OUR THIRD ROOMMATE introduced herself as Hannah Harris, and she was as blatantly and unremarkably human as I was. She was tiny, with curly yellow hair, an adorably slightly upturned nose, and a stubborn, almost aggressive tilt to her chin that suggested she’d been fighting against being called “cute” for most of her life. She was also a first year, and although she’d lived most of her life in the mortal realm, she had often visited her fae relatives at the autumnal court. Her only fae connection was a great-great great grandfather who’d had golden hair, eyes, and skin. The only thing she’d inherited from him was her hair, she noted with a sigh of regret.
“How many courts are there?” I finally demanded, and both Hannah and Lyrica looked at me like I’d asked what water was.
“Seven,” Hannah answered. “The favorite number of the fae.” She ticked the names off her fingers one by one. “The summer court, the winter court, the spring and autumnal courts, the sun court, the water court, and the dark court. Sometimes the sun court is called the fire court, and the dark court is also called the moon court or the night court.”
“Do the names describe them? Is it… always spring in the spring court, for instance, and always night in the dark court?” I asked. I felt foolishly ignorant now.
“Well, no,” Hannah said. “But also, well, yes. Sort of. The kingdom—the fae kingdom, I mean—has seasons like the mortal realm. But the courts have more power during their respective phases. The spring court flourishes and has its greatest surge of power in spring, for instance. The dark court is more powerful at night. The water court is always powerful, but they are limited to their borders of rivers and sea. And so forth. There have been wars between the light and the dark, the seelie and unseelie,” she added, “particularly between the sun court and the dark court, which are the most powerful, but there is peace now.”
What she lacked in fae blood, it seemed, Hannah made up for in knowledge. I was glad she was my roommate.
After we’d all chosen our beds and explored our wardrobes, we put on our maroon after-hours clothing and went together to eat dinner in the dining hall. I was itching to try out the function of the locket my mom and Grandmother Azalea had given me, to send a message to them that I was safe and happy, but I was starving.
I’d send the message tonight.
The paths in the garden were more crowded now, although nobody else seemed to be wearing their uniforms yet.
“Perhaps putting on the uniforms was a rookie mistake,” Hannah murmured as we stood in line to enter the dining facilities. “We look like first years.”
“We are first years,” Lyrica said in confusion.
“Yes, but we don’t want to look like it, do we?” Hannah replied.
“Why ever not?” Lyrica asked.
The dining room had a great, arching ceiling that was covered in thick green vines heavy with lush foliage. Lanterns dangled from among them, casting a warm glow across the wooden tables and benches, and blossoms bloomed among the leaves. I craned my neck, staring in awe. It was beautiful.
As I was looking upward, I took a step forward into what had been an empty space devoid of any other people, and ran into something hard and muscled.
A chest.
I snapped my gaze from the ceiling, and my eyes landed on the playfully smirking face of a student with bronzed-brown skin, flowing golden hair that brushed his powerful shoulders, and yellow-brown eyes. He was handsome, and he obviously knew it.
“Hello,” the student said, catching me by the elbow as I stumbled. He unleashed a dimpled smile on me, making my stomach flip.
“I’m sorry,” I stammered. “I was looking at the ceiling. I didn’t mean to run into you.”
“It’s beautiful,” he agreed, but he was looking at my face instead of upward as he spoke the words. His smile deepened, and so did his dimples.
I flushed at the intensity of his attention. Was he flirting with me specifically, or was he the kind of guy who did that with everyone? I didn’t want to assume and make a fool of myself. “My name is Kyra Solschild,” I said, feeling awkward and charmed at the same time.
“Griffin,” he introduced himself. He still hadn’t let go of my elbow. “Third year, elite. You must be a first year. I’ve never seen you before, and I would have noticed you. What court is your family from?”
“The summer court,” I said, managing not to stammer this time.
His eyebrows lifted. “The summer court? I hail from the sun court, closest friends with the summer court. But I do not know you.”
“I grew up in the mortal realm,” I explained quickly. “And I, er, this is Lyrica and Hannah,” I said, gesturing vaguely at my roommates, who were gaping at Griffin as if he had three heads.
