Chapter 69 — Let Somebody Else Have It

Chapter 69: Chapter 69 — Let Somebody Else Have It

~ Raven ~

Raven spotted her roommates near the notice board.

They had already seen her.

Thalia was practically on her toes, both hands hooked around the strap of her bag as though physically restraining herself from charging over. Tessa had twisted around on the low wall to stare, and Brielle’s attention had shifted fully from whatever they’d been discussing.

None of them came closer.

Raven understood why a second later.

Nikolai was still beside her.

Nikolai followed Raven’s gaze and spotted the three of them.

His mouth curved.

"Ah." Nikolai looked between Raven and the three girls waiting by the notice board. "I’ll leave you to that."

"Coward."

"Strategist."

He headed toward the west colonnade, and students shifted out of his path almost without seeming to notice they were doing it.

Thalia was on Raven before he had made it ten paces.

"What happened? You disappeared, they dragged you to the Headmaster’s office, nobody’s seen you since second bell, and now you’re coming out of some back corridor with Nikolai—"

"Thalia."

"Everyone saw you, by the way. Everyone. There were slates up before you even reached us. Did Rowan do something? Did the Headmaster take your Seat? Somebody said they heard shouting from the office—"

"Thalia."

She finally stopped. "What?"

Raven sighed tiredly and looked at her.

"I’m fucking hungry."

Thalia’s mouth stayed open for a second.

"I haven’t eaten since a piece of meat I stole off a stranger’s plate before I climbed onto a table," Raven said. "That was four hours ago."

"I saved you something." Tessa was already swinging her bag around. "From lunch. It’s a bit crushed."

"Not here."

"It’s honestly barely—"

"Not here." Raven kept her eyes on the middle distance, where roughly forty students were pretending very hard not to look at her. "Room."

Brielle stood, hitched her bag onto her shoulder and started walking without a word, and the three of them followed her.

The academy did not go quiet all at once.

It happened around her.

A conversation ahead of Raven cut off in the middle of a sentence as two students noticed her coming. Both turned to watch her pass, and the moment she was behind them, their voices started again at half the volume. The same thing happened with the next group, then another. Near the stairs, somebody clipped a tray against the edge of a table because they were too busy looking at her.

Linkslates began appearing.

Not openly, of course. Half a dozen students held them around chest height, angled with the sort of casualness that fooled absolutely nobody.

Raven kept her chin level and concentrated on the fact that somewhere upstairs there was a bed with her name on it.

Three minutes.

That was all it had taken. She had walked beside Nikolai for three fucking minutes and Valerius had apparently found something new to discuss.

Near the fountain, a group of students wearing Rowan-crested collars shifted apart, and Raven saw Celeste standing among them.

The Pup Mark still glowed red against her forehead. She had stopped trying to hide it beneath her hair sometime that morning and now wore it in plain sight, which somehow made the humiliation look worse.

Celeste was not pretending not to stare either.

Her jaw was tight as her gaze moved from Raven to the west colonnade where Nikolai had disappeared, then back again. Something was turning behind her eyes, and Raven had known Celeste long enough to dislike the look of it.

She kept walking.

Ten paces later, beneath the archway, Isolde Marchmont stood with two Luna Court girls, a Linkslate hanging loosely at her side.

Unlike everyone else, she made no attempt to disguise her interest.

She watched Raven cross the entire courtyard, calm and unreadable. Her gaze flicked once toward the west colonnade, following Nikolai’s path, before settling on Raven again.

Raven did not stop for her either.

Two staircases.

One corridor.

One door.

Brielle got them through the last of the crowd with the efficiency of someone clearing furniture from a hallway, and a minute later Raven was finally inside their room with the door shut behind them.

She dropped onto the edge of her bed and covered her face with both hands.

"Right," Thalia said immediately. "Now."

"Food."

Tessa handed it over. A bread roll, split and pressed flat under a day of textbooks, cold roast pork inside it and something green that had leaked through one side of the crust.

Raven ate half of it in four bites and made a sound that was not entirely dignified.

