Chapter 33 — The Name Above Mine

Chapter 33: Chapter 33 — The Name Above Mine

~ Celeste ~

The cafeteria of Valerius academy had marble floors, sigil-lit chandeliers, and a view of the training courts through windows taller than the Blackthorn gates, and Celeste Blackthorn had decided within one day that she was never going home.

"You’re not eating," said the girl on her left. Priya, or Prina — a viscount’s daughter, which meant her name only needed remembering if she proved useful. "Is the food not to your taste? I can send for—"

"The food is fine." Celeste turned her cup slowly on its saucer. "I’m enjoying the quiet."

The quiet existed because half the academy was packed into the classification hall watching crestless first-years find out what they were worth.

Celeste had been invited to attend, but had declined without needing to think about it.

She hadn’t needed to stand in any sorting line or to wait for strangers to weigh her.

Her room in Rowan’s Wing had been prepared before she arrived, her crest registered before she stepped off the carriage, and the seat — *the* seat — settled before she’d unpacked.

Her token sat beside her plate where everyone at the table could read it.

CARDINAL COURT

TWENTIETH SEAT — CELESTE BLACKTHORN

Every time Alaric and Kieran came home, they brought Valerius with them—the stories, the duels, the Court. Celeste had begged to join them until she was sick of hearing the same answer from her parents.

Not yet. It isn’t time.

Then that bitch ruined the reception and disappeared, and before the week was over, Father had secured Celeste a place.

She still didn’t know what had changed.

She had stopped caring enough to ask.

She was here. That was all that mattered.

"Twentieth Seat in one night," Odile said from across the table. Celeste had remembered that one; Odile’s smile never reached her eyes. "Most of us spend years clawing our way into the first thirty. What did your father have to offer to place you above us?"

Most of us.

Odile had been at Valerius for three years and was still Forty-Second.

"Father handles arrangements," Celeste said. "I just arrive."

Two of the girls laughed too quickly.

One corner of Odile’s mouth tightened before her smile smoothed it away. Celeste lifted her tea and held Odile’s gaze over the rim, making sure she knew the slip had been seen.

Let them choke on it. None of them would say what they truly thought—not to a Blackthorn, and certainly not while sitting beside one might still earn them something.

Their envy only proved Twentieth Seat was worth having.

Priya—or Prina; Celeste really didn’t care—leaned closer.

"Is it true you were meant to arrive sooner?" she asked. "Someone said there was some trouble at your family’s reception."

Her pause before trouble was far too careful to be innocent.

The tea went bitter in Celeste’s mouth.

Seven days.

The cut beneath Celeste’s jaw had vanished before the following morning. The bruises around her wrist had gone with it. Her body had erased every trace of what happened.

Her memory had not.

And now this viscount’s insignificant little daughter was trying to pry the story out of her over lunch.

A disturbance.

A wolfless servant pressing a carving knife beneath Celeste’s jaw before every noble family in the territory. Raven backing through the Blackthorn gates, one hand locked around Celeste’s throat as though she was nothing.

Smiling.

She had been smiling when she dared Celeste to move.

Celeste hated many things about that night. The knife was not the worst of them. The worst was that the bitch had gotten away with it.

Father had sent his hunters after Raven before the reception hall was even cleared. They returned without her.

One of them had let slip that they’d tracked her to some woman living deep in the woods. After that, every hunter’s mouth closed. Father’s orders.

When Celeste demanded the woman’s name, he looked at her the way he looked at troublesome petitioners.

Leave it.

He had sworn before his entire hall that Raven’s escape would be answered in blood. Yet one stranger in a forest had been enough to make Alpha Blackthorn abandon the hunt and bury every word of what happened there.

Which meant the stranger was someone even he wouldn’t cross.

Celeste had lain awake on that thought more nights than she’d admit.

She set her cup down and gave Priya-or-Prina her warmest smile. "A minor household matter. Handled."

She held the girl’s eyes one beat past comfortable. "Servants, you understand."

"Of course," the girl said quickly. "Of course."

Odile and the girl beside her traded a glance over their cups. Celeste filed it and moved on. They could trade glances all they liked; the only version of that night these girls would ever own was the one Celeste sold them.

"—no, listen, my brother was in the gallery," a voice carried from the next table, a knot of second-years too excited to keep their volume down. "He watched the board do it. Four years that record stood—"

"She cheated. Obviously she cheated, they’re re-testing her—"

"They’re not, Cassian was standing right there when it posted. You think a first-year cheats in front of Cassian Blade?"

