11

The morning starts too early with a knock at the door.

I should have drawn my bed curtains like the others did. The noise would be silenced by the enchantments, muffled at least, and my sleep wouldn’t be disturbed.

But it is, and I stir enough to scowl at the door.

It rattles again, firmer this time.

A huff grates out of me.

I flip onto my side and aim my puffy scowl at the clock on my nightstand. A few strokes past nine.

Too early.

Too early for a Saturday, at least.

The breath that huffs out of me swells my cheeks. I kick off the blankets, then fumble out of bed. Tights protect my feet from the cold floorboards, and I only now realise that I slept in my uniform. It’s all wrinkled and the skirt is askew, and I have a sudden deep urge to shower.

Instead, I drag myself to the door, then whip it open.

I blink ahead at the empty corridor, then look down at the girl standing there.

A small, red thing. Even for a first year, she’s suspiciously small. Thirteen my ass, this child is seven by my guess.

She has her big green eyes aimed at up me. “Are you Oliver Craven’s sister?”

I rub my fist against my eye. “Yeah.”

“He told me to come tell you that your father is on the phone,” she says, unsurely, unevenly, and I think of a red mouse. “Booth seventeen.”

Then, just like that, she turns on her heels and runs off with a scurry, scuffing and squeaking steps.

I draw away from the door, leaving it ajar. I’m quick to unclasp my skirt, then rip off my shirt.

I pull on a too-large cord sweater before I rush out of the dorms for the booths. The quick attack of the frosty air as soon as I’m out of the Living Quarter is a gust of whistling wind spearing through the corridors. With only tights and a sweater to battle the cold, I’m falling into thoughts of a hot, steamy shower or, better yet, a scalding bath.

But call first.

I slip into booth seventeen, all the way at the end of the line of twenty-one booths, and I draw the curtains.

I slump on the bench and lift the receiver from the phonebook. It’s cool against my ear. “Father?”

“Olivia, I hope I didn’t you wake you.”

Father’s way of telling me I took too long getting to the phone.

Rolling my eyes, I snatch the gum from the edge of the phonebooth, left behind by my brother or someone else in the booth before me. I rifle through the thin foil stuffed inside, then tug out the only strip of gum left.

I stuff the gum into my mouth.

The inky taste is horrid, enough to twist my mouth, but the bubble you get after chewing for an hour is the glittering night sky. It’s worth it.

I smack the gum on my tongue. “I wasn’t asleep,” I lie. “I was working on an essay.”

“Which class?”

Trying to catch me in a lie.

I’m better prepared than he expects.

“Geometry.”

“Of?”

“The Ley Lines.”

“Oh.” I can almost hear Father’s signature small, proud smile. It’s fleeting. Always is. He’s back to business, quick. “I am calling to inform you that your contract has been reopened for the season.”

The season is the New Year. The debutante balls and ceremonies will roar through the final month of the year. Then, after school’s last semester, we enter wedding season—midway through the year—and contracts close for those months. It’s tacky to get engaged during wedding season. Steals the spotlight, and all that nonsense. And the following two months after wedding season is a whole load of pregnancy announcements. A lot of us, the aristos, are born in the same months. February, March, April—you do the math.

So contracts close for months each year to protect the dignity of wedding season and all the consequent pregnancy announcements.

For now, mine is open. Again.

I flatten my tights-covered feet on the wooden wall opposite me. “That’s good.”

“Your tone suggests otherwise,” Father drawls.

My knees are too close to my face, and I can see the little blonde hairs that dodged my razor and poke through the material of the tights.

“I don’t mind,” I say with a shrug. “Just… It doesn’t matter, does it? Open or closed, no one’s making any offers on me.”

He has a pause before he says, “I suspect many of gentry will.”

I smack my gum. “Now who’s the one who doesn’t sound thrilled?”

“I have higher ambitions for my only daughter,” Father says, softer. “And it appears that might come to be.”

The speckled black gum is pinched between my bite.

I pause, then frown at my knees. “What?”

“No offer has been made of yet,” he says, as if to slow down my excitement… but there is no excitement.

I’m just stunned.

There’s nothing happy about my surprise.

