“Supposedly she was dealing with some problem at home,” said Ta. “Your father wasn’t at dinner at all.”

“Oh, wow,” said Lovisa. “One of my little brothers is sick. I wonder if he’s okay.”

Ta wandered away, satisfied with herself, leaving Lovisa to ponder her mother’s tardiness to dinner and her father’s absence. One of her brothers was sick. But Lovisa doubted Vikti’s cold would keep her parents away from a dinner with the prime minister and delegates from the Royal Continent.

She was half looking out the window thinking this over, half reading her Sentient Animal Law textbook, when another student who’d been missing from dinner appeared on the path below. Nev. Finally. Lovisa had noticed Nev’s absence, a little clock in the corner of her mind paying attention to the passage of time. It was well past curfew. This mattered for a student like Nev, who wasn’t the niece of the prime minister. Nev could get into trouble for being out so late.

Lovisa watched Nev approach. Even through the thickening snow, her tall, straight-shouldered form was unmistakable; that one-named girl always looked as if the freezing cold, her hatlessness, the lateness of the hour, and any other unpleasant circumstance was inconsequential to her. She was a scholarship student from the north, Torla’s Neck, a province in Winterkeep near to the Kamassarian border. Lovisa had been to Torla’s Neck several times, because it was the location of the house and mine shared by her mother and uncle. Ferla and Katu had grown up in Torla’s Neck. The province was rough, wild. A place with few wealthy families, few restaurants; a place with glaciers, and rocks, and forests, and mines. Not a place that justified Nev’s proud shoulders.

Nev stopped in a circle of light cast by one of the streetlamps and raised her face to a window somewhere above Lovisa’s. Mari Devret’s, probably. Lovisa had watched Nev climb to Mari’s window more than once when Nev and Mari had been dating and Nev had been doing whatever it was Nev did that made her miss curfew so often. Breaking curfew without a pass from a professor meant a demerit, which carried a fine that Lovisa was sure Nev couldn’t afford. Too many demerits led to expulsion.

But Lovisa doubted that Nev would call on Mari Devret for help with that now. It hadn’t been a friendly breakup. Lovisa knew, because Mari was one of her oldest friends, that Mari had been too surprised and hurt for that. It had been months ago and he was still moping around, like a sulking child. There were other rumors too, mean stuff that Lovisa collected and filed away, but didn’t necessarily believe.