Bound in Violet and Shadow

The train station was three hours behind me now, but I could still feel the ghost of my mother's hand not touching my shoulder, could still hear the silence where a goodbye should have been. Lisa and Travis had handed me a check, a suitcase full of black clothes I hadn't packed myself, and a one-way ticket to a place called Blackwood Academy. No hug. No explanation. Just the usual routine of being passed along like a parcel nobody wanted to claim but nobody wanted to lose, either.

The sky over Blackwood was the color of a bruise that hadn't decided whether to heal or spread. Iron clouds pressed low over a landscape of black pine and gray stone, and the academy itself rose out of the mist like something that had grown there instead of being built, all spires and broken angles and windows that looked like they were watching me back. I adjusted the strap of my bag on my shoulder and walked toward the gates, my boots crunching against gravel that seemed too loud in the stillness.

The gates were obsidian, taller than any gate had a right to be, twisted at the top into shapes I didn't want to look at too closely. As I passed beneath them, the air hummed, a low vibration that crawled up through the soles of my boots and settled behind my eyes. My violet irises stung beneath the tinted contacts I'd worn every day for the last six years, a sharp, electric itch that made me blink hard and swallow down a curse. I told myself it was the cold. I didn't believe myself for a second.

"Miss Calloway."

The voice slid out of the shadows before I saw the man attached to it, cultured and soft, the kind of voice that made you want to lean in even as every instinct screamed to step back. He was tall and impossibly thin, his iron-gray hair slicked back from a face carved into sharp, aristocratic lines. His eyes were a milky, near-blind blue, and yet I had the distinct sensation that he could see straight through my jacket, my hoodie, my skin, down to whatever it was I'd spent my whole life trying to hide.

"Headmaster Morgaunt," he said, extending a hand that I didn't take. "Welcome to Blackwood. We've been expecting you for quite some time."

"Funny," I said. "I only found out about this place two weeks ago."

His smile widened, thin and patient, the smile of a man who enjoyed being underestimated. "Your parents have been in contact with us for years, my dear. They were most insistent about your special needs. A unique curriculum, tailored just for you." He let the words hang there, heavy and deliberate, like stones dropped into still water. "It seems they understood more about your gifts than they ever let you believe."

Something cold dropped through my stomach. I thought of Lisa's spaced-out apologies, of Travis's careful silences, of every school they'd shipped me off to without a single word about why. I wanted to ask what he meant. I wanted to grab the front of his high collar and shake the answer loose. Instead, I kept my face flat, the way I'd trained myself to since I was fifteen years old and learned that showing anyone what I was feeling only gave them a weapon to use against me later.

"Right," I said. "Unique curriculum. Can't wait."

Morgaunt's cane, topped with a crow's head carved from black stone, tapped once against the flagstones, and the sound echoed far longer than it should have. "You'll find we take very good care of our special students here. Some might even say they were given to us."

He turned before I could ask him what the hell that was supposed to mean, gesturing for me to follow with the crook of one long, pale finger, and I had no choice but to trail after him toward the looming doors of the Great Hall.

Inside, the air was thick with the smell of old parchment and candle wax, and underneath it, something darker, something that reminded me of wet earth and rot dressed up in perfume. Rows of new students stood clustered on the stone floor below a vaulted ceiling lost in shadow, and I slid into the back of the crowd, keeping my head down the way I always did on the first day, cataloging exits, counting faces, marking who watched too long and who didn't watch at all.

That was when I felt it. A gaze, precise and deliberate, cutting through the noise of Morgaunt's welcoming address like a blade through silk. I looked up toward the balcony that ringed the upper level of the hall and found him immediately, as if some invisible thread had been strung between us and pulled taut.

He was tall, dressed in the school's black uniform with the collar open and the tie hanging loose, his obsidian hair falling over a face that looked like it had been carved by someone with very exacting standards. But it was his eyes that stopped my breath, a cold, piercing silver that seemed to catch what little light there was in the hall and throw it back sharpened. He wasn't looking at the crowd. He was looking at me, and there was nothing polite or curious in it. It was the look of a hunter cataloging the exact spot he intended to strike.

I held his gaze because looking away would have meant losing, and I didn't lose. Not to strangers, not to silver-eyed boys who stared like they already knew every secret I'd spent my whole life burying. Something passed between us in that silence, charged and wordless, and for one disorienting second I felt that same hum against my eyes that I'd felt at the gates, sharper now, closer, like it recognized him.

He looked away first. I told myself that meant I'd won.

The rest of the ceremony blurred past in Morgaunt's velvet voice and the shuffling of new students being sorted into houses I didn't care about. When my name was finally called, I was assigned to the Crow's Nest, the highest tower in the academy, isolated at the end of a staircase that seemed to wind on longer than the building's exterior should have allowed. A prefect with dead eyes led me up in silence and left me at a door with my name already carved into it, as if they'd known exactly where to put me before I'd ever set foot through the gates.

The room was small, cold, and windowless except for a single slit high in the stone that let in a thread of gray light. This isn't a school, I thought, dropping my bag onto the narrow bed. It's a cage with a library attached.

That was when I saw it, resting in the center of my pillow like it had been placed there by careful, deliberate hands. A single dried jasmine flower, its petals brittle and pale, curled in on themselves like they were protecting something.

Nobody at Blackwood was supposed to know that name. Nobody outside of Lisa and Travis had ever called me Jasmine and meant something by it.

Someone here already did.