Only my Mark answered, dark and bright at the edge, as if it had heard something far away and chosen not to look away from it.
Astra.
The dress.
The formal.
My father.
All of it moving toward the same room.
I put on the prefect coat but left the Ashford cuffs in the box.
Then I went to inspect Selene Verita’s dress before it reached Astra.
34
Imade it back to Room 114 before I cried.
That felt like an achievement until I shut the door and realized there was no one there to give prizes for collapsing privately after a highly public spectacle.
The books hit the bed first.
Then I did.
For a while I sat on the wool blanket with my sleeve pushed up because hiding the Mark had begun to feel ridiculous. Then I touched my mother’s brooch where it was pinned to my coat. The silver wren pressed its wing into my palm.
For a few minutes, I let myself do the useless arithmeticof escape.
The south stair. The service corridor Rev had shown me. The gate path. The road after that, assuming a road still belonged to me once I reached it.
It was not a plan. It was only my mind throwing itself at the walls to see which one hurt least.
Then I thought of my mother.
Selene Verita had left Zenith Hall alive.
The Council had found her and killed her anyway.
My hand closed around the brooch until the wing bit skin.
The Mark moved under my sleeve, searching for an answer the room did not have.
I stayed there until my breathing steadied and the room began to feel less like privacy than waiting.
My mother’s dress arrived before supper, carried by strangers.
I had expected the basin to light again. Instead, someone knocked on the door with three clean, measured taps.
No one I wanted to let in would knock like that.
I unpinned my mother’s brooch from my coat before I opened the door. I didn’t know why until I had done it. The wren sat in my palm, small and silver and mine for exactly as long as no one else remembered they had once owned it.
Caswell stood in the corridor.
Behind him were two women I had never seen before, both in dark gray dresses, both carrying a long black garment box between them. The box had brass clasps and a small Council seal pressed into the leather at the center.
The resemblance to a coffin was not subtle.
