The white castle had a bell-tower. A honking, ringing, gonging bell-tower that had evidently been structured mere feet over the ceiling of the first-year bedroom. At 4AM. Rose’s mouth was too dry to move, her back too stiff, and her bruises and face too throbbing to grumble, but the rest of her dorm did their fair share of it for her.

  “Make it stop,” the person in the four-poster next to her groaned, trying fruitlessly to smother the air-shuddering sound with his thin pillow. “Stars above, please make it stooooop!”

  The bell stopped ringing, suddenly and inexplicably, and Rose wasn’t the only one who fell immediately back to sleep. Unfortunately, they were awakened seconds later by the sound of clapping.

  Into the room strode Valentin, flanked by two blond-headed cronies whose sole purpose in this cold, miserable morning seemed to be glaring and glowering respectively. Valentin, on the other hand, was genuinely delighted to see so many people still in bed. Walking, and applauding slowly, he veritably strutted down the row of bunks making as much noise as he could.

  “5AM, and so very few of you have deigned to get up at scheduled hours. My-my.”

  “Is nothing sacred,” she muttered dryly, earning herself a glare from Valentin’s Glarer and a glower from the Glowerer.

  “Clearly you’re all too comfortable,” Valentin gloated, earning himself matching smirks from Glarer and Glowerer. “Anyone still in bed may turn in his blanket to me, now. Folded neat, if you please. Perhaps after a week of good behavior they could be returned…”

  The rest of his promise was drowned out by another chorus of grumbling, and this time, creative swearing from anyone who thought he was too far to hear.

  “Ugly language, too. Tut-tut. In the house of beauty, only the best of language and behavior is permitted. You’ll be turning in your pillows, too, then. Are there any other complaints?” Valentin asked sweetly.

  This time, he was met by dead silence, and matching groggy, murderous glares from anyone still left in the dorm.

  “Such groggy faces…” he tsked. “It’s a shame that your preparatory hour is already squandered.”

  “But the class schedule doesn’t start until nine!” someone on the opposite side of the room squawked.

  “House preparation in addition to coursework is what makes Glassenveil the utmost in precision among the Academy houses. And can we do that whilst smelling like an old breakfast kipper?”

  He got no response from the room.

  “Up! You don’t have time to be beautiful, but you won’t be allowed to breakfast looking sloppy,” he threatened.

  Still dressed in the pajamas Rob had lent her, rolled three times at the ankle, Rose filed after the rest of her dormmates into the adjacent bathrooms.

  Two days. Just survive two days, she told herself firmly. You can do anything for two days.

  Snappier than anyone had a right to be forced to move at that time of morning, the students rotated messily through the privy, mirror and sink room, and—and when Rose had only taken one step into the shower before she backpedaled right out again.

  There were no shower stalls. No covering. Nothing. Just a gym-style hose and spigot station (albeit a very expensive, nice-looking one) and a hoard of naked men in the steam. She backed out of there so quickly, she nearly ran into Valentin as he paced his inspection of the preparations.

  “Excuse me!” she breathed quickly. “Forgot the—um—”

  “Forgot to bathe?” he raised an eyebrow at her.

  Oh. Oh, she was not doing this. Not now. Not in front of Valentin.

  “Soap is absolutely crucial. You should really remind the rest of them of that!” she said with such absolute confidence—and only a small tired crack in her voice—that he let her shuffle aside and back into the bedroom.

  The first of the students were already meandering back, mostly dressed into the bedroom, and tucking in the final details of their uniforms. She put on hers behind closed curtains in a rush, careful to drape the baggy outer layer over her chest completely. They might not have noticed what she was last night with all of the facial bruising, but she wasn’t going to broker any excuses today.

  “Hey, Rose!” Rob’s voice carried through her curtain, just as she was doing the last button on her high collar.

  “Yeah?” she threw the curtain open, tying her hair up and back as small as possible. Several of the boys in this dorm had long hair, as well. If she was lucky, she wouldn’t have to cut it.

