Cold water soaked through her boots at once. The gates loomed higher than she had imagined, black bars twisted into thorns and crowns, slick with a skin of storm. Lantern light washed over carved stone that held old sigils and older cracks. The air tasted like wet rust.
She clutched her satchel and the letter pressed against her ribs. For a breath she could not make herself move. The towers beyond the gate climbed into the clouds, windows lit here and there like watchful eyes. She felt small and thin. The cloak she did not have felt like a missing layer of skin.
The step behind her creaked. Kai climbed down from the carriage, steady in the rain. Water ran off his hair and into the collar of his coat. His eyes were that strange pale gray with a ring of violet near the pupil. When he looked at her, he took in everything at once. Damp apron ties. Blue knuckles. Hair plastered to her cheek.
He shrugged a shoulder, tugged free the white fur cloak he wore, and swung it around her without asking. The weight of it startled her. Soft fur closed over her shoulders. The lining was a sober gray, warm against the chill. She smelled cedar and clean smoke, and beneath that something wild and cold that made her think of winter fields under a thin moon.
She caught the edges at her throat. "What are you doing."
"Keeping you from catching your death," he said. His voice was even, more practical than kind. "Or do you want them to laugh before they bow."
"I do not need your charity."
"Good," he said, the corner of his mouth lifting. "It is not charity. Call it common sense."
She wanted to shrug it off, but the warmth crawled into the bones of her shoulders and would not be denied. The cloak fit her as if it had been cut down from a larger shape. The fur caught the lantern light and flashed white, then gray, then white again. She drew it tighter. Her hands stopped shaking.
The gates began to move. Iron ground against iron. The sound rose up through the stone and into her teeth. A footman in a black coat stepped forward from the shadow of the arch. His hat shone with rain. He bowed low, precise and unhurried.
"Welcome, my lady," he said.
Ash went still. The words hit the same way they had at Darethmoor, but there was no sneer to follow here. Only the rain, the open gate, and a man in livery who acted as if this greeting were fact.
Kai glanced at her from the side, then back to the footman. "You heard him," Kai said quietly. "Try not to argue with the first person who treats you like you belong."
"I do not belong."
"Not yet," he said. "Soon enough."
The footman straightened. "If you will follow me. The courtyard is slick. Mind your step."
Kai gestured as if to say after you. She moved because standing still any longer would look like fear. The flagstones had a film of water on them that made every step a choice. Statues lined the path, hooded, their faces eaten by moss. A thin line of gutter ran between the stones, pulling the rain toward a wide drain cut with a circle of unreadable signs.
Ash looked down at the white fur over her work shirt and felt her throat tighten. "You should take this back," she said, more to the path than to him. "They will see it and think I stole something."
"They will see it and think you are not a joke," he said. "Which is the point."
"You do not even know me."
He kept pace at her shoulder without crowding her. "I know you were shaking," he said. "I know that gate makes most people small. And I know you would rather bite off your tongue than ask for help."
She risked a look at him. Rain beaded on his lashes. He did not look away. His face was cut sharp by the light, not handsome in the courtly way she had seen in portraits, but impossible to ignore. There was a steadiness to him that felt older than he was.
"You call me servant girl," she said, remembering the carriage and the way the word had landed.
"I tease," he said, and there was no apology in it. "Servant girl is what they named you. It is not what you are."
"How do you know what I am."
"I do not," he said. "Not yet."
The footman led them under the arch. The rain softened, then became a fine mist that drifted under the stone. The courtyard opened wide on the other side. To the left stretched a long gallery with narrow windows and iron lanterns hung at measured intervals. To the right, a stair climbed to a high door banded in dark metal. Straight ahead, a cloister circled a square of sodden grass where a single black tree stood with its branches bare.
Other carriages were arriving at the far gate. Figures stepped down and blurred into the gray, some with trunks, some with nothing but a coat and a look of fierce attention. Voices carried in fragments. Names. Orders. A laugh cut short when someone realized where they were.
The footman stopped beneath the gallery eaves. "You are to wait here," he said. "An usher will come and bring you to the intake hall."
Ash nodded, then remembered she was meant to speak. "Thank you."
He turned to go, then checked himself and faced her again. His eyes flicked to the cloak and back to her face. He bowed a fraction deeper than before. "My lady," he said again, and then he left, boots straight, shoulders square, as if he had saluted a banner.
Kai watched him go. "He thinks you are someone," he said.
"So do you," she said.
"I think you are trouble," he said, and the ghost of a smile crossed his mouth. "There is a difference."
"What do you think you are."
"Hungry," he said. "And wet."
She could not help it. She laughed once, a small sound that bent and then straightened again. It left her chest looser than before.
"Keep the cloak," he said. "You can return it when you are warm enough to pretend you do not need it."
"I will return it," she said, and meant it more stubbornly than she needed to.
