Chapter Text
· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·
By the time the coach finally grinds to a halt, Sigourney's right leg has gone pins-and-needles from being braced against the trunk of a crate.
"We've arrived, Highness," the driver calls, flicking the reins. The beast rolls one enormous eye, then huffs and starts worrying at the bridle. The driver climbs down, joints popping, and swings open the carriage door.
"Everaine Academy," he announces, as if the towers behind him aren't already doing that themselves. They loom over the mist-shrouded hills, their pale stone climbing into the cloud, higher still, above the furthest spire. A single banner carries the Academy's colours: deep blue and gold, and the sigil: an open book, a sword crossed over it, and a sprig of laurel. Knowledge, courage, victory. Or, as Posy always says, showing off, stabbing, and bragging afterwards.
"Thank you," Sigourney answers, and swings herself down without taking the hand he offers. The force of the landing runs up through her boots into her knees, satisfying.
The iron gate that marks the entrance into Everaine is twice her height and more ornamental than metal, with gold twisting branches and little carved beasts peering from the leaves. Someone has polished it for the new term; the bars catch the fading light like thin water.
A line of words runs along the crossbar.
LET NO TALE BE TOLD ALONE.
There's another line under it, scratched in by a knife with less ceremony:
AND NO TEST BE PASSED Sober.
Magnolia Hall's work.
A stone figure stands beside the gate on a plinth: a woman in armour, sword point resting between her boots, hair bound back in a soldier's knot. Her face is familiar; seen on the Academy broadsheets. Lady Everaine herself, if the legends are to be believed, though the sculptor has been kind.
As Sigourney draws near, the statue turns its head.
"Princess Sigourney of Montelais," the stone woman rumbles from her plinth.
Sigourney looks up at the carved face. Lady Everaine's features have been worn soft by the weather.
"The carriage was slow," Sigourney says. "You may address complaints to Montelais House of Transport."
Lady Everaine studies her for one long, grinding heartbeat. Sigourney can feel the magic in the gate wake and stretch, a weightless pressure that counts the rings on every button and the mischief in every bone.
"Very well," the statue says at last. With a groan of old hinges, the gate swings inward.
The magic slides over her as she steps through. Cold as riverwater without the wet. It catches on the curse under her skin, on the careful barriers she has learned to stack over it. For a moment, the old heat flares up her arms, eager as a hound on a leash.
The path climbs in broad stone stairs. Sigourney knows them well enough to count without looking.
To her left, the jousting field lies flat and green, lances stacked along the fence, flags hanging limp in the still evening. A centaur instructor stands with arms folded while a cluster of younger students argue. To her right, the Alchemy glasshouses bulge from the hillside, panes catching light in a hundred little squares.
She is surrounded no matter where she turns. There are humans in dark coats with their House crests; witches with beadwork woven through their hair; ogres in tailored jackets, horns polished to dull shine; a pair of pixies darting over the crowd. Trolleys of luggage rattle along stone paths.
The current of students parts ahead of Sigourney without being asked.
Some of it is habit; royalty learns early how to be a moving obstacle. Most of it is the black patch on her shoulder: the rearing stag of Montelais, and the whispers that have travelled ahead of her coach.
Sigourney keeps to the centre of the stairs where no one will brush against her. Her gloves are whole, the wards on her sleeves renewed, the curse quiet for now, but it is easier not to dare fate more than necessary.
At the top of the last flight, Magnolia Hall waits, the stone walls blotched with ivy. The magnolia tree in the courtyard has refused to pick a season; half its branches are heavy with white blossoms, the other half still bare. Its roots have cracked the paving stones in every direction.
Inside Magnolia, the entry hall is a jumble of trunks and shrieking voices. A broom hovers near the ceiling, spinning in uncertain circles while two first-years attempt to coax it down.
Sigourney stays near the wall, where there is stone behind her and a good view of anyone approaching. People notice her and then remember other things they urgently need to do somewhere else.
"Ziggy!"
