Chapter 27: Nikolai

Chapter 27: Chapter 27: Nikolai

Brielle came out of the washroom, nose cleaned, the swelling settling in faint and blue at the bridge. She looked at Raven’s bare collar and said nothing, so Tessa said it instead, matter-of-fact: "You’re the only one of us wearing neither a crest nor an insignia."

"I arrived yesterday. Haven’t had time to collect decorations."

"They’re not decorations." Brielle picked up her bag. "At Valerius, those markings tell everyone what power stands behind you. Who answers if you’re touched. Yours says no one."

Raven looked down at the two blank spaces on her chest.

"Then people will have to speak to me before deciding what stands behind me."

Thalia turned a smile toward the door. Brielle rolled her eyes and walked out first.

The corridor had become a river. Students poured along it fastening collars as they walked, arguing over a missing boot, a borrowed slate, whose turn the washroom was.

Older students with prefect bands on their sleeves moved against the current, barking at first-years to hurry. Somewhere ahead, someone had lost a training glove and wanted the whole wing to know.

A girl in the next doorway caught sight of Brielle’s face. "What happened to you?"

Brielle tipped her head toward Raven without breaking stride. "Ask the new girl."

The girl’s eyes went round. Two doors later, a whisper caught up with them anyway — that’s her, the white-haired one, the record — and a second voice, delighted and scandalized: "She fought her roommate already?"

Raven kept walking. Explaining herself to a corridor was a losing game; she’d learned that in a different house.

Besides, her attention was elsewhere again — because the corridor wasn’t only crowded with bodies.

She could feel them now. Wolves, dozens of them, each one a small pressure against her senses, brighter and heavier and more finished than the buried thing under her own ribs.

Even her roommates read clearly: Brielle’s wolf pressed hardest, coiled and forward; Tessa’s sat steady as a banked fire; Thalia’s ran light and quick, all motion.

Hers lay underneath every one of them, faint as a coal at the bottom of a mine.

But it was there. She walked with her head up.

The central hall of Nikolai’s Wing opened tall and plain, a working space rather than a grand one. Students packed the lower floor while prefects sorted them into blocks by year, and Thalia steered Raven into the first-year section.

The sorting needed no prefect, really — students from powerful Houses drifted together on their own, crests clustering with crests no, while the unranked and the scholarship students settled along the edges. Nobody told Raven where to stand. The blank on her collar did it for them, and a small space opened around her at the section’s rim.

The senior wing prefect called for quiet and got most of it. She ran the morning list without ceremony: curfew hours, restricted floors, training-hall rotations, dining periods, which infractions cost how many points. Raven listened to every word. Rules were weapons in any house — the people who knew them used them on the people who didn’t.

"First-year classification takes place this afternoon," the prefect announced. "Power Class, preliminary standing, and House recruitment eligibility will be recorded."

The hall buzzed. Brielle’s chin lifted somewhere to Raven’s left; a Tempered reading would put her over most of the year, and she knew it. Raven stayed quiet. The academy had already tried to classify her once, and the token in her pocket said how that had gone.

"Late admissions." The prefect consulted her slate. "Raven Rivers. Confirm presence."

The buzz dropped away. Raven raised her hand into the quiet.

The prefect found her, and half the hall found her at the same time, heads turning in rows. "Recorded. Note for the wing: the Stage One result posted yesterday has awarded provisional admission points to Nikolai’s Wing." She paused for the ripple that caused. "Provisional. The points stand only after official classification is complete."

The looks aimed at Raven shifted. Some students seemed pleased—her points helped the entire wing. Others only stared harder, already searching for a reason those points should not count.

"And if her result gets invalidated?" a noble boy asked, not quite quietly enough.

"Then the points vanish," his neighbor said, "and every other wing spends the year laughing at us for celebrating an impossible record."

The whispers ran off in every direction, some hopeful, some sour, most simply hungry for whatever happened next.

The prefect raised a hand. "Settle—"

She didn’t finish.

The doors opened.

No one announced him. The students nearest the entrance simply fell silent and moved aside. The reaction spread through the hall from there—voices dropping, shoulders straightening, uniforms quickly adjusted—until the entire room had gone quiet without anyone being told to.

A young man walked in.

Raven’s first thought, absurdly, was that he was beautiful — fine-featured and graceful, pale hair arranged with a care that should have looked vain and somehow didn’t.

He carried no visible weapon and released no aura she could feel. Green eyes moved over the gathered students, calm and unhurried, and the room organized itself around his attention like iron filings finding north.

He gave the prefect a small, apologetic smile for interrupting and murmured something that softened the stern set of her mouth.

Then he stopped beside the senior block.

He greeted a few students by name, exchanged a word with another, and asked a tall boy whether his shoulder had healed properly after training. The boy straightened at once, looking absurdly pleased that Nikolai had remembered.

Raven understood the silence now.

He had enough power to make an entire hall move out of his way, yet he was using the moment to ask someone about an old injury. The students were not quiet because they feared him. They were waiting for him to notice them too.

He turned with a smile and Raven finally recognized him with a shock.

The green eyes.

The headmaster’s office.

The beautiful young man lounging in her chair as though it belonged to him, congratulating Raven on breaking the record before strolling out.

Nikolai’s Wing.

They had only repeated the name around her a dozen times since last night.

Raven stared at him as the obvious finally caught up with her.

Oh.

Damn.

The prefect inclined her head toward him before gesturing across the hall—toward the first-year section, toward Raven and her blank collar.

"Lord Nikolai, you arrived just in time to meet our newest resident."

His green eyes followed her gesture and settled on Raven.