Astrid
Ivy pulled me into the courtyard before I’d even finished lacing my boots.
"You have to be there for the welcome speech," she said, dragging me by the sleeve through a crowd already three hundred students deep. "Aldric does it every year. Total snooze fest, but if you skip it they mark you truant on the first day, and trust me, that follows you."
I let her drag me. Half the school seemed to be packed into the courtyard already, rows of students standing shoulder to shoulder in front of a raised stone platform where an older man in academy robes was adjusting a microphone that didn’t need adjusting.
"Welcome, first years," Headmaster Aldric began, his voice carrying easy and warm across the crowd. "Moonshade has stood for three hundred years on one principle. Strength of character over strength of blood."
Nobody was listening.
I caught it in pieces, the way the whispers kept swallowing his words whole. Girls two rows up murmuring about someone’s hair. A cluster of boys behind me arguing about who’d gotten the better dorm. And under all of it, one name kept surfacing again and again like it was the only thing anyone actually cared about.
Ashwood. Ashwood. Ashwood.
"Did you see Reed at the gate?" a girl whispered somewhere to my left. "He didn’t even look at anyone."
"Xander waved at me," another one said. "I swear he waved at me specifically."
I rolled my eyes so hard it almost hurt.
"Do they always act like celebrities?" I muttered, mostly to Ivy, mostly under my breath. "It’s a welcome speech, not a coronation."
Ivy snorted but didn’t answer, too busy craning her neck to catch a glimpse of something behind us.
I kept going, quieter now, but not quiet enough. "They look spoiled. I bet they’ve never had to work a day in their lives."
The words felt good leaving my mouth. Satisfying, almost, after a night on a train and a lifetime of watching men like their father ruin everything they touched.
Then the courtyard went silent.
Not slowly. All at once, like someone had cut a wire, and the only sound left was my own voice hanging in the air with nothing to hide behind.
"Miss," Headmaster Aldric said from directly behind me, "would you care to repeat that?"
I turned around so fast I nearly tripped over my own feet.
He was standing there. So was Reed, arms crossed, his face unreadable in a way that made my stomach drop straight through the floor. So was Xander, one eyebrow raised, a grin already tugging at the corner of his mouth like this was the best thing that had happened to him all week.
Every single student in that courtyard was staring at me. I could feel it, hundreds of eyes pressing in at once, waiting to see what I’d say next.
I opened my mouth. Nothing came out.
Aldric didn’t look angry, not exactly. He looked amused, like he’d seen a hundred first years make exactly this mistake and expected a hundred more before he retired.
"Moonshade does not bow to titles," he said, loud enough for the whole courtyard to hear, "but neither do we tolerate public disrespect toward fellow students. Since you clearly have energy to spare, you’ll report to the dining hall after classes and scrape the gum from beneath every table."
Laughter rippled through the crowd. I heard Xander choke on his own breath trying not to join in. Reed just watched me, silent, his expression giving away nothing at all.
I wanted the ground to open up and take me.
The rest of the day passed in a blur of introductions and half-remembered classroom directions, none of which mattered much since all anyone wanted to talk about was the scholarship girl who’d insulted the princes in front of the entire first year class. By the time classes ended, my knees already ached from the memory of scrubbing brothel floors, and somehow this felt worse. I sat cross legged under a dining table with a scraper in one hand and years of hardened gum in front of me, muttering to myself that at least the floors back home had never fought back.
"What are you doing?"
I looked up. Ivy stood there in a pair of rubber gloves two sizes too big, already crouching down beside me.
"I came to help."
"You’ll get in trouble."
"I know."
She got to work without another word, and something in my chest loosened just slightly, the first real warmth I’d felt since stepping off that train.
"For someone who just arrived," she said after a while, scraping at a particularly stubborn patch, "you really picked the worst people in the entire academy to insult."
I groaned and dropped my forehead against the table leg.
"They’re not actually the King’s blood sons, you know," Ivy went on, like it was nothing, like it wasn’t the exact thing I needed to hear. "Their mother was the old Alpha Queen. She had them before she ever married His Majesty. Everyone still calls them princes because they’re the royal heirs, but there’s no blood between them and him at all."
I kept scraping, careful to keep my face perfectly still.
Stepbrothers, then. Through marriage, not blood. It shouldn’t have mattered. It changed nothing about what their father had done to my mother, nothing about the danger sitting a few hundred feet away in that headmaster’s office.
But some small, treacherous part of me noted it anyway.
We finished the last table just as the sun dipped low through the windows. I peeled off my gloves and was halfway to standing when a low whistle cut across the empty hall.
Xander leaned against the doorway, arms crossed, grinning like he owned the place.
"Need another pair of hands?"
"No," I said flatly.
"Good." His grin widened. "Wasn’t offering."
He pushed off the doorframe and sauntered away, laughing to himself the whole way down the hall.
I stared after him, gum scraper still in my hand, and thought, for the first time since arriving at Moonshade, about how satisfying it would feel to throw a chair at someone.