I was glad I had Vivienne to talk to, but I had to be careful to not give myself away.
“Come on,” said Vivienne, after we had chatted for hours. “Let’s see if there is still any dinner remaining.”
We crept downstairs. The house was quiet and dark, and most of the girls had gone to sleep. Vivienne led me to the kitchen, where slices of cold roast beef and cheese lay waiting on the middle table.
The kitchen was a lovely, high-ceilinged room with a long wooden worktable and benches in the center. In the middle of one wall, the last embers of a fire were flickering in the large fireplace. Along the other wall were a brick oven and a large washing tub. We ate our midnight snack in silence, crept back upstairs, and climbed into bed.
That night, I slept very little. I kept having dreams of standing in a classroom with everyone laughing at me. Then Rafe was there, as he always was in my recent dreams, but I could only see his back. I called out to him, but he was walking away from me on the arm of another girl whose face I couldn’t see. They were laughing and cuddling as if they were having a marvelous time, and Rafe never even turned to look at me. I tossed and turned the whole night and was still awake when the sun rose from the Stardust Sea in the early hours of first light.
The next morning, I got out of bed early, since I was already awake. The crisp morning air was chilly, and I dressed quickly, trying to figure out how my new uniform was to be worn.
The novices all wore the same thing: ankle-length robes with a white, full-sleeved shirt under a leather vest that was to be tied in the front with laces. This was worn over thick tights tucked into sturdy leather boots. The color of the robe indicated the year the mage was in. Novices all wore green, the second-years wore red robes, third-years wore blue, and fourth-years wore purple. When it was cold, we had a standard brown cloak that all the students wore.
I was anxious about my first day and didn’t want to be late. The dining table in my dorm house was laid with freshly cooked eggs, bowls of fruit, and little pots of butter and jam interspaced about the table. Big jugs of cream accompanied the blueberries that were placed in tiny bowls. Jugs of different fruit juices and milk, and baskets of freshly baked bread, cakes, and flaky jam-filled pastries, along with bowls of porridge, cheese, and some sort of cured meats filled in the gaps. A few of the girls were already there, eating and chatting away.
When I came in, they ignored me. Vivienne was already sitting at the end of a table eating. She waved me over, so I found myself a place at the end of the bench near her, sat down, and quickly ate my breakfast.
Vivienne and I had classes together, so that would be fun. I consulted my scroll as to where our first class was.
Evolon was like no school I had ever been to. Although the classes involved students and a teacher, that is where the similarities stopped. Most of the classes were held outdoors—in courtyards near fountains, under the shade of an old oak, or down in the gardens where a marquee was set up to shade us from the sun. And as if the whole place weren’t confusing enough, the classes kept moving locations, so if you didn’t check the board in the main hall every day you might have to end up trudging miles back from a class that had already moved. To top it all off, the classes were not all in the same structure.
There was a separate area on the grounds for warrior skills, a different house for healing studies, and one for transformation and illusion skills. Alchemy was all the way on the other side of the campus because the students frequently blew things up. Ancient studies, history, and political studies were located in the best house of all: the library.
I checked my schedule; my first class was history. That seemed quite normal, except it wasn’t, really. I would be learning about the history of a world I never knew existed until a few weeks ago. One thing I was definitely looking forward to was learning about my heritage. I had read a few books when I was at Silverthorne Castle, and most of them mentioned my father’s or mother’s names at some point, or one of their ancestors. It was quite fascinating, learning about my family in this way.
Vivienne and I strode along the flower-lined walkways that intersected in a maze of confusing paths, sometimes leading to a frustrating dead end. Finally, we had to climb over three flowerbeds and under one bush to get to the broad avenue that led to the library, the largest mansion on the property.
I was picking leaves out of my hair and smoothing my robes when I saw it. According to Vivienne, the academy’s library was famous throughout the whole kingdom and beyond for housing the greatest collection of knowledge, second only to the knowledge of the fae, who had lived in this world longer than any other race.
It was a fantastic structure that looked a lot like a sixteenth-century manor house. Wisteria had climbed the walls of the front façade, which was huge and imposing, and two additional wings led out at right angles toward the sea. It stood on the highest point of the university grounds, on a cliff overlooking the clear blue waters of the Bay of Pearls. The main avenue leading to it was lined with cherry blossoms and packed with scurrying students eager to get to their classes and not turn up late. We hurried along too, climbing up the
