking the voice of their human companion. Cavendish is the bossier of the two. He turns his head to glare at me with his one beady eye. The other socket is empty and scarred over.
“We heard there was trouble in the woods,” Caldwell says. He has but one foot—the other is a sticklike nob that’s only a finger-width long. He hops down from a stack of books and slips on a few loose sheaves of paper.
I close the door behind me and step over my littered books, homework, and clothes to flop backward onto my bed. “There was. Nothing I couldn’t handle. I certainly didn’t need the help of you two overbearing hens.”
“Did you just compare us to poultry?” Cavendish squawks.
Caldwell flutters to the window and pecks at the glass. “Nasty things in the woods! Oh, terrible things.”
“Well, they’re out there, and I’m safely in here. Don’t ruffle your feathers.”
I’m in for the night. I stare at the rafters over my bed. I kick over a pile of washed but unfolded clothes to make more room for my legs. This punishment seems extreme. My godfather has always been strict, both as a stand-in parental figure and as a headmaster. But this? I don’t understand.
Caldwell hops onto my chest and jerks his head sideways as he stares at me. “Why the dreary look? Did the charming bespectacled lad best you in dueling class again?”
I lift my head abruptly, and he stumbles back, flapping as he regains balance on his leg. “Lonan is not charming.” He is, but I’m tired of everyone noticing, everyone praising him for it. It’s a performance—he wraps everyone around his finger.
Cavendish clacks his beak and croaks—the raven equivalent of a laugh. “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”
I drop my head back down and study the ceiling. “I bungled a job for my godfather. I’m not allowed to go to the Solstice feast. That’s why I’m upset.”
But I don’t understand why he didn’t punish Lonan. It was just me, even though Lonan was the one who killed him. He lost control. And might’ve saved my life in the process. That’s too uncomfortable to contemplate.
I tell myself it’s not because he believes in Lonan more, trusts him more, loves him more. But my petulant heart doesn’t want to hear it.
No one can do what you do. You’re special, Vesper.
Special is a lonely thing to be. But perhaps that’s why his expectations for me are higher. My mind is spiraling. This is the strange reality of my broken heart—dire circumstances ice me over, allow me to operate with clarity and reason. But lighter problems—simple things like my relationship with my godfather and my terrible cohort captain—those can twist me in knots.
The door handle rattles. Cavendish and Caldwell clack their beaks and scramble to flutter out the window. They don’t like to be around others, and no one but me has ever heard them speak. A moment later, the door swings open. A large ginger cat drops from the handle and meows loud enough that I have to cover my ears.
“For fuck’s sake, George.”
George the cat, Poppy’s pet, has always been an escape artist. And he has an obnoxiously loud yowl. Poppy says it’s because he’s hard of hearing. I say he’s got the personality of a back pimple. If he can learn to open the door, he can learn to pipe down.
A moment later, his owner appears. Poppy still looks pale as she ascends the stairs. I sit upright. “Pop! What are you doing climbing all the stairs?”
She waves me off, stepping over my piles of junk to get to her side of the room. There’s a line down the middle of our dormitory that separates her half from mine. We make good roommates for the most part, but Poppy’s side is swept, all the books are aligned on the shelf and organized by title and subject, and her bed is neatly made, a deep green quilt folded crisply at the mattress corners. My half . . . well . . .
The floor is checkered with stacks of textbooks and discarded sweaters. The floor, desk, and bed are littered with scraps of paper covered in half-finished lines of poetry, a few packs of sweets, and old inkpots discarded among the homework and clothing.
I started writing poetry shortly after my mother left. At first it was just a few words scribbled in notebooks, the things I wanted to scream but would have made my stepmother cross with me. I couldn’t say them out loud, so I wrote them down. Over time, charged, angsty lines became longer verses, layered and heavy with wonder. I learned to play syllables like harp strings. I learned to bleed words onto a page.
And then my godfather started training me in the Dark. And the words turned to literal blood.
When I came to Gossemort, my godfather discovered my gift, sensed the potential for its use in Dark magic—the magic of feeling, of impulse, sourced from within, while the Light is sourced from without. I did not, of course, expect the verses to carve themselves into my skin. I did not expect my body to become a canvas for my Dark magic. Poppy knows I love poetry. She does not, of course, know about the poems that scar my body. I keep my legs covered at all times to avoid them being seen. The others just think I’m modest.
Poppy drops onto her mattress. “I came to find you. Figured you were getting ready.”
Her eyes glance over my school uniform and still-braided, ashy hair that has gone frizzy and disheveled from the day. “I know you tend to leave it till the last minute, but the feast is starting. I peeked in a few minutes ago. Did you see the desserts? Chocolate éclairs, toffee pudding . . .” She sees my face, and it takes her a single blink to read everything I can’t keep hidden on it. “What’s wrong?”
I blink at her and then cross the room to her bed, knocking over a pile of my books in the process, and collapse onto her mattress beside her, burying my face in her pillow.
“Oh, are we being dramatic? I want to join.” She flops back on her pillow, red curls spilling everywhere. “Woe is thee! Sorrows upon sorrows!”