Someone higher than gentry has talked to Father about my contract? That would be aristos. An aristos bachelor.

Father confirms it. “A suitor has approached,” he tells me, “and inquired after your contract. No more than that,” he adds. “Yet I am… confident.”

I spit out the gum. It lands on the phonebook.

My feet smack down on the booth’s floor.

I lean forward, as if to better speak into the receiver. “What if I don’t like him? What if he’s ugly? Or cruel? What if I don’t want to?”

The look of outrage is slack on my face.

I’ve never actually been in this position before.

My contract is never optioned. It’s never inquired after. No negotiations, and thus no suitor that my father has picked out for me.

Someone who might be fat and balding and old and—oh gods, someone like Master Welham. He’s gentry, so I know it isn’t him, but still, could be a lookalike.

The deadblood married to Mr Monopoly.

My brain is fuzz.

It vibrates with the shredding of my memories, like I tear through them in search of the face of every male aristo I have ever met in my life, and then the names and fleeting mentions of the ones I haven’t met.

Father’s sigh is soft. Patient. “I deem him suitable, Olivia,” he says. “In all the ways that matter.”

Wealth, breeding, blood, power, all the ways that matter…

I scoff.

Father’s tut is unkind. “Do not chide me, girl.” After a pause, in which I’m just scowling at the phonebook, he adds, softer, “I expected you to be pleased about this news. I thought it happy.”

“Yeah, I love being told I’m going to be sold off to the highest bidder, and I don’t even know who that is. Just cattle at a market with diamonds and silk—”

“Enough,” he snaps, harsh.

I flinch in the booth.

My gaze drops, instantly, as though Father has jumped through the phone to scold me in person.

Still, that niggle, that snark, it curls my upper lip and hisses my voice, “Don’t I at least get a say in who?”

It’s his turn to scoff, but his is a breath of air, a breeze, not the crass choked sound I make.

“And who would you choose?”

My mouth puckers on silence.

I have no suitors in mind. Not for marriage.

Well… I sort of, might, maybe, have a potential one.

Why else am I bothering with Eric Harling?

He’s actually quite fine a prospect. No wealth, of course. But he is charming, handsome, kind.

I could see him as a good husband.

But would he want me?

Eric has never made an offer on my contract. I don’t need to hear that from Father to know it. My contract is not available to the gentry, not until this moment, now that my contract is open for the final season.

And with that season coming up at the New Year, and no betrothal to my name, I’ll be in with the last picks. The scraps. Among the ones like Mildred and Melody, gentries .

I don’t know of a single aristos debutante who isn’t spoken for, whose contracts haven’t been tied to a suitor.

Just me.

We all know why.

So my options are gentry—and I wonder, maybe that is why Eric Harling is flirting this year. Why he is warmer with me than he has ever been in all the years at the academy.

Is he flirting—or courting?

He knows my father will be open to offers outside of the aristos this year. Whether or not my father will truly consider anything he thinks beneath me or the family, that all depends on how desperate he is to marry me off and get me out of the house, and if this mysterious aristos suitor drops out of the picture.

My mind is spiralling, out of control.

I ground myself and focus on one thing at a time.

Eric.

A safety net.

“What if I like someone?” I ask, quiet. “What if there is someone who—you might think beneath me but—is kind?”

Silence is my answer.

For a long moment, the receiver just crackles, the interference of condensed magic graining the connection.

“Crushes pass.” That’s the answer he gives. Firm. Unyielding. Then, he adds, “If you wish, this favourite of yours is free to extend an offer. I will consider it with a clear mind and a fair heart.”

The last part stings.

With a clear mind and a fair heart.

He doesn’t trust me to make the right decision for myself, because I am clouded. Illogical. Emotional.

Father at least has the decency to release me from the call. He doesn’t stick around for small talk or even bring up my grades, which I am sure he knows are mediocre, all except Brews and Theory, and that’s all thanks to Dray.

But I would never thank Dray, not with sincerity.

Father lets me go.

I head straight to the mess hall to fill up on breakfast. And by the time I’m done, abandoning my tray on the table, it’s almost 10AM, and so most of the students should be up and about now, maybe down at the village, but I don’t expect that is where I will find Courtney, not with so many assignments due this Monday. A lot.

