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He clearly didn’t want to be standing anywhere near me when I opened it, and I couldn’t blame him for that. In his place I’d have done the same thing and probably faster.

I didn’t open it there. Obviously.

The worst thing a person could do here was put on a show at a table in the dining hall, so I finished my toast at the speed I’d have finished it on any other morning, and I said something to Pippa about the draft in the hall that neither of us listened to and may have made absolutely no sense.

When I was done, I carried the folder out under my arm as though it weighed nothing at all. Then I went up the back stairs to the landing where the window never shut properly and nobody ever seemed to go. I perched on the cold window sill and opened the folder on my own, where the only person who got to watch my face was the crow outside.

It was two pages, which seemed like a waste of a folder to me. Vivienne Mallory’s triad had apparently been formalized after the scrimmage the night before. To celebrate it seemed as though they had submitted, for the consideration of the faculty, a complaint concerning the conduct of a provisional student. At the bottom was the sentence that stuck out like a sore thumb.

The provisional student’s mimicry constitutes harm and interference in the development of others.

I read it three times, and somewhere in the third my stomach turned and the toast suddenly seemed like a bad idea. I’d finally got hold of what had changed. What I did in the gallery had been an indecency. It had been a mess and an embarrassment and something only a first-gen girl would do. The worst of it then had been the way that the corridors went quiet when I passed by.

This was not that.

Somebody had swapped one word out for another, and the new word was ‘harm.’ Not strange, not obscene, not the vulgar taxonomic mess that it had been before.

Harm, a thing I did to other people, a theft of their growth siphoned off through whatever I was. And harm, unlike indecency, came with a procedure attached to it. Somewhere in this building a form existed, and a file that had my name at the top of it, and now because of the words used I had a feeling that form was going to get added to my file.

The part I kept coming back to, sitting up there with my feet going numb in the draft, was that the sentence never once accused me of doing anything to Vivienne. It said ‘others’. It said ‘development’.

Kit’s fire had been steadier since we figured out that I could channel him, and every person in the year knew it. Linden, who had come up out of two centuries of being furniture, had started planting himself in front of me on a field while the whole school watched him do it. So the complaint didn’t have to prove I’d hurt anybody. It only had to point at two boys getting better and invite the room to wonder where the better had come from.

If I was being honest, and up there on my own I was trying to be, the thing that had my hands cold wasn’t the letter. It was that I couldn’t prove a word of it wrong, because I didn’t know what I could do, hell, I didn’t even know what I didn’t know. I’d been asking since I arrived, and all I had to show for the asking was a hole on a shelf where a book should have been, a tutor that would rather file reports on me than actually help me learn, and my friendship with someone who might know, but couldn’t tell me because of his family and their secrets.

I tucked the letter away and went down stairs. There was another scrimmage that afternoon, because this place never once let a bad morning stand by itself. It went much the same as the day before only this time the other team was ready to target me the second I started stabilizing Kit’s power.

It was a long cold ugly day that none of us had any business being on a field for. Most of it went past me, though I noticed Vivienne not looking at me, which was both a relief and annoying since it took considerably more effort than looking would have. I noticed Gideon, who put a shield up between me and himself twice.

They were leaving me alone and that was reason enough to be thankful since my ribs were still killing me from the freezing blow Honora gave me the day before. Every time I moved I felt it twinge with a fresh wave of cold rushing out of it and over my skin. I wondered if she knew her blow had landed so neatly or if she thought it had just glanced off me the same way Kit had.

During the scrimmage Kit and Linden both stayed by my side, like they had at the end of the day yesterday. It didn’t stop at the scrimmage though, they waited for me to leave the field and walked with me to the washhouse where I was going to clean up a little before going back to my room.

Neither of them had said anything about it. I hadn’t asked them to do it. But having them looking out for me made something in me sit a little easier than it had been.

The washhouse smelled of soap and hot copper by the time we got inside, and we were the last ones in. To my great surprise some of the other students had stopped in to clean off as well. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who didn’t want to track dirt all the way up and into their room just so they could take a proper shower. I would shower, of course, but I could clean up a bit first.

By the time we got in there the rest of the students had already cleared out. It was the old kind of washhouse, stone and low‑beamed, with a row of deep copper tubs and a boiler that somebody had given up on regulating. The steam sat in the rafters like clouds. There were only a couple of lamps for the whole place, which made everything gold and uncertain.

“So you’ve got an official complaint, huh?” Kit said. He was down at the far end, working at a scorch mark on his own jersey with more force than it deserved.

I looked up at him, but he avoided my gaze. I hadn’t even decided on whether or not to bring it up and he was already asking about it so I just nodded.

“I heard from Pippa, who got it off one of the admins after you were served your folder or whatever.” He sounded slightly defensive as though I would accuse him of stalking me or reading over my shoulder or something.

“Interference in the development of others? They’ve had a lawyer at that. Nobody writes about the development of others at our age without help,” Kit grunted as he rubbed at the mark on his jersey even harder.

“She’s a Mallory.” Linden set his own jersey down on the bench without looking up.

Kit turned the jersey over before he gave up on it. “So we go at it properly. My name on a counter‑filing, Lin’s under mine, and let them explain to a faculty board how a Wyndham and a Fenwick have been getting robbed and somehow failed to notice it happening.”

“That’s the part they want.” I kept my eyes on the mud I was washing off my shoes.

“That’s the part I want.”

“Kit.” When I was done with my shoes I started to try and get the jersey off one shoulder and turned so that the bad side stayed away from the lamp. “The second you and Linden sign anything, the argument stops being ‘is she doing something to them’ and turns into ‘how much are those two willing to say to protect her’. And then it isn’t a complaint anymore. It’s two legacy names covering for a provisional girl.”

Kit’s hand went still on the fabric.