"Most students begin at sixteen. Your peers have four years of training and social structure already in place." He delivers it flat and courteous, a warning with no expectation of changing anything. "There will be an adjustment period."
I think about the girl with the folders outside. Don't be anything they notice.
"I'll manage," I say.
Owen nods once, something shifting briefly behind his eyes, and stands. "Let me show you the campus before I take you to your room."
The tour takes forty minutes. Lecture halls, library, dining hall, training grounds, healer's wing. Owen delivers it all in hiseven register with a careful smile and distance between every sentence, as though the words are a service he's providing rather than a conversation he's having. Students we pass in corridors go quiet when they see us, and the looks that flick to me and away are not curious glances at a new face. They're something lower, something that sits differently in the chest, and I file it without naming it.
At the end of the east wing he stops in front of a heavy oak door, iron-banded, a bolt on the outside. No keypad, no electronic lock. Just a bolt, thick and manual, the kind that doesn't care about power cuts.
"The disciplinary wing," he says, and pushes it open.
The smell shifts immediately. Underneath the building's warm animal base, something sharp cuts through, metallic and cold. Not a temperature cold. The cold from what a place is built to do. The corridor beyond is bare stone, strip lighting overhead, no portraits, no candle holders, nothing decorative at all. Doors on both sides, each with a small barred window set at eye height.
Owen walks me to the nearest one and I look through the bars. Stone floor, stone walls, a low sleeping platform bolted to the wall. And on the far wall, set into the stone at shoulder height, a pair of manacles. Silver, the word arrives in my head before I've made sense of where it comes from, before I understand yet what silver means for something like me, only that my body reads them and goes quiet and still, recognizing something dangerous.
"Students who break rules come here," Owen says. His voice hasn't changed register at all. Same tone as when he described the library's opening hours. "Most come back from it."
I look at the manacles. "Most."
"The Academy has high standards, Miss Bardot." He closes the cell door. The bolt slides home and I feel it in my back teeth. "Probationary students especially."
"I'm probationary."
"All late enrollments begin on probation. Standard procedure." His eyes stay on mine, calm and intent, carrying more information than his expression does. "One significant infraction and the matter goes directly to the Council. They would determine next steps."
The cold from the corridor settles into my bones and I breathe through it carefully and keep my face still.
"There are worse things than expulsion, Miss Bardot." He says it almost gently, the gentleness of having said it many times and knows it lands best that way. "I think you understand that already, given what brought you here. Be careful. Stay in line. Don't attract the wrong attention."
He turns and walks back toward the main corridor without waiting for me to respond.
I follow him. I don't look at the cells again, but their weight comes with me for the rest of the tour and into the evening, a cold that settles behind my sternum and doesn't leave.
My room is on the third floor of the east residential wing. Two beds, two desks, two wardrobes, one window facing the mountain. One side of the room is clearly occupied, books on the desk, a small photograph on the windowsill, the bedcovers worn soft with use.
My new roommate is sitting cross-legged on her bed with a textbook open in her lap when Owen knocks and opens the door.
"Miss Ashton. Your new roommate, Nova Bardot."
She looks up. Small-boned, pale, dark circles under brown eyes that move over me quickly and come to some private conclusion. Her expression tightens for just a moment, and thenher face goes neutral, mouth flat, eyes steady, nothing in them she didn't put there.
"Hi," she says. Careful.
Owen leaves without ceremony, handing me a key and a keycard on his way out.
I set my bag on the empty bed. "Nova," I say, because his introduction felt too formal to leave standing.
"Lily." She closes the textbook, and I notice that her hands aren't quite steady when she sets it on the desk. "You're the new late enrollment."
"Word travels fast."
"That's one of the things you need to know about this place." She looks at me for a moment, weighing something. "How much do you know about how this school works?"
"Almost nothing."
She takes a breath. Gets up and checks the corridor outside our door both ways before closing it. Sits back on her bed with her knees drawn up, making herself smaller, a habit so ingrained she probably doesn't notice she does it anymore.
