I.

It began in March, on an ordinary Tuesday, in the practice gym that smelled of rubber mats and old sweat.

Lissa Dragomir had come to watch because she always came to watch. Watching Rose was one of the fixed points of her life, like the vaulted dark of the chapel or the taste of her own name. She sat cross-legged on a folded tumbling mat with her calculus notebook open and untouched on her knee, and across the room Rose Hathaway circled Mason Ashford with her hands up and her chin tucked and a bright, ugly, delighted look on her face.

Rose was losing. She lost most matches that spring; she had a year of catching up to do and Mason had a foot of reach on her. But she lost the way she did everything, at full speed, laughing, and when Mason finally hooked her ankle and put her down on the mat she hit it hard enough that the sound went through the room like a slap.

Something in Lissa’s chest went very still.

She would think about that stillness for a long time afterward, the way you think about the last ordinary breath before the water closes over you. Because what came next was not a feeling she recognized. It was not fear for Rose, which she knew intimately, a familiar cold hand she had held all her life. It was not sympathy. It was a sound, almost — a low animal note struck somewhere under her ribs, in a room of herself she had never been shown.

He put his hands on her.

Mason was pulling Rose up. Mason was grinning, freckled and harmless, saying something about her footwork. Rose slapped his hand away and got up on her own, and she was still laughing, breathless, her cheek flushed where the mat had scoured it, dark hair stuck to her temple, and Lissa looked at that flushed cheek and thought, with perfect clarity:

Mine.

The word arrived whole. It did not feel like a thought she had made. It felt like a thought that had been standing behind her for seventeen years, waiting for her to turn around.

She got up so fast her notebook slid off her knee. Rose’s head came around immediately — that was the bond, Rose always knew — and Lissa waved a hand, mouthed bathroom, and walked out into the corridor and put her back against the cinderblock wall and breathed.

You’re tired, she told herself. You used magic on Tuesday. You know what magic does.

She had watched Ms. Karp lose her mind one syllable at a time. She knew about spirit users the way a person with a family history of madness knows about madness — as a country she might be deported to without warning. This was that. This was only that.

But it hadn’t felt like madness. That was the thing she could not say to anyone, then or ever. Madness would have felt foreign. This had felt like coming home.

II.

Rose felt it as static.

The bond was not a telephone. It was more like living in a house with someone: you heard the doors, you smelled the cooking, you knew from the weight of a footstep whether to stay out of the kitchen. For two years she had known Lissa’s moods before Lissa did — the sugary spike of a good grade, the flat gray Sunday feeling, the specific greasy panic that meant a royal Moroi had said something about her family.

This was new. This had texture.

It came in waves that spring, mostly at night. A hunger — but not the blood kind; Rose knew the blood kind, had felt it through Lissa a hundred times, a thin urgent thirst like a scratch at the back of the throat. This was thicker. Slower. It had intent. It felt like a hand closing.

The first time it woke her, she sat straight up in her narrow dorm bed at four in the afternoon — the middle of the night, on the Academy’s inverted clock — with her heart banging and her mouth dry and absolutely no memory of a dream. She sat there in the dark and reached down the bond and found Lissa lying awake three buildings away, rigid, her jaw aching from being clenched, and around her a wanting so enormous that Rose’s own body startled from it.

Liss?

The bond didn’t work that way. Rose said it anyway, out loud, to the ceiling.

The next morning at breakfast Lissa was luminous and normal, eating half a grapefruit and complaining about her Slavic art elective, and she asked Rose if she was sleeping all right, because she looked tired.

“I’m fine,” Rose said, and watched her friend’s face, and found nothing there but Lissa. “You?”

“Never better,” said Lissa, and smiled, and under the smile the bond gave one long shudder, like a dog straining at the end of a chain.

III.

Lissa did what Lissa always did when she was frightened: she went to the library.

Not the school library. The chapel’s attic, where the church kept two hundred years of moldering Moroi devotional literature, and where a girl could sit unbothered among the stacked hymnals and the dead flies on the windowsill. Christian used to find her up there. Christian still found her up there, and she let him kiss her, and she thought about Rose’s mouth the entire time and hated herself with a thoroughness that felt almost like piety.

She was looking for St. Vladimir. She’d been looking for St. Vladimir since she was fifteen, on and off — the mad saint, the spirit user, the one who healed and compelled and heard voices and had been kept alive, they said, by his shadow-kissed guardian Anna. Lissa had always read those texts for hope. He didn’t lose his mind. He had Anna, and he didn’t lose his mind.

That spring she read them differently.

She found a translation of the Life that the Academy library didn’t shelve, printed in Bucharest in 1891, and in it a passage the modern edition had softened.

