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I understood enough, even then. A sense of danger crept out of the woman’s pores and drenched the hall we stood in.

“There’s been a mistake,” she said. “One that cannot be undone.”

I was relieved. The hawk-woman did not think the mistake was mine. I wasn’t in trouble.

“You… you will be all right. But only if you remember to do as I say. Only if youneverbreathe a word of this conversation to another.”

“Yes,” I said. I tilted. The hallway tilted.

“You are Nina Clarke.Say it.”

“I am Nina Clarke.” My lip trembled. The feeling of catastrophe returned.

“You were born in Sommerland.”

“I’m from Sommerland.”

“Your mother was Greta Leisel.”

“My mother was… was…”

“You are my ward.”

“I am your ward.”

Francis Leisel placed a long-fingered hand on my shoulder. “When I call on you, you will refer to me as Aunt Francis. It is crucial that you remember.”

“Aunt Francis.” I was nodding mechanically. “Yes.”

“Promise me.”

“I promise.”

“Should you forget, Nina Clarke,” Aunt Francis warned, “we will both be thrown from this city forever, or worse. Is that what you want?”

Lord help me, it wasn’t.

I was first pulled into a secondary room for something Francis Leisel called processing. I’d pictured the moment to be more ceremonial in my mind. In reality, there was only a flushed woman with a sweaty upper lip holding an iron brand in the coals of the open fireplace, then pressing it into the underside of my wrist for four excruciating seconds.

I screamed and bit into a leather strap. Aunt Francis held on to me.

The burnt skin showed a bubbling depiction of the Artisan emblem—the profile of Idia, her eyes closed in death, her hair sweeping around to form a near circle.

That was that.

The Artisan children had boarded carriages that waited before the National Artisan House, but all had departed, save one.

Here, the building facade was luminescent and clear of limescale. The street beyond the drive and the rampart were filled with onlookers, waving and fluttering kerchiefs as I was hustled out the grand doors. They cheered good-naturedly. Wished me success. Long live Belavere.

The coach was black. The horses were sabino. The driver was a Craftsman who tipped his hat to me. These were the only details I could recall later as I sat alone in the National Artisan School dormitory, clutching my bandaged forearm, barely believing I was there on that narrow bed, in that unfamiliar room.

In the morning, I would dress in the apprentice’s uniform waiting in the wardrobe. I would blindly follow the other freshly branded first-year students to the refectory, then to the orientation. I would sit in a curved room with vaulted windows and oak desks. The professor would take us through the school rules, schedules, classes, and then point to a large charcoal sketch affixed to the paneled walls—an elaborate diagram of terranium ore.

The professor would say, “We will start at the beginning.”

I would sit among my peers, whose eyes would slither in my direction, and wish for the first time in my life that I were home in Scurry.

In the evenings, I would lay awake in that small characterless room, unable to sleep. I’d summon dust from the candelabra, from the narrow windowsill, from the floorboards beneath my bed, and watch it dance in my hand.