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I went completely still.

She held my gaze for several seconds, and I could find nothing in her expression that told me what she was thinking. Then her attention moved on, and I realized I had been holding my breath.

“Sit wherever you like tonight,” Oda said. “Eat what you like. Tomorrow, you will know where you belong.”

She stepped down from the dais, and conversation rushed back into the room. The newcomers broke apart and headed toward the tables.

Tamsin caught my sleeve and pulled me toward the far end of the Saltmere table, where we could sit partly in the shadow of another pillar. The students there were friendly, damp-handed, and quick to pass us a basket of bread that was still warm from the oven.

There was stew, roast potatoes, and a pie that Tamsin attacked with enough enthusiasm to suggest she hadn’t eaten in days.

I managed a little food, but my stomach was too tight for much more.

I started looking around the hall because I couldn’t seem to stop myself.

The Solace table was the loudest. Everyone there seemed to be talking over everyone else, laughing with their whole bodies and showing an unreasonable number of perfect teeth. One laugh rose above the others, coming from a dark-haired boy who had his boots propped on the bench. There was a slight delay before the sound came out, just long enough to make me wonder whether he had actually found the joke funny.

Bramblegate was almost the opposite. Their table was quieter, and several of the students sitting there were enormous.

At the very back of the hall, away from the tables, a man sat by himself on a bench against the wall. He was huge, broad through the shoulders, with close-cropped dark hair and a hard, weathered face. He ate with his back against the stone and kept his eyes on the doors.

Nobody sat anywhere near him.

When another burst of laughter came from the Solace table, his shoulders tightened. He placed his fork carefully on the table, rested one hand flat against the wood, and opened his fingers one at a time.

He was counting.

High above the doors was a narrow gallery I hadn’t noticed when we came in. A man stood there in a dark, high-collared coat, writing steadily in a small leather book. He continued through dinner without once looking down at the hall, and for some reason that unsettled me more than it would have if he had been openly watching us.

When I turned toward the Fenhall table beneath the gray wolf, I saw the most beautiful girl I had ever seen.

Her hair was nearly white and fell straight to her waist. She had a long neck, a composed face, and skin so clear that I resented her for it almost immediately. She was laughing at something someone had said, and nearly everyone around her seemed more interested in watching her reaction than in whatever conversation had prompted it.

A Saltmere student farther down the bench noticed where I was looking.

“Delphine Marrow,” she said. “Swan. She’s technically Skyreach, but she spends more time at Fenhall. Her father sits on the Council, and she’s been promised to the Fenhall heir since they were children.”

I turned toward her. “Promised as in engaged?”

“Promised as in their fathers decided it before either of them was old enough to have much to say about it.”

Before I could ask anything else, the doors at the far end of the hall opened, and the change in the room was immediate. Conversations faltered. Chairs shifted. Nearly everyone turned toward the entrance at once.

The man who walked in was tall and lean, dressed in a black jacket cut close across his shoulders. His dark hair was swept back from a sharply defined face, and there was something severe about the set of his mouth and the way he carried himself. He walked down the center aisle without hurrying or acknowledging anyone, while people stepped aside before he had to ask.

He took the empty seat beside Delphine, and she rested a hand lightly on his arm. That was when I noticed the thin, fresh scratch across the back of his right hand. It looked recent enough to have come from thorns or brambles, and for some reason it seemed strangely out of place on someone so meticulously put together.

“Kaelen Vance,” another Saltmere student murmured. “Fenhall heir. His father runs the Council. He’s at the top of every class, half the island is terrified of him, and that jaw should probably be illegal.”

I looked at the jaw in question, then at his cold gray eyes and the hard line of his mouth. He held himself with a rigid kind of control, as if every movement had already been considered before he made it. My attention lingered on his mouth longer than it should have, and I looked away before I could examine that too closely.

Absolutely not, I told myself. What am I even doing?

A quiet laugh escaped me as I looked down at my stew. As though this were a decision I would ever be asked to make. As though a man like Kaelen Vance would ever notice someone like me in the first place.

Then, as I reached for the water jug, something changed.

A draft came through the open doors carrying the ordinary smells of the hall: woodsmoke, roasted meat, damp wool. Beneath them was another scent, one I couldn’t place immediately. Cedar, perhaps, and wet stone, with something sharp and metallic underneath.