Winter crept into the city. The academy's stone halls stayed warm, lit by fires that snapped in grand hearths, but the cold lived in me all the same. I carried it in my chest each time I saw my classmates arrive in carriages, their coats lined with fur, their shoes shining. I walked from the tram stop in secondhand shoes that pinched my feet until the skin blistered.
Lectures grew harder. We studied procedure, the invisible machinery that kept trials moving. I absorbed it eagerly. The order of witnesses, the rights of counsel, the sacred duty of the judge. To me, each rule was proof that the law had a spine, that justice had form.
Yet the cracks widened.
One afternoon, the dean himself presided over a mock trial. The students filled the chamber, sitting in polished benches that looked down on the floor where the accused stood. The case was simple: a theft from the market, a poor boy accused of stealing fruit. I was assigned as defense. Dorian, with his lazy grin, took the role of prosecutor.
I spoke with every breath of my soul. I argued necessity, hunger, the moral duty to protect the weak. My words trembled with conviction. Dorian smirked and offered little more than a shrug, claiming theft was theft and law was law.
The dean praised him. He said Dorian showed discipline, a clear understanding of the harsh but necessary letter of the law. My arguments, he said, were sentimental, unfitting for a serious jurist. The class applauded Dorian. He bowed as though he had conquered a battlefield.
I sat in silence. My heart hammered, my throat burned, but I kept my face still. Around me, the marble columns loomed tall, the carved crest of the academy stared down. I felt small beneath their weight.
After class, a fellow student named Maren touched my arm. She was from a family of merchants, not rich enough to be untouchable, but never hungry either. "You were right," she whispered. "But right doesn't matter here. Remember that."
That night, when I returned home, my father asked how I fared. I lied. I said my professors respected me, that my voice carried weight. He coughed until he spat blood into a rag, then nodded as if my words comforted him. My mother gave me half her bread and told me she had already eaten. Her ribs showed through her dress.
I went to bed staring at the ceiling, unable to close my eyes. The words of the dean echoed: sentimental, unfitting. And Maren's voice lingered: right doesn't matter here.
In the silence of that night, something shifted. A seed of doubt sprouted in the cracks of my belief. It was small, but it rooted itself deep, where no amount of study could tear it out.
The statues in the courtyard would see it first. Their stony eyes would watch me grow into something I did not yet understand.