Today, it wasn’t.
Astra Verita crossed it alone, cutting diagonally across it from the dining hall.
She had something wrapped in waxed paper in one hand.
Bread, probably. Zenith Hall seemed determined to make bread into a currency. Bread at every meal. Half the time stale.
I preferred apples.
Halfway across the quad, Astra stopped.
For a moment, she just stood there in the cold, looking toward the west wing.
Toward the part of the building Delphine Moreau had not come back from.
She never looked up, which was good, because it meant she hadn’t seen me.
I had already been in her room without permission. I hadalready left apples where she slept and kissed her on a roof she had only found because I had asked her to come.
I didn’t need her catching me above the quad at six in the morning, watching from a place she could not see.
There were only so many ways to look like a bad idea before a person had to admit she was right.
I glanced down at the apple on my knee.
My right hand hadn’t moved.
I hadn’t expected it to.
At fifteen, an Oracle read my Verse too far.
A Mark was what a person carried. A Verse was what the Mark was doing to the rest of your life.
Most students heard only a line or two before graduation. Enough to choose a field, a family, a shape to grow toward. Three lines if the Oracle was feeling reckless.
Mine read twelve.
All of it.
By the last line, the Oracle looked sick and my mother was weeping uncontrollably.
And he shall not live to see his full years, for the Mark destroys.
A stupid line. Doesn’t even make sense. Too plain for the damage it did. A line like that should have arrived with more ceremony, not under an apple tree at noon on a sunny day.
But he had spoken it, and so it was.
The first line of my Mark crossed the top of my right shoulder.
That was where the Verse had entered.
That was where the ending had started counting down.
For three years, my shoulder had been the first place the ending showed itself.
A tremor. A failed lift. Numbness that came and went.
Small things. Explainable things.
