Page 4 of Darkened Wings
And apparently it was true; they’d had to take me.
“Gwendoline? Miss Bellamina?” The sharp tone in Clara‘s voice told me that it wasn’t the first time she’d tried to catch my attention.
“I’m sorry.” I gave her a rueful grin. “I was just thinking how nice everything is here, and how grateful I am to have the opportunity to learn about my heritage.”
She frowned at me, but whatever she’d intended to say was cut off when her attention focused behind me. “Astra, come here please.”
“Yes?” The girl she spoke to looked to be about my age, but she was a whole different kind of person. For one, her glossy black hair had an electric-green streak in it, and she was curvy and wore a trapeze dress in rainbow hues. Everything about her looked shiny and clean and well, perky.
I was dusty from the road and hadn’t managed to shower in a couple of days. I probably smelled.
“Have you picked up your uniforms yet?”
Astra’s head bobbed up and down. “I’ll get to it.”
“Classes start tomorrow, you know, and you cannot attend wearing…that.” Clara blew a breath out her nose, apparently winding up into a lecture, but then she stopped. “Actually, this is good. Astra, this is Gwendoline Bellamina. Your new roommate.”
“What?” Astra appeared stunned. “But I was told nobody wanted to room with me because—”
“That has changed.” What was the assistant stopping her from saying? “Gwen is new and doesn’t know anyone, so you can be her mentor. Since you haven’t picked up your uniforms and presumably your books?” She stopped and waited until Astra nodded. “Excellent, you can do it all together.” Picking up a stack of pages from the printer, she tapped them into a neat pile and stapled them together. “Gwen, here are your classes and all the other information you’ll need. Astra will show you where to get your uniforms and to the bookstore as well.”
Bookstore? Did that cost money? I was hoping nobody would ask for tuition, that maybe my legacy or orphan status would help me get financial aid. But until it was mentioned, I wasn’t asking. But the bookstore was different. What if they asked me for payment?
“Here’s your coupon.” The assistant, who really should have a nameplate, shoved a half sheet of paper at me. “It will cover your books.”
“How will I know which ones to ask for?”
“It’s all in the papers,” Astra hissed and grasped my elbow. She towed me away from the desk. “She’s not going to be any more helpful than she has to be. Let me see what she gave you.”
I held up the coupon, but she waved it off. “Not that. The other pages. It will have your class schedule and the instructor’s list of books and other materials for each class in it.”
We were strolling down the hallway now, only a few sculptures breaking up the marble and plaster. “You know your way around. I take it you’re not first-year like me?”
“Oh, I am, but I was here for the orientation last week. You missed it. We traipsed all over campus being oriented and hearing lots of campus history. It was quite the spectacle.”
“Really? Interesting?”
“Not so much.” She stopped. “The uniform shop is just up there. We get five sets each and I am so annoyed that we have to do it at all. Why can’t we wear ordinary clothes? Ravens have a reputation among other shifters of being stiff and formal, and we’re doing our best here at the academy to prove that true.”
I peered ahead, seeking the store she was mentioning, maybe a big window like the one in town with mannequins modeling the uniforms. I hadn’t seen any other students so far, and what my new roommate wore was anything but stiff or formal. In addition to her rainbow dress, she wore earrings in the shape of bird cages. As she reached for the handle on a perfectly normal-looking door, they swung and I got a better look at them.
“Are there birds in your earrings?” I leaned in close as we stepped inside the large room lined with shelves. Not like a boutique, more like one of those military scenes in a movie where the recruits are handed a stack of things based on the guesstimate of the quartermaster.
Her earrings were more interesting than the boring uniforms.
I leaned from left to right when she didn’t answer. “Oh, they are birds! And they are different. How cute.”
The person standing behind the counter tsked, and I jerked my head toward her. Probably in her sixties or so, she wore a white silk blouse neatly tucked into a pencil skirt. Her silvery-gray hair was smoothed into a bun, and her makeup was subdued and more than classy. At least she had the high-end boutique style down, even if her wares did not fit the mold.
“Did you have something to say, Donna?” Astra’s tone held ice I wouldn’t have expected from her. Of course, we’d met just a few minutes before.
“Of course not, dear. You can’t help what mistakes your parents made. Here for your uniforms, finally?” She ducked behind the counter and stood again holding a thick parcel wrapped in brown paper. “I’d begun to think you were going to try to wear your…street clothes to class tomorrow.”
Astra hadn’t said a word since the woman commented on her parents, and I waited for her to respond. I wanted to defend her, but with no idea what “Donna” the shop assistant or manager or whatever she was had referred to, I didn’t know how. But when my new roommate didn’t take the package from her hands, Donna set it on the counter and took two steps back.
I flicked a glance to my left and saw what she was backing away from. Astra’s cheeks held two circles of deep red, her lips were thinned, her jaw tense. But it was her eyes that held the warning. I couldn’t even remember what color they had been before; with so much vividness about her clothing and hair, they hadn’t stood out. But now they were terrifying. A circle of red surrounded her dark pupil in an effect I’d never seen before.
But I did know it wasn’t typical of our kind. At least not in my limited experience. My parents had dark, shiny eyes, in raven form. Deep brown for Dad and gold like mine for Mom the rest of the time. Was there some rare kind of raven with eyes like that? Or did anger make it happen? I’d made my parents pretty mad a time or two, but this never happened.
