stumbled out of the anteroom with the rest of the boys, his left hand cramped from writing. He was exhausted, and had no idea whether he had passed or failed. The exam had been full of baffling questions, pages of personal inquiries such as “Please describe your childhood home,” “What is your most shameful memory from when you were young?” “Please describe the sorts of presents you receive on your birthdays and for holidays,” and “If you misbehaved as a boy, what were your punishments like?” And then there were the typical math/science/history/English questions. But there were also odd questions written in foreign languages with instructions to answer these questions in different foreign languages. The last three pages were hypothetical questions: “If you accidentally insulted a foreign dignitary, how would you recover from this faux pas? Please describe a scenario in your answer.”

Henry had mostly answered the school subject questions (he avoided the math ones, as he was terrible at math), the language ones, and the hypotheticals.

Anyway, he didn’t really think it was anyone’s business that his childhood home was the Midsummer Orphanage or that his most shameful memory was the time he visited the City and someone mistook him for a beggar, offering him a spare penny. Or that he sometimes received a pair of new (to him) shoes or trousers on his birthday, and that, when he misbehaved, he was given extra chores to perform on an empty stomach.

He didn’t feel like writing about how the orphanage priest had taken Henry under his wing for a while, teaching him to read and write and hoping that Henry might become a man of the church when he grew older, but all that had stopped when Henry got into a pile of philosophy books and declared that he didn’t believe in God.

And so Henry had waited until he turned thirteen and could leave the orphanage, then hiked up the steep hill to the Midsummer School, with its vast library and gilt-framed portraits, where he worked as a servant boy and studied stolen books at night.

This story, he knew, wasn’t the story of a knight.

Even so, that didn’t stop him from wanting to get into Knightley. Not for the glory of passing the exam and breaking the Midsummer Curse, like so many of the other boys, but because if he did, it would be the first thing to go right in his life in a long while.

Henry’s stomach grumbled, and when he looked at the clock, he realized it was nearly noon and all of the boys were heading in the direction of the dining hall. Cursing under his breath, Henry opened a shabby little door that lead to a servants’ staircase and raced to the kitchen.

“Yer late, boy,” the cook grumbled when Henry arrived, panting, in the clammy kitchen, which smelled of stewed vegetables and roasted meat.

“Sorry,” Henry said, trying to catch his breath.

“’E was takin’ the exam,” one of the maids said, pointing a wooden spoon at Henry. “Fer that fancy school. Wasn’t yeh?”

“Yes, I was,” Henry said quietly, staring at his falling-apart boots.

“Mr. High an’ Mighty thinks ’e’s gonna be a knight,” the maid cackled.

“Well, ’e ain’t,” said the cook. “Now git out there an’ serve yer superiors, boy, no time teh put on yer livery.”

The cook shoved a heavy tray with bowls of savory soup into Henry’s hands.

Henry staggered over to his assigned table, which, just his luck, was filled with boys who’d taken the Knightley Exam.

“Oh, this is priceless,” Valmont said, smirking. “Now do you remember your place, servant boy?”

“You can never step into the same river twice,” Henry said, slamming a soup bowl onto the table in front of Valmont.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Valmont sneered.

“It’s from the Greeks,” Henry said. “And it means that things change.”

With that, Henry plunked the last soup bowl on the table and headed back toward the kitchen to wait for the next course.

Maybe it was Henry’s imagination, but the meal that afternoon seemed unusually filling. After the vegetable soup, there were roast beef sandwiches and roasted potatoes, then chocolate cake with thick frosting.

Henry nibbled at one of the leftover sandwiches, his stomach a heavy pit of nerves. The exam wasn’t finished, of that he was certain. Why else had the examiner called that morning’s test the “written portion”?

As Henry cleared the dessert plates (which the boys at Valmont’s table had deliberately smeared with frosting, and then coated with a disgusting layer of salt and pepper all the way to