The Vow She Swore to Break

Chapter 6

Word travels fast in a building with this many stairwells. By breakfast the next morning, at least four people I've never spoken to have found a reason to walk past our table twice.

"You're getting looked at again," Rune says, not looking up from his eggs.

"I'm aware."

"Sylvester's staring especially hard. I think he's trying to decide if you're contagious."

Sylvester — dragonfly boy, still visibly wounded about it three days later — catches me noticing and looks away fast enough to knock his fork off the table. I decide not to make it worse by acknowledging it.

Aldridge, across from us, is too busy reconstructing his own account of the summoning hall to care about anyone else's reputation. "So then Quintin says — and I'm not exaggerating this part — he says, 'in all my years,' and everyone just kind of leans in, right, because Quintin doesn't do the in all my years thing unless something's actually happened—"

"You weren't there," Rune points out.

"I have excellent sources."

"Your source is me, and I told it to you badly on purpose."

Aldridge waves this off like an inconvenient fact rather than a real objection and keeps going. I've decided, in the three weeks I've known him, that this is simply how Aldridge processes information — not by absorbing it accurately, but by narrating it enthusiastically enough that accuracy stops mattering to anyone in earshot.

Herbology's technically called Phytomancy here, which Professor Wren finds a distinction worth defending at length, and it's the first class where I actually understand, properly, what I saw in that dream on the train.

"Yggdrasil," she says, holding up a single pressed leaf under glass, pale lavender-blue even flattened and centuries dead, "is not, strictly, a tree. It's closer to a wound the old magic healed itself around — a place where enough grief and enough hope collided in the same generation that something had to grow there to hold the shape of it. There is exactly one living specimen left in this hemisphere. I am not going to tell you where it is, because half of you would go looking, and looking is exactly how the last three attempts to find it ended."

"What happened to them?" someone asks.

"Nothing dramatic. They simply never found it. Yggdrasil doesn't hide from malice. It hides from convenience." She sets the glass case down with more care than the leaf under it probably requires. "It only shows itself to people who need it more than they want it."

I think about the tree in my dream — stardust and moonlight, blooming out of a forbidden page — and don't say anything, though Rune glances at me sideways like he's guessed exactly what I'm thinking about.

"The Ghost Flame Lily, by contrast," Wren continues, moving down the table to a second, considerably less impressive specimen, "is common enough that most of you will never bother learning its properties. Cold-burning, faintly luminescent, largely decorative. Its only notable use is in certain very old dream-binding rituals, none of which are taught here anymore, for reasons the Restricted Archive can explain better than I can."

I file that away. I don't yet understand why it matters. I will, eventually, and by then it'll matter considerably more than a passing mention in a Tuesday afternoon class.

Dinner in the Great Hall follows a hierarchy I'm still learning — seniors claim the tables nearest the hearth without anyone ever formally deciding this should be the rule, first-years get whatever's left, and somewhere in the middle, Goldenleaf and Silverbrook trade good-natured insults across the aisle that Frostwillow mostly ignores and Emberthorn mostly escalates.

"Ignore the noise," Aldridge advises, spooning something involving considerably more gravy than food onto his plate. "Emberthorn's just upset because we beat them at the last dueling exhibition and they've decided the only appropriate response is volume."

"We didn't beat them," Rune says. "It was a draw."

"A draw is a win if you refuse to admit it wasn't."

Across the hall, near the windows, I catch sight of Freya in deep, focused conversation with two other Silverbrook girls, gesturing with the specific precision of someone explaining exactly why she's right about something. She catches me looking and doesn't look away first, which I've come to understand is simply how she operates — no flinching, no pretending she wasn't already aware of the attention.

I don't see Ivara anywhere. I've noticed, this past week, that I never do at meals. I mention it to Rune, quietly, once Aldridge has wandered off to relitigate the dueling match with someone at the next table.

"Wardens eat separately," he says. "Different hall, I think. Or no hall at all — I've heard some of them just don't bother most nights."

"That sounds lonely."

"I think that might be the point." He says it without much weight behind it, but something in his voice makes me look at him a second longer than the comment probably warrants. "Anyway. You planning to actually eat that, or just rearrange it?"

I eat it. Above us, through the tall windows, the first wyverns of the evening are already lifting off from the eastern towers, beginning their long, patient circuits over the valley, and I think, not for the first time, that there's an entire second life going on above this school that most of us never look up long enough to notice.