The classroom was a small stone chamber off the eastern gallery of the library — six chairs in a half-circle, one worn desk, a single tall window the colour of weak tea. Father Aldric was already there, sitting on the desk with a slim book, and he did not look the way a man of his reputation should. Small, neatly dressed, white-bearded, with the patient brown eyes of someone who had given up being impressed several centuries ago and decided that was a mercy.

"Miss Marsh."

"Father Aldric."

"Sit anywhere. The chairs have no politics yet. By the third week they will, and you'll avoid the one at the far left. Today they're neutral."

I took the second from the right. Four students filed in — three pale and soundless, the grace I was learning to read as young vampire, and one alone a few minutes later, ginger, freckled, taller than the rest, whose eyes flashed amber for a heartbeat when they crossed mine and then went brown. Werewolf. He took the chair farthest from me, nodded once, and did not look at me again.

The last arrived just before the hour and sat at my side. He gave me a sideways look I couldn't read, smiled at it without explaining, and said in the easy voice of someone who has never been meaningfully told no:

"You're Marsh. I'm Dorian. Cassian's brother. He doesn't know I'm in this class. Please don't tell him." He paused, and something honest flickered through the brightness, there and gone. "I'm bad at most things, by the standards of my House. I'm reliably good at one. I keep the secrets I'm given and I keep them for a very long time. You'll find that useful, eventually, when you've run out of other people to give yours to."

He looked younger than the others, or worked at it — perhaps twenty-two, dark hair tousled in the way that takes a vampire two centuries to perfect. He had Cassian's nose and almost none of Cassian's stillness.

"Your secret," I said.

"Excellent. We'll be friends."

"That's not how friendship works."

"You're right, it isn't. But I've decided, and I'm more stubborn than reality, so I usually win."

Aldric coughed. Dorian sat up. Class began.

He didn't lecture. He asked us, one by one, what compulsion was. The pale three answered correctly in the same flat key. The werewolf gave a sentence more courteous than his face. Dorian said it was the thing he was extravagantly bad at and his brother was extravagantly good at, which was why he was taking the class a third time, and the room laughed.

Then Aldric looked at me. "Miss Marsh?"

"The use of voice and eyes by a vampire to override a human will."

"And its limits?"

"It doesn't work on other vampires. It doesn't work on werewolves. And it doesn't work —" I stopped, unsure whether to say it, and decided to. "It doesn't work on Awakeners. I'm told."

His eyebrows rose by exactly one millimetre. "You're told. By whom?"

"My mother. When I was twelve."

"Did she say how she knew?"

"No. And I was twelve, so I asked everything. She still didn't say."

He nodded, and wrote nothing down, because he didn't need to. "Then we'll demonstrate the safe way — a vampire who knows he's being demonstrated upon, and a human who's consented." He gestured. "Dorian."

Dorian rolled his eyes and went to the front, three feet from Aldric, who set his book aside. His eyes didn't flash. His voice didn't deepen.

"Dorian. Sit on the floor."

Dorian sat on the floor. Not dramatically — he simply folded down onto the stone between one second and the next, like a man who'd concluded three seconds ago that the floor was an excellent idea. He smiled up.

"Stand. Now tell us how that felt."

Dorian stood, considered, and said: "Like a kind uncle suggested something perfectly reasonable. I wanted to sit. The floor seemed the correct floor. I'm not entirely convinced it wasn't."

The room laughed again. Aldric did not. "Compulsion done well isn't violence," he said. "It's erasure. Done badly, it feels to the human like a hand at the throat. Done well, it feels like agreement — and the vampire can't tell from the inside which he's doing. He has to be told. By a human who can resist." He turned. "Or by an Awakener, whose blood reads it for what it is. Miss Marsh. Come forward, please."

I did not move.

I didn't decide not to. My body refused before my mind had finished the arithmetic of the distance, the way a hand won't go to a flame. The class felt it. Dorian felt it. The werewolf in the far chair finally looked at me again.

"No," I said. I heard the word leave me in my own voice. I heard the silence behind it.

It was the first time in my life I had ever said no to a person who outranked me and felt the floor stay where it was. At home, no had always cost something — a door, a dinner, a week of my father's careful hurt quiet. Here it simply landed, and held, and nothing fell. I understood, in the space of one syllable, that my mother had been right about a thing she had never lived to prove to me, and the understanding went through me like cold water and left me more awake than I had been since the dock.

