With trembling knees and a lip clenched between her teeth, the girl stepped forward, taking a handful of dirt from a silver bowl and letting it drift onto the roses, and then repeating the gesture twice more as the master of ceremonies called.
‘Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Earthern carn earthern, ashen carn ashen, peltarn carn peltarn!’
With those words, the pallbearers came forward as the girl gave a final deep curtsey, the late duchess’ son and five of the elder Sagean princes lifting the coffin high into the air and beginning the slow procession through the fallen fields to the cathedral, just visible beyond the treetops. As it passed, the onlookers, hundreds in total, bowed, King Ll’iriad Athenea joining them in a show of unity that only a state funeral could bring.
Behind her veil, the young duchess let a tear slide down her scarred cheek.
‘Autumn?’
The sound of my name snapped me from my trance. My eyes refocused, finding the glinting tip of the sword pressed to the crimson scars of his upper jaw.
‘Autumn, don’t force me to hurt you.’
He didn’t need to worry, as my rigid arm was already slackening; he took the opportunity to raise his left arm and tentatively, like I was a wild animal that might pounce at any moment, to press his fingertips to the blade and push it away from his neck. I didn’t resist.
‘Autumn, I didn’t mean to offend—’
I cut him off as I forced his lowered sword into his hands and took back my own, sliding it into its sheath. I tried to mumble something resembling an apology, but the words would not come and instead, I fled, humiliated and desperate to work out why I had let my emotions get the better of me.
She didn’t say a word to me throughout tutorial. It was as though she was making every attempt to blot my very existence from her mind. Why?
When the A level English class started she stuck her hand out for the sheets that had arrived on the desk, just as I did the same. When our hands brushed, I thought for a moment that a flint of fire from my fingertips had caught her knuckles and that I had burnt her – there was a spark of a very different sort travelling the length of my arm – because she nursed her hand to the deep V of her blouse like I had hurt her. Yet there was no expression of pain in her face – not the physical kind, anyway. Instead, her lips parted into an O, her eyes widening.
She turned away quickly, and I thought she breathed, ‘Idiot.’
I recoiled in shock but didn’t say anything. I just couldn’t reconcile the image of the emerging woman with that of the twelve-year-old girl who, even then, had managed to stun the court with her looks and stage-managed character.
Where is the granddaughter of the old duchess who would never even speak against a superior, let alone press a sword to their throat?
‘In pairs, I want you to analyze the soliloquy I have assigned to your table. Off you go,’ Mr Sylaeia said.
I turned my attention away from her and to the sheet.
‘To be, or not to be, that is the question …’
I groaned as I read through Hamlet’s dramatic contemplation of the pros and cons of suicide, before my gaze returned to her. Her gaze flicked towards me.
‘What?’ she snapped. ‘Why do you keep looking at me?’
Fates above, is it illegal to look at her now?!
I thought fast and scanned the sheet. ‘Disease imagery.’ My pen hovered above the paper. ‘There.’
‘I don’t need help,’ she insisted, despite her blank-looking page.
My eyebrows lowered a fraction. ‘He said analyze in pairs.’
She bowed her head and hid behind a curtain of hair and began scribbling across the page.
So she’s not going to share, then? Fine.
I adopted the same tactic.
She said very little once we had finished with the soliloquies, only answering questions when she was picked on. As the bell sounded, she repeated her ritual of slowly, even sluggishly, packing her bag, as though very tired – or in the hope I would leave before her. But I did not leave (I did not fancy throwing myself to the hordes), hovering beside the door as Mr. Sylaeia called her over to his desk. She dragged her feet, hand clutched so tightly around the strap of her bag that her knuckles whitened. She seemed to know what was coming.
‘Precocious. Presumptuous. Insulting.’ He handed her back what looked like an essay. Her head drooped. ‘Not to mention the fact it was far below your usual standard.’ He glanced towards me, still hanging beside the door of the classroom that was now empty except for us. I pretended to become very interested in an explanation of adverbs on the wall. ‘Autumn, I’m disappointed. I’m the one person in this school that can truly understand your predicament – do you really think it is any different amongst the staff? – yet you repay me with such rudeness.’ I raised my eyebrows to the wall, wondering what on earth that essay contained to affect him to such a degree.
‘Sorry, sir,’ I heard her mumble.
‘You will be sorry after a detention on Thursday evening.’
She inhaled sharply and I thought it safe enough to turn back. ‘No, sir, please! I have work that evening and that’s following a twilight textiles lesson anyway.’ Her face was aghast and panicky, her eyes wide and shaped like almonds. I was aghast for a different reason. She has a job?!
‘Then your detention will take place after textiles, and you will have to miss work.’
‘Please, sir, any other evening, lunchtime even. Please, they are already threatening to sack me!’
‘Because of poor attendance?’
Her head drooped again.
‘As I thought. I wonder, Fallon, would you mind staying behind on Thursday, too? There’s a lot of summer work for you to catch up on, and Autumn will very quickly get you up to speed.’
I didn’t answer immediately. She wanted to protest, that much was clear, but her manners prevented her mouth from ruining the perfect straight line her lips created. I felt a tiny pang of resentment – what have I done? – but nodded. ‘Sure.’
That resentment increased a notch when the room went silent as they conversed with their minds, leaving me out. Yet it shattered when I caught a glimpse of her lips quivering as she turned away, her hand rushing to her face.
‘Fallon, would you mind stepping out of the room for a moment,