And the blessed Anna was his in all things, having nothing that he had not given her, neither raiment nor bread nor breath, and she said unto him, my lord, I have no other life; and he wept for gladness and blessed her, and drank.

Lissa read it four times. The attic was cold. Somewhere below her, the priest was moving chairs.

Later in the same volume, a chronicler noted almost in passing that in the saint’s final years no one but Anna was permitted to attend him, that she went nowhere without him, that the other guardians of the household called her by a word the translator had rendered as the vessel, and that when he died she cut her own throat in the church at Vladimir’s feet within the hour.

Lissa closed the book very gently, the way you set down something that might go off.

She thought: he loved her.

She thought: is that what love looked like.

She thought, and this was the moment the floor truly opened: I would take it. If it were offered to me exactly like that, I would take it, and I would weep for gladness, and I would not give it back.

IV.

Here is what nobody understands about Moroi.

They are raised, from the cradle, on the vocabulary of stewardship. Your guardians are your responsibility. You will learn their names, their families, their birthdays. You will never treat them as servants. Lissa had been the sort of Moroi child who cried when she learned about feeders. She had spent her whole life apologizing to dhampirs for the shape of the world.

And underneath all that, buried under twelve generations of etiquette and law and shame, there is a thing that lives in the blood and does not care about any of it. Moroi are not human. They come from a line of creatures that were kept alive, for a thousand years, by the willingness of a stronger species to bleed for them. Something in them knows how to own. It has just been very well brought up.

It woke up in Lissa Dragomir in her seventeenth spring, and it looked at Rose Hathaway, and it thought: you have been very stupid for a very long time. Look at her. She is already yours. Everyone can see it but you.

What horrified Lissa most, in those first months, was not the wanting. It was the unkindness.

She would be sitting beside Rose in the commons, Rose telling her some outrageous story with her hands, and a thought would go through Lissa like a wire:

You talk too much.

If you keep flirting with him I will make you cry and you will let me.

You’d look better thinner. You’d look better in green. You’d look better on your knees.

If someone broke your arm you’d have to stay in.

She would go white and Rose would stop mid-sentence and say, “Hey — you okay?” and Lissa would say, “Cramp,” or “I’m just tired,” and Rose would look at her too long.

They were not fantasies. Fantasies you invite. These were more like weather. They blew through her and left her shaking, and the worst part, the part she prayed about, was that the wire never sparked with disgust. It only ever sparked with appetite. She wanted Rose diminished because a diminished Rose would need her. She wanted Rose bruised because bruises were something she could heal, and healing was a way of putting her hands inside somebody.

She wanted, more than anything, for Rose to have nothing that Lissa had not given her.

Neither raiment nor bread nor breath.

She stopped going to the practice gym in April. It was the only defense she could think of, and it lasted nine days, and on the tenth she came back and sat on the mats and let herself look, because not looking had turned out to be so much worse. Not looking made a pressure behind her eyes. Not looking made her stand outside the novices’ dorm at three in the morning in her nightgown, in the freezing Montana dark, doing nothing at all, just standing there under Rose’s window with her breath smoking, until a patrolling guardian’s flashlight sent her scurrying home.

She never told anyone about that night. She never told anyone about the four others.

V.

By May, Rose had gone from worried to methodical.

She had a theory, and the theory had a precedent. Last winter Victor Dashkov had put a charm on a necklace and handed it to Lissa, and it had turned two people who loved each other into two animals in a cabin, and it had very nearly cost Rose her future and Dimitri his career. Rose had learned a lesson from that. The lesson was: when someone you love starts feeling wrong, look for the object.

So she looked. She went through Lissa’s jewelry box while Lissa was in the shower. She checked the hems of her coats, the lining of her school bag, the inside of her shoes; she made an excuse to hold Lissa’s hands and turned each ring; she stole her hairbrush and looked at it, absurdly, in the light. She thought about Natalie Dashkov, dead in the chapel with Dimitri’s stake in her chest, and she thought about how the worst things at this school always came from someone who smiled at you in the lunch line.

There was nothing. No charm, no ward, no clever little silver anything. Just Lissa’s stuff, Lissa’s clean-laundry smell, Lissa’s diary that Rose put back without opening because there were still lines she wouldn’t cross.

Which left the other explanations, and Rose hated all of them.

Spirit’s eating her, like it ate Karp. That was the front-runner. Rose knew the shape of it: the highs, the crashes, the whispers, and then one day a woman you loved walks out of the wards and comes back with red eyes and no soul. Rose was supposed to be the pressure valve — the bond took the darkness off Lissa and dumped it into Rose, which was why Rose spent that spring picking fights she couldn’t win and once put her fist through a bathroom stall door for no reason she could name.

But she was taking it. She could feel herself taking it. And still Lissa’s insides had that low grinding note, like a machine running with no oil.