Posy Fairweather comes skidding across the tiles like an enthusiastic child, skirts flying, hair full of something glittering that might be stars or the aftermath of a failed experiment. She dodges a trolley of hatboxes and a boy carrying a live chicken without losing momentum.
"Don't call me that," Sigourney says, which is what she always says.
Posy only beams. "Why not? 'Princess Sigourney of Montelais' takes three times as long and sounds like it wears uncomfortable shoes."
She barrels to a stop, reaches out automatically to grab Sigourney's forearm, remembers at the last instant, and redirects her hands to her own waist.
"This hall is a mess," Posy announces. "Half the notices are wrong, the prefects are useless, and nobody has brought me a pie. Let's go upstairs before I perish."
"From lack of pie," Sigourney says.
"From boredom," Posy corrects. "Come on, let go, let's see your housing arrangement for this year!"
Sigourney reluctantly follows. She could stand in the corner and glower until the sun sets, but the room list is posted already, and there is no avoiding that.
"Remind me," she says as they climb, "why are you this invested in who sleeps where?"
"Because I am a creature of drama," Posy says promptly. "And because a little birdie told me that you wrote to the Headmistress twice over the summer asking whether the Academy would consider finally giving you a private tower."
"I'm killing myself," Sigourney mutters.
"You're not allowed," Posy says. "I have plans for you this term."
They round the curve of the stairs to reach the notice board. She makes it halfway up before someone calls, "Your Highness!"
An older boy with a badge for one of the other Halls, his dark hair slicked back, approaches her.
"The room assignments—" he starts.
"I know where the board is," she says. "I've only been here six years."
He colours and steps aside. She ignores the guilty flicker; she has no energy left for other people's embarrassment.
The notice board waits on the landing, covered in neat columns. Magnolia Hall has its own section. Posy bounces on her toes. "Yours, yours, yours—where's our little cursed princess..."
Sigourney finds it before Posy does.
For a heartbeat, relief loosens something in her chest. The third floor tends to be single occupancy. Maybe the Headmistress listened. Maybe someone has finally decided that putting the cursed girl in a room with another student is inviting fate to do its worst.
Then her eyes drop to the next line.
Dame Brecht of Grevenwald.
The relief evaporates so fast it leaves her lightheaded.
"No," Sigourney says.
Posy makes a delighted noise. "Magnolia, Third. You lucky creature."
Sigourney stares at the ink as if she can glare it back into the bottle. "Last term, the Headmistress promised—"
"The Headmistress promised to review arrangements," Posy says, in the prim voice she uses when quoting adults. "She has. She has concluded that separating you would merely spread the chaos over two floors instead of one."
"Posy."
Posy tips her head, studying her. The laughter lines at the corners of her eyes go softer.
"It's your last year," she says.
Sigourney shuts her eyes briefly. Behind them, the memories are sharp and unhelpful. Brecht standing in the middle of a ruined training yard, sword hanging loose, mud up to her knees. Brecht shouting at her across a burning corridor. Brecht's hand, once, catching her elbow through three layers of fabric and leather when the curse surged and the floor opened and—
No. She has spent all summer not thinking about that.
"Think of the alternative." Posy leans close, eyes bright. "If you were assigned somewhere else, you'd just spend all year obsessing about her."
Sigourney opens her mouth and finds, to her annoyance, that no ready lie comes out.
Posy straightens, smoothing her skirt. "I need to go move my trunk from the hallway," she says briskly, as if the conversation had not just suggested anything at all. "If I leave it in the hall, some eager first-year will trip over it and sue me for grievous injury."
"I'll go with you—"
"No, you won't. Up you go, Ziggy."
Sigourney scowls. Posy beams back at her, all dimples. There is no winning against Posy Fairweather when she is like this. There never has been.
Sigourney abandons the bulletin with as much dignity as she can manage and continues alone up to the third floor.
The corridor outside her room is mercifully empty. Somebody has chalked a caricature of their duelling tutor along the wall, complete with crossed eyes and an overly dramatic cape. Sigourney pauses long enough to appreciate it. The likeness is unkind and accurate. Posy's work, almost certainly.
