4

The classroom floods with the raucous chorus of textbooks thudding onto tables, the rustle of backpacks and the low murmurs of dying chatter.

The legs of my chair screech horridly as I kick it back and throw my bag onto the table at the back of the room.

As I wrestle out my own textbook, Master Welham bowls into the classroom.

I spare him a passing glance before I drop into my seat with a hmph , then toss my abused backpack onto the wooden floorboards, so freshly polished that I can almost make out Master Welham’s bulbous reflection on them.

He’s a short, round thing, with a villainous moustache that almost seems comical. Looks like he should be running corruption on Wall Street, not here teaching us Brews and Theory. Maybe he was doing just that before he came to teach at Bluestone.

A hundred or so years ago, he would have fit right in on Wall Street. His corduroy jacket pinches at the middle of his bulbous belly, the buttons looking about ready to ping off and take someone’s eyes out, and he wears a bowling hat to cover his balding head. Looks exactly how I would imagine a corrupt witch hiding amongst the krums of the finance world would have looked a century ago.

Master Welham turns to face us, his cheeks and nose all ghastly shades of red, and he rolls on the balls of his feet.

I instantly tune out the moment he starts running over the curriculum this year. It’s the same every year. Brews, salves, ointments, blah, blah, blah.

I hate Brews and Theory.

My father insisted I take the class, since there’s so few I can study without power. And when father insists, he commands . His word is final. No negotiation, no discussion—he says, and thus it becomes.

So, I do what I do best.

Hide.

I’m tucked away in the shadowy corner of the classroom, right at the back, with a double table all to myself.

James and Courtney have taken a table at the front, and though I’m sometimes tempted to join them, it’s best to keep as much distance between me and Dray as I can.

He’s some desks down from me, and beside him, Landon Barlow picks at his neat fingernails with the tip of a sharpened pencil. His sleek black hair is combed back, but looks like it was done in a hurry, so some strands have fallen into the deep mahogany hues of his face. His tie is pulled loose, his sweater discarded on the floor with his satchel, as though those two items don’t cost more than a car. His dazzling white grin is aimed at the desk in front of his, right at Mildred who just throws him a withering look over her shoulder.

He kicks out for the back of her chair.

And that does it. She flings a pencil at him. Knocks him right off the head.

Landon just laughs.

He and Mildred have been good friends since our first year at the academy.

They are on the same snow-rugby team, which ties in their weekends together, especially when they aren’t spending their time in teams, they go off to the slopes instead, hit the perma-snow enchanted to stack there.

But Landon is…

Well, he’s not terrible. A Snake, sure, and his friendships are questionable. But I suspect he hasn’t got much malice in him. He’s more the type to go along with it, laugh, make fun, join in here and there. But I don’t think I have seen him instigate, not with me or anyone.

We are both in Star Theory together. No other Snakes but Serena in that lesson. And he hasn’t spared me a moment’s glance in those classes.

He’s only a threat if the other Snakes are around.

Mainly Dray and my brother.

Well, shit.

My face shutters.

Glinting diamonds for eyes, Dray is turned in his chair—and looking right at me.

The heat burns my face, and I look down at my textbook.

Still, I catch his movements out the corner of my eye.

Slowly, he drags his books into one arm, then slips out of his chair.

I fix my wide eyes on the blurred pages of my book.

My heart drops like lead to my stomach.

Dray advances on me.

I glance up as he kicks away the empty chair, then drops into it.

He tosses his books onto the table.

I blink at him, stupefied.

With a worried glance over at the master, I don’t see any objections and movement is rippling through the class.

I turn my now-furious stare on Dray.

“What are you doing?” I hiss at him.

Dray spares a dull look on me. “He told us to partner up,” he drawls, disinterested.

Neatly, he arranges his books and pencils beside me, making a sort of divider down the middle of the table, like my things have germs he won’t contaminate himself with.

I scoff. “Partner up with your friends, then. Go back to Landon.”

Dray doesn’t look at me. He sinks into his chair, and even that slumped posture looks elegant on him. He stares ahead at the front of the class, his tone undisturbed, “Boy, girl.”

I frown at him for a heartbeat, then turn my gaze around the classroom.

He’s right.

The layout has changed.

James and Courtney still sit together at the mahogany desk closest to Master Welham, and behind them, Oliver and Serena are huddled together, paying no attention to anything but the paper my brother scribbles on.

Mildred has moved to sit beside Landon.

And that leaves me for Dray.

Because no matter how much he loathes me and what I am, I am still of elite blood, I am a Craven, and an aristo.

Dray would pick me as a partner over a half-breed or a made one any day. The guy is as breedist as they come.