She tried, once, to bring it to an adult. She stood in Alberta Petrov’s doorway with the whole thing on her tongue — Guardian Petrov, I think something’s wrong with Lissa, no, not her magic, she looks at me like — and heard how it would sound. Heard the follow-up questions. Heard, in her head, the word that would end her life at this school and every school: the word people had thrown at her when she and Lissa came back from two years on the run, the word that had been chalked on her door and written on her locker and hissed at her in hallways, because everyone had guessed and everyone had been right.

Blood whore.

She’d fed Lissa for two years. She’d done it in motel bathrooms and behind gas stations, she’d done it because there had been no feeders and no Court and no choice, she’d done it because Lissa would have died or gone mad without it, and she would do it again tomorrow, and if she said one word to Alberta Petrov about the way Lissa was looking at her, she would be the one they’d look at.

“Hathaway?” Alberta had said, not unkindly. “Did you need something?”

“Nope,” said Rose. “Wrong door.”

VI.

Summer came and the campus emptied.

Most Moroi went to Court or to their families for the break; most novices went to summer camps or home to their mothers’ towns. Lissa, who could have gone anywhere, told Headmistress Kirova that she had fallen behind after her two years away and wanted the summer tutorial. Rose, who was two years behind in everything and had a court-ordered pile of make-up training with Guardian Belikov, had no choice at all.

So it was the two of them, and forty other stragglers, and a Montana summer that turned the campus into a green bowl of heat, and the long inverted nights when you could stand out on the quad at noon-by-the-clock and see nothing but stars and wards and the black wall of pines.

It should have been the best summer of Lissa’s life. In a way, it was. That was what she could never make anyone understand: she was happy. Radiantly, monstrously happy, in the way of an addict in the first hour.

She had Rose to herself. Rose ran six miles at dawn and came back soaked and breathless and drank orange juice straight from the carton in the little kitchen of the empty dorm floor Kirova had let them share, and Lissa sat on the counter and watched her throat move and thought about the fact that she could ask.

She did not ask. She was proud of that for a very long time. She would keep being proud of it long past the point where it meant anything, which is one of the ways a person survives themselves.

She also stopped going to the feeders.

Not entirely — she was not an idiot, and she knew what happened to Moroi who stopped feeding. But the feeders’ room at St. Vladimir’s in July was a sad, air-conditioned lounge with three humans in it, one of whom was a retired man named Alan who did crosswords, and Lissa found herself putting off the walk over there. Twice a week became once. She got thin and gray and cold-handed. She got headaches. She got the shakes in her Slavic art tutorial and had to grip the table.

Rose noticed on the fourth of August.

“When did you feed last?”

“Yesterday.”

“Liss.”

“Wednesday.”

“It’s Saturday.” Rose was standing over her with her hands on her hips, blocking out the desk lamp, and there was a smear of dirt on her jaw from Dimitri’s obstacle course, and she smelled like sweat and cut grass and dhampir, and Lissa’s mouth flooded with saliva so fast she had to swallow twice. “Go. Now. I’ll walk you.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Nobody wants to. Alan does crosswords. It’s twelve minutes of your life.”

“Rose—”

“Get up—”

“I don’t want him,” Lissa said.

It came out flat and terrible in the little room. The desk lamp buzzed. Down the hall a door closed.

Rose did not move. Lissa watched her friend’s face go through three or four things very quickly and stop somewhere unreadable, and she thought about how Rose had never in her life been slow. She had known. Some part of her had known since March.

“Okay,” Rose said.

“No. No, that’s not what I—”

“Liss.” Rose sat down on the edge of the bed. Her hands were shaking, very slightly, and she put them under her thighs so they wouldn’t. She looked at the wall. “It’s fine. We did it for two years.”

“That was different. There weren’t—”

“Yeah, and now you won’t go to the feeders and you’re gray and I can feel you starving from across the quad, so.” Rose’s mouth twisted. “It’s not a big deal. It was never a big deal. That’s what I kept telling everybody, right?”

Say no, Lissa thought. Say no. Get up. Get up and get Alberta and tell her everything and let them take me to a clinic and put me in a room, tell them about Karp, tell them, tell them—

“Are you sure,” she said.

And Rose Hathaway — who was seventeen, who had never once in her life put herself first, who had been raised from the age of four on a single sentence repeated like a heartbeat until it replaced her own — Rose said, “They come first.” She said it the way other people said amen. Then she pulled her hair off her neck and turned her head and said, “Just — do it fast, okay?”

Lissa was going to remember every second of the next two minutes for the rest of her life. She would take them out and look at them when she was old. She would be ashamed of that too.

