Four weeks. I was barely aware of which day it was right now let alone what week, but we had four of them left. Shoreshell made that excruciatingly clear a half dozen times as I worked on the latest revolutionary accomplishment they’d awed the class with: a leaf, which could be any colour you liked as long as it wasn’t green. Promised us it may be on the exam. I’d honestly prefer to grate my own horns if this was what we were tested on. Which I would’ve said to Kaspar and we could have joked and elbowed each other about it if he wasn’t sitting many desks away from me and steadfastly avoiding acknowledging my presence.

  My leaf turned blue, then red, and I gave a few minutes of effort to try to make it green again and gave up. Let my head slide to the desk and tried to figure out when and how in the hells I was gonna get Omen out of that death sentence of a carriage ride.

  *

  “Hey! Psst!” I turned and wished I hadn’t. In the tumultuous river of students flowing between one classroom and the next, through the bubbling din echoing off the masonry, Kaspar was looking at me. And I don’t think it was just cos he was tall that I always felt looked down on, even when he was puffing like he’d had to push through the stream of people to catch up to me – a stream now vocally disgruntled at having to flow round us. “Might you come with me a moment?” He peered over the tops of heads and waded away, and I knew I shouldn’t follow him. So what do you think I did?

  He led me up the narrow spiral stairwell I’d followed him to, one that must take you to the garret studies high in the attics. Sat on a step, wrapped around over himself, just under the window, head sinking to his knees, and I stood and watched him, arms folded, leaning on the outer wall. “Better be good or I’m pushing you out.”

  When his head came up, the glistening damp shone on his cheeks. Probably one of the endless social tricks the nobles learned for navigating life among their courtesans. Courtiers? Whichever it was – and I wouldn’t tolerate Kaspar correcting me anymore. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Part of my heart almost believes you.” I made to leave but he called for me again, and I whirled on my heel with a grunt. “What?!”

  “Please listen to me, I implore you. I’ve done something I cannot undo and I fear it may in its essence undo an awful lot more.”

  “Speak normally. I bet you can if you tried.”

  He speared me with a frightful stare. “A week ago I penned a letter in my finest hand to the Oakleys of Dreadfall and spared no detail as to what you’ve been up to here. So now they know everything you’ve done. How you’ve been contravening their trust in you, running away from the war, defying the enforced way of your village and people. How you effectively betrayed them all, eschewing any remorse and dishonouring everything they’d done for you, and how your web of lies had entrapped many innocent parties around you and nearly suffocated you time and again in the process.” I mirrored the stare, waiting him out. “When you pushed me against the wall of the cloisters, that’s where my thoughts went. I was so angry at you. I could hardly believe you’d treat me as you did. I felt as if you’d ruined this nascent life I’d longed for for so many years, the first time I’d had anything good that was genuinely by my own hand and not handed down to me. A life I was working so tirelessly to build for myself and for a while, for us… and it felt like you’d ruined it. An insatiable urge engorged within me: I needed to ruin yours in return.” His head sank again. Balled up like that on the stair, he’d never looked smaller. “Through the course of the week, I deliberated with… myself. I had obviously intended irreconcilable damage and the more I asked myself why, the more I realised whence it had come: it’s a political move. A stunt. A smear campaign. A tool to manipulate and manoeuvre atop the scheming hierarchies in my city. It’s an artisanal weapon to cleave through the upper echelons if ever needed, something I’d been taught by my court tutors, and it shouldn’t have been used against you – an individual with very little to fall back on, and no means of prosperity or independent social standing, essentially a pauper in the midst of –” He held up a regal hand to stop himself. “I severed what little you had, and I’m sorry for it. I truly am.”

  I let him stew. Let it boil over within him. Let it churn him up inside him and hoped it was doing something real, genuine, and meaningful in there. Or at least popping a couple of blood vessels. When I couldn’t hold it back anymore, I snorted a laugh, and he looked up at me. “Nice to know,” I said.

  “I prostrate myself before you in apology and you’re mocking me?”

  “You tried to make me live like you so much, you really never understood my world.” The thick confusion melting through his face felt a little satisfying if nothing else. “I’ve seen plenty of your fancy, loopy handwriting. Any pure-blood Forester would take one glance at a letter like that and toss it straight into the fireplace. Not worth the fuss.”

  His eyebrows danced like drunken caterpillars. “So… Wait. How sure are you of this?”

  “We had about thirty books in my whole village, all kept on a forgotten shelf at the town hall. Most of the fingerprints on their dusty covers were mine.”

  “So no one read what I wrote?”

  “Highly doubt it. Now if you’d sent a messenger, that would be different. You might know a lot of fancy things but you never learned the art of fucking someone over.”