Griffin nodded at them politely and then returned his bright gaze to me again. His lips curved in another smile, this one inviting.
“Would you like to eat with me?” he asked.
Tearly’s earlier admonition to stay away from elites ran through my head. I’d just gotten here. I had been counting on the companionship and solidarity of Lyrica and Hannah while I fumbled my way through my first meal here. I didn’t want to try to navigate through the unfamiliarity while under the gaze of this bronzed demigod, no matter how good-looking or charming he was.
“Maybe another time?” I said. “I was planning on eating with my friends tonight.”
Griffin’s brow wrinkled with astonishment, and he appeared genuinely flummoxed, as if he’d never been told no before. “Oh. I suppose—”
“Thank you,” I added, and then I grabbed Lyrica and Hannah and rushed past him toward the tables in the center of the room where the food was laid out like a sumptuous feast. There were whole roasted game hens—at least, I thought they were hens—and piles of fruits, and fire-browned bread spilling out of baskets.
I would have stared longer at the delicious-looking food, but my attention was snagged by a group sitting a few tables over, close enough that they’d undoubtedly just witnessed the interaction between Griffin and me.
The elites from earlier, the ones with the big dog—Selene, Declan, and Lucien. The dog wasn’t with them now, but Isadora was, as well as another male student with dark red hair and a foxlike smile.
Lucien was glowering at me. He had one hand braced on the table as if holding himself in place, and the other was clenched around a book in his lap. He looked furious.
Was he mad that I was talking to another elite? Did he think it beneath me, a middling first year?
I turned my back on him, pretending I didn’t feel uneasy at his hostility.
“Kyra!” Lyrica gasped as we picked up plates and served ourselves food. “He asked you to eat with him, and you told him no?”
“I don’t even know him,” I whispered, putting a generous slice of bread onto my plate as I forced myself not to look back over my shoulder at Lucien and his scowl. It was unnerving, but I wouldn’t let it get to me.
“That was Griffin, grandson of King Alondicus and one of the princes of the sun court,” Hannah said. She had a stunned expression on her face. “I don’t think anyone has ever refused him before.”
“Well, it’s probably a good learning experience for him, then.” I grabbed a few apples, a serving of the meat, and a dish of a quivering substance that looked like pudding. I was embarrassed now—embarrassed at my earlier panic, and a little defensive of my choice. “He isn’t really my type. I don’t want to give him the idea that I’m interested…”
“Not your type?” Lyrica looked scandalized. “A prince is everyone’s type. Well, I suppose unless your type is princesses, or royals of a neutral gender—”
“I like princes,” I interrupted. “Well, I mean, guys. But more, you know, the dark-haired, bookish kind.” I flushed as I realized I’d described Lucien, who most certainly wasn’t my type. “I mean, the humble, nerdy type. The kind who like to hang out in coffee shops and libraries. Griffin looks like…” The sun in human form, I wanted to say. “He looks like he’s use
d to golden palaces and caviar. His family wouldn’t like me. I’m too human for him.”
“Don’t sell yourself short,” Hannah said, her eyes flashing with sudden fire. “You deserve to be here, and so do I.”
I got the impression she said that a lot to people.
“I just want to get settled,” I said. “Get my bearings.”
We found a table and sat down, and I immediately stuffed bread in my mouth for an excuse to stop talking.
“Well,” Lyrica said around a bite of her food. “If he’s looking for a girl to take to the Wintertide ball and you turn him down, tell him I am interested.” She glanced at Hannah. “What about you? Shall we duel for him?”
“I’m not here to meet anybody either,” Hannah said resolutely. “I don’t want to get distracted from my studies and goals. He’s all yours.” She popped a grape into her mouth.
Lyrica sighed. “Well, he’s hardly that. But thanks. I’d have to tell my betrothed anyway.”
“Your… betrothed?” I asked.
She shrugged one slender shoulder. “I am engaged to be married to a fae boy from the summer court following my studies here at Spellwood. Until then, we have an arrangement. I can see whomever I like, and so can he. It only seems fair.”
