CHAPTER SEVEN

Fallon

She didn’t say a word to me throughout homeroom. It was as though she was making every attempt to blot my very existence from her mind. Why?

When the A-level English class started, she stuck her hand out for the pages that had arrived on the desk, just as I did the same. When our hands brushed, I thought for a moment that a flint of fire from my fingertips had caught her knuckles and that I had burned her—there was a spark of a very different sort traveling the length of my arm—because she nursed her hand to the deep V of her blouse like I had hurt her. Yet there was no expression of pain in her face—not the physical kind, anyway. Instead, her lips parted in an O, her eyes widening.

She turned away quickly, and I thought she breathed, “Idiot.”

I recoiled in shock but didn’t say anything. I just couldn’t reconcile the image of the emerging woman with that of the twelve-year-old girl who, even then, had managed to stun the court with her looks and stage-managed character.

Where is the granddaughter of the old duchess, who would never even speak against a superior, let alone press a sword to their throat?

“In pairs, I want you to analyze the soliloquy I have assigned to your table. Off you go,” Mr. Sylaeia said.

I turned my attention away from her and to the sheet.

“To be, or not to be, that is the question . . .”

I groaned as I read through Hamlet’s dramatic contemplation of the pros and cons of suicide, before my gaze returned to her. Her gaze flicked toward me.

“What?” she snapped. “Why do you keep looking at me?”

Fates above, is it illegal to look at her now?!

I thought fast and scanned the page. “Disease imagery.” My pen hovered above the paper. “There.”

“I don’t need help,” she insisted, despite her blank-looking page.

My eyebrows lowered a fraction. “He said analyze in pairs.”

She bowed her head and hid behind a curtain of hair and began scribbling across the page.

So she’s not going to share, then? Fine.

I adopted the same tactic.

She said very little once we had finished with the soliloquies, only answering questions when she was called on. As the bell sounded, she repeated her ritual of slowly, even sluggishly, packing her bag, as though very tired—or in the hope I would leave before her. But I did not leave (I did not fancy throwing myself to the hordes), hovering beside the door as Mr. Sylaeia called her over to his desk. She dragged her feet, hand clutched so tightly around the strap of her bag that her knuckles whitened. She seemed to know what was coming.

“Precocious. Presumptuous. Insulting.” He handed her back what looked like an essay. Her head drooped. “Not to mention the fact it was far below your usual standard.” He glanced toward me, still hanging out beside the door of the classroom that was now empty except for us. I pretended to become very interested in an explanation of adverbs on the wall. “Autumn,I’m disappointed. I’m the one person in this school that can truly understand your predicament—do you really think it is any different among the staff?—yet you repay me with such rudeness.” I raised my eyebrows to the wall, wondering what on earth that essay contained to affect him to such a degree.

“Sorry, sir,” I heard her mumble.

“You will be sorry after a detention on Thursday evening.”

She inhaled sharply and I thought it safe enough to turn back. “No, sir, please! I have work that evening, and that’s following a twilight textiles lesson anyway.” Her face was aghast and panicky, her eyes wide and shaped like almonds. I was aghast for a different reason. She has a job?!

“Then your detention will take place after textiles, and you will have to miss work.”

“Please, sir, any other evening, lunchtime even. Please, they are already threatening to sack me!”

“Because of poor attendance?”

Her head drooped again.

“As I thought. I wonder, Fallon, would you mind staying behind on Thursday, too? There’s a lot of summer work for you to catch up on, and Autumn will very quickly get you up to speed.”

I didn’t answer immediately. She wanted to protest, that much was clear, but her manners prevented her mouth from ruining the perfect straight line her lips created. I felt a tiny pang of resentment—what have I done?—but nodded. “Sure.”

That resentment increased a notch when the room went silent as they conversed with their minds, leaving me out. Yet it shattered when I caught a glimpse of her lips quivering as she turned away, her hand rushing to her face.

“Fallon, would you mind stepping out of the room for a moment, please?”

I didn’t want to. But then I remembered the pained expression she had worn when holding the sword to my neck. I did as I was told.

Outside the door, which slammed on its self-closing hinge, I tried to demystify what had happened that morning. Yet the deeper I dug, the less it seemed to make sense. We had been friends as children! We played kiss chase and staged play weddings and bossed each other about. Now it seemed like she hated me.

A few minutes later, the door opened and a blond blur passed without pausing. She had already shot past before I had prised myself away from the wall I was leaning on. I hurried after her down the stairs. She glanced back toward me and her pace doubled, as she half-jumped the remaining steps.

“Autumn!” She didn’t stop. “Autumn, I was just wondering if you want a lift home on Thursday? It’ll be late—”

I never got to finish my sentence, as she whirled around, mouth agape; lips rolled back slightly; red, puffy eyes narrowed so that they slanted. She didn’t say a word, but her expression said more than words could. She remained like that for a few seconds before she turned back around and left; her movements slow and sluggish once more.