Aldric stood very still, his face unchanged, and let my refusal sit in the room long enough for me to feel the weight of it. Then he settled back onto the desk with what I understood to be a teacher's deepest pleasure. "Good. The first lesson is always refusal." He addressed the others. "Awakener blood resists. What's less recorded is that most Awakeners obey anyway — because no one has ever told them the no in their throat is real. By the time they reach me, it's been trained out. Miss Marsh was raised by a mother who taught her otherwise. She is the first in fifty years to refuse on instinct in this room."

For one bright, cold second, sitting in a chair I had not been compelled out of, I felt something I had not felt since the ferry: power. Small, and mine.

It did not last the hour.

Aldric ran three more demonstrations on Dorian and let us go. At the door he pressed a slim cloth-bound book into my hands — A Decade in the Marble House, by Catherine Lyle, 1976 — and said, "She shared your classification. She's dead; her sentences aren't. First chapter by Tuesday. I won't test you. I'll only ask what you made of the second paragraph on page eleven."

Dorian was waiting in the corridor and fell into step without asking. "Lunch."

"I have to read."

"Read while you eat. There's a leek tart that won't survive being saved for me, and I have suffered enough from saved leek tart to know." A few steps on, quieter: "Ask me the thing you want to ask."

"Why are you talking to me?"

He stopped. So did I. For once he was entirely serious. "Because in 1976 my brother asked me to look after the Awakener of that year. I didn't — not really. I looked twenty-one and I was young enough to be stupid about it. She was kind to me and I was kind back, and the thing we both failed to do was the thing he was actually asking, which was: stay in the room with her when she was alone. He can't ask me twice. He doesn't know how to ask anything twice. So I've decided to do it without being asked." He shrugged. "You can send me away whenever you like. I'll go, and come back tomorrow, and try again."

"Did she know Catherine?"

"Lunch first." Gently. "I owe you sentences, and I'm bad at sentences without food."

We went through the eastern gallery — narrow, high, tall windows down one side, portraits down the other. Halfway along, I saw them.

Cassian and a woman, at the third window, facing each other, speaking low. They did not look at us. Her gloved right hand rested on his left sleeve near the elbow — the smallest possible contact, formal and intimate at once. She leaned a fraction toward him. He didn't lean back. But he let the hand stay.

We didn't break stride. Dorian slowed by a hair — just enough that I understood we were both pretending not to see and both seeing exactly.

The woman's eyes lifted, found mine across the gallery, and held. She smiled. A closed-mouthed thing, neither kind nor unkind — the smile a chess player gives the board when she's seen, four moves out, precisely how it ends.

Then Cassian looked up.

His eyes came to mine and stayed. Two seconds — long enough to be a decision, short enough to deny. In the Council Chamber he had spoken at the air a foot in front of me and never once at me; here he held my gaze across forty feet of cold stone, with another woman's hand on his arm, and something passed between us that I had no name for and felt in the base of my throat like a struck note. It was not warmth and it was not threat. It was the particular attention of a man looking at the one thing in a room he has decided not to look at, and failing, and letting you see him fail for exactly as long as he can afford to. Then it dropped away, and the cost of dropping it showed for half a beat in the line of his jaw before that, too, went still. Her hand did not leave his sleeve. If anything her fingers settled, the way a hand settles on a thing it has just watched someone else want.

We walked on. Dorian said nothing until we'd turned the corner. Then, almost to himself: "That's new."

"What is?"

"Her hand. On his arm. Where I can see it."

In the dining hall the leek tart came out steaming on a long silver tray, and the warm, buttery, oniony smell of it landed in my chest like a small kindness arriving by post. I noticed I was being fed a great deal, for someone supposedly here as a guest — the cracked egg, the gooseberry, now the tart — and I noticed that every plate set in front of me was put there before I asked, as if someone had a list of what I liked and had had it for a while. I filed that beside the rest. We ate without speaking for a while. When I finally did speak, I didn't ask the question I'd meant to. I asked the one I hadn't.

"What does it mean, when Seraphine puts her hand on a man's arm in a corridor she knows is being walked through?"

Dorian set his fork down. "It means she's buying him. Or selling him. Or telling someone he's already on her shelf. Depends who the someone is."

He picked the fork back up, and added, quietly, "In this case — I think the someone is you."