and associating. I’d followed Coline and Isabelle and prayed they’d known what it was. We’d just ended up back in our room.
Least the baths were as rich as the rest of the place—great stone pools dug into the earth and pumped full of hot water that filled the room with steam. I’d not known what most of Emilie’s belongings were, but soap was soap was soap even when it had lavender petals in it, and I’d made do with only it. There weren’t maids to look after us, thank Mistress for that, and I was more than happy to comb out Isabelle’s hair after she combed out mine. She’d laughed and said she used to do it for her brother when he was little and they were alone. Maman had always done Macé’s. I was too tender-headed and cried when she tugged, so she’d stopped combing mine.
I was too hungry to sleep, but fear kept me in bed. They’d know. They’d all know.
Couldn’t divine. Couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t even make it through a meal.
They’d find me out, arrest me, and send me to the gallows, surely.
We woke to a bell at dawn. I woke up bleary, eyes stuck together with the crunchy leftovers of sleep. We ate in the silver room, quiet and focused, and my headache returned after two sips of tea and a piece of pastry slathered in butter. I survived three bites before giving up. Least no one noticed.
Gisèle had taken to slipping me rolls every morning, though, and whenever Vivienne questioned it, Gisèle only repeated her words back to her.
“Help those you can,” she said, hand over her heart. “What sort of person would I be if I refused that call?”
We had to be allies, all of us as one, in order to survive.
Or, as Gisèle said one evening during associating, “We are our own.”
Two days out of the week, I joined Vivienne and most of the other students in the small church on the Gardinier estate. We stood in the vast, empty hall, the altar of Mistress Moon and Lord Sun rising at the front of the church, and I let myself fade off as the priest spoke. Mistress Moon surely understood—the water spilling from her cupped hands still showed my scryings when I kneeled at the feet of her statue. I kissed her talons, and she didn’t strike me down.
Every day, we ate breakfast, and then the entire new group was herded to mathematics. There were twelve of us, the other students as skittish as we were. Numbers were the same no matter how much money someone had, and the teacher, an older white woman with black hair knotted up in a tight bun, let us work quietly for the start of class. The problems were easy, and my headache lifted. Returned in time for history where I knew nothing and couldn’t keep up. Coline could recite every Deme king and what they were best known for two hundred years. I could name the current one.
Couldn’t say what he was known for.
Would’ve given me away instantly.
After a light meal at noon, Vivienne rounded up Coline, Isabelle, and I for an etiquette lesson that melted into a class on hosting and conversation with the other nine of our earlier classes after two hours. We practiced sitting and smiling and saying the right thing. Apparently, I couldn’t even sit right.
But the worst class was bookkeeping and home management. We spent the afternoon going over accounts and prices and the “delicate art of negotiation” with Madame Robine Bisset, who I couldn’t take seriously. The numbers in the books, fake but still close enough to the real thing, were so high, so absurd, and so long that I couldn’t comprehend them. This was how rich people ruined nations.
They saw 2.000 gold sols on a ledger, didn’t realize how much money that truly was to most folks, and ran us all into the red.
The weekly cost of dress fabric for my fake household was three hundred silver lunes. I’d never even seen more than ten in one place. We didn’t even pay that much to Waleran du Ferrant for our land in Vaser.
My fake household spent more on the horses and hunting hounds than the servants.
I crossed the hounds from the list and added the money to the wages.
“But how will you entertain guests?” Vivienne asked. “Do not sacrifice your own financial security for such foibles. You need not give in to such demands as higher wages like has become