  He coughed into his hands. “That’s… rather embarrassing. Skies above, I feel so secluded – cloistered, even. Appropriate for this place. I feel as I was born anew this year and I need someone to supervise me. It transpires I’m not very good at doing stuff on my own, not yet, but... I think I am glad it didn’t hurt you like I’d wanted at the time.”

  It all felt so totally inane I couldn’t help but laugh at him again. Maybe it was the release of tension but the whole thing was comical: Kaspar, shrunken and snivelling on the stairs under the weight of remorse thinking he’d ruined my life. Not that there was much connection left to sever but – “I can’t believe you really thought anyone I knew would read anything unless at knifepoint or someone owed them good money. Especially in that handwriting of yours – it looks like a spider fell into an inkpot and you ordered it to do all those fancy steps to one of your dances across the paper. It’s like trying to read the fronds of a curly fern.”

  “Oh yeah?” He looked up, his cheeks a deep blush. “Well, yours is… like trying to read a bird’s nest.” I eyed him. “Made by a bird with a wonky beak, too.” It was stupid. It was all so stupid. He wiped a stray mark from under his eye and that time, we both laughed a little.

  *

  “You were the best thing to happen to me and when I lost that, I didn’t know how to handle it. I felt utterly worthless. Utterly. As though even my new life here, the one I’d wanted for so long, didn’t want me in return. And now I must confess I’m really rather sick of myself for what I did – I didn’t know what I was doing or what effect it would have. I just needed to feel that destruction.” I stared out of Kaspar’s dorm window as he talked, snow across the castle grounds and thick in the trees beyond, the sky sliding from periwinkle through ash to slate. “I’m sorry.”

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  I wasn’t going to tell him I accepted it till I knew one way or the other if I even did. “Thanks for telling me,” I said instead. “I appreciate it cos your intention was brutal but next time, at least deliver.”

  “I shall try,” he said in a small voice with a weak snicker I guessed was at himself.

  “And you said some pretty rough things to my face as well. Half of them about it. Still stings, y’know?

  “I’m sorry for that too. I don’t think I meant it. Just, the… You know. But it wasn’t the slightest decent of me.” He sighed wetly. “If I taught you some coarse Avernorri terms, in exchange, would that make any ground towards redressal?”

  “...You make a good offer. Try it sometime and I’ll let you know.”

  The straw in the mattress crinkled behind me as Kaspar sagged heavily onto his bed. “It’s so fucking lame what people do to each other. Vengeance, feuding, wasting your energy razing someone else instead of furthering yourself. Instead of raising yourself. Ah, you would have caught that one first time, I’d wager.” With a heavy huff I heard him lay back on his covers, and then a noise which sounded exactly like a tired noble taking his boot off. “It’s entirely quite exhausting, running away from your own conscience. Always catches up to you so what’s the point?” The second one joined the first. “Can you see the moons out there yet?”

  “Just one so far.”

  “Indeed.” Both boots landed neatly on the floorboards. “If one night either of them calls to you by your name, don’t be surprised. Every night for the last week, I’ve sat out on my balcony and told them about you. All the good we had together. All the regrets I’ve had, too.”

  My hands tightened and eased on the window sill. “Oh right, why?”

  “Who else would I tell?” he asked. “And I needed to tell someone.”

  *

  We talked. We discussed. Felt bad in a few places. Felt good in a few more. Past histories. Future hopes. The exam. The exam. “Cos everything is kinda riding on it, right? Say we don’t pass. Then what?”

  “Quite honestly I’ve been rather avoiding contemplating that. My only suggestion of a fallback is that you may find me vagabonding the streets of the city awhile, but beyond that…” I do not know, he let the empty quiet say.

  “Must be nice,” I said. “I’ll be hiding out in the woods. There’s a really perfect little cottage I’ve been seeing when I’ve been walking up there. A garden full of foxgloves like you’ve never seen. It’s idyllic.”

  He looked like he was about to tell me I’d pronounced that wrong, but decided better of it. “Shouldn’t those have died off for the deepfrost?”

  “You’d think. I dunno what magic is in them,” I said with half a laugh and sat a little comfier on the side of his bed. “It all seems so perfect to me. If I flunk the exam, that’s where I’m going. Maybe then I’ll be able to rest a little easier. Maybe then I’ll start to feel happy.”

  A hand on my shoulder drew me closer to him. “You’ve got so much to be happy about already. Look at how much better your life has become now you’re free from your village.”

  “Is it freedom? Or are the chains just held by different hands?”

