Daphne Elizabeth glanced at her as they walked downstairs. “Good. It was good. I saw Alaric dancing with Portia and, I don’t know. I’m realizing maybe I just need some time to be by myself, you know? Ride that single train.”

The three of them pushed through the doors and walked onto the grounds, their boots crunching the snow. The tree limbs were all weighed down, heavy, reaching down as if to touch them as they walked.

“Right. That’s a good idea. A good thing to realize.” She rubbed her face, confused. “And now we’re going for a walk at five a.m.?” None of this was making any sense.

“Well, yeah,” Daph said, pulling her hat down lower on her head. “After Isha texted me and Caterina—”

Jaya turned to Isha. “You texted them? When?”

“Last night,” Isha said. She was so bundled up, Jaya could only see her eyes and her nose, the tip of which was red from the cold. “You fell asleep for a few minutes, and I knew I’d need help to get this whole Grey-plan situated.”

Jaya shook her head, frowning. “Okay…”

“Okay, so after Isha texted us, Caterina swung by my room.”

“Oh no, did she—”

“No, it wasn’t as bad as you think.” Daph buried her hands in the pockets of her coat and stared straight ahead as she spoke. They wound their way down a snow-covered hill and off campus toward the town of St. Rosetta. “She told me what Alaric had done. He actually was spying on you, in a sense, and sending information to that jackass Kiran. And Kiran called Grey.” Daph’s jaw was hard, her eyes like glittering emeralds.

“Yes, but, Daph… I don’t like what Alaric did, but he couldn’t have done it if it weren’t true. If I hadn’t plotted to break Grey’s heart and kept things from him at every turn.” She heard her voice crack.

Daph and Isha each put an arm around her, as if they’d coordinated. “You made a bad choice, I’ll hand you that,” Daph said. “But who am I to judge? The longer I stayed with Alaric, I… I lost my mind, Jaya. I wanted his attention and I thought taking him from Caterina proved—I don’t know, that I was important enough to someone to make him weak.” She snorted. “I’m an idiot.”

Jaya stepped on a snowy bed of pine needles, feeling their spongy weight beneath her boots. “So are you and Caterina talking now?”

Daph took her arm off Jaya’s shoulder and laughed. “No, are you kidding? She still wants to boil my spleen and eat it. We just temporarily reconciled to, ah, for a mission of sorts. But I did apologize to her. Again.”

“What’d she say?”

“I believe her exact words were ‘Fuck off and die.’ ”

“Savage,” Isha muttered.