What she remembered most was the silence afterward. Rose lay back on the bedspread with her eyes closed and her pulse visible and that loose, drunk, dreamy smile the endorphins always brought, and she laughed a little at nothing, and said something slurred about the ceiling, and Lissa sat over her with her mouth full of the best thing in the world and understood, with the calm of a woman signing a confession, that she was never going to fight this again. That the fighting had all been theater. That she had been waiting for permission since March, and now she had it, and the door she’d been holding shut had not been a door at all — it had been a curtain, and she had walked through it, and on the other side there was nothing but a long green field going on forever.

Neither raiment nor bread nor breath.

“You’re mine,” she whispered, into Rose’s hair, while Rose was too far gone to hear it.

That was the last night Lissa ever went to the feeders’ room.

VII.

The clothes started in September, and this was the part Lissa understood least, at the time. Later she’d see it plainly. When the thing inside her could not be fed on blood alone — and it couldn’t, it was never about blood, the blood was only the nearest available translation of it — it needed some other way to put its hands on the world.

It needed Rose marked.

The first was a coat. Rose’s parka had a taped-up sleeve and a broken zipper, and it had been Rose’s for three years, and Lissa found herself unable to look at it. Not with pity. With offense. That coat was an insult; that coat said someone else’s neglect had put its arms around her.

So Lissa opened her laptop and spent nine hundred dollars.

The Dragomirs were dead but Dragomir money was not, and Lissa had never once cared about it beyond what it cost to be polite. Now she discovered that money was a language, and that it was a language Rose could not argue with, and that it went through the mail.

“You’re insane,” Rose said, holding up the coat. It was black, heavy, cut long, with a wine-colored lining. It was exactly, exactly right. “Liss, this is — what is this, cashmere? I train in the snow. I’m gonna bleed on it.”

“Then bleed on it.”

“Take it back.”

“They don’t take things back,” Lissa lied, easily, and watched Rose’s face, and did not blink.

Rose wore it. Of course she did. Rose had never been able to refuse Lissa anything, and also — Lissa knew this and used it, and knowing that she used it was one of the small clean horrors she took to bed with her — Rose was seventeen and poor and had been given almost nothing in her life, and a beautiful coat is a beautiful coat.

Then it was a sweater, because Lissa had seen a sweater the color of green tea and had a physical reaction. Then boots. Then, in October, a dress, and that was the first time Rose actually put her foot down.

“I have nowhere to wear this.”

“It’s Founders’ Day.”

“I’m working Founders’ Day. I’m doing hall rotation with Eddie.”

“Then wear it after.”

“To what, Liss? The vending machine?”

“To me,” Lissa said, and heard herself, and laughed too high and too fast and turned it into a joke, and Rose laughed too, and something in the bond went taut and did not un-tighten for three days.

Rose wore the dress. Not on Founders’ Day. Three weeks later, on a Tuesday, for no occasion, because Lissa asked, and because it had gotten easier to say yes than to have the conversation about why not.

That was how the fall went. Lissa learned, with the swift terrible competence of a woman doing the only thing she has ever truly wanted to do, that she could dress Rose Hathaway the way other girls dressed dolls. That she could put her hands on her at will — a touch on the wrist, a hand fixing her collar, fingers combing through her hair — as long as she did it lightly, laughing, the way friends did. That she could take her hair down and say leave it long, it looks so good long, and Rose would stop cutting it, even though long hair is a handle and every novice at St. Vladimir’s knows it.

And Lissa learned that she could look. She had thought looking would be the hard part to hide. It wasn’t. Nobody at that school thought twice about a Moroi princess staring at her guardian-to-be. It was what dhampirs were for.

VIII.

By November, Rose knew.

Not the way you know a fact. The way you know there’s a stair missing in the dark.

Because it wasn’t only the bond anymore. The bond had been sending her Lissa’s insides since March — the hunger, the possessiveness, the ugly little wires of cruelty that Rose would catch mid-flight and drop, hard, like something hot. She had learned to shut the door on it as best she could. But you cannot shut a door on a face.

And it was in Lissa’s face now.

Rose would look up in class and find it. Not warmth. Not friendship. A flat, patient, slightly parted-lipped attention, the way Rose herself looked at an opponent’s hips before she moved. She’d feel it on the back of her neck in the commons. She’d catch it in the reflection of the dark window during Moroi Ethics — Lissa two rows back with her chin on her hand, watching Rose the way you’d watch a fire you’d built yourself.

The night it really landed, Rose was coming out of the shower, hair wet, and Lissa was sitting on her bed, and Lissa said, “You should keep it long,” and reached out and took a handful of it, and tugged — not hard, not playfully. She tugged the way you test whether a thing will hold.

Rose stepped back.

The look that went across Lissa’s face then was the thing Rose would dream about. It wasn’t hurt. Hurt she could have handled. It was surprise, brief and pure, like a woman who’d reached into her own coat pocket and been told to take her hand out.

