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People hadn’t finished celebrating the victory at Keelweard when the Equinox came along and gave them another excuse for celebration, mingling it all into one grand party. Some of the faculty even gave students a day off lessons. In the evening, there was a huge feast, almost as big as the one they usually had at Finstertide. The cooks had outdone themselves; no one wanted to look as if they weren’t happy about the victory.
No one except Penny, that is, and her dwindling circle of friends. They had a whole table to themselves: she and Eleanor Rath and Corrine Ripley. No one else wanted to sit with them. From time to time, someone would approach, seeing the empty chairs. But then they would notice Penny sitting there and turn away again, blushing. A few of them, the ones who had once been her friends, would give her a sickly smile and make some dumb excuse, like, “I think I forgot something.” There were plenty of empty seats. No one was forced to sit near her if they didn’t want to.
People were watching her, though. She caught them staring at her. When she got up to get more mulled cider, she could hear people whispering her name. She could feel their eyes following her. Some of them looked away when she looked back. Others were bolder, particularly the girls. Penny had never been on the receiving end of so many nasty looks in her life. She found it very disconcerting.
Much though Penny had always loved Atherton, she knew her popularity had been fatally damaged the past spring. She had guessed things would be bad this year, though she hadn’t known how bad they would be. She had tried to convince her mother to let her go study at a convent. But her mother said a convent school wouldn’t offer the “resources” that Atherton did.
“That’s what you told me three years ago,” her mother had said. “You begged me to let you go to Atherton, instead of staying at Brancaster. Then you went behind my back and begged your father until he let you go. So, I’d hate for you to miss out on all those ‘resources’ you were so eager to enjoy.”
Her mother didn’t care about academics at all. She believed in palm reading and tea leaves, for Finster’s sake. Penny had never seen either of her parents read a book for pleasure in her whole life. There was no reason for them to force her to come back here.
A lot of people hadn’t come back this year. For the most part, the missing were the sons and daughters of Sigor supporters. Like Meredith Barras, for example, daughter of the Duke of Pinshire. Penny had always liked Meredith, in spite of the fact that their fathers were on opposite sides of the war. That never mattered to Penny, and she had assumed Atherton was the kind of place where people from different backgrounds were brought together in a common spirit of intellectual inquiry, regardless of politics. Unfortunately, she was learning that she was one of the few people at the school who felt that way.
She and Corrine and Eleanor were about to start on dessert—a cream pie with raspberries and blueberries on top—when a pair of very young girls came up to the table. They were arm in arm, each one trying to push the other slightly ahead, and they were stifling giggles. Penny didn’t know them well, but she knew they had started at the school that term.
“Please, have a seat,” she said, pointing to the empty chairs and smiling encouragingly.
“No, thank you. We have seats,” one of the girls said. “We wanted to ask....” She dissolved in laughter, and her friend had to finish the sentence: “To ask if it’s really true you met Edwin Sigor here at school.”
Eleanor gave the girls a severe look. “Let me guess. You’re doing this on a dare, aren’t you?”
“Um...maybe,” one of them admitted, looking only slightly ashamed of herself.
“Go away,” said Corrine.
“It’s alright,” sighed Penny. “I did meet Edwin. He was here under an assumed name, and he was very nice, I’ll have you know. And yes, if you’ve heard that I kissed him, then you’ve heard right. You probably heard that I did more than kiss him, but that’s none of anyone’s business.”
“Does...does he still come visit you?” one of the girls said, in the tone of voice people used when discussing the delusions of madmen.
“Seriously, go away,” said Corrine.
The girls left, laughing so hard they had to lean on each other for support.
“Ignore them,” Eleanor advised. “They’re idiots.”
“I didn’t even tell them the craziest part,” Penny muttered.
They would have genuinely thought she was insane if she’d told about how her aunt, Queen Muriel Gramiren, had sent a sorceress to kill Edwin, and that she had ended up torturing Penny with magy to find out where he had gone. Penny hadn’t betrayed him—she was very proud of that. Of course, it was her fault that the assassin had known he was at the school to begin with, because she’d gone and blabbed about him to the girls on her hallway in Queen Freyda House. And for that, she was heartily ashamed.
She had been so stupid. But she had felt surprised and hurt that he had lied to her, calling himself “Henry Harris,” and saying that he was the son of a knight from Newshire. She had fallen rather hard for him, and one romantic night, she had let him go a lot further than she had ever imagined letting a boy go, at least not before she was betrothed to him. She would have gone even further with him—all the way, in fact—but then he had told her his real name.
