Page 36 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

So I did it for her. She sat on the edge of my bed in her slip while I knelt behind her on the mattress and put the pins in one at a time. Her hair was heavy and a little damp, and it smelled of the lavender soap we stole from the faculty washroom. I remember the shape of the back of her neck. I remember there was a freckle just under her left ear that she didn't know she had, and I never told her.

She told me she wasn't afraid of going down to the Well, because it was an honor—they had told her it was an honor. I believed her because she believed it. I was young and stupid, and I loved her so much I would have believed anything she said in that voice.

I put the last pin in. She turned around on the bed and kissed me, and her hands were cold. Then she put on her nicest dress and went down the stairs.

I still braid my hair every morning. It's white now, and long, longer than it ever was then, and I do it without even thinking. Some mornings, when I get to the end of it, I catch myself reaching for a pin I don't have.

I'm the only one left alive who ever saw Cordelia with her hair down.

Under the root cellar the lines run slow and steady. A long way south, the girl's bond hums in the dark. I sit at the kitchen table with my tea going cold in front of me, and the old man's calendar on the wall, and I listen to it get louder.

13

EVERLY

Summer at Nyxhaven is a whole different place. For one thing, nothing has tried to eat me in weeks.

It's so hot this morning that the butter has gone soft in its dish, and the smell of the quad the groundskeeper finally mowed is drifting in through the open kitchen window.

Atlas is leaning against the counter scowling at his coffee because it's too hot to drink, so he holds his hand over the mug to cool it down. A tiny grey cloud forms under his palm and opens up. Rain sheets down over the mug, the counter, the toaster and the floor, puddling around our bare feet, and it keeps raining a lot longer than anyone would like.

Atlas looks down at his coffee, which is now mostly rainwater.

"You need to learn to do that smaller." Brittany doesn't look up from her cereal. She's lifted her bowl off the table so it won't get wet.

"So teach me."

"I can't. I only just found out I could do storm magic at all."

Ren is standing in the doorway in his socks, which are soaked. "Control's mostly breathing. And blood—where it goes when you're tense. I could maybe help with that."

"Mors is mostly stillness." Callum has moved his newspaper out of the path of the water, and he turns a page with great dignity. "Knowing when not to act. That would help as well."

Felix tips his chair back on two legs. "I'd like to offer a course in cheating at poker."

"No one needs that," Brittany tells him.

"Everyone needs that."

By lunch there's a schedule taped to the fridge in Brittany's square handwriting, with the days of the week down the side, each of their names in a box, and a note at the bottom: Felix's class is not a real class. Felix draws a little crown over his name in pen.

So we teach each other. We're locked out of the lecture halls, the library and the labs, with no professors and no syllabus and no one telling us what's forbidden, and it's maybe the best thing that's ever happened to my education. I take every class. I'm a grimoire, so I'm allowed in all of them, and for once no one can tell me I've declared in the wrong house. My parents think I'm at an internship. In fairness, I'm learning a lot.

Ren teaches blood in the mornings, out in the overgrown garden behind Concordia where no one can see us. There are stone paths under the weeds and roses gone wild along the back wall, sweet and heavy in the heat. We spread a blanket on the grass and sit in a ring. Ren sits cross-legged with a ritual knife in his lap and turns into a professor.

"Yes, Professor Ashford," Brittany says the first morning, and she does not mean it as a compliment.

He's a patient teacher, and sometimes kind of a frightening one. He makes Brittany prick her finger with the tip of the knife and close the cut, then do it again, and again, all morning, until she can do it without her hand shaking. Her magic still doesn't behave. Half the time the cut closes, but the other half it bleeds faster, or frosts over, or once, memorably, closes on the wrong finger.

"Again," Ren says.

"I'm going to run out of fingers."

"You have ten. Again."

Felix sits in the back of every class heckling, and this one is no exception. He leans over to Brittany and says, "You know, in Tumult we'd just bet on whether it closes. Less blood, more fun. Five bucks says it frosts."

It frosts. Felix holds out his hand for the money, and Ren tells him, very calmly, without looking up from Brittany's finger, that he knows where every one of Felix's arteries is and could close any of them from where he's sitting.