She rests her gloved hand on the carved magnolia blossom set into the door. The wood is smooth with age. For her, the touch is never casual; she can feel the wards waking under her palm, recognising her signature and, more importantly, the curse pulsing under her skin.
The lock clicks. She pushes the door open with her shoulder.
The room is as it has always been: two beds under the slope of the roof, two desks, a single narrow window set deep into stone. One bed is bare; the other is already claimed.
Sigourney's trunk sits at the foot of the made bed, precisely where she left it at the end of last term. She never takes all of her things home. Montelais Palace has enough of her already.
She crosses to the window first. The latch sticks, then gives, and the pane swings out. Cool air spills in, stirring the light curtains. Below, the river glints; beyond it, the hills roll away into the distance. Her hand tightens unconsciously on the sill.
There is work to be done before Brecht arrives. It is easier to do things than to think.
She unlaces her trunk. Shirts. Tunics. Two extra pairs of gloves wrapped carefully in linen. A stack of books on curses that her father would disapprove of. She puts everything away with a quick precision that would make the palace maids proud.
The curse stays quiet, a low, contained thrum.
It is not painful anymore, not the way it was in those first months. It is worse than that. It is ordinary, like a second heartbeat. Her hands look almost normal in their gloves until she remembers what the skin beneath them can do. The ward-stitching along the cuffs was the colour of dried pomegranate, the kind of thread you only noticed when the light struck it at a slant. She ran her covered thumb along the seam, counting the tiny knots by feel—one, two, three—because the hands wanted to do something, and she would rather they did that than anything else.
The prophecy curls at the back of her mind, familiar like a bad song.
The princess of ill-starred hands shall unmake the tale.
Unmake whose tale, no one has ever been willing to specify. Theirs. Hers. The whole world's. Prophets are greedy with doom.
She shoves the last book into place and snaps the drawer shut.
On the mantel, the new ward-stone waited in its little cradle of salt. A pale river pebble, smoothed and inscribed with a sigil.
During her first year, they had told her that her roommate would arrive "directly after orientation." They had told her as if it were a kindness, as if the delay were a balm and not an indulgence granted to the other girl—a banner-hero who could be late and still be praised for making an entrance.
She was halfway through sorting through her trunk when the latch moved. She did not look up. She gave the door that courtesy: to open without being watched. There is a beat of silence. Then Sigourney lifted her gaze at last.
Dame Brecht of Grevenwald stood just inside the threshold, as if she expected the door to swing shut and strike her in the back for daring to come in. She was taller than she had any right to be at eighteen—tall in that way that made corridors feel narrower. Her hair was pulled back, the braid damp at the nape from sweat, and her coat was thrown over one shoulder.
She carried too much. She was dragging a trunk that looked like it was designed to survive shipwrecks and wars.
Behind her, Hollis Wren appears in the gap. He is pinned beneath a mountain of gear: satchels, a rolled sleeping mat, a canvas bag with the Grevenwald crest stitched on. He pauses when he sees Sigourney, as if the sight of her is a new kind of hazard.
Sigourney does not move her hands from her lap.
She doesn't need to. Even the motion of sitting up has tugged her gloves taut against her fingers, and for a moment she can feel the old pressure beneath the fabric—heat held back, luck held back, misfortune pressed into a tight, patient coil.
Hollis attempts a smile in the doorway and seems to regret it halfway through.
"Hello, Your—" he begins.
Sigourney lifts her chin. "Don't."
Hollis stops so abruptly that the bags on his shoulders sway.
Brecht does not react. She drags her trunk fully inside and lets it thump against the floorboards with a finality that makes the inkpot on Sigourney's desk shiver. She then unhooks her sword case from her shoulder and lays it across the bed opposite Sigourney's with care that borders on reverence. It is the only gentle movement she has made since arriving.
Hollis clears his throat in the doorway, a sound so apologetic it might as well be a bow. "I can— I can put this— where should I—"
"Out," Sigourney says, and then, because she is not cruel in the ways people want her to be, she adds, "Leave it by the door."
