Page 12 of Cruel Rite

“I know what she is.”

“Didn’t say you didn’t.” A pause, unhurried, the kind he allows himself only with me. “Just saying nobody’s ever put a man on a Wren House girl the whole time I’ve been standing behind you. Hell of a first.”

I don’t turn around. “Watch this one.”

Four words. I don’t explain them, and he doesn’t ask me to. Rook’s followed me since we were fifteen, and there isn’t a version of tonight where he needs the rest of the sentence spelled out for him—which should feel like loyalty and instead sits, for one uncomfortable second at this window, like something closer to a small horror: nobody in this house has ever once needed me to explain myself. Not about a dock route. Not about a girl coming up a cliff stair from somewhere I’ve decided I have to know about.

“I’ll find out,” Rook says, and leaves the corridor, already moving toward whatever door a Corvane soldier starts this kind of thing from—not tonight, not a tail down the steps in the dark, just the standing kind of order that sits quiet until it’s needed, the kind nobody can point to and call a decision.

I stay at the window after he’s gone, watching the door she went through, doing the math on it the only way I know how to do math on anything: what it costs, what it buys, whether I’d make the same trade again tomorrow. A man died in this house an hour ago and cost me nothing at all. A girl climbed a hundred and forty steps in the cold from somewhere I can’t name, and as of tonight, for the first time since she set foot on this headland, somebody is going to know.

She just doesn’t know that yet.

Chapter 8: Called and Claimed

Four hundred and six people are about to hear what my father was worth, and I’ve done the arithmetic four times since I woke up, and it comes out the same each time: worse than yesterday.

I do it once more anyway, buttoning the coat, because four times isn’t final and five might be. Salvatore’s letter said a number. The registrar’s sheet said a number, close but not the same, rounded somewhere in the gap between what a man is worth on paper and what a man is worth to the family that spent him. I have never seen the actual figure the Undercroft will read out this morning. In twenty minutes, four hundred people I’ve never spoken to will know it before I do.

“You’re doing the thing,” Junie says, from the other bed, where she has been not-quite-dressed for eleven minutes because she keeps starting a sentence and abandoning it for a different one. “The buttoning thing. You did all four already, top to bottom.”

“I’m checking they’re straight.”

“They’re straight.” She pulls her hoodie sleeve down over her knuckle and doesn’t push her glasses up with it, which is how I know she’s rattled—Junie fidgets forward, into things, and this morning she’s folding herself smaller. “Isa. I heard it in the dining hall. Both sittings. People who don’t know your last name know your last name.”

“I know.”

“Do you want—” She stops, starts again. “You don’t have to look like you don’t care. Nobody’s grading you on it.”

“I am.” I get the last button through its hole and it sits exactly where the others sit, which is the only part of this morning I’ve managed to make true by wanting it. “I’m the only one grading me on it.”

Cairnwood black has no weight to it until you put it on with nothing pinned to the collar, and then it has all the weight in the world, because everyone who passes you on the quad reads the bare collar before they read your face. No house. No standing. A girl in a uniform that fits a category nobody has a polite name for. I’ve worn it four weeks now and this is the first morning it’s felt like a costume instead of clothing.

Room 214 does its part to make the morning worse. The radiator’s been knocking since six, throwing off a smell of hot dust that never quite clears no matter how far we crack the window, and the cinderblock behind Junie’s head has been painted so many times it’s gone soft at the corners, like the wall itself has given up having edges. Somewhere down the hall a shower runs too long and somebody’s speaker starts up and dies again. Ordinary. Loud. None of it knows what today is.

My hands are cold. I flex them once, in my coat pockets, and put them back where they were.

“I could walk down with you,” Junie says. “I don’t have anywhere better to be for another forty minutes.”

“No.” It comes out faster than I mean it to, so I do the thing I do and slow the rest of the sentence down to make up for it. “I want to walk into that amphitheatre looking like a person with nothing to hide. If I show up with company, that’s the first thing anyone reads. Backup means I think I need it.”

“Do you?”

“Doesn’t matter what I think I need. Matters what four hundred people decide they saw.” I pick my coat off the hook—my mother’s, wrong season, always packed anyway, though I’m not wearing it, just checking the lining’s still stitched shut the way my hands check things now without asking me first—and put it back. “I have a plan. I can’t pay the balance. Ashgrove is coming for me at the match whether I stand for it or not. So I stand for it, on my own feet, before anyone has to drag me there. That’s the version of today I get to author. It’s not a good version. It’s the only one that’s mine.”

Junie doesn’t say anything clever back. She just looks at me the way she looked at me the first ninety seconds we ever spoke, like she’s cataloguing something she plans to bring up later, and says, “Okay. Go be terrifying, then.”

I go be terrifying.

The walk from Wren House to the Verge is four minutes if you don’t stop, and I don’t stop, and it still costs me the whole four minutes to notice what’s wrong with it.

Nobody looks at me directly. That’s the wrong way to say it—people look at me directly all the time, the ordinary kind of looking, a stranger clocking a stranger on a path. This is different. This is people finding something urgent to check on their phones exactly as I pass, or turning to say something to whoever’s beside them a half-second before I’d have caught their eyes. It’s the specific choreography of a crowd that already has an opinion and doesn’t want to be seen holding it.

The first morning on this headland, a man knelt on gravel with his hand wrong and two hundred students walked past without changing pace, and I thought that was the strangest thing I’d ever see people do in public. This is worse. That crowd didn’t know anything yet. This one does.

I count the not-quite-lookers between the quad and the chapel range. Eleven by the time the ground starts to slope down toward the amphitheatre. I stop counting after eleven because the number stops being information and starts being something else—no longer a fact I can hold, just a shape the whole morning is taking.

The air off the Sound this early in October has a specific bite to it, wet and metallic, the kind of cold that gets under a collar before it gets anywhere else, and I feel it now at my throat where a pin would sit if I had one to keep the wind off. The Verge takes the rest of it up through the soles of my shoes before I’ve even found my seat—granite holding October the way it’s held every October since 1809, cut hollow in the centre of each tread by two centuries of people sitting exactly where I’m about to sit. The tiers are already three-quarters full, low talk running under the surf that never actually stops here, close and constant, and I know from four weeks of watching this place work that the acoustics only run one direction: a voice on the floor comes up clean, but nothing said above the second tier carries anywhere at all. I find a spot in the general tiers, unaffiliated, no bloc to sit with, and I sit down before anyone can offer me a better seat or a worse one.