Page 17 of Zenith Court

“The Hall first. Basin checks at breakfast, curfew at dusk. Quill has third-years copying old records for something he calls attestation review.”

“Why students?” I asked.

“Because they’re quick, and they’re afraid to refuse,” Juno said. “Officially, the Tower matter is contained. Unofficially, first-years recite the transfer order like a skipping rhyme. They all know your name.”

She glanced toward the road before continuing. “There are six sister schools. Aldric’s people hold posts in four. Greywater signed the Council’s attestation two weeks late and sent an unsigned copy first. They want proof they hesitated. Fenholt’s headmistress read the decree to her students, then read Article Seven. That isn’t hesitation. She’s teaching resistance.”

“And the others?” Rev asked.

“Cardenhal would report its own ovens,” Juno said. “I can’t read Marbeck or the two coast schools yet, and I won’t make a plan out of a guess.”

She lowered her voice. “The Conclave has emptied every school of its governors. They’re all riding where you’re riding. The Court has also requisitioned records from all six schools—attestations, Mark registries, anything older than the Council. Whatever this oldest debt is, they’re assembling a file about you from every school in the country.”

The lantern hissed on its nail while I considered that. Beneath my sleeve, the three lines stayed warm and steady.

“You said I get one question,” I said. “Who gets hurt first?”

“The ones who arrived as you did. One bag, no name worth protecting. The east kitchen keeps a list, and it gets longer every week.”

“If we fail?”

“I start moving them out.”

Once the wagon was empty, we carried our blankets into the widow’s hayloft and arranged watches until morning. Juno took the first beside me at the gap between the boards, her shoulder against mine. I had more questions—about Quill, about my mother, about everything Juno had understood before the Tower took me—but I had used the one she gave me on the students still inside.

We stayed there after the lantern went out, listening to the wagons on the quarry road, until Rev came to relieve us.

At first light, Rev woke us with a hand and no voice. Quill had arrived a day earlier than Juno expected. We lay along the loft gap watching the quarry road below, where a Council party had stopped the morning wagons: eight riders, a records clerk with a lap desk, and Quill beside the first wagon. Juno lay beside me; her wagon was still in the yard.

Quill had lost weight. It showed first at his collar, his clothes hanging from him as he searched the wagon himself—lifting sacks, pinching seams, checking work he no longer trusted to a clerk. Whatever the Tower had cost him, he had answered with more counting and more inspection.

I could have called to him across the fields. I stayed silent. He checked a second wagon, neither of them ours, mounted stiffly, and rode north with his party.

“He was a good headmaster once,” Juno said. “Then obedience mattered more to him than students.”

Once the last rider vanished beyond the hedges, I looked past the quarry road. The Hall stood in black stone on its hill, the clock tower against a gray sky and smoke rising from the east kitchen. The first time I saw it, I had approached from below with one bag. Now I watched from a widow’s hayloft while the Council hunted me by name.

My feet remembered the stair count to the east tower. My palms remembered the chalk grain of the salle rail, my tongue the tin taste of the fountain by the west door. My body still knew the place.

Six windows shone on the east face. I counted them before I stopped myself. The Hall had schooled me, starved me politely, and sold me to a tower. My breath still ran easier facing it than it had on any road since.

Jonah stood at the other gap with his hands still. “I could walk the salle blind,” he said. “I used to think that meant I belonged.”

“It looks smaller from here,” Kieran said behind us.

“It isn’t,” I said.

“I know.”

When the road had remained empty for an hour, Juno sent her wagon back to the Hall without her. She would return after dark through a culvert beneath the quarry road, taking Rev and Cosima with her. The culvert was older than the Council’s maps, dug by Remnant hands and never entered on a survey. It drained into the underground beneath the school: the network’s quietest door.

We spent the rest of the day hidden in the loft. Near dusk, Rev split the widow’s bread five ways and stood over us until we pocketed it.

“Don’t insult anyone’s cooking between here and the Court. Half my grandmother’s people are on that road, and they’ll feed you better than you deserve.”

Then she pulled me into a hard, two-armed hug.

Cosima placed the watch ledger in Delphine’s hands and squared it to her palm. “Five names, none of them mine. It travels with the names. Bring it back holding the same count.” She buttoned her coat to her throat. “The key stays in my head. If Aldric’s book ever comes north without him, I’ll still know how to read it. That’s my part.”