Chapter 5 5

Celeste POV

She came in from the street with snow on her shoulders, which told me she had walked from wherever she had come from rather than arriving by car, and she unwound a green wool scarf from her neck and looked around the inn dining room and found me immediately and smiled, which was the kind of smile that changed the whole room slightly.

"You're Celeste," she said, pulling out the chair across from me and sitting down with the ease of someone who did not require an invitation because she had already decided the outcome of the interaction.

"I'm Isabeau Fontaine. Beau, if you want. I've been at the Academie for a year, I know where everything is and which professors to be afraid of and which ones are just performing severity. Edouard asked me to accompany you for the second half of the journey." She picked up the menu and looked at it.

"Are you all right? You look like you didn't sleep."

"I didn't sleep," I sighed.

"Fair," she said. "The ceremony thing was yesterday. That's not enough time to sleep it off." She set the menu down. "I should tell you that I know about the Convergence classification.

Everyone does, it was all over the Academie correspondence by this morning.

I want you to know that I'm not here because it makes you interesting. I'm here because Edouard asked me to come and also because you look like you could use one person in this car who is not running a calculation about you."

I looked at her. She had dark eyes and a direct quality that I found either very reassuring or very alarming and I had not decided which. "That's a specific thing to say," I said.

"I'm a specific person," she said. "Are you going to eat the rest of that bread?"

"No," I said.

"Wonderful." She took it. "Ask me anything you want. I'd rather you had accurate information about what you're walking into than the wrong kind."

I considered her for a moment. Then I said, "What's Deschenes like?"

She paused, very briefly, over the bread. "The ability heritage professor?"

"Lucien mentioned him," I said. "Earlier."

Something moved across her face that was not quite fast enough to be invisible. "When did he mention him?" she said.

"Last night," I said. "He said Deschenes would likely want to run my classification assessment."

She was quiet for a moment. "Deschenes is very warm," she said carefully. "He takes a very specific interest in unusual-classification students. He is," she paused, "known for it."

I noted the pause. "That sentence had something missing from the middle of it," I said.

She looked at me directly. "Yes," she said. "It did." She seemed to make a decision. "I'll tell you more when we're not in a car with Edouard Vael," she said. "That's not evasion. It's just geography."

I looked at her. She looked back steadily. I decided to trust her provisionally because she had said that sentence instead of any number of smoother alternatives, and provisional trust based on honesty was the best I had to work with today.

We left Vendome in the mid-afternoon, heading southwest toward the Loire.

The light was already going by three o'clock, the way it goes in December in that part of France, drawing down quickly to a low grey that smoothed everything to the same shade, the fields and the river and the road all becoming the same tone of pale winter.

Isabeau sat between Lucien and me in the back seat, which had the accidental effect of making the arrangement feel slightly less like a strategic deployment and slightly more like three people sharing a car because they were going to the same place.

I was watching the roadside pass when I saw the marks on the verge post.

Not a road marker. Not anything official. A series of small cuts in the wood of the post, three of them in a pattern, the same pattern repeated on the next post we passed and the one after that, and I would not have known what they were except that I had seen that pattern before in my mother's reference books on Fae territorial marking.

And the books called it a Hollow notation, which was a way the Hollow Court marked routes they were watching.

We had passed three of those markers in the last kilometer.

"Lucien," I said, quietly.

He was already looking out his window. "I see it," he said.

"See what?" Isabell said, looking between us.

He leaned forward and said something short and quiet to Edouard in the front seat. Edouard said something to the driver. The car's speed increased.

"What is it?" Isabeau said, more sharply.

"The road ahead may not be clear," Lucien said,

with the specific flatness of someone delivering information without the emotional component that the information carries.

I looked out the back window. The road behind us was empty.

The road ahead curved away into the winter dusk and I could not see what was around the curve, and my witch-blood, which had been sitting quiet since the ceremony last night, did the thing it sometimes did that I had never had a word for, a warmth at the base of my sternum that my mother's books called the Old Signal, the oldest part of witch inheritance, the part that noticed something before your mind had finished the thought.

Something unpleasant was now on the road ahead.