Chapter 77 — Morning, Rivers

Chapter 77: Chapter 77 — Morning, Rivers

~ Raven ~

"No," said the instructor. "Sit down and try that again."

The boy sat down and tried it again. "Metamorphosis is... when you go up a Class."

"It is not."

"But when you go up a Class—"

"When you go up a Class, a room full of assessors writes a different word on your file."

The instructor tapped the board without turning round. "Metamorphosis is what happens to your body and your wolf as they develop. It happens whether anybody is watching or not. It happened to half of you last spring and none of you noticed until your boots stopped fitting."

Somebody laughed.

"Power Class is Valerius putting a number on how much you can currently hold and control. That is all it is. It is a measurement." He turned around. "You do not train Power Class. You train, and your Class is what somebody else calls the result."

The seven Power Classes had been on the board since the start of the lesson, written in a neat line across the slate.

NASCENT — AWAKENED — TEMPERED — ASCENDANT — DOMINANT — EXALTED — SOVEREIGN

Raven knew them now. Nikolai had rattled off the same seven in a corridor eight days ago, back when half the words used at Valerius still sounded like things everyone else had been taught as children and somehow forgotten to mention to her.

"And before somebody asks me again, no, it does not decide fights. A Tempered with four years of drill will take an Ascendant who has never been hit. Class buys you capacity and it buys you aura. It does not buy you a plan."

He moved on to essence-load, and Raven glanced down at her notes.

Six lines in forty minutes.

That was new.

Eight days ago she had filled pages because half the language used at Valerius might as well have been another tongue. She had copied everything, then gone back to her room and made Tessa or Brielle explain what any of it actually meant.

Now she could simply listen.

It had taken eight days and an unreasonable amount of patience from three roommates who had apparently decided dragging Raven through eighteen years of missing education was a shared responsibility.

Points had been first, mostly because everyone at Valerius used the word as though there were only one kind.

There were not.

Merit was what Raven actually earned. Tests, classes, records, sanctioned fights, whatever else Valerius decided counted as achievement. It followed her, affected where she ranked and what she qualified for.

Available Points were the part she could spend.

Training access. Equipment. Private instruction. Academy sigils.

The first time Brielle explained that spending them did not reduce the Merit she had already earned, Raven had stared at her.

"So I can use them?"

"Yes."

"And they don’t take the achievement away?"

"No."

Raven had narrowed her eyes.

Brielle had eventually said, "Why are you looking at me like I designed it?"

Because Raven had spent most of her life in a House where receiving something usually meant somebody would eventually remind her what it had cost them.

Valerius, apparently, had managed to invent one system that did not punish people for using what they earned.

House Points were different again. Those belonged to the Wings collectively, which meant Raven could apparently damage Nikolai’s standing without ever personally possessing a single one.

She had found that information considerably less comforting.

Rankings were easier once somebody explained that Valerius had decided one ladder would be far too merciful.

Personal Ranking was mostly performance. Do well, climb. Do badly, fall.

Cardinal Court Standing was where the academy became itself again.

Merit mattered, but so did achievements, reputation, challenges, discipline and House influence. Which meant being Tenth Seat did not make Raven the tenth-strongest woman in Valerius.

It only meant enough different parts of Valerius had somehow combined to put her there.

Raven still wasn’t sure that was better.

Sigil Theory had become less offensive too. Natural, Need-born, Inscribed and Bound no longer sounded like four words Instructor Berry had invented specifically to expose Raven’s ignorance.

She could recognize the categories now, and House Lattices had turned out to be exactly what Raven expected from anything containing the word House: another advantage old bloodlines had been hoarding long before the rest of them arrived at the starting line.

That one had required very little explanation.

The Headmaster’s Redress ruling arrived on the third day.

There was no summons. No dramatic meeting. Raven was halfway through a bread roll when she found the notice posted outside the east hall with her name attached to a Merit deduction large enough to make her stop chewing.

She read it twice.

Then she remembered the Court.

For the first time since half the academy had apparently decided Raven Rivers belonged among its most important women, hope rose in her chest.

She crossed to the Court board.

Found her name.

10 — RAVEN RIVERS

Raven stared at it.

"That’s not—" She pointed at the board. "That is not possible."

"You lost the Merit," Tessa said.

"I lost a year of Merit. I lost more Merit than I have ever had. Look at it. That number should have taken my Seat and half my hair with it."

"Check your Personal Ranking."

Raven checked her Personal Ranking.

It had fallen eleven places.

She looked from one board to the other and back again, and the whole system finally arranged itself in her head in a way that no amount of Brielle’s patient explaining had managed.

"So the honest one punished me," she said, "and the political one didn’t notice."

"That’s about right."

"This academy has found a way to fine me and promote me on the same afternoon."

"You could try being worse at things," Tessa said.

"I have been trying. I have been trying extremely hard."

The other change was harder to put a name to.

The staring had stopped. Not entirely — there were still slates, and there were still girls who went quiet when she sat down — but the frenzy had worn off it, and what settled underneath was something Raven had no framework for whatsoever.

