2. The Rulebook of Cut Tongues

The first lesson at Edgewood Academy was not Latin or mathematics. It was silence.

Anika learned this on her second morning, when a girl two beds down from her in the dormitory—a reed-thin Valdorian named Maren—asked a question during breakfast. The dining hall was vast and vaulted like a cathedral, its long oak tables arranged in descending tiers. The Avignons sat at the highest table, their navy blazers immaculate, their hair swept into identical low knots. Maren raised her hand and asked when they would be permitted to write letters home.

The room went still. Forks paused mid-air. Even the kitchen staff, visible through a serving hatch, stopped moving.

Celine, the senior Avignon, rose from her chair with the fluid grace of a stalking heron. She was seventeen, older than the others, with cheekbones sharp enough to cut paper and eyes the color of tarnished silver. She walked down the tiers slowly, each footstep a deliberate punctuation, until she stood behind Maren and placed both hands on her shoulders. The gesture might have been maternal, if not for the pressure. Anika saw Maren’s shoulders buckle inward, saw the blood drain from her knuckles as she gripped the edge of the table.

“Letters,” Celine said, her voice soft as velvet over steel, “are a privilege reserved for Avignons. You are not Avignons. You are neophytes. Neophytes do not speak unless spoken to. They do not ask questions. They do not presume. This is your first and only warning.”

She released Maren’s shoulders and returned to her seat. Breakfast resumed. Maren did not weep, but something behind her eyes had cracked, and Anika watched the light drain out of her in real time. Later that day, Maren was assigned to latrine duty. She scrubbed toilets until her hands bled. No one helped her. No one even looked at her.

That evening, Anika sat on her bed and studied the academy’s printed handbook, a slim volume bound in cream-colored leather titled “The Edgewood Way.” It spoke of virtue, refinement, and the cultivation of feminine grace. It did not mention the fence. It did not mention the basement chapel. It did not explain why the windows on the third floor of the east wing were bricked over.

“Throw that away,” Liri said from her corner of the room. She was sharpening her spoon-knife against the bedframe, a rhythmic whisper of metal on iron. “It’s a script, not a rulebook. The real rules are unwritten, and you learn them by breaking them.”

“Then tell me the real rules.”

Liri looked up. Her eyes were older than her face, which Anika now guessed was maybe fifteen. “Rule one: the Avignons are untouchable. They report directly to Headmistress Voss, and Voss reports to the Foundation, and the Foundation reports to no one. Rule two: there are no friends, only allies of convenience. Trusting someone is a luxury you can’t afford. Rule three: when the Moonlight Salon convenes, you do exactly as you’re told. No hesitation. No eye contact. No memory afterward, if you’re smart.”

Anika felt a cold thread spool down her spine. “What is the Moonlight Salon?”

But Liri had already turned away, pulling her thin blanket up to her chin. “You’ll find out soon enough. We all do.”

The days that followed were a blur of indoctrination disguised as education. Classes began at dawn: elocution, table etiquette, floral arrangement, conversational arts in three languages. The teachers were women with brittle smiles and watchful eyes, and they corrected mistakes with a thin wooden rod applied to the knuckles. Anika learned to pour tea without spilling, to curtsy without wobbling, to laugh at the jokes of invisible dinner guests with a sound like silver bells. She learned that a woman’s highest virtue was to be ornamental, and that ornaments did not speak unless displayed.

But she also learned to watch.

She noticed that certain girls disappeared from classes without explanation. Their beds would be stripped by morning, their names erased from the attendance ledger as though they had never existed. When Anika asked Liri where they went, Liri only pointed one finger downward, toward the floor, toward the basement chapel, and said nothing.

She noticed that every Tuesday evening, a black sedan with tinted windows pulled up to the academy’s service entrance. Headmistress Voss would greet the occupant personally, her posture deferential, her smile wider than Anika ever saw it during daylight hours. The visitor was always male, always expensively dressed, always escorted directly to the east wing, where the bricked-up windows kept whatever happened inside invisible to the rest of the school.

She noticed that Celine, the senior Avignon, had a scar behind her left ear. It was a precise, deliberate mark, too clean to be accidental—a small, raised brand in the shape of a key. One afternoon, during a rare moment of unsupervised recreation, Anika glimpsed the same mark behind the ear of another Avignon, a stocky girl named Drea. She filed this observation away like a stolen gem.

The first test came on a rain-lashed Thursday.

Anika was summoned from her elocution class by Drea and two other Avignons. They escorted her not to the disciplinary office but to a small, windowless room behind the library that smelled of dust and old paper. Celine was waiting inside, seated behind a plain wooden desk. On the desk lay a single sheet of paper and a fountain pen.

“Sit,” Celine said.

Anika sat.

