Chapter 34 — Everyone’s Favourite

Chapter 34: Chapter 34 — Everyone’s Favourite

~ Raven ~

Three faces stared back at Raven as though she’d asked the least important question available to her.

Fair. She’d cursed at two Cardinal heirs, flattened half a hall with power she couldn’t name, and joined a ranking she’d never heard of, all before dinner.

There was probably an order she should be panicking in. She just didn’t know what it was.

"You threw me into a second-year," Thalia said. "That’s where I’d like to start. No warning. Just — whoomph."

She paused for effect, then continued complaining. "He’s enormous. I have his elbow print on my ribs."

"You’ll live," Tessa said, without looking at her. She was looking past Raven, down at the array floor, where evaluators were coaxing the guttered sigils back to life so the sorting could limp on — half the candidate line still waited along the wall, pretending very hard not to stare up at Raven while they did it.

Tessa’s eyes came back to her. "What sigil did you use to release that power?"

"I didn’t use one."

"Power doesn’t release itself. Not enough to put out a classification array and move benches with students still on them. Whatever you triggered—"

"I didn’t trigger anything. I don’t know what happened."

Brielle made a sound in her throat that carried opinions.

"Right," she said. "Of course. No sigil when you broke Cassian’s record. No sigil when you stood in my aura like it was a light breeze — with a wolf the trackers could barely find, by the way. And now no sigil while you knock down half a hall as a Nascent."

She counted it off on three fingers and held them up. "Movement. Grounding. Release. Three tricks, three denials. You’ve got work inked somewhere under that uniform and I genuinely cannot decide why you’re this committed to being mysterious about it."

Because there’s nothing to find, and if there were, I’d want to find it first.

"Believe whatever you want," Raven said instead. "I can’t explain something I don’t understand."

Brielle opened her mouth. Tessa was still watching Raven — a long, odd look with a frown moving briefly through it, there and gone — and said nothing at all, which was somehow worse than the accusations.

"Okay!" Thalia stepped into the middle of it with both hands raised. "She’s attacked a building, insulted two Cardinal heirs, and joined a ranking she can’t define. None of that is getting solved on an empty stomach. Food first. Interrogation after."

***

The whispers followed them out of the hall.

They weren’t even quiet about it. Students parted along the corridor and then closed behind them like water, and Raven caught her own name four times, Nascent twice, and fraud once from somewhere she couldn’t pin down.

Her token blinked against her palm. Behind them, the hall’s boards were still updating as the sorting resumed — some poor candidate’s result flaring to polite applause that sounded almost comical after everything.

Keep walking. Keep walking or start swinging, and swinging’s expensive.

"Someone explain the Cardinal Court," Raven said. "Now. Before I say something to one of these people."

"Oh, now she wants to know." Thalia skipped a step to come alongside. "It’s a ranking. The academy’s top female students, posted publicly, updated live. Separate from the Wing boards. Only the first twenty hold actual Seats."

"Court members get access," Tessa said. "Restricted trials. Formal academy events. Political gatherings tied to the four Houses. The highest Seats get paired with Cardinal heirs for certain competitions and ceremonies. It’s official standing, not gossip."

"It’s a shop window," Thalia said cheerfully. "The noble families use it to line up future Lunas where the heirs can see them. Judged, displayed, and aimed. My mother can recite the top ten from her own year. In order. With commentary."

A shelf, Raven thought. I fought my way out of one house to get put on a shelf.

"And Twentieth Seat means what, exactly? For me."

"It means you displaced someone." Brielle didn’t soften it. "There was a woman in that seat this morning and now there isn’t, and every ranked girl below you just inherited a reason to challenge you. The board doesn’t protect you. It advertises you."

"Wonderful," Raven said. "I’ve always wanted to be advertised."

***

They were almost at the junction leading to the main cafeteria when someone stepped away from the wall and blocked their path.

Raven recognized her immediately—the girl who’d screamed at her to kneel. Her uniform collar was still crooked, half her braid had come loose, and she clutched a slate and a battered book against her chest as though she’d been waiting for Raven to appear.

"You," she said. "You knocked me down."

"The floor knocked you down," Thalia said. "She just redecorated."

