the fashion for certain peoples these days. There are many who would be more than happy to take the job. Hard work pays heartily. A good employee will understand that.”
I added another zero. What did it matter? Once people were this rich, numbers weren’t real anymore. Prices were just ideas.
Least the sums in my ledger were all right. Coline was terrible at mathematics.
There were other classes too—music and art, architecture and room decorating, flower arrangements and conversational Thornish, the business etiquette of Vertgana, and even the whole final year could be devoted to poetry, literature, and translation. I knew none of it.
And after four days of crawling from bed to breakfast, suffering through the silver room headaches and lessons with Isabelle and Coline by my side, nothing seemed even remotely better. If anything, I was getting worse in the silver room.
Only seven other students in the whole school could use magic. Isabelle’s tuition, I learned, had been lowered because she could, making her a prize. Coline wasn’t the best at it, but passable and rich.
Seven of us, drowning in divined futures and scryed presents, and only I had a ringing in my ears and white spots in my sight. Even my nose hurt.
“You glow with it,” Isabelle muttered to me at breakfast one morning, her hands shaking as she ignored the silver tray before us. “You sure you can’t divine? You gather magic without even trying, and I’ve never seen someone do that.”
Scrying, observing present goings-on from afar, was easy, and really good artists like Estrel Charron could even scry the past. Divination—seeing the future—was like herding fainting goats.
There were dozens of futures, each one as fickle as the next, and not all of them came at once. Some showed up when an artist wanted them, but they weren’t the right future. Other times the future an artist needed faded before they could so much as catch a glimpse of it. Finding the right future—and holding on to it until they could see what they needed—required more channeling and precision than any other midnight art. Every time I tried to divine, I ended up sick.
The future I wanted was always just out of my grasp.
“I can’t divine.” I squinted at her. “I was never trained in the midnight arts. I’m probably just not used to it, is all.”
That evening before supper, Coline had passed a folded-up poster beneath the table as we waited to be served. I peeked at it, glad to look at something that didn’t hurt, and almost laughed.
HIS MOST BRIGHT MAJESTY
HENRY XII KING OF DEMEINE
WEARS DOWN THIS NATION LIKE MAGIC
WEARS DOWN HACKS—
TO DEATH
Isabelle winced when she read it and passed it along. “You shouldn’t have that. What if you get us in trouble?”
“I would rather get in trouble,” Coline said. “At least then I know I tried.”
“No point in being nosy about things that don’t apply to us,” some girl down the table said.
I did laugh at that. “Must be nice to be so rich, laws and death don’t apply to you.”
Coline shot me an odd look. I shrugged. Right, I was Emilie des Marais. Here, I was so rich that laws didn’t apply to me.
“If you don’t know why you should care about other people, especially the people who are dying for you,” I said, not looking down the table, “then you shouldn’t be in charge of anything, much less people.”
After that morning, a stifling silence filled the silver room before breakfast. Mostly when I entered. Coline loved it.
It exhausted me.
I crawled back into my bed that fourth evening—a whole bed to myself!—and ran a hand along the soft pillows. The quilts were too heavy for summer, but I pulled them over my head anyway. The dark eased the ache in my head, and the thick cloth muffled Coline and Isabelle’s whispers. It was evening, well past supper, and my stomach had finally settled. I’d managed a whole bowl of soup tonight. The fuzzy feeling of half sleep fell over me.
“Emilie?” a soft, musical drawl trickled through my quilt.
I turned my nose into the pillow cover, inhaling lavender and barberry. “One second, Alaine.”
“You’ve slept in the same room as me for nearly a week, and I held back your hair as you dry heaved.” A hand touched my back. “How could you have already forgotten my name?”
I jerked up, more awake than getting dumped in the Verglas would make me. Fool—my sister Alaine was long gone.
“Sorry, sorry.” I leapt to my feet, chest cold and belly