"I know," he said.
Silence settled. The rain on the tiles above them whispered like a thousand tiny feet. Somewhere behind the doors under the stair, a bell rang, low and measured, as if the building itself needed reminding of the hour. Ash watched the black tree in the square lift and bow its branches under the weight of the water.
"You did not tell me your name," she said.
"Kai," he said.
"Just Kai."
"For now."
She turned the name over in her head. It fit his mouth. It did not fit any family she knew, though there were hundreds she did not. She looked again at the white fur where it met the gray lining. "This cloak," she said. "Where did you get it."
"From home," he said.
"What is home."
"A place where winter is honest," he said. "And where warm things are meant to be shared."
She did not understand all of that, but she understood enough. She closed her hands over the fur and let her shoulders settle.
Another carriage rolled through the gate. Students stepped out laughing too loudly, then went quiet when a senior in a dark coat turned his head. The quiet that followed felt like rules being set without words. Ash watched and tried to learn their shape.
"You are not afraid," she said, and heard the edge of accusation before she could soften it.
"I am," he said. "I am simply better at choosing what to show."
"You think I am not."
"I think you are learning," he said. "Fast."
The doors at the top of the stair opened. A woman descended with a ledger tucked under one arm and a pen between two fingers. Her hair was smoothed tight against her head. She looked as if she had stood in this rain for twenty years and had never once been wet. She scanned the cluster of arrivals under the gallery, then pointed the pen at Ash.
"You," she said. "With the white fur. Come along."
Ash felt every eye that turned. The cloak made her unmistakable. She wanted to hand it back and vanish into the wall, then hated herself for wanting that. She glanced at Kai.
He signed something small with two fingers, a little tap against his wrist that felt like a private good luck. "Go," he said. "Before she decides to hate you."
"I thought they already did."
"Not yet," he said. "You have to work for it."
Ash drew a breath, then started toward the stair. The woman with the ledger waited halfway up, eyes sharp, pen ready. Ash climbed until she stood one step below her.
"Name," the woman said.
"Ash," she said, then heard Lord Veynar's laugh in her head and pushed through it. "Ashleigh Eleanora Virelli."
The pen scratched. The woman's gaze flicked up at the last word, then flattened again. "You will learn quickly that names here are only useful when you can keep them. Follow me."
Ash looked back once. Kai had taken her place at the edge of the gallery, one shoulder against the stone, water ticking from his hair. He lifted two fingers in a salute that was not quite friendly and not quite formal. Then she was moving again, because the woman had already turned, and the stair did not care if Ash's knees had gone loose.
They reached the door. The woman pressed her hand to a plate of dull metal. A line of runes glowed, then faded. The door swung inward on silent hinges. Warmth and lamplight poured out. The smell of wax and vellum wrapped around Ash like another cloak.
The woman glanced at the fur on Ash's shoulders, then away, as if choosing not to ask. "Inside," she said.
Ash stepped over the threshold. The floor was a checker of dark and pale stone. Shelves rose along the walls, not with books, but with wooden cases labeled in a tight, severe hand. A globe sat in the corner, so old its lines had blurred. A portrait of a man with a single cold eye watched from above the mantel.
"Wait here," the woman said. "Someone will collect you. Do not touch anything. Do not wander." She paused, considered, and added, "Do not faint."
"I will not," Ash said.
"Good," the woman said, and vanished through another door that shut behind her with a click like a bite.
Ash stood in the center of the floor because the center seemed safest. She could still feel rain on the edges of her hair. The white fur held the last of Kai's warmth. She turned slowly, taking in the room, the cases, the portrait that looked like it despised her on principle.
Beyond the closed door, the rain kept falling. Somewhere outside, Kai waited under the gallery. Somewhere beyond that, the gates held the storm at bay. Ash set her palm against the letter under the cloak and pressed until the wax edge hurt.
She was inside. The attic was a long way behind her. The world had changed and had not told her how.
The far door opened. A figure stepped through, not the ledger woman, not a servant. The light from the corridor framed him for a breath, then he came forward and the light let him go.
"Ashleigh Eleanora Virelli," he said. His voice filled the room without being loud. "Welcome to Virelai."
She did not answer. Her mouth had gone dry. She held the cloak closed and waited, because something told her that this was a moment where waiting would serve her better than speaking.
The man smiled with no heat at all. "We have much to discuss," he said. "But first, we will see if the building accepts you."
Ash felt the hairs lift along her arms. "The building."
"Yes," he said. "It has an opinion."
He turned and opened the inner door with a light touch. Beyond, a corridor stretched into shadow, lined with lamps that burned without smoke. He held the door for her with an impatience that was almost polite.
"Come," he said.
Ash moved, white fur brushing her wrists, letter steady against her ribs, Kai's last look tucked into the same small place as her fear. She stepped through, and the door closed her in.