Page 20

I sat in the last row of my minerals class. It was more difficult for anyone to watch me back there.

A sat beside a girl named Polly Prescott. She was a Scribbler from Lavnonshire with beautiful warm eyes, dark hair and skin, and a weak, trembling chin. I’d opted to sit beside her whenever space allowed; us being the only two brink children in our year.

The professor, a Mrs. Cromley, described the properties of different metals while we took notes.

“Most regard terranium as the most significant of the metals, and it certainly deserves considerable study. Terranium deposits alone encase the idium we seek. Terranium also contains bluff—from the outside, both kinds of terranium look nearly identical, but while idium is detected by its blueish hue, bluff is of the blackest ink, with no magic-enhancing properties. It does, however, accelerate healing when carefully diluted, and act as a powerful sedative when not.”

This description of bluff was rather wanting in my opinion. While medicinal bluff was, indeed, almost miraculous in its healing properties, it was also highly toxic in large doses. Artisans with the money to do so could purchase recreational bluff and consequently be separated from their mind for a time. In the brink, pure bluff was a luxury the average Crafter couldnot indulge in. Small amounts of bluff were mixed with laudanum and meadowsweet instead. The miners in Scurry sometimes spent a week’s wages to dose themselves with badly mixed bluff. You could find them lying in the street with ink-stained lips and glassy eyes.

“More curiously, terranium ore is the most brittle of the metals. When tampered with inexpertly, it crumbles, and when mixed with liquid idium, becomes putrefied. Of course, our Book of Belavere states that the Goddess constructed the ore this wayon purpose—to protect idium from unrighteous hands. Only Alchemists can siphon both idium and bluff.”

Billy Holloway beckoned from the front row: “But Alchemists are rare. What happens if the existing ones pass before more appear? Do we run out of idium?”

The rest of the class sat up straighter, young eyes widening in Mrs. Cromley’s direction.

Mrs. Cromley was a kindly woman. She smiled gently. “We needn’t concern ourselves with what we cannot control. God will give what is needed, when it’s needed.”

The class settled, mollified, and I was jealous that they could be-lieve her.

In my pocket, a letter burned between sheets of parchment. A letter written by a hand that I believed had usurped God’s. I was too afraid to leave it in my dorm, lest someone find it. Too afraid to burn it, in case someone were to interrupt me or find the remnants. It stayed on my person at all times. Every time I sat or bent forward, the parchment crackled, and I was reminded of Lord Tanner with his tiny teeth and hanging jowls. Had it only been weeks ago that I’d beamed up at him from the crowd? Now, his name sickened me.

Beside me, a boy snickered. When I turned to look, he and his friend averted their eyes, smothered their laughter. One held his hand up in my direction. In the center of his palm, marred by sweat and creases, was the wordworm.

That’s what they had taken to calling me. Never to my face, but I heardit still in the halls and bathrooms. On several occasions, I’d found live worms in my bed, in my shoes, mixed in with my dinner. Each time, a scream ravaged my throat but never breached my lips. I’d forsworn tears. I got rid of the creatures in stony silence.

Polly was monikered “squid,” an unimpressive interpretation of her medium. Her punishment for being born to Crafter parents was to have her clothes, sheets, and parchment constantly ink stained. It seemed she could hardly survive a class without some little shit “accidentally” knocking an inkwell into her lap or over her desk.

If it were Scurry, I’d have caved in their faces and stomped on their chests. But this was the National Artisan School, where children carried out their torments in passive, secretive ways. So, I imagined cracking their teeth, but never did it. Polly only sat silently in quiet refrain, her small chin ever quaking.

I ignored the sneers. Instead of mashing their brains in I was counting in my head, waiting for my body to unwind when the classroom door thrashed open, none other than Professor Dumley appearing in its frame.

Until that moment, I’d never seen him: the headmaster of the Artisan School. Even at our orientation, he had not appeared. But here he was now, in my minerals class, and his eyes caught on to mine immediately.

He was a man with overlapping chins and a peculiar complexion, blotched and spotted with age. I guessed he was seventy, but he could have been a hundred. He could have been as old as the school itself. He certainly commanded the room that way, as though the bricks and mortar had been built around him, for him.

I do not mean to say that he was menacing. In fact, his eyes twinkled kindly when he found me, and he wagged a finger in my direction as though I’d been intentionally hiding from him. “Just the young lady I’d hoped to catch,” he said.

The letter by my waist may as well have burst into flames. I felt it sear my flesh. Surely, he’d see it, wouldn’t he? Burning a hole into my middle?

But Dumley only turned to Mrs. Cromley. “I’m also looking for a Theodore Shop?”

“Here, sir,” said a boy. He stood from the front row, nodding his head politely.

The other Charmer. The same boy I’d seen at the siphoning ceremony. I’d noticed him in several classes, in the halls and common rooms. A water Charmer, yet not scorned for his singularity. Instead, he was a magnet, and it wasn’t difficult to see why.

He was dark haired, brown eyed, and light-skinned, a beacon even in the shade. Some people, I knew, were simply born with that kind of light. It seeped out and lured in those closest. Even his smile—closed and polite—was charismatic, difficult to ignore.

The other students were just as well-groomed, straight-backed and proper. But while they seemed to walk with an air of affectedness, Theodore Shop made his station seem a humble accident of birth, which it was.

“Ah, yes! Well, Mrs. Cromley, I apologize for the interruption, but might I steal these two away for the rest of the lesson?”

I doubted there was a single person in the room who saw it as a real question.

Dumley led the two of us through the vaulted halls and their oil paintings, up a spiraling case of stairs to a floor I hadn’t yet been. We passed bay windows that overlooked the gardens and courtyard, past busts of other headmasters and to a set of double doors so intricately carved, I thought the wood Mason responsible must have blinded himself in its creation.

It was the Battle of Belavere, captured in woodgrain. A hundred mounted soldiers and swords and fire, all rushing the center of the trench. “Good God,” I uttered, noticing the engravings on sword handles, the slope of Idia’s eyebrows, the fury in her static cry.

“It’s quite something, isn’t it?” Dumley said happily, reaching to take hold of a handle. “Carved three hundred years ago by a man named Valino Ferdinand. He died the day after this work was completed. Threwhimself off a bell tower, if you can believe it. Such awaste.” He pushed the doors inward and beckoned us inside.