"What happened in the Headmaster’s office?" Thalia had already dropped onto the floor in front of her. "Was Rowan there? Did they take the Seat? What did Nikolai—"

"I want you to teach me how this school works."

Thalia blinked. "What?"

"All of it." Raven pointed the remaining half of the roll at her. "Merit. Court Standing. Challenges."

She swallowed. "What a Redress actually is, since I found that one out with four hundred witnesses. What punishments exist. What a House can do to a student who hasn’t got one. What I’m allowed to refuse. What I’m not allowed to refuse. What gets people thrown out of here."

"That’s—"

"Two days," Raven said. "Every rule in this academy has been explained to me at the exact moment somebody was using it on me. I’d like to try it the other way round."

Brielle, on her own bed with her boots still on, said, "Reasonable."

"Thank you."

"It’s also about nine hours of talking."

"I’ve got nowhere to be. I’m about to lose my Seat."

Tessa turned around. "You’re what?"

"The Headmaster still has to rule on the refusal." Raven took another bite and spoke through it, because she had earned that. "Rowan filed the Redress properly. I refused it in public. She said the consequence gets reviewed in writing when she has the report. So there’s a Merit deduction coming, and it’ll be a big one, because I did it in front of a cafeteria and told the Court to take every line off every board with my name on it."

"And?"

"And if it’s big enough I drop out of Twentieth." Raven smiled for the first time since the library. "I lose the Seat."

Nobody said anything.

Thalia looked at Tessa. Tessa looked at Brielle. Brielle looked at Raven with the expression of a woman confirming a diagnosis.

"You’re pleased," Thalia said.

"I’m delighted."

"Raven—"

"Delighted."

"People spend three years trying to get onto that board." Thalia was up on her knees now. "Three. My cousin sat forty-first for two terms and cried about it. You walked in on a Tuesday and took Twentieth off a Blackthorn."

"I’m aware. Everyone keeps telling me."

"Do you know what a Seat gets you? Training slots. Instructor time. You can enter challenges instead of waiting to be dragged into them. People stop being able to just do things to you—"

"That is demonstrably untrue," Raven said. "I have had a Seat since two days and this academy has done nothing but things to me."

"It’s the only ladder here that doesn’t ask what your family’s called," Brielle said.

Raven stopped chewing.

Brielle hadn’t raised her voice or looked up from her boots. She said it the way she said everything, like a fact she had checked.

"Everything else in Valerius is decided before you arrive," she said. "House, Lattice, sponsorship, who your father knows. The Court is the one place where they have to put the number next to what you actually did."

A shrug. "That’s why people bleed for it. And it’s why Celeste has spent the day looking like that."

"Right." Raven finished the roll. "And do you know what my number has bought me so far?"

She counted it on the hand not holding the crust.

"Celeste Blackthorn. A Cardinal House filing formal proceedings against me on day two. Being marched across the academy in front of forty students. Being forced to kneel in front of the whole goddamned school."

She lowered the hand. "Somebody else can have it. Genuinely. I’ll help them carry it."

"That’s not how—"

Thalia screamed.

Raven inhaled a piece of crust and spent the next several seconds coughing.

"What," she managed, "is wrong with you—"

Thalia didn’t answer.

She was staring at her Linkslate.

Then she lifted her head, very slowly, and looked at Raven, and whatever was on her face put Raven’s stomach straight through the floor.

"No," Raven said.

Thalia said nothing.

"No. No. No. No. Fuck no."

Raven crossed the room in two steps and took the slate out of her hands.

CARDINAL COURT

16 — RAVEN RIVERS

Raven stopped breathing.

"Sixteen."

"Raven—"

"I was twentieth this morning." She turned the slate over, as though the back might contain an apology. "I have spent this entire day actively trying to destroy my own standing. I told a Cardinal heir to go fuck himself. I refused a formal petition in public. I offered them the Seat, Thalia. Out loud. In front of everyone."

"I know."

"So how the fuck have I gone up four places?"