“An open relationship?” Hannah supplied.
“Yes.” Lyrica leaned her cheek on one hand and plucked at her dinner with the other. “It was my idea.”
“Is he not here?” I asked.
“He is full-blooded fae,” she said, not sounding particularly enthusiastic. “And it wasn’t my idea to marry him, either, but he’s nice enough. It’s a good match for our families. His name is Alcorn.”
“Alcorn!” Hannah exclaimed. “I know him.”
Lyrica lifted an eyebrow as if to say, you see?
Hannah made a face. “He’s nice, like you said. A good, solid fellow. A little…”
“Odd?” Lyrica said.
“He’s eccentric,” Hannah agreed. “But nice. He truly is.”
A silver-haired woman dressed in light purple serving robes with black stripes across the neck and hem stopped at our table to bring us drinks in heavy wooden goblets. Her face wore a faraway expression, and her hands were slow and dreamy as she handed set down the cups. I stared at her, torn between confusion and concern. After she glided away, I looked at Lyrica and Hannah to see if they’d noticed her odd behavior.
They were both eating as if nothing were wrong.
“Our server seemed… unwell,” I said.
“Oh,” Lyrica said. “She’s just charmed. Don’t worry.”
“Charmed?” I stole a glance over my shoulder.
“Some of the servants and custodial staff here at Spellwood are serving a sentence or repaying a debt to fae society,” Hannah explained. “It’s a common means of restitution among the courts. Lawbreakers are given a choice, usually. They can work here under a charm for safety, or sit in the court’s dungeon. They are charmed to keep them orderly and to ensure they are not a danger to the students. The ones serving a sentence have the black stripe on their purple uniforms.”
I stared at her in horror. “They’re… slaves?”
“No, no, it’s like community service in the mortal realm,” Hannah said. “And it’s a light sentence. Some courts punish especially bad behavior by cutting off ears or turning the offenders into toads for a year. Or execution. This is useful, and they are treated with dignity. They know where they are, but they cannot interact with us.”
I still felt weird and unsettled about it. “Are all of the staff charmed prisoners?”
“No,” Hannah said, shaking her curly hair. “Most are former students who live and work here fulltime now. Half-bloods with nowhere to go.”
I stole a few glances at Lucien and his friends while I ate. He was ignoring me now, reading from the book that had been in his lap. Whatever thought had made him so furious earlier seemed to have abated.
Still, I didn’t understand why he seemed to have such an issue with me.
“What do you know about them?” I asked, nodding at the table of elites.
Hannah made a sound of disgust. “The red-haired one is Tryst, from the autumnal court. He’s a first year like us, but he’s an elite. He won’t have any classes with us.” Judging by her tone, they weren’t friends. “The dark-haired one is Lucien. He’s a second-year student.”
“He’s from the dark court,” Lyrica added. “Fell’s bells, he’s handsome, isn’t he?”
“And he’s Griffin’s half-brother,” Hannah said.
Half-brother? Maybe that was why he was so angry. He didn’t approve of his brother slumming with a middling girl who was barely fae. A pang of burning shame pierced my chest, and my fears of inadequacy whispered in my ears. I pushed them away. Like Hannah said, I deserved to be here too.
“How is he from the dark court if Griffin’s from the sun court? If they’re brothers?” I asked. The mechanics of it all was still fresh and confusing to me.
Aren’t those courts mortal enemies?”
“Half-brothers,” Lyrica emphasized.
“His father had a fling with a half-mortal princess of the dark court and conceived a child—Lucien—while his wife, Lindraia, was recovering from the birth of Griffin,” Hannah said. “Somehow, he didn’t die, even though he was of both sun and night blood. His mere existence was a great scandal for many years, and they say his father’s wife still refuses to even speak Lucien’s name. He and Griffin did not grow up together, of course. They only interacted when Griffin and his father visited the dark court, and Lucien grew up in disgrace.”
How oddly tragic, I thought.