I head to the study hall.

I find her tucked at the end of the long, narrow table. Only the one table can fit into the window-walled room that I suspect was once an arch or a bridge of sorts before it was converted.

I pass Landon and Dray down the length of the table. The latter doesn’t even lift his gaze to me.

If what Serena said is true, and he has sicked up from breaking the dare, there is no reason for him to stick to the promise. He could makut me now, and nothing ill will come to him.

Yet he doesn’t even look at me.

I suspect Serena’s a liar.

I step into the bench tucked to the table, then drop down with a grunt.

Courtney glances up from her inked papers, scraps and scrunched up pieces littered all over, and some empty mugs of coffee she’s been refilling from the machine in the corner.

I hate that machine. It’s too old. Always brews coffee that tastes like burnt dirt and a smidge of sludge.

Courtney turns her gaze back down to her assignment. The textbook sprawled out beside her gives away the topic. ‘CHARMS, SPELLS, ENCHANTMENTS AND CURSES: THE PRACTICE OF ARTIFICERY’

“What’s up?” she murmurs.

I can’t tell her.

I sought her out, the closest thing to a friend I have in my life, not just at Bluestone. And still, I know if I tell her anything about my contracts or suiters or arranged marriages, she’ll do what she always does.

Scoff, roll her eyes, mutter and mumble about how we all have a choice, no one can force a marriage, and that I should move out of home.

The ones like Courtney, the made ones, the half-breeds, they just don’t understand.

The world of the aristos, the elites—that world is the core of the Videralli. It’s the beating heart of all society, of economy, of war.

Do my feelings matter within the game of alliances and connections, in the grand scheme of the whole fucking world ?

No.

No single witch really matters.

It’s the unity of us all, and then the core—the beating heart.

I’m just another casualty.

We all are.

Courtney’s not yet figured out she doesn’t have a choice. She’s silenced. She’s controlled. And that fist will tighten around her and her whole life when we leave Bluestone.

If she wriggles too much…

Vanished.

Gone.

No more Courtney.

She understands that. It’s the price to pay for entry into our world. Graduate and service.

But when it comes to the aristos…

She’ll never get it.

Suppose that’s why our friendship never quite solidifies, never quite goes beyond convenience.

We both know we spend our time together because we share a dorm room. And we have no one else. Except James but he hardly counts.

I get the sense that I won’t see Courtney after graduation.

Our circles are miles apart with the gentry in between.

And I doubt she would really want to see me then, as though to make the time for me would be a nuisance.

Moments like this bloom an ache in me, a longing for a real friendship, one with someone like me. Not a deadblood, though that would be nice. But someone like Serena back in my fold, someone I can talk to about the mystery suitor, who can advise me on my next best move, about how it feels to be auctioned and negotiated.

Someone who gets it.

“What?” Courtney is frowning at me. “Did you interrupt me to just daydream?”

I smile something forced. “Want to do something tonight?”

She glides her ink-stained hand over the papers. “I am.”

“Something fun,” I sigh. “We could get some wine from the village, hang out in the dorm? Oh, or go to the tower—”

“I have assignments. You do, too.”

With that, she’s putting pen to paper again.

Bold to use pen. I stick to pencil, I make so many mistakes.

“Ok.” I slump. “Well, see you later.”

I push from the bench, then leave her to her studies.

Dray doesn’t look as I pass.

I go to the library and pull out all the ancestral trees of the aristos. If I’m going to waste my Saturday—and I will—it will be on this. Learning all the possible suitors it could be.

I look for names I know to be unattached to any debutantes, I look for names of older aristos men who have been widowed, or the rare ones who never married at all.

It’s a dull Saturday and utterly useless. I give up in the afternoon to find my dinner in the mess hall, alone.

And when I go back to the dorm, I spend so long flicking through catalogues and books and brochures and magazines that my eyes are burning by the time I kick them off the bed.

I flop down on the pillow.

I outwitted myself. Because before any of that familiar anxiety creeps into my guy, that I will be married off to a wicked man, and my future is in the hands of others, I pass out.

I dream of monopoly men.