  “I got permission from Valentin to take you to the hospital wing. Wanna get that face looked at? It’s… well, it’s worse today, if I’m being honest.”

  She believed him. The swelling had gotten so bad, she could hardly move that side of her face.

  “The tyrant is just letting us go?”

  “He’s anxious to—” Rob imitated Valentin’s stiff way of speaking, “‘Maintain the face of Glassenveil.”

  “Don’t let him hear that!” a boy with a very pointed chin and glasses across from them hissed. “He’s already taken the sheets, too, for something they did in the shower!”

  “Do you think the curtains are next, or the mattresses?” Rose asked in horror.

  Rob and the stranger both glared at her.

  She held up her hands, equally horrified. “Sorry, sorry. Tired. Let’s go, then!”

  Before anything else could happen, and looking as bland as possible, Rob darted down the castle’s myriad of stairs with Rose right behind him, feeling more as though they were escaping a crime scene than going for some bruise cream, or whatever medical aid this academy had for its delinquents.

  “You know where you’re going?” Rose puffed, as Rob showed her to a side door that exited the castle. It turned out that the main doors were only for formal events and visitors.

  Rob shrugged, his brown curls bouncing messily in the morning breeze. “Can’t be that hard if it's the hospital wing. You’re supposed to be able to find it even if you have a concussion.”

  “Hope that’s true,” she said, fighting to keep up with yet another being whose gait was at least a foot longer than hers.

  Now that the majority of the spiral brick street’s lanterns had burned low, and the sun’s rays were approaching the distant horizon, she could see the Drakespire Academy in the center of the curling road, and much farther. The academy itself had its own multi-terrained grounds that spanned miles past the dormitories until they hit an enormous wall—one that spanned in either direction around the border of a distant city. Labyrinthian patterns bled into the land from that wall like veins, eventually crumbling away, or simply tunneling beneath the landscape.

  Odd.

  As the rhythmic tap of their footsteps on paved brick mingled with the faint rustle of morning wind through the trees lining the pathway, the way to the Academy took them by no less than six other dorm buildings, all larger than the small white castle. One of these boasted Gothic arches and ivy crawling up its walls, surrounded by a garden of glowing mushrooms. Another had rivers of red flowing along its garden, and a heady scent of red roses that climbed every inch of its building. Still another, was not visible at all, instead encased by a lush glass biosphere, clouded over half-way to the top with tropical flowers that looked both beautiful and extremely poisonous. The final branch of the path did not lead to a dorm at all, and instead plunged directly into the lake.

  “The classrooms must be at least a mile away,” she realized with some horror.

  “Must be hard to have short legs,” Rob shot back, unsympathetic.

  “Hey, I’m 5’7. That’s pretty tall for a—” She stopped herself, mouth snapping shut.

  “A dwarf?” he joked, staying easily a half-pace ahead of her.

  “You’re snarky in the morning,” she sighed, changing the subject. Keeping the secret of her gender was going to be more difficult than she’d thought…especially if they actually managed to heal her face.

  “I’m snarky before food.”

  “Oh no… are we missing breakfast for this?” she asked, relishing the distraction.

  “Knowing Valentin?”

  She groaned. “Something in me wants to replace his mattress with a waterbed full of kool-aid. He’ll poke it open with that prickly personality of his.”

  “No idea what kool-aid is.”

  “It’s a drink that’s one part dye, and two parts sugar, and since he’s nearly as pale as I am...”

  Rob hemmed. “I think he’d look good in pink, if you’re taking requests.”

  “The moment I find a kool-aid stand and a barrel of duct-tape, he and his white carpet are gone.”

  “—AH! Nothing like threats in the morning to get the blood going!”

  Rose didn’t see the group of runners until they had rounded the corner from the forest dormitory and were hurtling at them—all dozen of them—with the speed of a pack of wolves. Rose almost didn’t recognize the speaker as he streaked by.

