Chapter 6 – She Was Not Fine

Florence was not fine.

She had been pacing the length of the attic room for eleven minutes. Alice had counted because counting was preferable to listening, and the floorboards were registering their objection with every pass. The pine was old, dry, warped by decades of Dunwick damp, and it groaned beneath Florence’s boots with the arthritic protest of wood that had not been asked to bear this kind of treatment and resented the imposition.

Step, step, turn. Step, step, turn. The pattern was metronomic. Florence moved the way people moved when the thing they were afraid of was inside them rather than in front of them. They moved fast and directionless, burning fuel for the sake of burning it.

The morning light came through the single window in a narrow, dust-thickened column that bisected the room at an angle, catching the slow rotation of particles in the stale air. It fell across Alice’s bed, across Alice’s face, and across Alice’s increasingly homicidal disposition.

“I’m ruined,” Florence said. She was gripping handfuls of her own hair with both fists, the knuckles white, the gesture somewhere between self-comfort and self-punishment. “I haven’t even started and I’m already finished. They’re going to turn me away at the door.”

From beneath a mound of patchwork quilts on the opposite bed, a sound emerged. It was not a word. It was the low, guttural vibration of a creature that had been buried alive and was considering its options.

“Florence.” Alice’s voice was muffled by the pillow, thick with sleep and the particular menace of someone who had been woken before their body had authorised the transition. “If you cross this room one more time, I am going to set this mattress on fire. I want you to understand that I am not speaking figuratively. I will burn this bed, this room, and both of us, and I will consider it a mercy.”

“The letter, Alice.” Florence stopped at the foot of Alice’s bed, her hands falling to her sides, her eyes wide and bright with the specific shine that preceded tears. “The acceptance letter. It was in the satchel. It’s gone. It’s in a crater on the King’s Road or it’s in a swamp or it’s in that cabin, and it doesn’t matter which because it’s not here.”

Alice pushed herself up on one elbow. Her hair, black, sharp-cut, and designed for precision, had spent the night conducting an experiment in alternative geometries, and the result bore no resemblance to the sleek, controlled line she normally presented to the world. She blinked at the daylight with the offended squint of someone who considered the sun a personal inconvenience.

“The letter,” Alice repeated. “You woke me for the letter.”

“Term starts next week. You have to present the acceptance letter to collect your student papers. Without it, I’m nobody. I’m a girl who wandered in off the street.” Florence’s voice was climbing, the words tumbling over each other in the particular rhythm of a panic that had been building all night and was now finding its stride. “Thomas paid for the tuition. He paid for the tutoring. Three attempts at the entrance examinations, Alice, and he funded every single one, and I lost the proof that any of it happened because I couldn’t hold onto a bag—”

She sat down on the edge of her own bed. The descent was sudden and graceless, less sitting and more the controlled collapse of someone whose legs had decided to stop participating. She pressed her hands over her face.

“They’ll send me home. I’ll have to go back to Briar’s Crossing and tell everyone that I failed because of paperwork.”

Alice regarded her.

The girl sitting across from her was wearing a navy wool dress purchased late last night from a second-hand shop in the lower commercial district, paid for with silver taken from a dead man’s belt. The dress was simple, respectable, and clean. The boots were new. It was the one indulgence Alice had insisted on, because you could survive bad clothing but you could not survive bad shoes. Florence looked, from the neck down, like a perfectly presentable young woman arriving in the city to begin her studies.

From the neck up, she looked like she was attending her own funeral.

“Florence.” Alice swung her legs out of bed. The floor was cold. She ignored it. “Look at me.”

Florence’s hands came down. Her eyes were red-rimmed, wet, and miserable.

“You are not going back to Briar’s Crossing,” Alice said. “You are not going back to the bakery. You are not ruined. What you are is a person who has encountered the first law of institutions, which is that institutions do not trust the things they give you to carry.”

Florence blinked. “What?”

Alice stood. She crossed to the cracked porcelain washbasin on the dresser, poured water from the chipped pitcher, and splashed her face. The water was the temperature of spite. She hissed through her teeth, reached for the rough towel hanging from the hook, and scrubbed until sensation returned.

