I woke up the next day to the moth, scarlet and fat, fluttering near my head, and at breakfast there was an extra place set beside Vivienne. The other girls whispered to one another, and to me, even though I heard none of it. Coline shook her head to some question Isabelle asked. The mirrored comb in her hair sparked and caught my gaze. I froze in the doorway.
Shaking, bloody hands knotted in gold hair. The slack-jawed stare of death in storm-gray eyes.
The vision snapped. A shock, white hot, shot through me like someone had lit a match right before my eyes. I squeezed them shut.
Couldn’t even get in the door, and I was crumbling. The magic wasn’t wearing me down yet, but even the midnight arts could break down a body over time, and I was failing so spectacularly at controlling my divining that surely I’d be nothing come winter.
I sunk as low in my chair as my clothes and manners would allow, and Isabelle, frantically blinking away a vision too, touched my arm. I shook her off.
Estrel Charron would know. Oh, Mistress, what if she’d scryed it? Divined it?
No, I wasn’t that important. She never would’ve looked for me.
But she didn’t need magic to see how much of a failure I was.
A server set down a squat bowl of fruit, and a vision swirled in the reflective silver—blood splattering across a white gown. Why were none of my scryings normal things like a lightning storm or caravan arriving home three days early?
The vision lingered. Silver specks drifted through my sight like snow, a hook of blue splitting the room in two.
“Students!” Vivienne’s voice forced me to look toward the front of the room. She was a smear of white. White hair. White skin. White dress. White snow powdering around her.
Mistress, this was worse than ever before. Artists didn’t have to be able to see to do magic, but seeing nothing but this white forever would be annoying.
“I am aware that some of you have had the pleasure of meeting Mademoiselle Estrel Charron at court, but please bear with me as I introduce her to your peers,” Vivienne said, and even through the snow, I could see she was smiling widely. Her hand reached out and found an arm. “Students, this is Mademoiselle Estrel Charron, the royal diviner. Estrel, these are my current geniuses.”
The others tittered and nodded, already sitting. Estrel was too country to demand standing, even if she was the royal diviner. She was only a blur of green and red to me.
And across the table, across the fourteen girls between us and a dozen trays and pitchers, across the onslaught of silver that still burned my eyes, my vision cleared and Estrel Charron stared straight at me. I couldn’t see anything but her eyes.
“Please, call me Estrel. We’ll start after breakfast,” she said, gaze sliding from me to the next girl. “Every midnight artist in this room needs quite a bit of work.”
Seven
Emilie
We had spent a week studying human anatomy, whispering bones in our sleep and muttering common ailments over our meals. At dawn we rose, Madeline and I earlier than all the rest, so we might bathe without interruption or scandal in the dreary bathhouse set aside for hacks and assistants that seemed to hold more mold than steam, and then we did our laundry while the other students got ready for the day. Madeline had taught me how, graciously not mentioning the atrocious way I treated my clothes. I had never had to think about it before.
We were the only two girls in training, and all the older female hacks we might have asked for advice were working elsewhere in Demeine. Our requests for their names so that we could write for advice had been dismissed. The university didn’t want us “gossiping.” It was unseemly.
The habit of apprentices to send hacks and assistants, our counterparts for the rest of academia who did not possess the ability to use magic, to run errands felt more unseemly, especially since we were given instructions that led us to breaking rules we hadn’t been told about. Madeline said we were lucky that was the worst that had happened.
Rainier had been asked to channel a bit of healing arts that had worn his body down so quickly, his blood hadn’t been able to clot for a day.
I had been asked to deliver papers to the anatomy laboratory, and they had neglected to inform me of the letter box right