It had a new nick in the wood.
I closed my hand around it.
“Pairs,” I said.
The class moved.
I still didn’t roll my sleeve down.
31
The dining hall was a terrible place to recover from learning your dead mother had once refused the father of the boy you were supposed to accept as your bond-mate.
That was why I chose it.
I couldn’t go back to Room 114 and sit on the bed while the school decided what I had to become. I couldn’t stand in a corridor and wait to be found by Quill or Caswell or even Juno.
In the dining hall, at least, I wasn’t hiding.
Rev pushed the door open with her shoulder.
The room was between meals and mostly empty but not entirely. A few students lingered over plates. Two stewards stoodnear the west arch. Someone I didn’t know at the north table stopped talking when I came in and didn’t begin again.
Rev went straight to the south side.
Delphine’s old chair was still empty. It hurt more today than it usually did.
I sat beside Rev and left her chair open.
A roll appeared near my left hand.
“Eat,” Rev said.
“I don’t think bread can fix this, Rev.”
“My grandmother used to say bread gives the soul somewhere to sit.”
“What does that even mean?”
Rev shrugged. “Not sure. But I figure it’s worth a shot.”
I tore the roll in half.
The side door opened, and Kieran Marsh came in juggling two apples in his left hand.
He was grinning.
He was also white as a sheet, and the first step he took into the hall was almost a stumble before he made it into something theatrical.
One apple went up. The other slapped neatly into his palm.
Left hand only.
“Oh, good,” Rev said under her breath.
“What?”
“He’s about to pretend he’s perfectly fine at us.”
