Chapter 266: Second Year

The bird was back on the wall.

Vane noticed it from the kitchen doorway, one boot still unlaced, holding a cup of something the Villa 4 staff had left in the pot overnight that had been tea at some point and was now a question. The bird sat on the same stone it had occupied for three months, brown and round-shouldered and deeply unbothered by the September morning. It turned its head once, clocked him through the window with one black eye, and went back to staring at the garden.

He had named it Kaito. Mara had named it Kaito. Then he had come back from the east having actually met Kaito, and Mara had considered the comparison for approximately two days before announcing a formal renaming on the grounds that the bird was less irritating and had fewer opinions. It was now Ryuken. The bird had not weighed in on this.

He pulled on the boot and sat down at the table.

The boxes were on the shelf where they had been since last night, all three of them open now. The crimson one, the silver one, the midnight blue. He had opened them in order and sat in the armchair afterward with the September light still coming through the window, and the words he had been searching for since February had finally been exactly where they needed to be, and he had sat with them for a long time before going to bed.

He sat with them now too. The chocolate from the crimson box was good, still good, sealed properly the way Valerica did everything properly. The pressed flower from the silver box had a quality of intention to it, deliberate and formal and lasting. The three words from the midnight blue were the three words they were, in Nyx’s handwriting, and every time he read them the corner of his mouth did something he was not going to examine too carefully before breakfast.

Mara appeared in the hallway wearing the expression she brought to mornings that required her full tactical attention.

She was twelve years old and two centimeters taller than she had been in June, and she had been running Villa 4 in his absence with the flat executive competence of a general managing a small theater of operations. The staff addressed her as Miss Mara. She had apparently not corrected this. There was a running ledger on the kitchen counter where she had recorded every household decision made in the last three months, cross-referenced and annotated, because in Oakhaven information was the only thing that kept reliably.

She looked at him. She looked at the cup.

“That is from yesterday,” she said.

“I know.”

“I can make fresh.”

“Sit down.”

She sat down, which meant she pulled out the chair at a ninety-degree angle to his, positioned so she could see both him and the kitchen entrance simultaneously. She had done this since she was nine. She called it being strategic. He called it a habit she would carry into adulthood and never lose.

She looked at the shelf.

He waited.

“You opened them,” she said.

“Last night.”

“All three.”

“All three.”

She folded her hands on the table. The gesture was adult. The hands were still a child’s, ink-stained at the fingers from the alphabet practice she did every evening, which she had been doing since Ashe told her to learn to read and she had treated this instruction as a personal challenge to be defeated as efficiently as possible. She was up to two hundred numbers and had recently started on a second language she had found in the library, apparently on the basis that if she was going to do a thing she was going to be thorough about it.

“Good,” she said, and went to the kitchen to make fresh tea.

He looked out the window. The spiral hill caught the morning light above the garden wall, white stone going gold at the top where the sun was finding it first. Above him, though he couldn’t see it from here, Lancelot was in Villa 1 doing whatever Lancelot did in the hours before the world required him. Anastasia in Villa 2. Isaac in Villa 3. And below him, one tier down the hill, Valerica in Villa 5.

He knew she had been on the hill three times during the summer. Mara had told him with the particular quality she used for information she had been holding at the correct temperature until the right moment. Once in July. Once in August. Once the week before he came back.

Each time, she had not come down.

He thought about the four hours she had spent on the chocolates. He thought about the pressed flower and what it meant in Isole’s tradition, which he knew because she had lent him the book that explained it. He thought about Nyx on a clock tower at two in the morning composing three words that managed to be both an accusation and an invitation simultaneously.

He knew what to say. He had known since last night. He was going to say it.

But the commencement ceremony was in two hours and Mara was setting tea on the table and the bird was on the wall and the morning was the morning, and some things kept properly even when you were in a hurry.

“The homeroom lists went up,” Mara said. She sat back down and wrapped both hands around her cup. “I checked. You are not with Valerica Sol. Or Isole Sylvaris.”

He looked at her.

“Or Ashe Razar,” she added. “You are with seven people I don’t know and Isaac Glacium.” She drank. “The notice said the second-year class has been fully shuffled to prevent cohort calcification. Those were the exact words. I wrote them down.”

“You wrote them down.”

“Cohort calcification. It sounds like a disease.” She set her cup down. “I think they mean they do not want the first-year squads to stay as units.”

He considered this. A full shuffle meant that for every class session, the careful social architecture of first year would be rearranged. New rooms. New people. New information about who had changed over the summer and in which direction.

“Smart,” he said.

“Disruptive,” Mara said.

“Those are the same thing sometimes.”

She made a noise that suggested she was reserving judgment.

He looked at the second-year uniform hanging on the back of the hall door. The Villa 4 staff had pressed it the day before with the thoroughness they brought to everything, which was the thoroughness of people who took their professional dignity very seriously and had also figured out within forty-eight hours of his return that the twelve-year-old with the ledger was the one to impress. The uniform was darker than the first-year version at the collar, the cut slightly different, like the same sentence said with more weight behind it.

He had been a second-year student since the rankings posted. He had not felt like one until this morning.

“The commencement ceremony is at the ninth hour,” Mara said. She was looking at the window now, at the hill above the garden. “The announcement said formal dress. No weapons at the ceremony itself.”

“I know.”

She was quiet for a moment. The bird shifted on its stone. It did not appear to have any opinions about the ceremony.

“Henri came by yesterday,” she said. Henri was the kitchen contractor, the one she had renegotiated with in June after doing a cost-per-calorie analysis and presenting him with a written breakdown of his pricing margins. He had been annoyed. He had agreed. “He asked if the new arrangements were still in effect.”

“Are they?”

“I told him yes and gave him the updated meal schedule.” She turned her cup. “He is less annoyed now. He told me I have a good head for numbers.” She paused. “I told him I know.”

He looked at her across the table. Twelve years old. Ink on her fingers. Running the household accounts of a fourth-tier villa on a floating academy island while he had been in a mountain fortress on the eastern continent learning what the ground was actually for. He thought about what she had been in Oakhaven, the specific smallness and sharpness of her, surviving on the margins of things that were not designed with her survival in mind.

She looked at him. She registered whatever was on his face. She did not comment on it.

“Go get dressed,” she said. “The uniform is on the door. You have an hour and the hill takes fifteen minutes.”

He stood.

“Vane.” She had her eyes on her cup. “The bird moved here when the staff moved us. From Villa 1. I do not know how it found us.” A pause. “I choose to believe it is loyal. The alternative is that it is following me specifically, and I find that more unsettling.”

He looked at the bird. The bird looked at him.

He went to get dressed.

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