Page 7

“It’s a shame we don’t have royalty in Bomard,” Larissa said to Liam Quill, loud enough for them to hear. “I’d have liked to be a princess.”

“Our rulers follow a bloodline,” Cordelia said briskly. “Yours follow wealth and power. Completely up to chance.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Toven said, his voice drifting up to her ears. “My father’s the richest man in Bomard—actually the entire continent of Moreland—and he’s only eighth in line for the Seat.”

Liam scoffed. “Richest only if you count properties and holdings across the sea—”

“Which we do,” Toven said patronizingly. “We all do.”

There was only one more staircase to take, and then they’d be free of them. Briony squeezed Cordelia’s elbow, begging her to hold her tongue a little while longer.

“Katrina, dear, I don’t know how you survived leaving us,” Larissa said. “You must prefer Bomard to Evermore.”

Katrina looked between them all, unsure how best to respond without insulting anyone. “Well, I do miss it—”

“Of course you do. I prefer Bomard to Evermore any day,” Larissa said. “At least in Bomard they abolished patriarchal succession. A woman could never be ruler of Evermore. Despite how high and mighty they may act …” Her eyes drifted up Briony’s embroidered wool dress to her face.

“I’d be pretty full of myself, too, if I had gold running through my blood,” Toven said.

Briony kept her expression blank, even though the energy around them crackled.

When they finally turned into the classroom, a long hall with tapestries on one side and large windows on the other, they found it unrecognizable.

Three dozen towering pine trees lined the center of the room, seemingly sprouted up overnight.

Needles littered the bases of the trunks as wide as a human chest.

Briony found Rory and Didion staring up at one tree and wandered over to join them.

“Are we … climbing the trees?” Didion asked.

“No, Mr. Winchester.” The long-suffering voice of Tutor Amelia came from behind them as she walked to the front of the classroom. She was a brusque woman in her forties who didn’t seem to enjoy teaching all that much.

Didion blushed and pulled out his notes.

As Briony smiled at Didion’s embarrassment, a chill crested over her shoulders, and her breath shuddered in her chest. She burrowed further into her cloak and scarf.

Toven Hearst came to stand at the tree next to theirs, and Finn and Liam joined him.

“Positively balmy in here, wouldn’t you say, Finn?” said Toven conversationally.

Briony frowned. So he’d seen her shiver.

“Makes me want to strip down,” Finn said.

“Wish I had some of those Eversun fabrics about now,” Toven said, shedding his cloak dramatically and tossing it to the side of the room. “The silks .”

She sent a glare his way and found him rolling up the sleeves of his shirt as if it were a warm summer’s day. The veins under his pale skin seemed to strain.

“Absolutely,” Finn agreed. “And I’d do anything for an iced glass of fairy wine. So cold, it could crack the glass.”

Briony turned back to the front, waiting for Tutor Amelia to begin. She tucked her chin into her scarf, blowing hot air into the fabric and letting it warm her lower face.

Rory frowned at her. “You’re cold?”

“You’re not?”

She felt that draft again. And suddenly it clicked.

Briony’s neck snapped to look at Toven. He was rolling up his other sleeve, his mirthful eyes on her. The fingertips of the hand by his side were rotating in infinitesimal circles.

He was the one sending a breeze her way. She was cold because of Toven Hearst.

Briony’s eyes lit on fire. She watched Toven’s lips turn up in a smirk.

“Comfortable, your grace?”

She flushed in anger, but despite that, her body shivered without her permission.

She heard Finn cover a laugh with a cough.

Briony ripped off her scarf and followed Toven’s lead, defiantly shucking off her cloak and tossing it to the corner of the room.

The air hit her in a rush, breezing over her uncovered arms and shoulders, but she grasped the thread of magic between her eyes and began pulling on the heat in her blood with rotations of her fingertips, warming her against the chill.

Now that she knew what was affecting her, she could counteract it nicely.

Tutor Amelia called for attention. Briony faced forward, but she could still feel Toven’s eyes on her.

“We are going to put last week’s lesson into practical use today,” Tutor Amelia said.

“As we know, all magic is done with gesture. From your early schooling, you may have learned simple magic that brings objects to you or pushes them away, but that is rudimentary at best. Last week we identified the original eight magical gestures, which are—?”

A dozen hands shot into the air. Briony’s stayed by her side, even as Rory’s palm shyly lifted.

She knew the answer, but this was part of the deal with her father. She was allowed to receive good marks, but never better than Rory. She couldn’t outshine him in class. If Rory was struggling, it was her duty to make sure he succeeded. No matter how.

