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He stole a grape off my plate, popped it in his mouth and chewed while he considered me. “You’d miss me.”

“I would recover.”

“Eventually, perhaps. With support. Possibly a small ceremony.”

Across the table Pippa made a strangled noise into her tea and set the cup down before she could drown in it. She had the kind of face that couldn’t decide whether it was allowed to laugh, which meant she laughed at almost everything and apologized for half of it.

I’d been surprised when she began sitting with me and Kit. I’d expected being associated with a social pariah to be the last thing the prefect wanted, but she seemed to be on the social outskirts herself, so it, apparently, didn’t bother her.

The fourth spot was occupied by Linden Fenwick. Occupied may have been the wrong word for what Linden did to a seat. Kit occupied space; he filled it up and dared it to complain. Pippa fluttered in space, like a moth both drawn to a flame while being aware that getting too close would kill it.

Linden was unlike either of them. He arranged himself so precisely that the space around him seemed to forget to notice he was there at all.

He had started appearing two days earlier, with no announcement and no request. One morning he was simply at the far end of the table with a book and a cup of tea, behaving as if he had always been there, which, because he was Linden, nearly convinced the whole room he had.

Kit had greeted him by lobbing a grape at his head. Linden caught it without looking up, set it down neatly beside his tea, and turned a page. That had been the entire explanation offered to me, and I had been at Æscholt long enough to know none was coming.

Part of me wanted to ask why he had joined us, but having his quiet confidence there seemed to balance out Kit’s exuberance and Pippa’s anxiety, so I decided not to question it.

Now he sat with his back to the wall and his face angled so both dining hall doors stayed inside his sightline. His book lay open. I had watched him from the corner of my eye for two days and I had never once seen him turn a page while something loud was happening in the room.

He watched exits too, though not like I did. I watched exits because I needed to know where to run when the room turned on me, which in my experience rooms eventually did. Linden watched exits like he had already chosen the spot he’d stand if something came through one of them. Not fleeing. Meeting. I found that I liked that.

“You’re doing it again,” Kit said.

“Doing what?”

“Thinking loudly.” He propped his chin on his fist and winked at me, and there was smoke on him this morning, faint under the bread and beeswax, the way there always was, like his blood ran warmer than the rest of us. “I can hear it from here. It’s very distracting.”

“You’re always distracted, I don’t see how me thinking is any different.”

“You wound me.”

“Superficially.”

“Still counts.”

Pippa sighed and stirred her tea into a small hopeless whirlpool. “Can you two go one meal without doing this?”

“No,” Kit and I said, at exactly the same time, and he lit up like I’d handed him something.

I looked away first, and not for the first time either. In fact, it was becoming a pattern, which I didn’t like. Breakfast continued for a while before we all started to disperse. Kit had been the first one to go, seemingly eager to get to the training sessions that were scheduled for that morning.

After breakfast I meant to go to the stacks, because the stacks did not require me to have a demonstrated Order, but Kit intercepted me under the south arch, before I even got close to the library. He had already changed into training clothes, a sleeveless black shirt that looked a touch too small for his frame and long pants that weren’t quite joggers but weren’t trousers either. His expression was one of a man who had planned my next hour without the courtesy of asking. Something I decidedly didn’t appreciate.

“You’re coming to the yards,” he said without preamble.

“No.” I’d already decided to skip training. I couldn’t work out how I was supposed to train a magical power I only theoretically had, and I refused to stand in a ring and prove to two hundred strangers that I had nothing to show them. But the thing that hit me as he stared me down, arms crossed over his chest, was that he’d known. He’d read the skip on me before I’d even reached the door.

“Compelling,” he said. “Counterpoint, yes.”

“I have homework.”

“You have avoidance. Different thing entirely.”

“What do you actually want, Wyndham?” I countered.

“To educate you.” He spread both hands like a man offering a gift I’d be a fool to refuse. “Sallow lectures like power was invented by a committee. All words and principles. If you want to know what the Orders actually do, you have to watch them in a ring, where they sweat and miss and put each other on the ground.”