  “Do shut up, Rook,” Prefect Valrose, struggling a half-a-pace behind him panted.

  Rob groaned. “I think—”

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Rose watched the group pelting up the hill behind them with an equal sense of foreboding.

  “That was definitely the prefect,” she sighed. The white on hems of their exercise uniforms matched the formal robes from the night before, but why Rook was running—and in the lead—in hunting boots was beyond her.

  “Let’s just get this done. They were moving fast enough, maybe they won’t remember what we looked like.”

  And with that unlikely proclamation, she followed Rob the rest of the way to the towering black Academy. As the first rays of sun were rising above the edge of the city wall, Rose and Rob meandered through an outdoor peristyle to the side of the gray stone academy.

  The first interior hallway looked as anyone would expect an academy of such a gothic style to look. There were long, stretching corridors with rows of bolted doors, stained glass windows, and weathered suits of armor posted every few feet. At the tops of the vaulted ceiling, heavy beams formed ribbed rafters thicker than her torso. Lion-headed gargoyles that reminded her of the gargoyle-headed fireplace in Dross manor sat scattered along the upper ribs. In fact, she realized when the gargoyles turned to watch her, they were precisely the same as the one in Dross manor, excepting of course, the moving, stony stares.

  “Um, Rob… look behind us.” Rose pointed.

  The door they’d entered through was still only a few feet behind them, innocently ajar as they tried in vain to walk in farther.

  Rob’s expression said it all—he went through all the stages of grief in just a few seconds, landing somewhere between anger and desperation.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  Suddenly, Rob took off running. Watching the effort was an odd experience. Rob did move. The flagstones beneath his feet did pass under him, but he never actually got any further away. From herself, or the entry door.

  Experimenting, Rose tried to move the other way, back toward the exit, and had the same result. A hysterical, hopeless laugh bubbled in her throat.

  “Hey, could you not laugh? If we’re stuck in a hallway on our first day, we might never actually make it to class! I don’t want to get detention or probation or worse on day one, thanks!”

  A sense of guilt pricked Rose’s innards. She swallowed. “I know, sorry, I—wait. I have an idea.”

  Rose turned on her heel and stalked back toward the door where they’d walked in.

  “Go out and find a new entrance?” Rob asked, following her. “That’s a great idea. We should—hey!”

  Rose shut the door.

  “What are you doing! It might not even open again!” Rob lunged for the handle.

  “No, wait! Just—just watch.” Rose walked down the hallway, watching Rob as she did. She got farther away from him. The walls behaved normally. It was back to being an ordinary corridor.

  Rob stomped after her. “Fine. Fine. Take the risk without asking. Whatever. Let’s just find the restoration rooms.”

  So much for manners.

  Now that the hallways were working normally, it was as though the corridors could sense what they were looking for. They practically deposited them right in front of a large open doorway a minute later. Just beyond, a line of sterile white beds and privacy screens waited.

  Rob, once again half a step ahead, entered first, oblivious to the tension of the absolute quiet in the room.

  “Hello?” he called out brashly. “HI! We’re just here to treat some injuries, please! HELLO!?”

  “Oh, yes, do come in. Don’t worry about who you’re waking up, either! Patients, healers, it’s all the same. No sense of bedside manner, oh no!” came a grumbling male voice from a back office. Out from an unmarked door at the end of the beds bustled a very young-looking healer, midnight-black hair pulled tight at the nape of his neck. A tangle of scars on the exposed skin of his jugular, and one through his eyebrow gave him a stern, no-nonsense sort of look, particularly when he glared the way he was glaring at Rob.

  The name on the tag pinned to his crooked collar matched the one on his clipboard: Healer Sorin.

  “Carry on, young man!” Healer Sorin grumped. “Get any louder, and you’ll learn to wake the dead and then you can take my place! I can finally retire!” The healer saw Rose. “—Oh, blood bags, boy! And here I thought first years weren’t allowed to duel! There’s more bruise than boy in those robes, I’d wager!”

