Chapter 54 — Instructor Berry

Chapter 54: Chapter 54 — Instructor Berry

~ Raven ~

Sigil Theory was on the second floor, in a room with tiered benches and a slate wall that took up the entire front.

The instructor was already sitting on the front edge of her desk when they came in, one ankle crossed over the other, unhurried about all of it.

"Instructor Berry," she said, when the room had settled. "You’ll be seeing a great deal of me. Try to bear it."

Somebody laughed. She let it happen.

She was somewhere past thirty and entirely comfortable about it, and she had the sort of low, unbothered voice that made you listen whether or not you’d meant to.

Two boys in the second row had already lost the ability to look anywhere else. Berry noticed, was clearly used to it, and went on as though she hadn’t.

"I’m told half of you were dragged out of bed at three this morning and made to run about in your nightclothes."

She looked over them without a great deal of sympathy. "How thrilling for you. Sit up."

She reached back and wrote a number on the wall.

"Four methods place a sigil into this world. Five Merit to the first of you who names all four."

Hands went up across the room like a hedge growing.

Raven’s didn’t. She was still working out what Merit was.

Tessa’s arm shot up so hard she winced and grabbed her bruised shoulder — and a boy two rows down was already talking.

"Natural, Need-born, Inscribed and Bound."

"Correct. And fast. Five Merit."

Berry marked something on the slate in her hand without looking at him.

"Don’t get used to it."

A few people laughed.

She pushed away from the desk and started down the front of the room, hands clasped behind her back.

"Now, natural sigils..."

"Inherited," a girl near the window answered.

Berry looked at her. "Inherited what?"

The girl straightened. "Through race or bloodline."

"Good. And what did you personally do to earn yours?"

The girl’s mouth opened, then closed.

"Exactly." Berry kept walking. "Nothing. Nobody in this room worked for the blood they were born with. Remember that before you start congratulating yourselves for it."

That killed a few smiles.

"Bound sigils. Give me one you’ve touched since waking up."

"Dormitory locks," Tessa said immediately.

"Good."

Berry pointed toward the ceiling as she passed beneath one of the lamps.

"Those. The doors downstairs. Half this building. All bound."

A boy farther up frowned at the lamp. "But it just sits there doing one thing."

"Until the stored essence runs low."

Berry looked at him.

"Then it sits there doing nothing, and somebody from maintenance has to refill the anchor while students complain that Valerius is falling apart."

A few people laughed again.

"Inscribed sigils are the ones we actually learn, right?" another boy asked.

Berry stopped.

"Inscribed sigils are the ones you attempt to learn."

That got quieter.

"You’ll be terrible at them for a while. Most of you will stay terrible longer than your pride thinks is reasonable. The students who eventually become good are usually the ones willing to make mistakes where everyone can see them."

Tessa slowly lowered the hand she’d raised too late for the first question and mouthed something unpleasant at the back of the boy who had taken the five Merit.

Raven almost smiled.

Berry reached the wall and tapped it twice with one finger.

"Need-born."

The room changed slightly at that.

"Define need."

"Wanting something badly?" someone offered.

"No."

"Desperation?"

"Closer."

Berry turned to face them.

"Need-born does not mean you wanted something very much. It doesn’t mean you were stressed. It doesn’t mean your father shouted at you until you cried or you failed an assessment and decided your life was over."

A couple of students suddenly found their notes fascinating.

Berry noticed.

"Need," she repeated. "Real need. The kind your body believes it may not survive."

She let the silence sit for a second.

"We’ll come back to that."

Raven wrote it down.

Then kept writing.

And after less than five minutes, one thing had become painfully obvious.

Most of the room wasn’t learning this for the first time.

They were remembering it.

The noble students had the bored familiarity of people who had already heard versions of the lesson from tutors years ago. Some barely bothered writing anything.

Tessa was the opposite. She had clearly studied ahead and was now offended whenever somebody answered before her.

Brielle answered a question about anchor decay without even turning fully away from the window, then went straight back to ignoring everyone.

Thalia was keeping up.

Barely.

She seemed perfectly happy with that.

Raven looked down at her own page, already crowded with writing.

She was taking down everything.

Because unlike most of them, she couldn’t afford to assume she’d hear it twice.

Raven kept writing.

"Practical," Berry said. "Why can a bound heating sigil not produce endless heat? Three Merit, and I’d like it in fewer than nine words."

Hands went up again.

"Resonance decay across the anchor lattice," a girl said.

"Not for heating sigils," a boy cut in. "Thermal saturation happens first."

She glanced at him. "Only if the release pattern is poorly balanced."

"Which most of them are."

Berry lifted a hand before they could keep going.

"Wonderful. You both know expensive words. Somebody give me the simple answer."

"That was ninety words and both of you are describing the third problem."

