Page 85 of Zenith Court

For years I had worn it inside my coat, metal against lining, where no reader could see what it meant. The bent pin had snagged hems and once scratched me beneath the collar. I had hidden it so long that exposing it felt stranger than carrying it through the Court.

I fastened it to the outside of my coat, over my heart.

Jonah came up behind me and placed his hand between my shoulder blades. The pressure was familiar, broad and steady. I leaned back until his chest touched my shoulder.

“Come in,” Caspian called from the table. “Rev sent bread. It’s better than ours.”

“Unfair comparison,” Kieran said. “Rev knows what she’s doing.”

Jonah’s breath warmed my ear. His hand covered mine over the wren.

I looked once across the valley, then went inside. The door stayed propped wide between the cool evening and the warm kitchen.

The doors stayed open.

Epilogue

SABINE

The gold circlet pressed into the tender places behind Sabine Dacre’s ears.

Her mother had ordered it measured and remeasured. The goldsmith had blamed Sabine’s hair, then the heat, then an apprentice who had not touched the piece. Sabine had worn it through the entire rehearsal without complaint. In a few moments, Rector Vey would fasten the meridian star at its center and the circlet would belong to her rather than the academy.

First Laurel of Meridian. Heir to the Dacre chair. The youngest woman in three generations to finish first in readings, protocol, and the governance examinations.

The Sun Hall had been opened for her investiture. Noon burned white through the glass roof and caught in the gilt lines set into the floor. Eighty students stood according to rank along those lines. Faculty occupied the shaded arcade. The old families sat above them beneath their embroidered standards, close enough for Sabine to distinguish her mother’s pleased expression from the less useful expressions around it.

Lucan Rook waited on Sabine’s right in the blue formal coat he would wear when their bond agreement was witnessed in autumn. His cuff touched hers whenever either of them breathed too deeply. They had practiced the distance until it appeared effortless.

Marek stood one step behind her left shoulder. The small Dacre star at his collar marked him as hers to command until his twenty-fifth year. He had entered her household at twelve, outgrown uniform after uniform, and learned to anticipate an order before Sabine finished drawing breath for it.

Ivo Dane stood in the third row with no family standard above him. His examination score had fallen two points below Sabine’s after lineage weighting. He had appealed once, received the expected answer, and now watched the velvet cushion instead of her.

Rector Vey lifted the meridian star from its velvet cushion.

The side door opened.

The porter who entered wore road dust to his knees. He stopped inside the hall, saw the assembled families, and came forward anyway. A folded notice rested on his bare palm.

Rector Vey did not lower the star. “This hall is closed.”

“It was marked immediate.” The porter’s voice carried farther than he seemed to expect. “For every academy holding authority under Council charter.”

A murmur began in the student ranks. Sabine kept her face toward the rector. The circlet dug harder behind her ears, but touching it would be worse than letting it draw blood.

Her mother rose in the gallery. “Whatever the Court requires can wait until my daughter is invested.”

The porter looked up at her. “There is no Court requirement, Lady Dacre.”

Nobody moved.

Rector Vey set the star back on its cushion and took the notice. The paper bore no Council crest, only four signatures crossing a plain blue seal and Meridian’s registrar’s countermark at the lower edge. She read the first lines in silence. Her thumb shifted once along the edge.

“Read it,” Ivo said.

A faculty member hissed his name. Ivo stayed where he was.

Rector Vey looked at the old families, then at the students arranged beneath them. “The Council of the Star-Marked Court has been dissolved.”