“Sorry,” Lissa said instantly, and her eyes filled, and she was Lissa again, small and stricken. “God — Rose, I’m sorry. I don’t know why I— I’ve been so—”

“Hey. Hey, it’s okay.”

“It’s not.” Lissa was crying, now, in earnest, and Rose was already sitting down beside her because that was a reflex older than language. “Something’s wrong with me. I can feel it, it’s like — you know how Ms. Karp used to—”

“Don’t.”

“I think about you all the time.” Lissa said it into her hands. “All the time. I can’t — I don’t want anything else. I want you to be mine, Rose, I don’t know how to say it any better than that, I want it so much I’m scared of myself, and I’ve been trying, I’ve been trying since March, I swear to God—”

Later, Rose would understand that this was the last honest thing Lissa Dragomir ever said to her. That she had been handed, in that moment, the whole map, and had been too busy loving her to read it.

What she did was hold her while she cried, and say we’ll fix it, and it’s the spirit, it’s not you, and I’m not going anywhere, and each of those three sentences was a nail.

Lissa did try, that winter. Rose would give her that, in the years to come, on the good days.

She broke up with Christian in December, which Rose had not seen coming and which the whole school talked about for a week. Lissa told him it wasn’t fair to him. She was even telling the truth: she had begun to look at Christian Ozera and think about how conveniently flammable he was, and it had frightened her enough to send her running to the chapel to sit in the back pew with her fists in her eyes.

She went to the priest, obliquely, twice.

“Father, if a saint did something wrong — if St. Vladimir did something wrong, to Anna, something the church wrote down as holy — how would we know?”

The old man had smiled at her, delighted by the theological turn, and given her forty minutes on hagiographic convention, and sent her away with a book. She read it three times looking for absolution and found, instead, another passage about the vessel.

She fasted. She spent one entire week refusing to touch Rose at all, hands in her pockets, walking on the far side of the hallway, and by Thursday she was hallucinating faintly at the edges of the dark and could not stop grinding her teeth, and on Friday she took Rose’s face in both hands in an empty stairwell and just held it there, breathing, for maybe forty seconds, saying nothing, while Rose stood absolutely still like a woman waiting out a wasp.

And she came very, very close to telling Dimitri.

She had it planned. He was the one adult in that place who could not be shocked and who loved Rose — Lissa had known that for a year, and had been careful never to think about it in words. She rehearsed it: Guardian Belikov, I need you to have me sent away from her. I need you to make it a rule. I need it not to be my choice anymore.

She got as far as his office door in January. She could hear him inside, moving papers, humming something Russian and tuneless.

And the thing in her said, very reasonably: He will take her away from you. Not for a week. Forever. You will be assigned some stranger and Rose will be assigned some stranger and you will be old and dead and she will never have belonged to you at all.

Lissa stood in the corridor for four minutes and then went to the library and requested three more books about St. Vladimir.

IX.

The Badicas invited her skiing for winter break. The Ozeras invited her to Court. Her own guardians-in-waiting expected her to go somewhere; royals went places.

Lissa said she wanted a quiet holiday and stayed at the Academy, and Rose, whose mother was in Nepal and whose father was a rumor, stayed too, and the campus emptied down to a skeleton crew and a scattering of orphans and hard cases. The dining hall served the same three things. The lights in half the buildings stayed off. It snowed for eleven days.

It was the happiest fortnight of Lissa’s life, and the night it broke, they had been watching a movie in the dark on Lissa’s laptop, on Lissa’s floor, under a blanket Lissa had bought.

Rose had come off the ice that afternoon on her shoulder — showing off for Eddie on the frozen pond, cracking her elbow on the bank — and she had a bruise from wrist to bicep, purple-black, spectacular. And Lissa, who had spent eight months learning not to reach out, reached out, and put her palm on it, and healed her.

Spirit magic went out of her like a breath she’d been holding since March.

And it was inside her. That’s what no one told you about healing, or maybe no one else ever felt it this way: you didn’t just close a wound, you went in. Lissa knew, in that instant, the exact architecture of Rose Hathaway’s arm — the old badly-knit hairline fracture in her fourth rib from a stake drill in October, the scar tissue at her knee, the anemia she’d been hiding since August, the two dozen small daily insults of a body being trained past its limits. She knew Rose’s body better than Rose did. She had put her hands inside another person and found a house she could live in.

Rose made a small sound. Blue-white light went out of her skin. The bruise faded like breath off glass.

Then the backwash came — the darkness, the sick undertow that always followed the magic, the price — and Lissa braced for it, and it did not arrive, because it went where it always went now. It went down the bond. Rose flinched, and her pupils blew wide, and she made a fist and pressed it against her mouth, and took it, the way she took everything.

They sat there in the blue laptop light.