“Don’t feel too sorry for him,” Hannah said, reading my expression. “He’s rich and spoiled. He is still a prince, even if he is an unwanted one. And he has the worst taste in friends.”
I stole another glance at the table. At Selene, dark and beautiful, Isadora, her black eyes slitted in some private anger at Declan, who, I realized, had a tail. Tryst lolled in his chair, smirking at them all.
They looked like the pinnacle of snobby, rich students at the top of Spellwood’s food chain, the kind that were too beautiful and privileged for their own good.
“What societies are they in?”
“Basilisk, I bet,” Hannah said with a sigh. “Maybe the girls are in Briar. Let’s talk about something else, please? Something that doesn’t churn my stomach.”
“I heard,” Lyrica said, wide-eyed, “There was once a seventh society called Ghostbellow, but then they all disappeared. Though I’ve heard they still exist, they’re just all ghosts now—”
“Oh, that’s just a rumor spread by Toadcurdle back when my father was a student at Spellwood,” Hannah declared with a wave of her hand. “It isn’t true. He said they made it up so they could blame their pranks on someone else.”
They broke into a spirited argument over the origin of Hannah’s facts and the veracity of Lyrica’s, but I was no longer listening. I was still looking at Lucien.
He always seemed to be reading a book.
Before I could turn back to our dinner, Lucien’s eyes slid from his book and caught mine again, and a shiver passed through me at the intensity in his dark gaze.
What did he want? Why did he keep looking at me like that?
I turned my head, breaking the stare, feeling somehow like I’d lost in a contest of wills.
CHAPTER NINE
ORIENTATION TOOK PLACE the next morning at nine o’clock. Hannah, Lyrica, and I woke groggy and late for breakfast, for we had stayed up late into the night telling stories of our childhoods and getting to know each other. I felt like death warmed over, for after the other girls had fallen asleep, I’d tested my locket with a scrap of paper that said simply, miss you. I’d sat up waiting for the reply until nearly morning, when I’d fallen asleep with the locket still clutched in my hand.
In the morning light, the scrap of paper inside the locket read, Miss you too.
Tears flooded
my eyes, and I stared at the paper until the chiming of the clock outside broke into my thoughts, reminding me of the time. I only had time to scrub myself over with a washcloth wet in the sink of our bathroom, brush my teeth, and throw on my uniform before I joined the others scrambling down the spiral staircase.
Lyrica was somewhat fuzzy on concepts of hours and minutes. Hannah and I, being familiar with the mortal realm, had to explain three times what nine o’clock actually meant while we scrambled up the path toward the dining hall in our new maroon robes. I felt a little bit like I was going to be an extra on the set of a movie. I’d left my hair down long because I hadn’t liked the look of it in a ponytail with the formal robes, and it was flowy and messy because I hadn’t had time to do anything with it.
“How do you tell time in your court?” Hannah was asking Lyrica in an attempt to find a suitable analogy for the fae girl’s mind to make sense of.
“We might say, meet me when the dew sparkles on the lawn,” she replied, blinking her feathery lashes as if this were the most sensible thing in the world. “Or, the party will begin when the first star glistens in the evening sky. Or, wake when the spiders finish their webs.”
“But what if you don’t know when that will be?” I asked. “Do you have to get up and feel the ground to see if it’s wet enough? How can you plan around that kind of imprecision?”
“You just… know,” Lyrica insisted. “It’s like a tug in your chest. The spring court is in tune with the world around it. We breathe in time with it, you see. It’s in our blood and bones.”
“What about your court?” I asked Hannah.
“The autumnal court uses sundials like proper folk,” Hannah said.
In Spellwood Academy, the use of clocks was apparently a concession to the more mortal of the students. A way to keep everyone on the same page, as it were. I was deeply grateful. If I had to be punctual based on things like sparkling dew and first stars, I’d be late to every class. And I certainly didn’t want to tell time based on anything having to do with spiders.
After breakfast, the entire student body gathered in the main assembly hall. It was an echoing chamber made of stone, with arching windows soaring high above our heads and letting in streams of golden sunlight. The students sat on wooden steps that descended downward in a circle.
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