Brielle came closer instead.
Her eyes tracked down Raven’s collar, her sleeves, the token in her fist.
“A grounding sigil,” she said, half to herself.
“Somewhere.
Has to be.” Her hand came up, reaching for the token — Raven watched the arm move in slow motion.
Her hand crossed the space and closed around Brielle’s wrist.
Everyone froze.
The aura still bore down on her, and holding the grip under it made Raven’s whole arm shudder, tremors running wrist to shoulder.
She held it anyway.
Brielle stared down at the fingers on her wrist as though a chair had grabbed her.
“You wanted to know whether I could stand,” Raven said through her teeth.
She tightened her hold — one degree, enough that the first tug Brielle gave didn’t break it, and the failed tug showed on Brielle’s face.
“Now you know.” Raven opened her hand.
Brielle stepped back, and the pressure vanished all at once, sucked out of the room like a door slamming on wind.
The relief nearly finished what the aura couldn’t.
Raven’s knees dipped, but her hand was already moving, and she turned the stumble into setting her bag down on the bedpost beside her, slow and deliberate, as though she’d simply decided this was the moment to put it there.
Rubbing her wrist, Brielle retreated to her own bed.
She didn’t look defeated.
She studied Raven again, slower this time, hunting whatever she’d missed but when she saw Raven’s expression her expression turned ugly.
“Don’t flatter yourself.
I wasn’t even using a fifth of my strength.
Resisting one held-back aura doesn’t make you powerful.” “I never said it did.” The answer landed wrong on her — Raven could see it land wrong.
No boast to tear down, no submission to accept.
Brielle’s mouth opened, found nothing worth the effort, and closed.
“How did you do it?” Tessa asked quietly.
“Resist.
With a reading that thin.” “I don’t know.” Brielle scoffed from her bed without turning around.
“Right, so.” Thalia clapped her hands once, cheerful by main force.
“Sleeping arrangements.
That one’s yours.” She pointed at the last bed.
It sat hard against the window, directly in the path of a draft Raven could feel from across the room.
It stood furthest from the washroom door, and its storage chest hung open an inch at the lid, warped past ever closing properly.
Raven looked at it and said, “Fine.” Tessa and Thalia traded a glance.
Brielle didn’t bother hiding hers.
Of course she’ll take it, the glance said.
Look at her.
She’s probably slept in worse.
Which was true, Raven thought, crossing to the bed.
She had slept beside a chimney gap that whistled all winter and a door that guards kicked open for fun.
A draft was nothing.
But the draft wasn’t why she’d said yes.
From this mattress, she could see the door and the window without moving her head, and the window latch was the kind that opened from inside without a sound.
Eighteen years of Blackthorn had taught her many useless skills and one useful one — never sleep anywhere you can’t leave.
Let them think it was humility.
Humility was free.
She set the canvas bag on the blanket and unpacked.
It took almost no time.
The clothes Melissa had given her, folded into the crooked chest.
The academy summons and her admission papers, flat beneath them.
What remained of the food pouch, tucked into the corner and also her knife.
Everything else she’d ever owned was still at Blackthorn.
She’d walked out of that house holding a hostage instead of a bag, so somebody else’s hands would find it all now, and the thought dragged at her until she pressed the warped chest lid down as far as it would go.
Let Blackthorn keep the papers.
The person who’d written them had gotten out.
Thalia’s eyes followed the knife.
Her mouth opened on a question, and for once she put it away for later.
“Valerius isn’t a servant shelter,” Brielle said from her bed.
She’d watched the whole unpacking, all forty seconds of it.
“Students are expected to arrive equipped.” Raven looked around the room — at the brass-cornered trunks, the crests, the fitted cases.
“Then I’m ahead of you all.
I grew up in one of those.” Tessa laughed.
It escaped before she could stop it, a short bright sound, and she pressed her knuckles to her mouth while Brielle turned a stare on her.
“Sorry,” Tessa said, not sounding it.
Brielle lay back on her pillows and addressed the ceiling with her silence.