People said good morning to her.

"Morning, Rivers."

"Morning," Raven said.

She got two steps down the corridor.

"Who was that?"

Thalia glanced back. "No idea."

It kept happening. Seats got saved for her in lecture halls by people she had never spoken to. A boy from the scholarship intake held a door and then looked as though he wanted to apologise for it. In the dining hall an Omega girl she half recognised slid a bowl across to her without a word, and by the time Raven had worked out what to say about it the girl was gone.

On the fourth day a third-year stopped her outside the drill court and asked, entirely seriously, what her position was on the Wing registration proposal.

Raven looked at him.

"My what?"

"Your position. On the proposal."

"I don’t have a position on the proposal."

"But you’re Tenth."

"I know what I am," Raven said. "I found out on a slate, in my room, while shouting."

Apparently Tenth Seat also came with unpaid consultancy. Nobody had mentioned that either.

Celeste she saw most days and never up close. Always at the far end of something — a hall, a courtyard, a staircase — always with Rowan-crested collars around her, always watching, and never once coming any nearer.

Isolde she saw more often than that, and it was never obviously deliberate, and it never felt entirely accidental either.

The Bellringer’s poll refused to die.

Twice that week Raven passed students arguing about it, and both times the conversation died the moment they noticed her. She found that somehow more irritating than if they had simply kept talking.

On the sixth day she caught the end of one on the staircase.

"Dante, obviously. He nearly fought two people over her—"

Raven kept walking.

"Cassian," someone else argued.

She walked faster.

"Nikolai."

Faster still.

Then, from somewhere behind her, "Rowan."

Raven stopped.

Slowly, she turned and looked back at the staircase.

Half a dozen students stared at her.

"Really?"

Nobody answered.

Raven shook her head and continued upstairs.

Unfortunately, stupid polls were not the only things following her through Valerius.

Two problems had settled beneath the relative peace of the past week and refused to leave.

The first was the dream.

Or rather, the lack of one.

Eight nights had passed without the white place. No thunder. No blurred face. No cold presence forcing its way through her memories. She woke each morning in her own bed without blood beneath her nose or that horrible pressure behind her eyes.

She should have been relieved.

She wasn’t.

The man had not chosen to leave her alone. Raven had thrown him out.

There was a difference.

She still remembered the rage in his voice when he realized he could no longer force his way deeper, and she remembered the mistake he had made before disappearing.

This academy.

He was here.

Which was why Raven had spent the last eight days watching Rowan whenever she got the chance.

Not obsessively. She had classes, assignments and apparently an education to acquire. But if Rowan crossed a courtyard or appeared at the end of a corridor, Raven paid attention.

She watched for anything unusual. A reaction when he saw her. An interest he should not have. Some sign that the man who had torn through her memories was checking to see what damage he had left behind.

On the fifth day she spotted him across one of the courtyards, speaking with two students from his Wing.

He had not noticed her.

Raven took advantage of it.

She studied him from where she stood: his posture, his hands, the set of his shoulders, anything that might betray him.

Rowan happened to turn his head.

His eyes found hers immediately.

Raven did not look away.

Neither did he.

His expression darkened.

Suspicious.

The second time happened outside Wolf Physiology.

Raven had already been watching him for several seconds before he noticed. The moment he did, his jaw tightened hard enough for her to see it from the other side of the corridor.

Extremely suspicious.

Raven knew perfectly well that a man becoming irritated because she kept staring at him was not evidence of dream invasion.

Unfortunately, it was currently more evidence than she had for anyone else.

Someone had entered her mind, gone digging through memories of her and left her sitting on the edge of her bed with blood smeared across her wrist.

Eight quiet nights did not convince Raven that he had stopped.

It only made her wonder what he was doing instead.

So she kept watching Rowan.

The second problem was Alaric.

That one made even less sense.

It started on the fourth day during a practical session.

Raven had spent nearly forty minutes trying to hold a controlled essence pulse steady and had managed, at best, a breath and a half before it collapsed every single time. By the end of the lesson sweat had dampened the back of her uniform and she was one failed attempt away from deciding essence control was a personal insult.

She straightened after another collapse and glanced toward the gallery above the training court.

A handful of Vanguard students stood there between sessions.

Alaric was among them.

Raven almost looked away.

Then she realized he was watching her.

Not the class.

Her.

Their eyes met across the court.

Alaric did not flinch or pretend he had been looking somewhere else. He held her gaze for another second, calm as ever, then turned back to the student beside him and continued whatever conversation they had been having.

Raven remained where she was, hands still raised from the exercise.

That was what bothered her.

Kieran glared.

Kieran had been glaring at her for most of her life, and since arriving at Valerius he had continued the habit with reassuring consistency.

Alaric was different.

For eighteen years, Alaric Blackthorn had possessed the remarkable ability to look directly toward Raven and somehow see whatever piece of furniture happened to be behind her.

He did not watch her.

Not without a reason.

And now, apparently, he had one and she was not sure she wanted to find out.