The Mirror Said Don't Go to the Royal Academy novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Rune Master

Ansgar Dahl takes her into the cellar, Hedda claims the other bed, and Linnea's anger unravels the lecture hall's wards for a breath, while the mirror shows a second figure at the stone door.

He let go of my hand, and I felt the cold of the evening rush back in where his palm had been.

"Inside," Ansgar said. "Before you freeze."

The gate swung open for him without a sound.

I followed him across a courtyard of packed snow and into a hall where a fire burned the length of one wall.

Nobody asked me for a coin or a pledge or a signature.

At the Royal Academy, Caspar had told me, you couldn't pass the door without swearing to the Crown.

Here a girl in a grey wool coat looked up from a bowl of stew and went on eating.

"Your ring," Ansgar said, low.

I took the silk glove out of my satchel and unwrapped it on a bench.

The silver band lay on the cloth with its pale stone, innocent as a button.

He didn't touch it.

"A Warden's band," he said. "The Crown puts them on mages who haven't woken yet, to keep them from waking wrong."

"It was an engagement ring."

"A Lorimer one, by the mark inside the band."

His mouth turned a little.

"Keep it. Don't wear it. Don't throw it in the river either, because I'll want to read it."

"You wrote my acceptance."

"Your grandmother wrote me a letter, years ago."

He glanced at me.

"She said if her granddaughter ever applied to Grey Thorn, I should be the one to read it."

"She never told me anything."

"No," he said. "She wouldn't have."

He didn't say anything else about her, and something in his face told me not to ask yet.

The girl in the grey coat appeared at my elbow with the stew bowl still in her hand.

She was stocky and freckled, with a red-blonde braid.

"You're the scholarship girl," she said. "Hedda Valdheim. We're sharing the north tower. I'd warn you that I snore, but you'll find out anyway."

"Linnea."

"I know. The whole hall knows.

"Dahl hasn't read a student's letter in four years, and then he walks down to the gate in a snowstorm."

Her eyes cut to him and back.

"So either you're a genius or you owe him money."

"Eat," Ansgar said to me, and walked off without answering.

Hedda grinned.

"Told you," she said.

The north tower room was small and cold and had two narrow beds under a slanted window.

I put my grandmother's mirror on the sill, still in its quilt, and fell asleep with my boots on.

In the morning I walked into the wards lecture in a borrowed grey coat and found a hundred students in a round stone hall.

Runes were cut into every lintel and chalked on every board, and a ring of small lamps hung from the ceiling on silver chains.

Ansgar stood at the front with his left hand wrapped in a strip of cloth.

"Every ward in this room is a promise," he said.

"Today you read one the way its maker meant it."

He pointed his chalk at me.

"Linnea Aldwin. The sigil on the east lintel."

My stomach dropped.

Every head turned.

I knew what the rune said.

My grandmother had carved that very line over our front door.

I opened my mouth to read it, and the thought that came up wasn't the rune at all.

It was Caspar's hand on mine, and his voice saying give me the ring.

It was the baker's wife saying I couldn't.

It was eighteen months of warm smiles over a cold band.

It was something being pulled out of my chest every time he lit a lamp.

I read the rune aloud, and anger sat in every word.

The east lintel's carving gave a thin sound.

Then every ward in the hall let go at once.

The chalk lines slumped on the boards.

The little lamps dropped on their chains and went out, and a hundred silver wardrings fell off a hundred fingers and rang on the stones.

For one breath the whole round hall was dark and silent.

Then somebody laughed, a short, shaken laugh, and the lamps flared back on one by one.

"Well," Hedda said from three seats over, entirely at ease. "That's a first."

I stood there with my fists shut and my face burning.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't mean to."

Ansgar crossed the hall and stopped in front of me.

He wasn't angry.

He looked like a man who had finally received the news he'd been waiting years to hear.

"Class dismissed," he said, without turning round. "Everyone but Miss Aldwin. And someone fetch the porter, because I want the east lintel recut by supper."

"Am I in trouble?" I asked, when the room had emptied.

"No." His voice was very quiet. "Cellar, tonight, after the bell. Bring the mirror."

"How do you know about the mirror?"

"Because she'd have left it to you," he said. "Go and eat something."

I didn't eat.

I went back to the north tower and sat on my bed with the mirror in my lap and pulled off the quilt.

My own face looked back, pale with a smudge of chalk on the cheek.

Then the glass cleared, and my face was gone.

The older woman stood in the dust again, in the same grey robes, burn and all.

The stone door still shuddered behind her.

But the picture had changed.

There was a second person standing in the dark by the door.

A tall figure, a man's shape, one shoulder braced against the stone.

I couldn't see his face.

"Who is he?" I whispered. "Please. Who is he?"

The woman in the glass didn't answer.

Her lips didn't move, and her eyes were closed.

She had said she only had one chance.

I sat holding the cold frame until the bell rang for the cellar.

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