“Liss,” Rose said, carefully, “don’t do that again.”

“You were hurt.”

“It was a bruise. I like bruises. Bruises mean I’m learning.” Rose was breathing shallowly. Her voice had gone very young. “And every time you heal me you get — you know what happens after. You get the crash and then I get it and then you get weird and then—”

“I’m not going to be weird.”

“You’re being weird right now.”

“I know exactly what I’m doing,” Lissa said, and it was the first entirely truthful thing she had said in months, and Rose heard it. Rose went still the way prey goes still.

“Okay,” Rose said. “Okay. I’m gonna go to bed.”

“Stay.”

“Liss—”

“Please.”

And there it was: the machine, fully assembled at last, every gear meshing. Please. One word, from the last Dragomir, the girl whose family was ash, the girl who had held Rose’s hand at four years old and made her not-alone; from the person Rose Hathaway had been created, trained, and consecrated to put before herself in all things.

Lissa never compelled her. She wanted to be clear about that, then and always, and she was very clear about it, and she polished that clarity like a saint’s relic for the rest of her life. Not once. Not one word, not one push, not one silver thread of magic. She could have. It would have been so easy — it would have been kinder, and she knew that too, and she chose not to, because compulsion took a thing and left it hollow, and Lissa did not want a hollow Rose. She wanted Rose choosing her. She wanted it fresh, every time, out of Rose’s own free unmagicked mouth.

She had discovered that she didn’t need magic. She had something better. She had seventeen years of love, and a bond, and a school full of people who’d taught Rose that her body was a tool for a Moroi’s use, and one soft word.

“Okay,” Rose said, after a long time. She sat back down. “Okay. I’ll stay.”

X.

Rose tried to get out. It matters that she tried. She would need that later, in the years when there was nothing else to hold on to: I tried, I tried three times, it wasn’t nothing.

One. February, Alberta’s office, again. She got the door shut behind her this time. She got as far as, “I need to talk about my assignment. Post-graduation. I don’t think I should be assigned to Princess Dragomir.”

And Alberta Petrov, who was not a stupid woman and not a cruel one, took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes and said, “Rose. I’ve read every file that girl has. She’s the last of her line, she’s unstable, she lost her whole family, and she has a bond with you that we don’t understand and can’t replicate. If you tell me you want out, I will start the paperwork. I’ll take the fight to the Council if I have to. But I need to know why, and it can’t be ‘we had a fight,’ because they will ask me, and I will have to answer.”

Rose looked at the fluorescent light on the desk and thought about how the answer went. She looks at me like she’s hungry. She feeds off me. She dresses me. She stands under my window. Every sentence ended in the same word, and the word wasn’t Lissa’s; the word was hers. Dhampir girls who let Moroi feed on them didn’t get transfers. They got quiet meetings and no promise mark and a bus ticket and a name that followed them into every dhampir town in the world.

“Rose.”

“It’s nothing,” Rose said. “Forget it. I’m PMSing.”

Two. March, the cabin at the edge of the wards, where Dimitri sometimes made her run drills until she vomited. She was flat on her back in the pine needles and he was standing over her with his arms folded, and she said, without planning to, “Can I ask you something completely insane?”

“Yes.”

“If a Moroi wanted something from you — something you didn’t want to give — and they didn’t order you, and they didn’t compel you, and they just — asked. And kept asking. And cried.” She was looking at the sky. “Is there a rule about that?”

Dimitri Belikov was quiet for a long time. Long enough that Rose’s heart began to pound, because he was not a slow man either.

“No,” he said finally. “There is no rule about that. There is only what you decide.”

“That’s not helpful.”

“No,” he agreed. And then, in a different voice, one she’d never heard from him: “Roza. Is there something you need to tell me?”

She could have. That was the crack in the door, the last one anybody ever offered her, and she stood in front of it and thought about Dimitri’s career, and Dimitri’s face when he learned what she’d been doing since she was fifteen, and Lissa’s file, and the word unstable, and what happened to unstable spirit users who couldn’t be managed — the clinics, the drugs, Ms. Karp walking out into the dawn with red eyes.

They come first.

“Nope,” she said, and got up, and put her hands up. “Again.”

Three. April. This one wasn’t even really an attempt; this one was reflex. Mason Ashford asked her to the spring dance, sweaty-palmed and grinning, and Rose — who had spent a year privately, wistfully cataloguing exactly how much she liked the shape of Mason’s shoulders and exactly how much she liked Dimitri’s mouth and exactly how much she liked, in general, in a way she had never once questioned in her life, boys — said yes.

She said yes at 11:40 on a Tuesday.

At 11:52 she found Lissa standing in the corridor outside the dining hall. Not moving. Just standing, in her camel coat, with her hands at her sides, looking at Rose. The bond was so loud that Rose put a hand on the wall.

