The train arrived at Duskhollow at the exact hour the maps said it wouldn't.
Elowen Faust had spent the last six hours studying those maps — the official ones issued by the Academy in a stiff envelope sealed with burgundy wax, and the hand-copied one she'd made herself from three different sources cross-referenced in the Varenmouth Public Library. The official maps showed a single rail stop, Duskhollow Halt, accessible by the eastern line on the third Tuesday of each intake month. The hand-copied map showed the same stop, but Elowen had found a footnote in a 1903 travelling almanac that suggested the eastern line had been rerouted sometime in the 1940s, which meant the stop was no longer on the eastern line at all, which meant she was probably on the wrong train.
She was not on the wrong train.
The train simply arrived somewhere the maps had decided to disagree about, at an hour they had chosen not to discuss. Elowen filed this information away in the same place she filed everything: the back of her mind, behind her left eye, in the particular slot labelled things that do not make sense yet.
The station platform — if it could be called that; it was more of a suggestion of a platform, a narrowing of gravel between the track and a wall of black iron fencing — was empty except for a gas lamp that burned the wrong colour.
Not orange. Not yellow. A blue-green that reminded her of the water at the bottom of a very deep well, the kind of blue-green that meant something lived there and preferred not to be looked at directly. It threw light without warmth. The shadows it cast went the wrong way.
Elowen stood on the gravel with her one bag — everything she owned that mattered, which was mostly books and one change of clothes and a knife she'd been told three times she didn't need and had brought anyway — and she looked at the lamp for a long moment.
Then she looked at the iron gate in the fence, where a sign read: Duskhollow Academy. First-year intake. Proceed directly.
Proceed directly to what, the sign did not specify.
✦
The academy revealed itself slowly, the way bad news did.
First, the gatehouse: a squat stone building with no windows and a door that stood open onto absolute darkness. No one inside. A ledger book on a podium, already open to a page that had her name on it. Just her name, her scholarship classification — conditional (merit) — and a room number. East wing. Third floor. Room 307.
Elowen signed next to her name with the pen provided. The ink was too dark to be ordinary ink. She did not ask about this.
