Chapter 156: It’s Not on the Exam

Blair reached the examination hall at five minutes to two with an empty stomach and a head full of nothing.

She had meant to eat. She had meant to review. Instead, she had spent the whole walk from the elm turning one word over and over, like a stone in her pocket.

Win.

She pushed it down and went inside.

The seating chart hadn’t changed. Desk 1, Desk 2, Desk 3. Killian’s chair was still empty. Jasper’s was not.

But the hall was different. Nobody chatted away from the back row. Students sat bolt upright with their pencils lined up, and nobody was looking at Blair at all.

They were looking at the podium.

Jack stood behind it with his black wings folded tight and his coat hung over the back of the proctor’s chair. He squared a stack of papers with two light taps against the wood. He didn’t look up when she came in.

Blair walked down the aisle on legs that didn’t feel like hers and sat.

"Hello again, sweetheart." Jasper propped his cheek on his fist and breathed in. "Oh, much better. You smell almost like a person." His nose wrinkled delicately. "Almost."

Blair stared at her pencils. Of course he had smelled it.

"Mr. Silver." Jack’s voice carried without rising. "If you have energy to spare, I can find you a longer paper."

Jasper smiled and sat back. He didn’t say anything else.

The doors opened. The hall went still the way it had this morning, and the footsteps came down the aisle the same way, unhurried.

Killian sat at Desk 1 and set out his single black pen. His tongue flicked out, tasted the air once, and went back in.

A small muscle jumped in his jaw.

He didn’t look at her. He picked up his pen and stared straight ahead at Jack.

Jack looked back at him for a long moment. Then he turned the hourglass.

"History," he said. "Three hours. I wrote it, so there’s no one to complain to." He sat. "Begin."

Blair’s stomach growled forty minutes in.

It wasn’t a small sound. In a hall that silent, it sounded like something trying to get out of a cage.

Blair froze with her pencil on the page. Behind her, someone snorted. On her right, Jasper pressed his knuckles to his lips, his shoulders shaking.

"Whoever that was," Jack said, without looking up from the book he was reading, "stop it."

Laughter rippled through the hall. Blair’s face caught fire. She hunched over her paper and pressed her arm hard against her stomach, begging it to stop.

It waited five minutes. Then it growled again, longer and louder, with real feeling.

Something landed on the corner of her desk.

It was a small sweet, wrapped in black paper and twisted closed at both ends. Blair stared at it. Then she stared at the hand withdrawing from it. Long, pale fingers.

Killian was already writing again. His eyes were on his own paper. They had never left it.

"Eat it," he said, very low. "Quietly."

Blair didn’t move.

"Your Highness." Jack turned a page of his book. "Eyes on your own paper."

"They are."

It was true.

On Blair’s right, Jasper made a soft, wounded sound. "Where’s mine?" he whispered.

Killian didn’t answer him.

Blair untwisted the paper as slowly as she could, wincing at every crinkle. Inside was a single round piece of something dark and glossy. She put it in her mouth.

Honey, and something sharp underneath, like ginger. It was the best thing she had ever tasted, and it came from the man who had promised to put her in her place.

Her stomach went quiet. Her heart did not.

She folded the black paper into a tiny square and slid it into her sleeve. She didn’t know why. Then went back to her paper.

The last question had a page to itself.

Question 12 (30 points). The Great Spatial Rift is officially attributed to a nuclear detonation. Evaluate the official account. Do you find it sufficient?

Blair read it once. Then she lifted her eyes, just slightly, to the podium. Jack was reading his book. She had asked him about the Rift once and he had called her questions ghost stories.

Then he had written one into his exam.

Every other student in the hall would describe the official account and call it sufficient, because that was what the textbooks said, and what the supposed humans who caused it said, and what everybody believed.

Blair began to write.

It is not sufficient. The Rift was not an accident. The people who-

Her pencil stopped.

She looked at the words for a long moment. Then she turned the pencil over and erased them, pressing so hard the paper went soft and gray. She brushed the crumbs off the desk and into her palm.

She started again.

She laid out the official record: the dates, the war that never quite began, the casualty figures from the textbook. She wrote that no surviving record explained what the detonation had been for, and that no human had ever been asked to tell that part of the story. She wrote that a historian should treat any account written entirely by the winners with care.

Every word was true. None of it was the answer.

She set her pencil down with an hour still on the glass and didn’t pick it up again.

When Killian rose this time, he went straight up the aisle without stopping. Jasper left a while later, humming.

Blair stayed until the last grain fell, because she couldn’t make her legs stand any sooner.

"Pencils down."

She carried her paper to the podium with her eyes on the floor. Jack held out his hand, and she gave it to him. Their fingers touched.

"Ms. Willows."

She stopped.

"You ate during my exam."

"I’m sorry, it won’t happen again," she whispered and quickly walked toward the doors.

Jack had gone to the tall window behind the podium. He was holding her exam up to the afternoon light, tilted at an angle, his thumb resting at the bottom of the last page.

Right on the soft gray patch where she had pressed too hard. Under light like that, every erased letter came back as a shadow. Then he folded her exam in half and slid it into the inside pocket of his coat.

Not onto the stack with the others.