In retrospect, she admired and loved him all the more for doing it. But at the time, she had been so shocked and humiliated that she had slapped him and run all the way back to her room. And she’d been so angry and hurt that when some girls asked her what had happened, and why she was so upset, she had told them the truth.
Almost no one believed her. Most people thought she was lying because “Henry” was really a lowly merchant’s son, and she hadn’t wanted to admit she’d been tricked into thinking he was a gentleman. Other people thought she was doing it for attention, or to make some other boy jealous. When she doggedly insisted that she was telling the truth, people got annoyed at her. Even some of the people who believed her were annoyed, too, because they thought she was betraying her family by falling for a Sigor. The people who disbelieved her thought she was a fool, and the people who believed her thought she was a traitor. Earstien only knew what the Sigor supporters at the school would have thought, if there had been any left. They’d probably be mad at her for blowing Edwin’s cover and almost getting him killed.
The only people who stuck by her were Eleanor and Corrine, and though Penny loved them both dearly and was glad they were on her side, she knew they believed her out of friendship, not because they found her story believable. Their support was little comfort, since they would have been just as loyal if she said she had been romanced by the Immani Emperor or by the ghost of Edmund Dryhten.
At a packed table farther down the dining hall, someone started singing a song about the fall of Keelweard. It had a nasty and rather vulgar verse about Edwin Sigor supposedly being in a romantic relationship with his sister, Princess Elwyn. A lot of people turned to look at Penny when they sang it. She tried to pretend she couldn’t hear what they were saying. At the end, when some of the boys led a cheer for “Good King Broderick,” she refused to join in.
Again, that probably made people think she was a traitor, but so what? She thought the war was stupid. Penny was a republican, and she didn’t believe there should be a king in Myrcia. The fact that her family and thousands of other people were killing each other to determine who would hold a job that shouldn’t even exist was, to her, the height of idiocy.
A bread roll sailed past her head, ruffling the blue silk ribbon in her hair. She looked at the cream pie before her and set down her spoon. “You know, I’m not really hungry anymore.”
Corrine and Eleanor wanted to come with her back to Queen Freyda Hall, but Penny insisted they stay and enjoy the rest of the feast. She wanted to be alone for a while, and she didn’t want her friends being miserable on her account.
The first thing she saw when she got back to her room was the book she had borrowed from the library the day before: Religious Establishments of Myrcia and Odeland. It had a chapter on the history of the Erstenwell Abbey—the place where Morwen Byrne was a nun—and she had read it twice through already. There was a map, too, and she tried to picture what it would be like to walk the cloister or sleep in the dormitory or attend prayers in the abbey church. She almost felt homesick for the place, though she’d never been there. And apparently, if her mother had anything to say about it, she never would.
She changed into her nightgown and bathrobe, stretched out on her bed with her calculus book, and tried to concentrate on it. But not even math could make her feel better tonight. It only reminded her of how hopeless Edwin had been at algebra when she met him, and how excited he’d been when she finally got him to understand. Everything reminded her of Edwin now—all the places they had been together, all the things they had talked about.
He had been playing the part of someone else, so she had no way of knowing whether she actually knew him at all. Wouldn’t it be awful to have fallen in love with someone who didn’t even exist? This had troubled her a great deal over the summer. If he had lied about his name, how could she know if anything he had told her was true? When he said he liked Adler’s poetry or dancing the Mt. Nellis Reel, was he telling the truth, or had he made up those answers because they sounded like something “Henry Harris” would say? Eventually, she came to the conclusion that he must have been telling the truth, because why would he bother to lie about those sorts of things? That would have been an awful lot of work, even for a young king traveling incognito.
She tried again to concentrate on her calculus book but found it impossible. She took out her Sahasran grammar—she had been looking forward to starting the language, but now all she could think about was that Edwin and the Sigors had been in exile in Briddobad. If they had to flee back there, maybe she could go live with them. For a few minutes, she dreamed of strolling with Edwin through fantastic gardens of wild pink and purple flowers and resting in the shade of some gilded pagan temple.
“Oh, this is intolerable,” she said, smacking her forehead with her translation homework. At this rate, she would never get anything done, and then what would be the point of having come back here? If only she had been allowed to go into a convent. Or would it be worse there?
Sister Morwen Byrne had said she could write to her, but Penny wasn’t quite sure what she would say if she did. “Dear woman I barely know, I’m pathetic and heartsick over a boy I knew for a month and a half, whose family is fighting a war against mine.”
Earstien, how stupid.
Penny blew out her candle and pulled the covers over her head. Not that she had any great hopes of falling asleep, but if her light was out, at least people would leave her alone for a while.