“Mr. Rosewood.” Tutor Amelia turned to the chalkboard.

“Push, pull, throw, smash, tear, lift, drag …” Rory cleared his throat and glanced down at his notes.

He was forgetting the one gesture that Briony (and Toven, actually) was currently using.

Briony paused the circling of her fingers that gathered the warmth in her blood and tapped into the thread behind her eyes again.

With a curl of her finger, she pulled the words on Rory’s page into new shapes, new letters.

She watched him focus on the ink she was manipulating. “Gather,” he said, finishing the list. Briony released the ink, allowing it to return to the form it was before. Rory sent her the briefest of smiles in gratitude.

“Very good.” Tutor Amelia wrote the first eight on the chalkboard. “And Vindecci identified two more with the advent of mind magic. What are they, Miss Rosewood?”

“I don’t know, Tutor Amelia.”

The older woman dropped her arm from where she was adding the word gather to the bottom of the list on the chalkboard. She turned, and the classroom held its breath.

“Two gestures. Not on this list,” she said, pointing to the board.

Briony felt her skin heat, and it had nothing to do with the warming charm she was employing. She shook her head and stared again at Rory’s notes, knowing exactly what would happen next. She twitched her finger and dragged the ink around the page again.

“One of them, Miss Rosewood?”

The letters rearranged. R … E …

“Mr. Rosewood, can you assist your sister? She seems to have slept through last week’s lessons,” Tutor Amelia said disdainfully.

Rory looked down at his notes, following the letters she manipulated.

Even in the early years of their education at home, she’d helped him in maths and history like this.

When they were very young, he used to say that they were answering the questions together , as a team.

This spirit of teamwork continued at school now.

“Reach,” Rory said, looking up from the moving letters on his page.

“Mr. Hearst? The final gesture added?” Tutor Amelia turned back to the board.

Briony lifted her gaze, watching the word reach added to the list. The pause before Toven spoke caused Briony to look over at him.

He was leaning against the nearest tree trunk, arms crossed and eyes narrowed on her.

No. Not on her. On Rory’s notes.

He glanced up at her with suspicion in his gray gaze and answered silkily, “Penetrate.”

Briony tore her eyes away, cheeks burning.

“Excellent. Please take note, Miss Rosewood.” Tutor Amelia clapped her hands. “Today we are giving a practical application to the gestures. Step one will be carving words or designs into the wood from increasing distances. And the more advanced step is cutting the trunk down, as with an ax.”

Cordelia grumbled, “Wasteful. These poor trees.”

“They were destined to become your firewood, Miss Hardstark,” said Tutor Amelia. “We in Bomard don’t consider our warmth ‘wasteful.’”

Cordelia pursed her lips against the laughing whispers of their Bomardi classmates.

“Now, four to a tree,” Tutor Amelia instructed.

Briony inched closer to the tree to her right, but unfortunately, Rory, Didion, Katrina, Cordelia, and herself made five. They shuffled, looking around for an empty spot. When Briony turned backward, Toven Hearst, Liam Quill, and Finn Raquin were smirking at her from their tree.

“Oh, Briony, dear,” Finn said in a sugary-sweet voice. “We have room for one here.”

Briony sighed and resigned herself to separating from her friends.

“Begin by choosing which of the gestures best suits your task,” Tutor Amelia said. “You are to draw your initials into the tree trunk. First from a close distance. Then from a farther one.”

Briony stood two feet from her tree and frowned at the bark. Just beyond the trunk, she could see Toven Hearst doing the same. Finn was to her left, Liam to her right.

Push, pull, throw, smash, tear, lift, drag, gather, reach, penetrate. Which one?

“Once you’ve chosen a gesture, call upon your magic. The vein in your chest for heart mages. The thread in your mind for mind mages.”

She imagined a knife in her mind’s eye. She placed it against the bark and dragged. The first line of the B eased its way into the bark. It was faint, but it was there.

Briony smiled at her success on the first try. The joy was short-lived, as she glanced past the trunk and found Toven narrowing his eyes at her. She tilted her chin up and refocused on carving the curves of the B .

She’d just gotten the basic outlines of it and was beginning to go over the letters again when she heard Liam huff in exasperation to her right. She glanced at his side of the tree, finding not even the first line of the L .

Briony quickly searched behind her. There were no letters carved yet into the tree Rory, Didion, Cordelia, and Katrina were working on.