Chapter 3 Chapter 3

They gave me four hours of sleep in a room with no lock on the inside and a uniform folded on the end of the bed like an apology nobody meant.

Grey wool, unranked cut — no house color at the collar, no crest over the heart, just a blank strip of fabric where every other student's identity apparently lived. I put it on anyway. Walking onto Thornfield's main campus in yesterday's bloodstains seemed like a worse opening statement than walking on as officially nobody.

A proctor collected me at dawn and didn't speak the entire way, which suited me fine. It gave me time to catalogue the route — the tree line thinning into manicured grounds, the stone dormitories rising up like they'd been grown rather than built, the mountains standing close enough behind everything that the whole campus felt less like a school and more like something the wilderness had reluctantly agreed to tolerate.

Then we came around the chapel and I stopped cataloguing anything, because I was looking at the Board.

It took up the entire east wall of the central courtyard — black stone inlaid with shifting silver, four columns rising under four house sigils, names sliding up and down the rankings in slow, deliberate increments like the whole thing was alive and thinking. ASHGRAVE. VOSS. DRAYCE. And a fourth column, MARROW, that I recognized as the last surviving minor house, small enough not to matter to anyone but itself.

No fifth column. Of course, there wasn't. There hadn't been a fifth column in nineteen years.

My name wasn't under any of them. It was underneath all of them, in a strip of plain grey stone at the very bottom, isolated the way a warning label is isolated from the rest of the packaging: LARKE, V. — PROVISIONAL.

"Enjoying the view?"

I hadn't heard her approach, which meant she'd wanted it that way. Pale hair, Ashgrave grey worn like it had been tailored specifically to remind everyone else what they weren't, and an expression that suggested she found most of the world mildly beneath her attention and was making a rare exception for me.

"It's very informative," I said. "I didn't know humiliation came with its own font."

Something flickered behind her eyes — not quite surprise, more like recalibration. "Isolde," she said, the way people say their own name when they expect it to do work for them. "You're the one who killed an Ashgrave enforcer bare-handed and got Vale to invoke a clause nobody's used since before I was born."

"Word travels."

"Word flies, in a place with this many wolves and this little to actually talk about." She tilted her head, studying me with the specific, clinical interest of someone deciding whether I was a threat worth the effort of destroying properly. "Thane hasn't stopped thinking about last night. I could smell it on him at breakfast. Whatever you did out there —"

"I defended myself."

"— left a mark on him he can't explain, and men like Thane don't tolerate things they can't explain. It makes them reckless." Her voice didn't change register at all, which was somehow worse than if she'd let it sharpen. "I'd be careful, if I were you, about what happens to unranked girls who make him reckless."

She was gone before I could decide whether that had been a threat too, or something closer to a warning — and I was starting to suspect, uneasily, that at Thornfield those two things were rarely different enough to matter.

I turned back to the Board because it was easier to look at than the space where she'd been standing, and that was when I felt it — not a sound, not a scent I could name, just a low, physical certainty settling into my sternum like a held note. Thane. Somewhere across the courtyard, close enough that my body had apparently decided to notice on his behalf before my eyes managed to find him.

I found him anyway. Near the chapel steps, in conversation with two proctors, jaw set in that same controlled line from last night — and even from here, even through fifty feet of open courtyard and a crowd of grey-and-crested uniforms, I felt the exact moment his attention snagged on me. Heat again, faint this time, a lower register of what had gone off in the woods. A tether pulled taut and then, deliberately, not released.

He didn't come over. I didn't move either. We just stood there, marked and marked, doing absolutely nothing about it in front of witnesses, which felt like its own kind of admission.

"You're supposed to report to the training yard," a new voice said, blessedly breaking whatever that had been. A younger proctor, clipboard in hand, reading off a notice with the flat cadence of someone who delivered bad news for a living. "Provisional wards are required to complete their first evaluation Trial within twenty-four hours of enrollment. Standard practice is a training period first, but —" he flipped the page, and something in his expression suggested he didn't love what came next either — "House Ashgrave has petitioned for immediate evaluation, citing unusual circumstances. Vale's approved it."

Twenty-four hours. I'd been enrolled for six.

"Who petitioned," I said, already certain, already watching Isolde's pale hair disappear through the chapel doors without a backward glance.

"Doesn't say who specifically. Just the house." The proctor consulted the clipboard again, wincing slightly, like he'd drawn the short straw of having to deliver this part in person. "Your evaluation opponent has been set. Cassian Voss. Sundown, training yard three."

Across the courtyard, close enough that I felt it more than heard it, I watched Cass detach himself from a knot of Voss-crested students and go very still, staring at the same notice I was, an expression crossing his face that had nothing charming left in it at all.

Sundown gave me roughly nine hours to learn how a formal Trial worked, figure out what Isolde actually wanted from putting me in front of the one heir who might genuinely want to like me, and decide what I was going to do about a ring still hidden in my boot that I hadn't had a single safe minute to examine.

Nine hours. I'd survived on considerably less than that before.

I just hadn't done it in front of an audience.