"An illegal release sigil." The girl’s voice climbed, pitched for the corridor’s audience, and the corridor obliged — students slowing, drifting closer. "That’s what that was. There’s no strength in you. The array said so. Nascent. Everything you’ve done here came off a concealed sigil, and when they strip you and find it—"

Raven stepped around her.

She’d already had this conversation once today, with someone whose opinion ranked higher, and she was hungry. But the girl turned and followed, right on her shoulder, louder now.

"Keep walking. When they find those sigils, they’ll strip you of that crest and your stolen Seat." Her voice rose. "And when they do, you’ll kneel when I tell you to."

Raven stopped.

You’ll kneel when I tell you to.

By the time she realised she had turned, she was already closing the distance. Her hand rose toward the girl’s collar before sense caught up with it—

Fingers closed around her wrist.

Tessa caught Raven’s wrist before she could grab the girl’s collar. Her grip locked tight, though her face remained unreadable. At the same moment, Brielle stepped between them, blocking Raven’s path.

"Think," Brielle said, low. "You’ve held a Court Seat for less than ten minutes. Start a fight in a corridor and it’s points off you and points off the Wing — my Wing — and every person watching runs to tell an heir or prefect. Not worth it. Not for her."

Raven looked at the girl over Brielle’s shoulder. Her heart was going hard and her hand wanted its errand back.

She forced it down.

"Speak to me like that again," she said quietly, "and you won’t get another warning."

The girl backed up two steps. Then, from what she’d apparently measured as a safe distance: "Fraud."

Tick.

Raven’s forehead pulsed. Brielle’s hand landed flat on her sternum, unimpressed. The girl spun on her heel to leave — and the book shifted in her arms, cover catching the corridor’s sigil light.

Beyond the Chains.

Raven stopped. Completely.

The spine was cracked white along its length. The corners had gone soft and round, the way corners went when a book lived in a bag, came out on breaks, got read under blankets and read again. Raven knew exactly how a book got to look like that. She’d just never once imagined watching it happen to—

"Don’t tell me," Brielle said, following her stare, "that you’ve never heard of "Beyond the Chains."

"I—" Raven’s voice needed a moment to report for duty. "I know the book."

"It’s practically everyone’s favourite," Brielle said. "And R. Vale left us with that ending, then vanished. A full year and still no next book. Who does that?"

"The library has a waiting list for every copy," Tessa said. "All four wings."

"My cousin cried at Chapter thirty," Thalia said. "The tough one. The one who bites."

They kept walking. Raven’s legs handled it while the rest of her stayed three steps back in the corridor.

Her book. In Valerius. In the arms of a girl who’d just called her a fraud, worn soft from rereading; on a library waiting list four wings long.

A week ago that would have lifted her straight off the floor.

Now it just opened a trapdoor. The next manuscript was still under the loose floorboard in her Blackthorn room — every page of it — and the only pages she’d carried out had gone into greasy dishwater with the rest of her old life.

Her publisher’s letters, the whole careful method she’d built for reaching them without a name: all of it behind gates she could never walk back through.

If R. Vale was ever finishing that book, she’d be rebuilding it from memory. And finding a new road to her publisher. Somehow. From inside a fortress where her own face was currently the most discussed object on four boards.

One disaster at a time. You’re on, what. Six?

"—and the ending," Brielle was saying, hands actually moving now, "you can’t tell me that ending wasn’t—" She caught it. Caught herself mid-gesture, caught Thalia’s growing smile, and her whole face closed like a shutter. She frowned, turned, and walked ahead of the group at speed.

"Brielle Vance," Thalia breathed, delighted, hurrying after. "You have feelings—"

"She’ll have her aura out again if you keep going," Tessa said.

"Worth it."

***

The main cafeteria of Valerius opened ahead of them like a second classification hall — four vast sections under four hanging crests, hundreds of heads, and the smell of actual cooked food rolling out to meet them.

Raven’s stomach growled loud enough that Thalia turned around.

After everything else she had done today, being heard starving barely ranked.

"I’m starving," Raven announced, and stopped pretending otherwise.

A chair scraped back, somewhere in the section under Rowan’s crest.

Raven glanced toward the sound and the girl who’d risen from the table turned toward the entrance at the same moment.

Both of them froze.

"You have got to be fucking kidding me."