Hollis makes a grateful noise and begins lowering bags.
Brecht lifts her trunk's lid. The hinges squeal. For a moment, neither of them spoke. They had done this before. Last year. The year before that. A ritual of pretending the other was not inevitable. This is their room. Their shared inconvenience.
Brecht broke first, because Brecht always did; she could not stand a silence unless she had made it herself.
"You're in my chair," she said.
Sigourney glanced at the chair. It was, indisputably, a chair. Four legs, a back, a cushion that had seen better days. There was another chair beside it, identical enough to be insulting.
"It has not protested," Sigourney replied. "You've brought half a weapon shop."
Brecht's eyes cut, finally, to her. Grey-green, the colour of river stones when the sun is gone. Her gaze snagged on Sigourney's gloves, as it always did, and then flicked away as if she'd been burned by the sight of them.
"I've brought what I own," Brecht replies, as if the distinction is insulting.
Sigourney lies back against the chair with exaggerated grace, the way she used to when she was a younger girl. "You'll have to stack it somewhere."
Brecht glances around the room—the built-in shelves, the wardrobe divided in two like a treaty line, the thin strip of floor between beds that becomes, every year, a battlefield. Her gaze lands on Sigourney's side.
Sigourney's book sprawl. Her ribboned prophecy notes. The little cluster of charms she keeps pinned above her headboard, not because she believes they help, but because it pleases her parents when she is seen trying.
Sigourney keeps her face still.
"You're encroaching," Brecht says.
"And yet you live," Sigourney responds.
Brecht dropped her pack onto the nearer bed with unnecessary force. The bedframe gave a small, wounded creak.
"Disappointed?"
"I am saving my disappointments," she said. "It is a long year. We are meant to be economical."
Hollis has finished depositing his mountain of bags and is backing toward the door like a man leaving a room where a duel might begin.
"Goodnight," he says, with the strained cheer of someone who knows it is not night and will not be good.
Brecht does not look at him.
Sigourney does not look at him.
Hollis leaves.
The door clicks shut.
Sigourney watched her unpack without seeming to watch. A rolled blanket. A pair of boots, a small satchel of sharpening stones. A book, surprisingly plain, bound in dark cloth, the sort of book that did not want to be recognised in public.
Brecht caught her looking and quickly slapped the book face down on the bed.
Sigourney lifted one brow.
"Reading?" she asked.
Brecht's ears went faintly pink. It was the only thing about her that ever confessed.
"It's... tactics," she said.
"Ah," Sigourney replied simply.
Brecht yanked open her trunk and began shoving items into the drawers with too much aggression.
"They've been busy," Brecht said, glancing at the ward-stone on the mantel. "New toys. They changed the warding," she said. It was not a question.
"They did," Sigourney agreed. She tipped her chin toward the window. The curtains had been replaced, too: thicker cloth, a sober pattern, less sunlight. "We are in our final year. The school is pretending to be careful."
Brecht's gaze followed, and for a moment, her expression did something strange.
"They don't trust us," Brecht said.
Sigourney laughed, one short sound that died before it could become warmth.
"They do not trust me," she said. "They do not need to trust you. They only need you to be where they can point."
Brecht turned back to her trunk as if she had been dismissed. She rummaged and pulled out, almost grudgingly, a small tin.
Sigourney watched the tin land on her bed.
"What is that?" she asked.
"Salve," she said. "For... blisters. From training."
Sigourney's eyes flicked to Brecht's hands. They were bare. There were calluses, yes; there was the faint scrape of a scrape.
"And you thought," Sigourney said carefully, "that I blister."
Brecht's mouth tightened. "I thought you might—" She stopped, and the stop was the point. She would not say hurt.
Sigourney looked at the tin a moment longer than necessary.
"Very thoughtful," she said at last, keeping her voice flat. "What would the ballads do without you?"
Brecht's eyes went sharp again, hope turning quickly into irritation.
"I can take it back," Brecht snapped.