The afternoon wore down outside the window after that.
Girls came and went along the corridor, doors opening and shutting, names carrying through the walls — hers among them more than once.
When the dinner bell rang, Thalia tried to pull Raven along to the dining hall, took one proper look at her, and went without her.
She came back with a bread roll and a wedge of cheese folded in a napkin, dropped them on Raven’s blanket, and said nothing about it, which from Thalia was its own kind of gift.
Raven ate sitting on her bed while the sky over the towers went from gold to gray to dark.
Half the academy had seen her walk out of that sealed hall today.
The other half could wait until she’d slept.
The room loosened once the lamps came on, the way rooms do after the worst has already happened.
Tessa returned to her slate, laying out her morning in neat rows — uniform, boots, two slates, a ration token lined up on her chest like soldiers making Raven frown.
Thalia talked while she changed, because Thalia seemed to talk while she did everything.
“Classification ceremony’s at first bell, by the way.
All first-years.
Don’t be late, they mark it.” “I’ve been assessed,” Raven said.
“You’ve been admitted.” Thalia pulled her nightshirt over her head and kept going, muffled.
“Entrance assessment decides if you get through the gate.
Tomorrow decides where you stand once you’re inside it.
Power Class, aura resistance, your starting personal standing, which sigils you’re cleared to use.” Her head popped free.
“And the Houses watch it.
All four.
It’s half the reason recruitment season gets vicious.” “Your entrance result made it worse,” Tessa said, not looking up from her rows.
“Everyone who read that board will be watching one thing tomorrow —You.” The curtain rings scraped as Brielle sat up and dragged her bed curtains halfway along their rail.
She paused in the gap.
“Speed can be hidden,” she said.
“Essence can’t.
Whatever you buried under your clothes or your skin, the classification array reads through it.
By tomorrow the whole academy knows whether that record was real or manufactured.” Raven frowned as she tested the edge of her knife unconsciously.
“People have been promising to reveal what I really am since I was a child.” She looked over at the gap in the curtains.
“So far, none of them have agreed on the answer.” Brielle held her gaze a moment.
Somewhere below, a bell tolled twice, low and round — first-year curfew.
The lamps dimmed on their own, sigils drinking down the light until only a soft amber line glowed along the ceiling seam.
Raven changed into Melissa’s nightclothes with her back to the room.
The fabric came down over her shoulders soft as breath, softer than anything she’d ever been given at Blackthorn, and she stood a moment just feeling it before she sat on the edge of her bed with the academy token in her hand.
Raven Rivers.
She traced the letters once.
Unassigned.
Unconfirmed.
The academy had stamped her with two words that meant we don’t know, and they were still the kindest words anyone official had ever attached to her name — because wolfless maid had been an answer, and Unconfirmed was a question, and questions could still go her way.
She slid the token under her pillow, next to the ruined pages, and lay down facing the window.
Valerius hadn’t gone to sleep.
Voices drifted up from a courtyard she couldn’t see, someone laughing, someone arguing about points.
Figures crossed a lit bridge between towers, and a sigil flared along its rail, blue-white, then gone.
Far off, steel tapped steel in slow practice rhythm, unhurried, like the academy’s own pulse.
She’d lie awake for hours.
She knew that.
Servants who slept through the morning bell learned not to, and every one of her instincts was in a strange room with strange breathing on three sides and a whole academy outside saying her name.
Thalia’s whisper faded first, then Tessa’s slate stopped scratching, then the room was only breathing.
Raven’s own breaths stretched out.
The window lights smeared.
She let her eyes close, and sleep took her from below like deep water, fast and complete.
She expected darkness.
She opened her eyes instead.
White.
Raven stood barefoot on white — white beneath her feet, white above her, white running out level in every direction to no wall, no sky, no horizon line where a horizon should be.
No dormitory.
No bed, no window, no breathing but hers.
The cold of the floor came up through her bare soles, and that was the only proof she had a body at all.
She turned in a slow circle, and her heart began to pound against nothing.
“Where the hell am I?”