Page 6

Eight Years Ago

I T SEEMED TO TAKE brIONY LONGER than the others to acclimate to the cold of Bomard.

When the young people of Evermore had arrived in the spring for their first year of shared education, Briony had assumed that spring meant warmth and breezes and crisp-smelling trees. That was what spring was in Evermore.

In Bomard, spring was merely the end of winter.

Snow was still melting, and heavy furs were still worn.

Outdoor activities were limited. Briony and Rory had visited Bomard with their father plenty of times on official state business, but never this far north.

Here, carved into the side of the mountain range that protected Bomard from the realms across the sea, the Bomardi school was crystallized in snow.

Briony longed for the warm breezes in Evermore. She pulled her cloak more tightly closed and tapped her fingers across her face, encouraging her blood to magically warm under the surface.

“Careful,” Rory said, moving behind her at their shared breakfast table. “I saw Simon Leatherby trying that last week, and he ended up giving himself a fever.”

“I’m careful,” she said, teeth chattering. She sent a yearning glance at the dying fire. “Do you think they’re toying with us? Giving the Eversun heir only three logs per day?”

Rory sat across from her, wrapping his fingers around his warm cup of tea. “Yes. I think they’re hoping to laugh at our weakness. Maybe they want us to beg for it.”

Briony rolled her eyes. “Well, we’ll just have to remember this next year when we’re home. Perhaps we’ll weld all their windows shut so they can just swelter.”

Part of the treaty that had kept Evermore and Bomard peaceful for five hundred years was that the youth of both countries would be schooled together, in alternate countries, for the last five years of their magical education.

Next year, the Bomardi would be schooled near Evermore’s temperate lakes, but this year it was Bomard’s turn to host.

While there was certainly a divide between those who practiced mind magic and those who practiced heart magic, the basic principles were very much the same.

It was the source of the power and the connection to it that differed.

For a heart magician, lifting a rock into the air started in the muscle.

For a mind magician, it started at the source of movement—the brain.

Heart magicians felt a pulsing vein of magic in their chest, while mind magicians felt a thread between the eyes, tying their mind to the outside world.

Briony had always been taught that the Eversun mind magic was an evolved technique: Mind magicians did not tire as quickly as heart magicians, and the Bomardi didn’t have the patience for mind magic.

Heart magicians could accidentally deplete their magic, yes, but it took less training to get strong results the first time.

Consistency was the friend of the mind magician.

“Let’s just be happy that there are private rooms assigned to the Rosewoods,” Rory said.

“I don’t know what good it does us. At least in the dormitories, there’s more body heat.” Briony reached for her teacup and heated the liquid to scalding. They’d been in Bomard for a month, and she was the last Eversun still shivering in the classrooms.

She stared at Rory from across the small table laid with fruit and bread as he shoveled food into his mouth.

He was a full head taller than her now and had been eating twice as much.

Now, a few months shy of seventeen, they were finally looking less alike.

He had put on muscle during a winter of training with the infantry, and she had spent the season broadening in all the places she wished she wouldn’t.

It had taken only one glance at Larissa Gains’s cinched waist and delicate wrists upon arriving in Bomard for Briony to realize that perhaps a winter spent reading and eating honeyed pastries wasn’t doing her any favors.

“Shall we go?” Rory asked, popping one more biscuit into his mouth.

Briony swallowed down the last of her tea, letting it burn her tongue. She grabbed a wool scarf from her wardrobe, hating the cool weight of it across her neck before it acclimated to her warmth.

She followed Rory down to the grand hall on the first floor, where the year one students were taught every morning from nine till noon.

The year twos were the floor above, and the year threes were the floor above that, and so on, with the dormitories above those.

The private suite for the Eversun heir was at the very top, in a turret.

Rory and Briony were ten minutes late to the first day of lessons, and the Bomardi tutors had been incredibly unpleasant about it.

Father had sent a letter the next day instructing Briony to focus on her brother’s timeliness.

On the seventh floor, they picked up Didion from the boys’ dormitories, and on the sixth, Cordelia joined them.

“How many logs for the fire do they give your dormitory?” Briony asked Cordelia as they linked arms.

“Wait! I’m coming!” a voice called from behind them.

