Inside, as I raced along a back corridor, all lay quiet except for a buzz of conversation from the lecture hall. I had a chance to get to my seat before it was too late. In icy darkness, I hurried up the narrow steps that led to the balcony of the lecture hall. The proctor had already turned off the single gaslight that lit the stairwell and had gone in, but I knew these steps well. With the strap of my schoolbag gripped between my teeth, I tugged my scholar’s robe on over my jacket and petticoats. I shrugged the satin robe up over both shoulders and smoothed it down just as I felt the change of temperature, from bone cold to merely flesh-achingly chilly, that meant the door loomed ahead.
Had the proctor locked it already?
Blessed Tanit! Watch over your faithful daughter. Let me not be late and get into trouble. Again.
3
My hand tightened on the iron latch, the metal so cold it burned through the palm of my writing gloves. I applied pressure, and the latch clicked blessedly free. Catching my breath, I listened as female voices gossiped and giggled, schoolbook pages turned, and pencil leads scratched on paper. A heavy tread approached, accompanied by the jangle of a ring of keys. Straightening, I opened the door and crossed the threshold into the proctor’s basilisk glare.
She lowered the key she had been about to insert into the lock and attempted to wither me with a sarcastic smile. “Maestressa Catherine Hassi Barahal. How gracious of you to attend today’s required lecture.”
I opened my mouth to offer a clever reply, but I had forgotten the schoolbag gripped between my teeth and had to grab for it as it fell. The neat catch allowed me to sweep into a courtesy. “Maestra Madrahat. Forgive me. I was discommoded.”
Some things you could not fault a respectable young woman for in public, even if you wondered if she was telling the truth. She favored me with a raised eyebrow eloquent of doubt but stepped aside so I could squeeze past her along the back aisle toward my assigned bench. “Button your robe, maestressa,” she added, her parting shot.
As I hastened along the aisle, shaking from relief and shivering from the cold, I heard her key turn in the lock. Once again, I had landed—just barely—on my feet.
A few of the other pupils glanced my way, but I wasn’t important enough to be worth more than a titter, an elbow nudge, or a yawn. At the back of the balcony’s curve, I slipped onto the bench beside Beatrice. Her schoolbook was open to a page half filled in with an intricate drawing, and she was shaking a broken lead out of her pencil as I sat down.
“There you are!” she whispered without looking at me, intent on her pencil lead. “I knew you would make it here in time.”
“Your confidence heartens me.”
“I dreamed it last night.” She slanted a sidelong look at me. “You know I always believe my dreams.”
Below, on the dais at the front of the lecture hall, two servants rolled out a chalkboard and hung a net filled with sticks of chalk from its lower rim.
I bent closer. “I thought you dreamed only about certain male students—”
She kicked me in the ankle.
“Ouch!”
The headmaster limped out onto the dais and we fell silent, as did every other pupil, males below on the main floor and females above on the balcony. The old scholar was not one to drag out an introduction: a name, a list of spectacular experiments accomplished and revolutionary papers published, and the title of the lecture we were privileged to hear today: Aerostatics, the principles of gases in equilibrium and of the equilibrium of balloons and dirigible balloons in changing atmospheric conditions. Then he was finished, although a surprised murmur swept the hall as the students realized the lecturer was a woman.
“So, did you complete the essay?” Bee demanded, the words barely voiced but her expression emphatic. “I know how you love the headmaster’s seminar. It would be awful if you couldn’t go.”
Under cover of the measured entrance of the dignitary in a headwrap and crisply starched and voluminous orange boubou, I made a business of extricating my schoolbook from my bag and arranging it neatly open before me on the pitted old table with my new silver pencil set diagonally across the blank page. Meanwhile, I spoke fast in a low voice as Bee fiddled with her broken lead.
“I finished but not quite how I wanted it. It was the strangest thing. Some man had come in through the window and was waiting in the study.”
“How did he manage that?”
“I don’t know. Uncle wondered the same thing. That’s why they’d gone out to the garden when you came down. Then another man came after that. Uncle had to get a book from the parlor for him—I had to run so Evved wouldn’t see me. Blessed Tanit! I left the journal I was reading on the table. He’ll wonder why it was there!”
“He’s been very absentminded and more snappish than usual these days. I think he’s anxious about something. Something he and Mama aren’t telling us. So perhaps he won’t notice or will forget to ask.”
“I hope so. What else could I do? I grabbed my schoolbag and my essay, and I ran all the way to the academy, only I forgot my coat, so I was very, very cold.” I was still cold, because a third of the long underceiling windows were propped open with sticks to move air through the otherwise stuffy confines of the cramped balcony tiers. “One exciting thing did happen, however,” I added coyly. “As I ran into the courtyard, a very fine carriage rolled up and who should step out but Maester Amadou and his twin sisters.”
Bee’s hands stilled. Her rosy lips pressed tight. She did not rise to the bait. Not yet, but she would. Instead, she said in the most casual voice imaginable, “I saw the twins come in.” She gestured to a pair of girls seated in the front row by the balcony railing, resplendent in gold-and-blue robes cut to emphasize their tall figures, their hair wrapped in waxed cotton scarves whose sheen might have given off more light than the poor gas illumination. They recorded dutiful notes, writing in unison, as the esteemed professor sketched the lines of an airship on the chalkboard. “How did they get up here faster than you did?”
I smiled, luring her closer. “Maester Amadou stopped me. To ask a question.”
“Oh. A question.” She sighed wearily, as if his questions were the most uninteresting thing in the world to her.
“He asked about you.”
Sprung! I gloated expectantly, but she turned her back on me, her attention flying away to fix on a spill of movement in the hall below us. Certain male pupils were coming in fashionably late and now settled into their assigned places. It seemed likely she would stare at Maester Amadou’s attractive form and excellent clothes for the next century just to thwart me of the chance to annoy her, or perhaps she would stare at him because she had been doing so from the first day he and his sisters had arrived as pupils at the academy college, right after the Beltane festival day almost six months ago at the beginning of the month of Maius.