“You’re going with Mason,” Lissa said.

“Word travels fast.”

“Do you want to?”

“I mean — yeah? He’s nice, and I’ve never actually been to a—”

“Okay,” said Lissa. And smiled. And walked away.

She didn’t cry. She didn’t argue. She didn’t compel anybody. She just went cold, and stayed cold, for six days — polite, distant, answering in single words, a beautiful closed door — and Rose spent those six days coming apart like wet paper. Because the bond ran one way. Because Rose could feel her, all day, every day, and what she felt was a grief so vast and so specifically shaped, so bereaved, that it was like being made to watch a funeral for something she had killed.

On the seventh day Rose told Mason she couldn’t go after all, and Mason said, “Yeah. Okay,” in a way that told her he’d already figured out more than she had, and Rose walked to Lissa’s room and knocked and said, “I told him no.”

And Lissa opened her arms.

That was all. That was the whole spell. No magic, no order, no threat: just six days of weather, and a pair of open arms at the end of it, and the animal relief of being let back in from the cold.

Rose walked into them, and something in her lay down, and did not get up again.

XI.

She didn’t take the field trials.

They started in May, the six-week qualifiers every senior novice at St. Vladimir’s lived and breathed for — assigned a Moroi, guarded them around the clock, ambushed at random by guardians playing Strigoi, graded on everything. Rose Hathaway had been the best novice in her year on a bad day, and every instructor in the building expected her to run the table.

What happened instead was a form.

Lissa filled it out. Petition for Non-Standard Assignment, filed with the Council through the Dragomir family attorney, requesting that the guardian assignment protocols be waived in the matter of Rosemarie Hathaway, on the grounds of the documented psychic bond, the petitioner’s status as the last of a royal line, and the medical opinion of a Moroi physician in Missoula whom Lissa had visited alone in April and to whom she had spoken with great candor about her mental health, her attachments, and what she believed would happen to her if she were separated from the subject.

Rose read the paperwork afterward. There was a phrase in it she never forgot: the subject’s presence functions as a therapeutic necessity.

Kirova fought it. Alberta fought it harder, hard enough that Rose heard her shouting through a closed door for the first and only time — “She’s seventeen and she’s the best I’ve got and you’re going to make her a pet—” and then a Council liaison came out from Court with a briefcase, and there was a closed hearing, and then there wasn’t.

The Dragomir name won. It always did. Lissa hadn’t compelled a single person; she’d simply been the last of something, and rich, and very frightened, and very persuasive about her own fragility, and every institution in the Moroi world was built to take that seriously and to take Rose Hathaway not seriously at all.

So while her whole year ran drills in the dark, Rose sat in a window seat in the Dragomir suite in the guest housing, in an ivory silk blouse, and watched them.

“You’re sulking,” Lissa said, coming in with tea.

“I’m not sulking.”

“You’re radiating.”

“That’s the bond, and it goes the other way.” Rose didn’t turn around. Down on the quad, Eddie Castile was shepherding a Moroi across open ground in a textbook diagonal, checking his sightlines, and Rose’s hands ached. “Stan’s going to jump him at the tree line.”

“Then Eddie will learn something.”

“Yeah,” Rose said. “Somebody should.”

Lissa came and stood behind her and put both hands in her hair — long now, past her shoulder blades, kept that way — and gathered it up off her neck, and let it fall, and gathered it again, over and over, the way a person plays with worry beads.

“You’d hate it,” she said, quietly. “The field. You’d have been beautiful at it and you’d have hated it. You’d have spent forty years standing in doorways.”

“That’s the job.”

“It isn’t your job.”

“So what’s my job?” Rose asked, and it came out with more teeth than she’d intended, and she felt Lissa’s fingers stop.

There was a pause. Then Lissa bent down and put her mouth against the top of Rose’s head, very gently, and said, “Mine,” in a voice like someone naming a country.

Rose looked out the window at the tree line, and did not answer, and felt, distantly, the thing she’d been feeling more and more all spring: not despair, exactly. Something flatter. The way you feel about the weather in a place you can’t leave.

XII.

Graduation was in June.

The novices got their promise marks that afternoon: forty-two seniors going one at a time into the tattooist’s room in the guardians’ wing and coming out with the small curved mark at the base of the skull, the sign that said I am a weapon and I am spoken for by the world. They came out laughing and crying and shoving each other. Eddie Castile came out and held the back of his neck all day like he couldn’t stop checking it was real.

Rose did not go into that room. She had no mark and would never have one — not the promise mark, not the molnija she’d have earned in a year of real work, nothing. Her neck was bare, and she had a different set of marks there, small and healed and invisible under her hair, and everyone at that school knew about them by now. Nobody said the word out loud anymore. They didn’t have to. It followed her down the hallways like a smell.