  He rubbed his fingers into me in a way that felt real, so real and so deep into my soul. In a way I’d sorely missed. “I’m scared I’m gonna freeze up,” he said. “I tended to. I sat through all the lessons and knew all the etiquette and manners and delegations, all the rites and rituals to transact with the various interests in the duchy. All for Almos, naturally, but I had to know it too, of course. Be as good at everything, never better at anything. Yet when we were tested, he persisted under pressure, and I always… froze. I don’t know how else to describe it. Our tutors just looked at me like I was… I don’t know. Some rubbish that someone was meant to take out a week ago.”

  My hand slipped against his. “I know the feeling. How did you manage with it?”

  “Escapism, mostly. When I felt bad, I’d… Oh, skies above, I’m not sure if I should say.”

  “Really?” I teased. “After everything else?”

  He blew hard against the back of my neck, and shivers ran through me. “Hush, you. I… invited courtiers into my chambers. Not often and only one at a time. Perhaps a dozen over a couple of years although there were a few I preferred above the others, who I’d return to – or who would be allowed to return to me, indeed. Ah, that’d be valuable information for your short-lived espionage career. Shame it didn’t last – you could’ve made a fair mint selling that on.”

  “Maybe I should be an informant. Whole world seems to think I’d fit it. Sounds like good money too.”

  “There’s a career for you if you fail the exam. Would you like to know something else I think you may find valuable?” His fingers traced around the back of my neck, running along the collar of my shirt. “I guess it was good for what I needed at the time, but I don’t think it felt like much. It felt more of a, uhm, ‘professional privilege’, on both sides.” They dipped below the collar and I found myself warming already. “Not to be crass, but I think I wanted it; I’m not sure I wanted them. I wasn’t picky – I’d invite anyone who I knew would be available and interested. And I think I only began to see how much I was missing when I realised how much I found myself wanting you.” I leaned a little back against him, letting him take some of my weight. “Was I any good?”

  “Hm? Good at what?”

  “With you?”

  “Oh. It was nice, really nice… I don’t really have much to compare to. But I enjoyed it. A lot.” He hummed contentedly and I guessed my answer was good enough. Thoughts tumbled round my head, one in particular striking me directly in the gut. I didn’t wanna think about it cos I –

  “You never really did that much back,” he said. Exactly that. Even under his gentle hands, my every muscle tensed. “Which I suppose I don’t really mind, but… I want things to be fair between us. Fair and equal and mutual.” His voice was so soft and inviting, just the way he’d talked to me before all the mess happened between us. A voice deep and so warm, like a pile of the softest blankets I wanted to curl up in forever. “I don’t want to push you into anything you don’t want. But if you do want it, then it’d be nice for us to have it, right?”

  *

  “Psst,” said the dark dorm. Could’ve been the wind or my boots on the boards but it came again. “Psst. Oi. Where’ve ya been?”

  “Who, me?” I asked the room. My jaw ached a little. “From where comes this voice? Are you of the dark spirits?”

  “I’m of the Silverstones. Why are you back so late?”

  I tapped the Ooh and let it hum some warmth into the room. “I’ll explain tomorrow. Don’t wanna talk too much right now.”

  For a handful of seconds I thought I’d get some peace. I sat on my bed, kicked my boots off, and almost laid down when from out of the darkness came a startling, “For all the grass in the valley, Leafy! I can’t believe you. After everything!”

  “How did you – oh, never mind. Look,” I said clearly. “He apologised. Haven’t you ever forgiven someone after they apologised to you?”

  “I gave it some space first! When Clover effed me over, I gave it a good couple of months. Healing takes time. It doesn’t take… whatever you guys did and didn’t do.”

  “I know, I know. You’re right, Holly. But it was a really good apology.”

  Another voice. “Even better than an apology,” it said, “would be not fucking you over in the first place.”

  “Grove! Why are you awake? And why are you both weighing in on all my personal business right now anyway?” I sat up on my sheets, hugging my clothes close, feeling weirdly exposed. “Anyway, it happened, and that’s not changing. Kaspar really seemed nice and really wanted to try some stuff. I can look after myself sometimes, I swear.”

  “And did you want to try it too?” asked Holly.

  “Well… yeah? There’s more to it than that –”

  “There’s what?”

  I grumbled. “There’s more to it than only that. We talked. Stuff felt… better.”

  “That boy is gonna keep causing you trouble,” she said.

  I grumbled again and started pulling the sheets around me. “It’s fine. I’m gonna try to keep a healthy distance. I’m not chasing after him, don’t worry, and I’m not taking any more gifts or money. It’s nice that you’re looking out for me – both of you – but I promise you I can make good decisions sometimes.”

  “I know,” said Holly in a soft voice. “You just make bad ones a lot quicker and much more often.”