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Then blink again.

“Valor, Miss Marionne, is difficult to breed,” Beaulah says. “I have my methods.”

The air crackles with laughter. Glasses clink, and cheering shouts blare in my ears as the world spins. I tighten my grip on my chair but it doesn’t help. Georgie pulled himself from a grave. How?

But the answer hits me. Not everyone in Perl knows Beaulah’s dark secret.

“You used toushana,” I whisper. His eyes widen. I touch my diadem. “You can tell me.”

He nods. “She told me I could if it answered to me.”

My skin turns to gooseflesh. He fought his way out of pounds of dirt piled on top of his body before it suffocated him. With only his will and toushana at his fingertips. The cold in my bones unfurls, screaming, begging to get out of here.

“You learned this in your sessions?”

He glances over his shoulder, then leans in. “She picks some of us for special classes.” The children of those in her inner circle.

“Is everything okay here?” Mrs. Kinsley barges in.

“Everything’s fine, Mom. I was speaking with Miss Marionne about how good my Trials went. Actually”—he shifts—“my bones are still hurting.”

“Give it a few hours, dear. It’ll all be a lot better in the morning, from what I recall. You’ll hardly remember your time in that forest. What you’ll remember most is”—she pokes the valor pin on his chest—“this.” She kisses him despite his best effort to dodge it.

They depart and I stand, unable to stomach the nausea.

“I’m going to bed,” I tell Beaulah. Her fingers lasso my wrist.

“I’m sending along some light reading to prepare you for our time together tomorrow.”

“Right.” Experiments. I rush out of there, and once the lounge is completely out of earshot, I take off to a run. Burying people alive? As a test! Bile climbs up and out of my mouth before I can stop it, and I hurl on her polished floors, Georgie’s deranged expression burned into my mind.

I have to get what I need from this place and get out of here.

Fifteen

Nore

Nore stared up at the gargoyles perched along the roof of Dlaminaugh Estate and shivered. Their elongated bodies sloped down the sides of the building and their claws dug into the stone. As a girl, Nore had pictured them as an army keeping watch while she slept, like soldiers on the battlements of a fancy castle. Now they seemed to be glaring at her audacity to return. But she had to find that Scroll, which meant figuring out how to get into her family’s vault.

The gates parted up ahead and the estate came into full view, drowned in a blanket of snow. Dlaminaugh was built to inspire envy, much like the students who studied within its walls. It boasted broader buttresses and hundreds more windows than even Yaäuper Rea. Stuck to a steep mountainside, it was a masterpiece of multiple buildings constructed in Gothic stonework but modernized with tall peaks, sharp angles, concrete, and long stretches of glass walls. Its pitched roof touched the clouds, pushing the bounds of architecture beyond its natural limits.

When she crossed the gate’s threshold, the dead waited for her.

She avoided their sunken, shadowed eyes. As she passed through the courtyard, she kept her gaze on the grand glass doors ahead. Flat headstones paved the cobbled entryway, each with the surname Ambrose. She hated the way it felt when she walked across someone’s grave, like she was stirring up buried secrets. The ancestors pressed in closer: they didn’t seem to like it much either. Nore strode faster, keeping her chin tucked tight into the hood of her sapphire House robe. But no matter how fast she moved, her heart rammed faster. She gulped a big breath of icy air as the Dragun on guard approached.

“Miss Ambrose?” His wide eyes were outdone only by the grin on his face. “How was your sabbatical? It’s so nice to see you out and about.” Finally, he didn’t have to say.

Her hands trembled. She shoved them into the pockets of her dress. He bowed, keeping his eyes to the ground. A silly but effective rule Mother had made. If they didn’t look at her too long, or too hard, they wouldn’t notice the way her diadem was in a slightly different place each day.

“Good morning.” She walked right past.

“Should I call Headmistress?”

“You will do nothing. That is all.”

He nodded. She nodded back and her diadem slipped. Her heart leapt. He wasn’t looking, so she pushed it back in place. Nore hurried, skirting the main doors and darting around the estate’s exterior, past the Mortuarri Observatory, beneath the Hall of Discovery bridge (which linked two of its buildings), and around the Electus and Primus quads. She used to roam the grounds dreaming of stowing her stuff in her Electus bunk, exploring the mysterious family vault, and studying until the wee hours of morning in the Caelum, the library in the clouds—with millions of books. She used to lie awake for hours imagining what her diadem would look like, who her roommate would be, and what a Cultivator ring’s magic would feel like. But none of that ever happened. She had no magic. Her eyes stung, and she told herself it was the cold.

When her boots hit grass, she picked up to a run and left the ancestors behind. They stayed outside and didn’t wander too far from the courtyard, usually roaming one of their many graveyards.