"You're not doing well. Are you?"
The girl did not answer.
Her thumb stayed pressed against the thin place on her cuff, and her eyes went to the floor, then to the dead vines along the far wall, anywhere that was not Priscilla's face. A muscle in her jaw worked once and stopped. This close, the gray under her eyes had a bluish edge, the kind that came from weeks of short nights, and her lips were dry enough to be cracked, as if she had stopped noticing when she was thirsty.
The silence was no surprise. In the corridor the girl had spoken one line, and in the lecture hall Priscilla had never heard her voice at all. A girl who had spent her whole time at the Academy at the back of someone else's sentence did not start talking because a princess asked her to.