Raven looked up from her notes.

She’d spent eighteen years around heated storage rooms and warming pans and the great bound lamps in the Blackthorn hall that a servant had to walk round and re-anchor twice a month with a stick of etching chalk and a headache.

Her hand went up before she’d finished deciding to.

"They run out of fuel."

The room’s attention swung to her. Berry stopped walking.

"Correct."

Somebody said something to somebody else. Raven ignored it.

"Every sigil is a mouth. It eats something — ambient, anchored, or yours — and when there’s nothing left to eat, it stops." Berry made another mark. "Three Merit, Rivers."

She turned back to the wall.

"The rest of you spent the better part of a minute on lattice theory because not one of you has ever had to keep one alive. Do try to remember that the people who maintain your houses know things."

Raven watched a number appear next to her name on her slate.

Three points. Her first three, from an actual classroom, for knowing something because she’d carried it.

She sat back and bit a smile from forming on her face while being aware of Tessa grinning at her sideways.

"Harder. No Merit for guessing, so spare me." Berry turned. "Why are stable Need-born Sigils politically dangerous?"

The room’s temperature changed.

"They can’t be reproduced," a girl said. "You can’t teach one. You can’t buy one."

"You can’t predict who gets one," a boy added. "Houses can’t plan around them."

Someone near the back said, without putting a hand up: "Because a nobody can wake up with something better than an heir’s."

There was a pause.

Two of the nobles at the front turned round. One of them laughed, one short unpleasant note.

"Yes," Berry said. "That’s the whole of it, and how nice to hear someone say it out loud."

She let the room sit in that for a moment, and did not appear to mind the two nobles glaring at the back row.

"A new, stable Need-born Sigil is worth an extraordinary amount of Academy Points to its bearer and an extraordinary amount of House Points to whoever can claim association. Which means Houses will want to study you, sponsor you, marry you, or own you, and they are rarely fussy about the order."

She said it in exactly the tone she’d used about the lamp. "So. If it ever happens to one of you — you come to me before you write home."

The drawl had gone out of her voice.

"That is not a joke, and I won’t be saying it twice."

Nobody wrote that down. Everyone heard it.

Then, from somewhere in the middle rows, quietly:

"Marchmont."

"That’s different."

"She was sixteen—"

"Miss Marchmont’s case is not today’s lesson," Berry said, without turning round, "and the next person to make it today’s lesson can explain to me why they think they’d survive being her."

Raven’s eyes went to Brielle before she could stop them.

Not because she thought Brielle had a sigil. Because forty people in this room had just reacted to a name, and the only person Raven knew who had history with that name was sitting two seats away.

Brielle’s face had gone completely flat.

Beside her, Thalia had discovered something fascinating about her own notes and was giving it her full attention.

Raven put that with the later, and went back to writing.

The class went on. Merit went out in threes and fives — for anchor geometry, for a demonstration where Berry woke a bound sigil on a plain iron ring and handed it to a boy in the front row who had spent the whole lesson watching her instead of the wall, and held his eyes until he yelped and dropped it, for a question about why inscribed work fails on living tissue that nobody got right.

Nobles who lost points to scholarship students took it badly and quietly. Two boys behind Raven kept up a running commentary of the running total. Someone’s friend whispered an answer across an aisle and got caught and lost two.

By the middle of the lesson Raven understood something about this place that nobody had bothered to say out loud.

Valerius wasn’t a school with rankings attached. It was a competition, permanently, in every room, and the lessons were where they handed out ammunition.

She was thinking about that, and about how far behind she was starting, when the door opened.

Berry stopped mid-sentence.

That alone put the room on notice. She had not stopped for anything in fifty minutes, including a boy being sick in a bin. Students nearest the entrance sat up. A whisper started before anyone had seen who it was.

Rowan stood in the doorway.

He wasn’t dressed for class. A prefect stood a pace behind him with her hands folded, and there was a folded document in Rowan’s hand with a House seal pressed heavy into the wax.

"This is a first-year lesson, Heir Rowan," Berry said.

"I know."

He came in.

The room reorganised itself around him as he crossed it. The three Rowan Wing students on the left straightened almost in unison. Two girls further along turned to watch him with open interest and did not bother hiding it. Down the far side, a pair of Dante’s Wing students glanced at each other instead of at him. Half a dozen slates went under desks.

And every Nikolai Wing student in the room looked at Raven.

Rowan set the document on the instructor’s desk.

The seal woke under his fingers, a thin line of light running around the wax and stopping.

Berry looked down at it. Whatever she read there took the ease out of her entirely.

"House Redress," Rowan said.

Then he raised his head and looked across the room, past forty students, directly at Raven.

Raven met his eyes.

And all around her, one row at a time, the entire class turned to look at her too.

Fuck this academy sideways.