Briony and Cordelia groaned. They pasted on smiles and turned.

A girl with bright-green eyes and hair as yellow as straw stumbled to catch up.

“Good morning, Katrina,” Briony said.

“It’s starting to warm up, isn’t it!” Katrina said, voice perpetually a bit too loud. Briony frowned, suppressing a chill. Katrina’s eyes popped wide. “I forgot my notes!” She turned and ran back toward the dormitory door.

Briony glanced at Rory and Didion as they continued on, descending the next set of stairs already.

“I suppose we can’t just leave her now,” Cordelia said dryly.

Briony sighed in agreement. Her father had foisted a friendship with Katrina Cove upon Briony a year ago, despite the two of them having nothing in common.

Katrina was the daughter of a peace treaty marriage.

She’d been raised in Bomard for her first fifteen years, but after her mother’s death, her father returned home to Evermore with her.

There was nothing wrong with Katrina, strictly speaking, but she was loud, clumsy, and talked about how happy she was to be back in Bomard daily as Briony seethed and shivered.

Cordelia and Briony waited for her and watched the rest of the early risers leaving their rooms, starting to pack the stairwell.

Briony’s bones shook as a draft seemed to breeze by them.

“Still cold, your grace?”

The air in her chest seemed to frost over. She didn’t need to turn to see who had spoken. There were only a handful of people who felt the need to poke fun at the Rosewood royalty.

Toven Hearst and his pack of Bomardi boys were descending from the seventh-floor dormitories.

Briony had suffered more slights and humiliations in the past month at the hands of Toven and his friends than she had in her entire lifetime.

They called her “princess” or “your grace.” They threw purple roses at her in the hallways, the symbol of the Rosewood crest. They swept into low bows when she entered a room.

For someone who’d spent the first sixteen years of her life instructed not to outshine her brother—to be plain and unnoticeable—it was mortifying.

Briony had sobbed into her pillow for the first week, wondering if her own people thought she was as snobbish and condescending as the Bomardi claimed she was.

Briony tilted her chin up and waited for them to pass without a glance in their direction.

“Oh stones, the chill has gotten her hearing as well,” said Liam Quill, a handsome dark-haired boy with copper skin whose arrogance ruined his looks.

“Hey, Princess!” a thick voice said. “I know what will warm you up.”

Briony’s nose scrunched, and she spun to face them as they howled in laughter. The lewd one was Canning Trow. He was three years older than them and had no business talking that way to a sixteen-year-old, in Briony’s opinion.

She glared into his wide and leering face as they passed.

“No, haven’t you heard?” A high-pitched voice came from the girls’ dormitory. “Her brother keeps her warm enough. That’s why they share a suite.”

Larissa Gains glided toward the pack of boys. A flowery scent somehow preluded her arrival instead of following it, and her thick sheets of blond hair swayed hypnotically in time with her hips.

The boys’ laughter rang from the stairwell as they descended. Toven Hearst hung back with a sharp smirk in her direction and waited for Larissa to grab his arm before following her down the stairs.

Briony had learned from a very young age that as a woman in the Rosewood line, the most valuable thing she could learn to do was smile when she’d rather scream.

Cordelia, on the other hand—

“What an absolutely depraved thing to say!” she yelled after Larissa. Briony grabbed her wrist, trying to shush her, but Cordelia continued. “And you can’t even say it to her face!”

Larissa paused on the top step and called back, “I did say it to her face, I just find it so hideous to look at directly.” She winced dramatically and flounced down the stairs.

Toven threw his head back and laughed deep in his throat. “You’re so bad ,” he said, the sound disappearing with him as he followed.

Briony closed her eyes and took deep breaths. Cordelia grumbled next to her.

“Where the fuck is Katrina?” Briony hissed.

“Here! Sorry!” Katrina linked arms with both of them and dragged them to the stairs. “Did anyone else have troubles with the assignment?”

Briony let herself be dragged. There was a bottleneck in the circling stairwell, as there always was if the younger students waited too long.

They quickly caught up behind Toven and Larissa, and Briony slowed Katrina down.

As the stairs twisted, Toven looked up and smiled smugly at them.

Briony frowned at her shoes. The draft was back in the stairwell again, and she had to focus everything in her to keep from full-body shivering.