  “Bad odds on that bet, sir,” Rose said, before she could stop herself.

  “Thinks he’s funny,” Sorin grumbled. “Not a check-in, then. Well done. I could use your face as a balloon at the next non-incident party—if we EVER get to have one in this drake-forsaken place. So.” He glared. “Where else are you injured? Or can I call this a cosmetic issue and leave it be?”

  Rose froze. The last thing she needed was anyone at this academy seeing her ribcage beneath the baggy robes. If it weren’t for the high collar and hood hiding most of her throat, her lack of adam’s apple would have outed her, as well. Suddenly, she was feeling very attached to her injuries.

  “Nowhere,” she lied quickly.

  Healer Sorin snorted. “First years. You’re going to have to be a better liar than that if you want to last in the white court.”

  “The white court?” Rob asked dumbly.

  Healer Sorin gestured vaguely to the white hem on their robes. “That would be what the rest of campus calls the Glassenveil dormitory. Get used to it. Used to be an insult before Valrose took it literally and reformed the place. My guess is you tried to challenge your way out of pawnhood, eh?”

  He directed the question to Rose.

  “No, I—” Rose began to stammer.

  “She was attacked by the Sunken Manor ghost staff,” Rob supplied traitorously.

  “Two comedians, I see,” he rolled his eyes. “Oh, if I had a pay raise for every time some disgruntled first year tries to fight his way up—”

  “He’s—um—not joking,” Rose said.

  Sorin dropped his clipboard with an uncomfortably loud smack!

  “You. You went inside? Inside there? Thought you’d go and have a nice flirt with death, did you?” Sorin waved his now-empty hands. “Marvelous. Just marvelous. So, tell me, boy. Are you supremely idiotic, or just suicidal? For paperwork reasons.”

  “Depends,” Rose sighed. “Do idiots still get healed?”

  “I should let you sleep that off on your own, for that,” Sorin grumbled. “But seeing as I am a professional, I’d prefer you out of here as efficiently as possible. So—”

  With that, Sorin left them abruptly, and waved the tiny blue ring on his finger in front of a cabinet. Its latched doors popped open immediately, revealing hundreds of corked vials, each containing liquid of every color and viscosity. There was one, more notable than the rest, that looked like liquid mercury. Another, not far from it, contained something that resembled swamp goo, complete with gloppy, near-sentient bubbling.

  To her horror, the bubbling goo was the one Sorin selected.

  She only barely caught it when Sorin threw the bottle at her chest.

  “Well! There you go! Down the hatch!”

  “I—what exactly—”

  Sorin burst out laughing, and snatched it back. “Kidding! I keep that one for boils. Not for internal use. Here.”

  He handed her a very different bottle of blue liquid.

  “That’s for whatever internal injuries you’ve gotten—that’s right. Your lies get you nowhere in this hall, you lucky thing. I’ll give you a paste for some of the topical stuff. I don’t have to see it all for you to put it on. Fortunately for us all, it’s idiot proof.

  “Now. It’s the time for you to be honest with your healer, because if you have any breaks that aren’t set, or muscle tears that aren’t in the right place when you drink this, they will heal, and they will heal wrong. Permanently. So, presuming you don’t want me to have to melt your flesh later in the semester so we can try this again, do you have anything that might heal badly if I give this to you now?”

  Rose swallowed hard, grateful that this, at least, was something she could answer honestly.

  “Just scars,” she said.

  “Scars? In the white court? In that case…” Sorin snatched the bottle, uncorked it, and added three drops of something pink that fizzled with a smell that made her eyes water. It was like vinegar and tar. “Well then, boy. I wish you luck, and improved intelligence. Drink,” Sorin ordered.

  The healer watched to make sure she drank every drop of the stuff. It tasted like chalk, and flowed like pepto-bismol, but at least it wasn’t almost-alive. Rose shared a look with Rob when the liquid was gone, to see if anything had changed. He only shrugged. Nothing. Then, the burning started.