Sigourney lifted her gloved hand, palm outward. A stop sign. A ward, of its own.
"No," she said. "Leave it."
Brecht stared at her. Then, unexpectedly, she let out a short laugh. The laugh died almost immediately, as if it remembered it was not welcome.
"Are you going to the evening rite tomorrow?" she asked.
Sigourney paused.
The rite. The parade, dressed up as tradition. Names read aloud, roles assigned with ceremonial grace, as if fate were a gown you could be laced into and made to fit.
"I suppose," Sigourney said.
· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·
Sigourney is already in bed when Brecht begins her routine, because Sigourney has learned to use the hours she is allowed. She has washed her face, her hair, and arranged her blankets.
She has tried, earlier, to sleep.
She rarely sleeps the first night back. At home, she lies awake listening for the change in her own breathing, waiting for nightmares to rise like tides. She wakes with her pulse racing and her hands clenched inside gloves that feel suddenly too thin.
At Everaine, there is Brecht, making herself impossible to ignore.
It starts with the boots.
Brecht takes them off like she's unstrapping armour, each buckle undone with purposeful clicks. She sets them on the floor with care.
Sigourney lies still, eyes open to the dimness, watching the ceiling's faint patterns shift as the lamp on Brecht's side flares brighter.
She waits. Counts to ten. Counts to twenty. She could say something. She could demand, as a princess, that the light be extinguished.
Instead, she says, very quietly, "Do you plan on staying awake all night?"
Brecht does not turn around. "I'm cleaning my sword."
"That is," Sigourney says, "an activity you can do in the morning."
Brecht opens her sword case. There is a sound of leather unfastening, of metal shifting. The blade slides out with the soft, hungry sigh of something relieved to be awake.
She hates the way her mind tracks the blade's movement even without seeing it. She hears Brecht lay it down carefully on whatever cloth she has spread across her bed.
Then the whetstone begins.
Shk. Shk. Shk.
Sigourney closes her eyes.
Brecht's breathing is even. Controlled. The routine goes on: polish tin opened, cloth rasping against metal, buckles adjusted, a belt set out for morning, a shirt folded and unfolded and folded again. The routine of it is comforting.
In the home, nights are treacherous because they are empty. There is too much space for fear to invent itself. Too much room for memory to wander. Too much silence in which to hear her own pulse and think of all the things she has been told she is capable of.
Here, Brecht's noise pins the night down.
Sigourney's thoughts slow. Not because she chooses to let them. Sigourney does not enjoy letting go of control, but because there is a rhythm in the room that insists on being followed.
Shk. Shk. Shk.
Fold. Fold.
Buckle.
A chair scrapes softly as Brecht shifts her weight.
Sigourney's eyelids grow heavy, to her own annoyance.
Then Brecht speaks.
"Are you still awake?"
Sigourney keeps her eyes closed. "No."
A pause. Brecht's footsteps cross the narrow strip of floor between them; careful, not wanting to tread on Sigourney's territory even while invading it, and then the light on Brecht's side clicks off.
Darkness spills across the room.
Brecht's bed creaks as she sits, then lies down. The mattress gives a quiet groan.
For a moment, nothing moves.
"Your wards are holding well," Brecht said at last, too casually.
Sigourney stilled.
Sigourney looked down at her gloved hands. The fabric was clean. The stitches were neat. Her fingers were still. She could almost believe she was a normal girl with normal skin and normal blood and nothing strange humming in her bones.
Almost.
"Yes," she lied.
Another pause.
Brecht turns on her side. Sigourney hears it in the shift of sheets, the change in breathing.
"Good," Brecht said.
Silence returns.
Sigourney's mind searches for the edge of fear out of habit and finds none scare her enough to cut tonight.
Sigourney's anger lingers, unspent.
But beneath it, something else takes root. The strange, unwanted certainty that in this room, for tonight, nothing will reach her without crossing Brecht first.
Her eyes close.
In the dark, Brecht's breathing deepens into sleep, and Sigourney's follows, finally, like a reluctant truce.