Chapter 32 — I Choose

Chapter 32: Chapter 32 — I Choose

Whose House, then?

The question landed and took Raven’s smile with it.

She’d demanded the choice at the top of her voice with power rolling off her skin, and she had not spent one second deciding what the choice would be.

The hall waited on her now the way it had waited on the heirs all afternoon — hundreds of held breaths, wagers frozen mid-hand — and somewhere in that silence a slip of paper changed owners anyway, because someone was already taking odds on her answer.

Her eyes went to the platform, and she worked fast.

Dante — no. The blaze in his eyes hadn’t dimmed since she’d cursed at him, and he’d thrown a claim on her without so much as a glance in her direction first. She could already see the shape of every day in his wing: him pushing, her planted, an audience gathering. She’d done enough assessment courts for one lifetime.

Cassian’s pale gaze was waiting when hers reached it, and she moved off it almost at once. He wasn’t looking at a student. He was looking at a knot he intended to take apart strand by strand, and she had too many strands she needed left alone.

Rowan took even less time. She remembered the avenue, the pressure of his aura across the paving stones, the cold coming off him now that his interest had woken — and wanted none of what living inside that interest would cost.

Her gaze reached Nikolai.

He hadn’t demanded she repeat herself. He hadn’t laughed, hadn’t flinched, hadn’t filled the silence with a single word.

He simply watched her from his chair, still and attentive, waiting — the only one of the four leaving the next move where she’d said it belonged.

She didn’t trust the pleasantness. She’d watched warmth leave that smile once today without disturbing a feature, and she’d filed what that meant. But her room was in his wing. Thalia was in his wing, currently hiding behind a second-year, and Tessa, and even Brielle, who was at least a problem whose edges she’d already mapped.

A known wing full of half-known people, or three strangers with burning eyes.

Raven lifted her chin, turned square toward Nikolai, and bent her head — small, brief, the least bow that still counted as one.

"I choose Lord Nikolai’s House."

The murmuring broke out at once, running along the tiers in both directions.

Nikolai’s smile came back. It arrived the way it always did, easy and effortless, but his eyes never joined it. They stayed on her, sharp and green and far more awake than they’d been all morning.

"Accepted."

Raven braced for Dante’s temper.

It didn’t come. His grin returned instead, and it came back with a finer edge on it than it had carried before, as though her walking away had answered one question about her and opened ten better ones. He dropped back into his chair, sprawled comfortable again, and kept watching her.

"The— yes." The evaluator gathered herself, straightened her slate, and called the ceremony back into order with the voice of a woman deciding to pretend the last five minutes had gone normally. "Final confirmation. Token."

Raven’s token went back into the sigils.

This time, the array didn’t hesitate.

Light ran the full ring, gathered over Raven’s token and bit into the blank metal. Nikolai’s crest formed line by line, burning white before cooling into a dark, permanent mark.

Raven ran her thumb across the new grooves.

For eighteen years, there had been nothing beneath it. One look at the bare face had always told people what she lacked.

Now her token looked like everyone else’s.

She turned it over once, then back again, just to see the mark return.

The evaluator read the result off her slate. Raven’s unsettled points flashed once and locked, and high on the wall the public Wing board rearranged itself, numbers spilling upward along one column until Nikolai’s Wing climbed past where it had sat all term.

His block of the tiers detonated. Students who had watched Raven in silence two minutes ago were on their feet cheering her name and their own wing’s total in the same breath, and across the aisle the other wings watched the full weight of a broken record land in someone else’s column and turned to each other with faces like debt.

Raven let out a breath she’d been holding since the white light died.

Done. Chosen, confirmed, counted—

The token flashed again.

The evaluator looked down at it. Her brows pulled together. She checked her slate, checked the token, and looked up at the side wall — and along that wall, a second board woke.

Raven hadn’t noticed it among the crests and banners: taller than the Wing board, older-looking, its dark surface climbing with script. Names and numbers shifted across it faster than she could follow, whole lines trading places, and then the movement stopped, and the lowest line on the board burned itself in fresh.

CARDINAL COURT

TWENTIETH SEAT — RAVEN RIVERS

Somewhere in the tiers, a girl gasped loud enough to echo.

Then the sound came from everywhere at once. Female students were rising all along the hall — not shouting this time, just standing, staring at the board, confirming it letter by letter with their own eyes.

The name that had held the Twentieth Seat was already gone; the board had swallowed it without ceremony, without even displaying who had been displaced. Whispers tore along the rows, and the looks that found Raven now were sharper than anything Dante and Nikolai’s argument had pulled out of the crowd.

That had been resentment.

This was envy with its skin off.

Raven took her token from the evaluator and gathered the rest of her things from beside the array.

The metal was still blinking in her hand as she climbed the tiers, Nikolai’s crest shining across its face. Students shifted their legs out of her path without being asked, their eyes following her all the way up.

Thalia remained beside the broad second-year, staring at Raven with the expression of a woman watching someone walk away from a fire they had started.

Raven reached their row, lowered herself into the empty place beside her and tucked her things beneath the bench.

Above the array, her name still burned beneath a title she had never heard in the Blackthorn house, at the academy, or during any of Celeste’s endless talk about the four Houses.

She had chosen her wing. Her points were permanent. That much she understood.

Raven leaned toward Thalia who was still staring at her with a strange look and kept her voice low.

"What the hell is the Cardinal Court?"