  Rose clenched her teeth against the pain. The veins in her face, sides, and arms where the fresh bruises were, writhed. Her blood boiled, and she could feel minor things inside of her reshaping themselves. Tiny vessels knitting together. Then, she gasped, and grabbed at her side. The surgical scars, every suter line, and places deeper, inside her lungs were on fire.

  “Thought so,” Sorin chuckled, entirely unfazed by her pain.

  Her breathing came heavy, but she didn’t make a sound. This was pain that she’d felt before, every morning forcing herself to walk to the manor, and with every breath she took of cold air in the early days after the piano incident.

  “Impressive. Most first years scream.” Sorin shrugged, glancing conspiratorially at Rob, who looked appropriately horrified.

  It only lasted a few second more, and Rose’s breathing came easier—far easier. She laughed.

  She laughed, and it didn’t hurt. She breathed easy for the first time, truly, in months. It was better than even before the accident. It was better than she’d ever felt in her life.

  “Huh,” Rob commented. “So that’s what you look like. I don’t know, I was expecting something more…tough?”

  Even Sorin was scratching his chin, a puzzled expression twisting his mouth as he examined her newly-healed features. Fortunately, he didn’t ask more questions—not in front of Rob.

  “Pretty boys. Great. Definitely white court,” he muttered, producing a mirror from the back of the cabinet. “Better?”

  Rose could have sworn he rolled his eyes behind the mirror, but what she saw in the glass was an entirely different person than she’d been this morning—or even before she’d indeed this world.

  Her already dark hair was even darker and shinier from the grease of two unshowered days, and her collar needed straightening, but other than that, her pale skin was as pristine as it had ever been. Her eye-color the only black and blue left on her face. Most fantastic of all, the scar from the accident, the one that cut its way from her eyebrow to her chin, and the reason she’d hid her face even from Didymus for so long, was nearly invisible. All that was left of it was a tiny fissure line in places—like a blond hair had made its way onto her face and needed to be brushed away.

  It was incredible. It was miraculous. It was… probably going to cost her a fortune.

  “Ah—thank you, healer Sorin,” she stammered quickly, realizing she’d spent far too long staring. “What do I owe you?”

  Sorin shook his head, still contemplating her a little closer than she would have preferred. “Owe? If you really want to thank me, you will ensure that I never even learn your name. I don’t want anymore idiotic stunts. I don’t want anymore flirting with death, danger, and disaster. I have dreams of my own, you know! And they all involve the students of this academy exercising just a sliver of sense!”

  “Yes sir! We will absolutely do that!” Rob interjected, edging back to the door.

  “Right,” said Sorin, eyes narrowed. “Need anything basic next time, there are supplies on the cart. Anything there is no-question, no-yelling up for grabs. Got it?”

  “Right! Thanks again, sir!” Rose waved as Rob began to tug her away. She only just had the presence of mind to snatch a roll of bandages from the no-questions cart before Rob pulled her all the way out of the medical hall.

  “That was rushed,” Rose quipped as Rob went back to his fast stalking down the hallway.

  “I didn’t want him to change his mind and charge you for the potions, Mr. Forgot-my-trunk.”

  “I was wondering about that. What does the magic healing juice usually cost?”

  “More arcens than I make in a month.”

  “Arcens?” Rose asked.

  Rob stopped in his tracks. “Arcens. You know, cabbage, cash, spending metal. Where did you say Shreveport was, again?”

  “Somewhere where they use the dollar mint,” she responded.

  “Mint is valuable? The weed?”

  “As in gold mint,” she rolled her eyes. “And, I make sort of a pittance as well, but I’m not destitute—yet.”

  “Right,” he said.

  “Where are we going?” she asked, hurriedly, eager to avoid other questions.

  “Smell that?” he pointed to the air.

  She shook her head.

  “Sausages.”