“You have been observed, neophyte. Your progress is noted. Some say you are clever. Some say you are dangerous. I am here to determine which assessment is correct.” Celine pushed the paper across the desk. On it was a list of names. Anika recognized some of them: Liri, Maren, Tanai, the other girls from the container. Other names were unfamiliar. “Circle the name of the girl you believe is least suited to the Edgewood program. The girl who should be… dismissed.”

The silence stretched like a wire pulled taut. Anika understood immediately that this was not a test of judgment. It was a test of loyalty. Of willingness. Of the soul’s pliability. If she circled a name, she became complicit in whatever happened next. If she refused, her own name might appear on a similar list in a different room.

She thought of Maren, already broken. Of Tanai, who still whispered Valdorian prayers in her sleep. Of Liri, who had shared the unwritten rules and asked nothing in return. And she thought of the photograph her father had given her, now dissolved to pulp, and of the debt that had not been his to pay.

She picked up the pen.

She circled Celine’s name.

For three seconds, no one moved. Then Celine laughed. It was not a warm sound. It was the sound of a blade being tested against a whetstone. “Interesting,” she said, and took the paper back. “Very interesting. Most neophytes sacrifice a friend. You sacrificed an enemy. That suggests either extraordinary loyalty or extraordinary calculation. Either way, it is… useful.”

She stood, and the Avignons flanked her like shadows. “You will report to the east wing tomorrow evening at eight o’clock. Dress in the white gown you will find on your bed. Speak of this to no one. If you do, the basement chapel will gain another penitent. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Anika said.

“Yes, what?”

“Yes, Avignon.”

Celine smiled, and the scar behind her ear seemed to glimmer in the lamplight. “You learn fast. That will serve you well. Or it will destroy you. I haven’t decided which.”

That night, the white gown lay on Anika’s bed like a ghost that had shed its body. It was made of fine linen, high-necked and long-sleeved, virginal and funereal at once. Liri took one look at it and went pale.

“You’ve been summoned to the Salon.”

“Tell me what happens there.”

Liri sat on the edge of her bed and wrapped her arms around herself, a gesture Anika had never seen from her before. “Once a month, the Foundation sends patrons to the academy. Important men. Men with money and influence and appetites that the normal world cannot satisfy. They come to the east wing, and the girls summoned to the Salon serve them. Food, drink, conversation, music. And sometimes more. Whatever the patron requests, the girl provides. No hesitation. No refusal. If you please them, you advance. If you displease them…” She touched her own throat, a feather-light gesture. “There’s a reason the third-floor windows are bricked.”

Anika sat very still. “How do I survive it?”

Liri looked at her, and for the first time, her eyes held something that might have been respect. “You’re already thinking the right question. Most girls ask how to escape. There is no escape. But survival—survival is possible. Watch everything. Remember every face, every name, every word spoken when they think you aren’t listening. Knowledge is the only currency that can’t be stolen from you. And when the moment comes, when a patron gives you an opening, no matter how small… take it. Even if it means doing something you can never undo.”

She reached under her pillow and withdrew the spoon-knife, its edge now gleaming with a wicked sharpness. She pressed it into Anika’s palm.

“Hide this. Not to use on them—they would kill you for it. But to remind yourself that you are not just an ornament. You are a weapon waiting for the right battle.”

Anika slid the blade into the hem of her sleeve and felt its cold weight settle against her wrist. That night, she did not sleep. She lay awake watching the moon crawl across the barred window, listening to the distant pulse of the basement chapel, and rehearsing the person she would need to become when the sun set on the following day.

At exactly eight o’clock, she stood before the east wing’s ironbound door, wrapped in white linen and fear. The door swung open. Warm light spilled out, along with the scent of wine and cigar smoke and something muskier beneath. A man’s voice, deep and accented, drifted down the corridor.

“Ah, a new one. Lovely. Bring her in.”

Anika stepped forward, and the door closed behind her with the finality of a lock clicking into place. She did not yet know that by the end of the night, she would have her first patron—a silver-haired businessman named Kassel who smelled of mint and malice. She did not yet know that she would catch her first glimpse of the ledger that recorded every transaction, every sale, every girl reduced to a line item in the Foundation’s accounts. She did not yet know that the old Valdorian prayers still chanted in the basement chapel were not for the dead.

They were for the girls awaiting their turn to be sold.

And far beneath her feet, in the Oratory of Second Grace, Maren—the girl who had asked about letters home—was being prepared for her first and final dismissal. By dawn, her bed would be stripped. Her name would be erased. And the black sedan would depart with something heavier in its trunk than a businessman’s briefcase.

Anika could not save her. Not yet.

But she remembered every face in the Salon that night. She catalogued the way Kassel touched his signet ring when he lied. She noted the brand on Drea’s neck, the same key-shaped scar that marked Celine, and she began to understand that the Avignons were not just enforcers. They were graduates. Girls who had survived the Salon long enough to become its gatekeepers.

And she understood, with terrible clarity, that the only way out was through.