“Think,” Alice said, her voice muffled by the towel. “The University of Dunwick is three hundred years old. It has survived wars, plagues, two changes of dynasty, and an incident in 1194 involving a fire in the theology department that nobody talks about. Do you honestly believe that an institution of that calibre and that age relies on individual pieces of paper carried by individual students across muddy, bandit-infested roads?”

She lowered the towel. Her face was pink from the cold water, and her expression had settled into the particular configuration it adopted when she was about to dismantle a problem. It was sharp, focused, and faintly impatient with the problem for existing.

“They have a ledger, Florence. A Master Ledger. A very large book in which a very dull man with excellent penmanship has written the name of every student who passed the entrance examinations. Your name is in that book. It has been in that book since the results were confirmed. The letter was a courtesy, a formality sent to inform you of something the University already knows. Losing it is an inconvenience. It is not a catastrophe.”

Florence was sitting very still. The tears had paused, suspended, the way weather sometimes paused between one kind of storm and another.

“But if I walk in and say I lost it—”

“You don’t.”

“—they’ll think I’m careless, or worse, they’ll think I’m lying, because if I never received the letter then how would I know I’d been accepted, and they’ll think I’m someone trying to—”

“Florence.” Alice held up one hand. “Stop. You’re building a tower out of problems that don’t exist yet. Sit there, breathe, and let me give you the answer before you invent six more questions.”

Florence sat. She breathed. The breathing was uneven, but it was breathing, and Alice accepted it as sufficient.

“You tell them the truth,” Alice said. “Most of it. You never received the official packet. The post from the countryside is unreliable. This is a fact that every clerk in every government building in Dunwick has experienced personally, and the envelope never arrived. However. Your brother, Thomas, who lives in the city and works for the government, checked the public results list posted at the University gates. He wrote to you with the good news. You came on his word.”

She paused, letting the shape of the story settle.

“It puts the failure on the postal service, which bureaucrats love because it confirms their belief that every other branch of government is incompetent. It makes you look trusting, a girl who packed her bags on her brother’s say-so, which is charming. It makes Thomas look responsible, which he presumably is. And it requires the clerk to do nothing more difficult than opening the ledger and confirming what they already know.”

Florence was staring at her. The panic was still there, but it had been joined by something else. It was a cautious, incredulous relief, the expression of someone watching a knot untangle that they had been certain was permanent.

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“That works,” Florence said. Her voice was smaller now, but steadier. “The public results list. Thomas wrote to me. I never received the packet.”

“It works because it’s simple, and it’s mostly true, and you are a terrible liar, Florence, so the less fabrication involved, the better. Your face does things when you lie. Obvious things. We’ll work on that later.”

Florence opened her mouth to protest, thought better of it, and closed it again. She picked up her boot and resumed lacing it, her fingers still trembling but moving with purpose now rather than agitation.

“What about after?” Florence asked. “The Registry? You said last night that has to come first.”

Alice was dressing. She pulled on a high-collared black blouse that was plain, modest, and unremarkable. It was the kind of garment that existed to prevent people from forming an impression, and she buttoned it to the throat.

“The Registry comes first,” Alice confirmed. “Being an unregistered student is a clerical headache. Being an unregistered mage is a prison sentence. We handle the magic before we handle the enrolment.”

She stepped into a dark skirt, smoothed the front, and turned to examine the result in the small, foxed mirror above the dresser. The reflection that looked back at her was severe, colourless, and entirely forgettable. She looked like a governess between positions. Good.

“Is it a test?” Florence asked. She was sitting on the edge of the bed with both boots laced, her hands clasped in her lap, the posture of a student preparing for an examination she hadn’t revised for. “Will they make me cast something?”

“Lord, no. If they asked unregistered mages to demonstrate in a government office, there wouldn’t be a government office.” Alice turned from the mirror. “They use a device. A Resonator. It’s a sphere, usually glass or polished quartz, about the size of a large apple. You sit down. You put your hand on it. And it reads you.”