Master Welham shouts my focus back to him. His purple hands rest on his belly. “You may begin!”

Startled, I clench my fist around a pencil and study the rest of the class. Heads dip all around me, and everyone starts to copy the notes from the chalkboard.

I copy the headline.

‘DRAUGHT OF THE UNDEAD’

A lethal poison, one that someone like me could never master, even if I had magic in me.

Everyone has a talent, their print. We can study other skills, practice them even, but by nature we each excel at just one particular magic.

Mother excels at numerus—to manipulate anything with numbers, which might sound basic, but when you have witnessed appointment times change at salons, or flight departures altered under her whispers, it’s undeniably convenient.

Father’s print is a little older than that. Rarer.

Alchemy.

It’s a talent my brother has inherited.

I have seen Father, with just one ritual, transform puddle water into a single gold bar. He did it for my eleventh birthday, a little parlour trick to impress me, and it did.

I still have that gold bar, tucked away in the white trunk with the flowers poorly painted all over it, a little craft project from the days I had a governess who tried to keep me entertained.

Alchemy and numerus, it explains our never-changing aristos status. Hard to fall out of wealth with those prints on hand.

If I got to pick one, it wouldn’t be numerus. Wouldn’t be alchemy, either, no matter how important it might be.

I don’t quite know what I would pick.

Maybe Serena’s print.

She has perfected illusion. She can manipulate just about anything, from sight to sound to smell.

I could stand in front of her and not recognize her at all if she’s manipulated the fineness of her nose, or deflated her lips, or lightened her hair. And it’s not just her appearance she can change. I once saw her transfigure Landon into a first-year boy. Lasted just fifteen minutes, but the grand parlour was buzzing about it.

Asta can do it, too. Illusion. It’s just not as good as Serena’s. I think Asta is still stuck on sound. That’s as much as she can do.

Landon is brewer at heart. A basic print, common, and one he inherited from his father. Shame, because his mother’s print is on the more advantageous side. Prediction.

But Dray’s print—that might be the cause of his effortless arrogance, embedded into his soul—is rarest.

Dray is arrogantly good at most things, but the print he inherited from his father is a rarity.

We call it makut .

It means ‘ without tool ’.

It is to hex without hexbags, curse without chants, conjure without ritual. A scarce talent, one I have been victim to many times, when he’s conjured a tin of cold beans above my head and had them spill all over me, or he’s enchanted rugs to pull out from under my feet in the corridors, or had my tongue sticking to the roof of my mouth for two days straight.

I only personally know one other who can do makut—Harold Sinclair himself. But I hear that the headmaster of the academy hidden deep in the thick rainforests South Americas can do it.

But this .

This is one of the reasons the elites take the bloodlines so seriously. Preserve the purity of ancient blood, preserve the sanctity of rare power.

Join two rare prints together in a marriage, the better the chances of strong and powerful offspring to carry on the magic.

Yanked out of my thoughts, I watch a piece of pink-tinted paper appear on my notebook.

Slowly, it transpires from thin air.

I watch as inked cursive starts to unribbon over the parchment.

‘A deadblood walks into an orphanage…’

My face twists with a scowl.

I know the answer is unkind before the words rearrange and scatter, some disappear, and I’m left staring down at it.

‘…where she belongs.’

My head jerks up and I glare at Dray.

He’s writing in his notebook, and I don’t see any sign of pinkish paper near him.

My slitted stare does a turn around the class.

And then I find him.

He’s looking at me already, leaning back in his seat, his arm draped over the back of Serena’s, and a devilish grin smeared over his lips.

It’s a grin Father would smack off his face if he knew what Oliver had sent me.

I would tell on him. If I had the evidence.

But the paper is gone when I glance back down at my notebook. All that’s left in its place is pink dust, and I can only guess he bought a few enchanted items to taunt me with before school started.

I flip off my brother and add a nasty sneer.

Beside him, Serena’s laugh is faint and practiced. It doesn’t reach her eyes. She turns her back on me.

I loosen a breath and put pencil to paper.

If the beginning minutes of the first class is anything to go by, this year will be a rough one. And that was my brother. Gods know what it’ll be like when Dray finally has the bother to turn on me.

But he is quietly working beside me, not so much as throwing a glance my way.

I know Dray.

I grew up with him.

I was his closest friend, the one he smiled for, the one who made him laugh, who stole his kisses—and then I became familiar with his darkness over the years.

I became the victim of his darkness.

I am not soothed by his silence, I am not eased by his apparent disinterest in me.

It will change.

The longer he appears to ignore me, the worse his attacks will. And I have that horrid, cold-dread coil in my gut, the one that tenses me on my seat and prickles my mind with the suspicion—that Dray is gearing up for my worst year yet.