The reception was in the commons, under strings of white lights, and Rose stood at Lissa Dragomir’s right shoulder in a dress she had not chosen.

It was gray-green silk, cut on the bias, and it had cost more than her mother made in a month, and it was — she could admit this, in the honest back rooms of herself — beautiful. She looked beautiful in it. Lissa had wept a little when she’d first seen her in it, which was its own kind of horror.

The shoes were heels. Three inches, delicate, buckled at the ankle. You could not run in them. You could not brace in them, could not turn, could not kick; if something came through those wards Rose would go down like a folding chair, and that was not incidental to the design. Lissa had spent a year learning that a woman in beautiful shoes cannot leave a room quickly.

Her hair was down and long and brushed to a shine, because Lissa had brushed it herself, sitting behind her on the bed for twenty minutes without speaking. Around her throat was a thin gold chain — nothing on it. Just the chain. Rose had checked it three times for charms.

Across the room, the guardians stood in their black-and-white along the walls, in their sensible shoes, watching the doors. Alberta Petrov looked at Rose exactly once and then very deliberately did not look again, and her jaw was tight. Dimitri stood near the east exit with his hands loose at his sides and his eyes on the windows, and when Rose caught him looking at her the expression on his face went through her like a stake — not disgust. Not even pity, quite. Grief. The look of a man attending something’s funeral and being obliged not to say so.

She lifted her chin at him. He inclined his head, very slightly, the way you salute a colleague.

Then he went back to watching the doors, because that was his job, and it was nobody’s job to watch Rose Hathaway.

“You’re not eating,” Lissa said.

“I’m not hungry.”

“You should eat.” Lissa’s fingers were around her wrist — they were often around her wrist now, a light bracelet of possession she seemed to put on without noticing. “Later, then. I’ll have something sent up. And you’re pale — is it the—?”

“I’m fine.”

“You always say that.”

“Because I’m always fine.”

Lissa laughed, and it was Lissa’s laugh, the real one, the one from the sandbox and the road years and the hospital and every good day of Rose’s whole life; and Rose felt her own mouth answer it automatically, because it always had. That was the part she’d stopped being able to explain to herself. There was no monster in the room. There was only Lissa, in white, radiant, being congratulated by Ozeras and Badicas and Conta cousins, keeping one hand on Rose at all times the way a child keeps one hand on a balloon. Lissa, who had never once compelled her, and who said so, sometimes, in bed in the dark, with a kind of pride that made Rose’s skin crawl: I never made you. You know that, don’t you? I never made you do anything.

It was true. That was the whole trick of it. Rose had walked here on her own two feet, one okay at a time, one please at a time, one they come first at a time, for fifteen months, and there was not a single moment she could point to and say there — that’s where it was done to me.

At some point in the evening she went out onto the little balcony off the commons for air. Below her the campus lay in its false night, the wards humming faintly at the perimeter, the pines black, the sky an enormous cold spill of stars. She thought about Nepal, and about Mason’s shoulders, and about the fact that Mason had gotten a Moroi in Chicago and would be gone in a week; about Dimitri’s mouth and the way she’d once been so sure that liking a boy so much meant her life had a shape she could recognize; about the two hundred girls in that room who would spend forty years standing in doorways and how she’d have given anything, once, to be one of them.

She thought: This is my life now.

Not with rage. She’d had the rage for months and it had worn out, the way everything wears out, the way water wears rock. What was left was flat and level and almost restful. This is my life. It has good food in it, and warm clothes, and a person who loves me more than anything in the world has ever loved anything. It will not have doorways. It will not have Mason. It will not have anything I picked. She turned that over, and put it down, and found she could stand up under it.

The door opened behind her. She didn’t need to turn.

“You disappeared,” Lissa said.

“Just getting air.”

“It’s cold.” Lissa came up behind her and put her arms around her waist and her cheek against Rose’s shoulder blade, and Rose stood there, in three-inch heels, on a balcony, on the night she was supposed to have become a guardian, and watched the stars, and did not move.

They stayed like that a while. Down on the quad, some drunk novice was singing.

“I keep thinking,” Lissa said, into her back. “About how there’s nothing I want. Do you know how strange that is? I have never in my life not wanted something. And now there’s nothing. It’s like being finished.”

“Mm,” said Rose.

Lissa’s arms tightened. “You’re happy, aren’t you?”

The wind came up off the field, smelling of pine and snowmelt from the high country. Rose looked out at the wards, at the invisible line, at all that dark on the other side of it where nobody was waiting for her.

“Yeah,” she said. “Sure, Liss. I’m happy.”

And Lissa Dragomir let out a long breath against her spine, and said, “Good,” and meant it, and never once in the whole rest of her long and gracious and celebrated life asked the question again.