"A first-year nobody’s ever heard of—"

"Raven-something. That’s all anyone knows. White hair, no crest, came out of nowhere—"

Celeste’s fingers stopped against her cup.

The cafeteria fell away.

For one breath, Celeste was back beside the kitchen basin, Raven’s wet hand locked around her wrist and those eyes blazing silver-white. Then came the banquet hall—the slap, the stunned silence. The knife beneath her jaw. The gates behind her. Raven smiling as though she wanted Celeste to try something.

Heat crawled up Celeste’s neck.

She forced herself to breathe.

Ridiculous.

Raven Rivers was wolfless. One week ago, she had fled into the woods bleeding, with only five minutes before Father’s hunters were released after her. One unknown woman turning them away did not change what Raven was.

A kitchen servant did not walk into Valerius Academy and break a Cardinal heir’s four-year record.

The name meant nothing. It had to.

White hair, though.

"Celeste?" Odile said. "You’ve gone pale."

"Drop it."

The table went silent so fast it was almost sweet.

Celeste smoothed her sleeve down over her wrist and reached for her tea, and after a moment Priya — useful after all — changed the subject with the eagerness of a girl escaping ice.

"So. Twentieth Seat." She propped her chin on her hand. "Which of the heirs will it be, then? You’re ranked now. You’re allowed to have ambitions."

"Rowan," another girl said at once. "Obviously Rowan. Her brothers are his, her House is his — the politics arrange themselves."

"Politics," Odile said, "share a bed poorly. Cassian. A Blade and a Blackthorn — the bloodlines alone would terrify the continent."

"Nikolai," sighed the youngest one, and got laughed at, and defended him anyway. "What? He smiles at people."

Celeste let them argue over the four heirs and said nothing.

Dante.

She’d never met him. She didn’t need to. Years of her brothers’ stories had built him for her — the temper, the duels, the training courts he’d cracked open, the heir who made headmasters ache and refused to be the polished thing the other three pretended to be.

Every other name on that platform was an arrangement. Dante was a want, and Celeste had been raised to believe that Blackthorn daughters got what they wanted.

The smile arrived on her mouth before she’d decided on it.

"Actually," she said, "I’ve always thought—"

Her token flashed.

Celeste looked down. The light around the engraved line flickered — stuttered — and went out.

"Oh," Prina said, in a very small voice.

Across the cafeteria, tokens were flashing on every table, and the ranking board on the far wall had begun to move. Conversation thinned as students turned toward it.

Celeste watched her own token instead, watched the letters rearrange themselves in front of five sets of carefully arranged faces.

CARDINAL COURT UPDATE

CELESTE BLACKTHORN — TWENTY-FIRST SEAT

She didn’t move.

One night. She had held the seat for one night and half an afternoon. Somewhere between her tea and her ambitions, someone in that classification hall had climbed over her.

Around the table, the flattery cracked along its seams. One girl dropped her gaze a half-second too late. Odile lifted her cup, but the rim didn’t quite hide the smile beginning at the corners of her mouth.

Enjoy it, Celeste thought, cold and clear. I’ll remember the order you smiled in.

The token flashed again. A second line assembled beneath the first, naming the student who had taken the Twentieth Seat.

TWENTIETH SEAT — RAVEN RIVERS

Every thought in Celeste’s head emptied out at once.

Raven could be a coincidence. Kitchens full of them. Raven at Valerius could be — a stretch, a cruel little joke of the Goddess, but possible.

Raven Rivers.

How many girls in the world carried that exact name?

The cafeteria noise came back around her as whispers — the board, the update, who is Raven Rivers rippling table to table — and Celeste heard none of it.

The wolfless maid. The creature her family had fed, dressed, and owned for eighteen years. Escaped, hunted, cornered in the woods — and now sitting above Celeste’s name on the Cardinal Court board before Celeste’s first full day had ended, wearing the seat her family had paid for, one week after holding a knife to her throat.

Not dead in the forest. Not begging in some village.

Here??

Her fingers closed around the blinking token hard enough that the edges bit in.

"Celeste?" Odile asked. "Do you — know that name?"

Celeste stood. Her chair scraped back, and five faces tilted up at her, hungry as gulls.

"Where are you going?" Priya-or-Prina asked.

"To find my brothers."