Sadie would be in one of them.
I slowed at last year’s cabinet.
Hale stopped without turning fully around.
“What did I say about questions?”
“I haven’t asked one.”
“You were about to.”
Annoyingly, he was right.
Hale led me back out the way we’d come, locked the archive behind us, and took me back up through the warmer corridors without speaking.
At the door to the south wing, he stopped.
“That’s the tour.”
“That’s the whole tour?”
“For today. You have first attunement at noon. East practice hall. You’ll find it on your own.”
“I’ve noticed that’s the preferred method here.”
He looked at me then.
Not my face.
My wrist.
Then the direction of the archives.
“Don’t go digging in last year’s cabinet,” he said. “You won’t find anything you want to see there.”
I opened my mouth to protest, even though he was right, but he held up a hand.
“I notice everything, Astra,” he added. “It’s a curse.”
Then he turned and walked away.
I watched him go back the way we had come, still admiring the way he moved despite myself. He had reached the stairwell before I let myself look away.
The leather-warm trace of him stayed at the back of my throat.
By the time I reached Room 114, my Mark had moved again.
6
Imanaged to find the attunement room on my own, as was expected of me.
The room had a high ceiling and no windows. The air was too warm and too still. A circle of pale stone had been inlaid into the floor, three paces across. Someone had scrubbed the center of it recently; the wet mineral smell still clung to the room.
Students stood around the circle with their hands at their sides, eyes down or fixed on the blank stone above us.
I had been ignored more warmly by inanimate objects.
The man at the center of the circle looked up from the stone.
